Attachment and the Need to Belong
Remember the fairy tale of the Ugly Duckling? A story of a longing to belong and be attached to the group. A story of rejection, isolation and feeling different. That feeling of wanting to belong but feeling on the edge is something many of us know all too well. Our inbuilt “need to belong” (Baumeister, & Leary, 1995) leads to painful emotions and feelings when we sense we are being left out, abandoned, or overlooked in some way. We’re hard wired to attach, to forms bonds of connection with other humans, to belong. So, rejection hurts because it directly challenges our instinctive attachment need for belonging. For our ancient ancestors, to be left on the outskirts of the tribe was a matter of life and death. And evolution leaves that imprint on us today: to sense feel that we don’t belong within a group can be agonising. Whether its being ghosted in a romantic relationship, feeling excluded at work, or left on the fringes of family dynamics, our attachment need to belong reminds us how painful isolation and exclusion is.
Your early need to belong
Sadly, too many of us have experienced difficult connections and the feeling of being overlooked and left out within the group we first belonged to – our family of origin. Consider your own childhood:
To what extent did you experience belonging?
Did you feel securely attached to those whose job it was to care for you?
To what extent did you experience rejection or abandonment?
The answer to these questions shape the present. Feeling like you don’t belong within your early experience of groups has the potential to impact your here-and-now. Past rejection and difficultlies in feeling attached, safe and secure within your family or origin can impact your adult relationships. If your early need to belong was not fully met, then present day isolation and loneliness are likely to be triggering, giving a sharp prod to painful memories of disconnection as a child or teen.
In an ideal world, you’ll have experienced a strong and supportive connection or attachment in your early days within your family of origin. You will have been easily able to sense your belongingness in the eyes, words, actions and physical connection of others.
Yet for many of us, there's a different story. One which can involve strained or difficult attachment relationships and connections with our caregiver(s). Perhaps part of your own childhood story includes memories of being ignored, or misunderstood, or where the people around you were unable to see or hear what you wanted or needed? You might recall feeling that you don’t belong with or fit in with the people around you. Taking time to consider your childhood attachment history and what belonging in your family of origin was and is like for can be a powerful way to make meaning of your relationships as adults. That can be the work of psychotherapy - to grow your awareness of your own experience of belonging and attachment, and to make meaning of your inbuilt need to belong.
In this article, I want to give an overview of some of the psychology concepts that help to explain attachment and the need to belong. In later blogs, we’ll pick up some more learnings from attachment theory as we look at childhood attachment styles. There’s also an article covering adult attachment patterns and you may want to look at the final blog, exploring how you can lay to rest any ghosts from the past relating to your unmet need to belong by developing earned secure attachment.
So, let’s look at some of the psychology concepts that help to explain attachment and the need to belong:
Bowlby and Attachment Theory
John Bowlby
An important figure in helping to understand your need to belong
Attachment Theory, put simply, is the way of making sense of our need to belong. Attachment Theory attempts to explain how the connections we experienced with our early caregivers influences us in subsequent relationships. British psychologist, John Bowlby, is a key person in helping to formulate what we now call Attachment Theory.
Working in the 1950s, Bowlby began to study the bonds of connection between mothers and their young children. He was looking at the psychological connectedness between a caregiver and baby, and how that impacted the child. Bowlby came to understand that a baby enters the world already orientated towards seeking out and finding closeness, connection and belonging. He observed how children reacted when they were frightened – often moving towards or even trying to cling to their caregiver. He called this pull towards the caregiver an “attachment” response. Other research at the time seemed to suggest that infants seek connection, care, and responsiveness from a parent over and above food and sustenance (Harlow, 1961). In other words, Bowlby and others were recognising how important the drive towards belonging, connection and attachment with a supportive and psychologically available caregiver was for children. Babies seemed to choose belonging over and above other needs.
Bowlby was writing at a time when social expectations meant Mothers were more likely to be holding the baby, literally. Since Bowlby’s time, subsequent research has focused on the role of primary caregivers in children’s lives. Nowadays, we recognise the crucial and critical role of Fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings and professional childcarers in the lives of children, and also how the concept of family differs throughout cultures. We know that children will seek out the support of a nurturing safe haven, be that Dad, Nanny, a member of our extended family or some other important caregiver who is reliable and consistently psychologically available. We know that humans have an inbuilt need to belong and to feel a sense of secure attachment with someone that feels safe, and trustworthy.
Attachment and belonging in the Strange Situation
When you’re frightened, confused or facing a strange situation, there’s a want and need to experience safety in your nervous system.
Having the support of a secure and reliable safe person, and feeling that you belong somewhere, helps towards feeling safe.
Bowlby’s work inspired other researchers, including one of Bowlby’s own students - Mary Ainsworth. Ainsworth designed an experiment to better understand the attachment relationships between caregivers and young children. Known as the “Strange Situation”, the research explored how toddlers between the ages of 12 and 18 months behaved when their caregiver left the room, and when a stranger entered the room (Ainsworth, et al., 1971; Ainsworth, et al., 1978). They considered the level of distress the infant showed when their caregiver left the room and how they reacted when the stranger entered the room. They observed how the child responded when their caregiver also came back into the room. Ainsworth’s research showed there were three different types of responses and suggested that these responses were related to the attachment relationship the toddler had already developed over time with their caregiver.
Attachment responses to the strange situation:
The three types of attachment responses identified through Ainsworth “strange situation” research were labelled:
Secure attachment
Insecure avoidant attachment
Insecure ambivalent/resistant attachment.
Further research since then has added a fourth category: disorganised attachment (Main & Solomon, 1990).
In a later blog, we’ll consider each of these categories of attachment patterns, and how they might play out as you develop and mature into adolescence and adulthood. These attachment patterns help to explain our responses in relationships and how we feel about belong, rejection and connection.
Caring for yourself as you explore your need to belong
For many people, learning more about attachment styles and patterns gives a language and a framework to talk about the early relationships we had as children and our early longings to belong. It can support making meaning of your past and your present. Yet, thinking about attachment patterns and the relationships in our family or origin and even the relationships with our own children can be difficult work. Connecting with childhood memories and feelings associated with your place in our family of origin can throw up feelings that are challenging to work through. It’s important to look after yourself in this process. If you’re on a journey of making meaning of your own attachment patterns you will be coming up against how you respond when you feel rejected or sense that you’re not welcome, or that you don’t belong. As you explore this, consider how you can find ways to take care of yourself and treat yourself with the gentle nurturing that is so important to our wellbeing, no matter what age we are. Working with a counsellor or psychotherapist can be part of that taking care of yourself as you explore your own need to belong.
If you’ve found this article helpful, do consider also checking out my other blogs in this series on childhood attachment patterns, adult attachment styles and ways you can develop earned secure attachment.
Get in touch
If you’d like to talk through how counselling can help you with a deeper exploration of your own feelings and responses around belonging, rejection, abandonment and attachment, do make contact with me, Claire Law.
We can talk through how online counselling or face-to-face counselling at my therapy room in Preston can help you in this exploration, so you feel more at ease with where you do belong in life. I’d be glad to hear from you.
References:
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Bell, S. M., & Stayton, D. J. (1971) Individual differences in strange- situation behavior of one-year-olds. In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.) The origins of human social relations. London and New York: Academic Press. Pp. 17-58.
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529
Harlow, H. F. (1961). The development of affectional patterns in infant monkeys. In B. M. Foss (Ed.), Determinants of infant behaviour (pp. 75–88). Wiley.
Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M.T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti & E.M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years (pp. 121–160). Chicago, University of Chicago Press.