Wired for Love and Belonging
In Brene Brown’s research, she found that love and belonging are essential to our well being and considered one of our basic needs like food, shelter and water. Her definition of love is: “We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.
Love is not something we give or get, it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal and the withholding of affection damages the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare”.
Belonging is also that sense of safety and comfort we feel when we are part of a family, group, or community where we are fully accepted as ourselves. So much of our identity and feelings of value and worthiness are tied up in this concept of belonging, yearning to “be part of something–to experience real connection with others–but not at the cost of our authenticity.”
Our desire for connection and love runs deep, so much so that we may compromise who we are, in order to belong. Brené Brown says that when we ‘fit in’ instead of actually ‘belong,’ we mold ourselves to the situation instead of standing for our authentic self. This doesn’t create real connection and we can end up feeling lonelier with people than we would have if we had stayed true to ourselves.
“ True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are”. – Brené Brown
In reality, the only true belonging that exists, and the connection that underscores everything else and all other relationships in life, is that powerful sense of being authentic to ourselves and God. We are so often trying to belong elsewhere that we turn our backs on this most important and key aspect of belonging anywhere and everywhere in life. God loves us and wants us to love ourselves and see ourselves worthy of love?
I believe God has wired us for connection and has created a longing in us that can only be filled by belonging to him first and then ourselves and then to each other. C.S. Lewis talks about the, “the inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Lewis, eventually concluding that we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an “inconsolable longing” that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong in another, godly one. He also penned this passage, “Our commonest expedient,” wrote Lewis, “is to call [the longing] beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.…But the books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them only; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into foolish idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
