In 1943, well within the midst of the global atrocities and uncertainties of World War II, American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the world to an idea that has come to be known as the “Hierarchy of Needs” within his paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in the Psychological Review journal.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is typically represented as a tiered pyramid image, building up components of what humans need to survive and to thrive from the bottom up (see here).
I love that Maslow put “belongingness” at the center of the pyramid. Often, the sense of belonging that we each acutely feel a need for is discussed as an inconsequential social construct. However, it is so much more than that. In fact, recent research completed by students at Middlebury College and at University of Vermont (2020) has shown direct correlations between positive feelings of belonging and an overall lower frequency rate of negative mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts. In other words, feeling we belong is a core human need, even for our brains and our bodies.
There are innumerable sociopolitical and ideological forces at play in our culture today that make people feel like they don’t belong, in one way or another. Most of these are obvious, and are being talked about more regularly than they used to be: racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classism, ableism, ageism, sexism, etc. These forces present themselves both as unconscious internal biases that we all have a tendency to develop, as well as systemic problems built into the structures of what makes our society run.
But, regardless of your personal identity and of how it intersects with the rest of your life around you – almost all of us have felt the feeling “I don’t belong here” before. Maybe it happened on the middle school playground when you were the very last person to get picked by the team captains of the pickup football game. Maybe it happened when you saw that post on Facebook from an old college buddy that reunited with several mutual friends and didn’t invite you. Maybe it happened when you walked into the big church in your neighborhood for the first time after having recently moved to that town, and you didn’t know where to sit or who to talk to.
You’ve felt it, and it stings. When we feel like we’ve been excluded, forgotten, or “othered” in any kind of way, it has dramatic effects on our mood and our health. If these feelings are prolonged, and the symptoms they lead to are ignored, it can be life-threatening for some of us – especially those of us who are identified as a minority in our general community. Simply put, we cannot survive, and we certainly cannot thrive, alone. We need each other, even with all our differences.
I encourage you to keep these memories of what it feels like close to your heart the next time you meet a stranger (especially one who’s different from you in some way). I encourage you to remember this need that we all share the next time you start typing or sharing a potentially ill-informed post on social media. I encourage you to remember these words from Mother Teresa, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
-Written by Chase Cotten, Community Director
