True Belonging Being Without Any Consequences due to Who You Are Being

              Ahhh Teal Swan made a video that blew my mind! It described every profound thought I had about my life recently. About love and my adoption feelings that drag me through the mud. Sometimes, we need outer validation and I got that from her. It is called Belonging and How to belong.

             She says that social needs of belonging is more powerful than physical needs, because we are social beings, and without it, we DIE. Belonging is accepting a person for all of what they are, so it is inherently love and oneness with another person. If a person has an aversion to true belonging, it is because they did not experience true belonging in the first place. It was a ruse. They experienced lack of belonging disguised as belonging. The truth is, she says, "If it is possible for ostracization, dis-inclusion, or not belonging to be a consequence of any type of behavior, there was no belonging in the first place." And,  "With true belonging you don't have to do anything to belong or keep your true belonging."

               Dysfunctional families work like this. "Parent is self centered they can't take anything in as part of themselves because they don't recognize that anything other than themselves exists. Everything is...an extension of themselves but in a negative way...The child that does not please them will be ostracized from the family... That's the consequence of not behaving the way they want..." They are the family scapegoat.

                The flip side is the golden child who hates to belong because learned to adapt to belonging by "completely getting rid if their own identity, they erase who they are for the sake of the parent that's how they stay safe within the family group." The child knows inside that they just belong by doing what the parent wants, and not being themselves. They feel no loving feelings, and, "Belonging feels like enmeshment so...they will be obsessed with freedom." this is what I meant when I said that people I know are scared of true intimacy, because they never truly felt they could be themselves with their mothers/ caregivers. Like my sister and cousins who all follow the script that their parents are perfect and they can never say how they truly feel so it is all a circus of everyone having to behave happy and perfect all the time. If they experience sadness, they feel estranged from their family, and hide away in their rooms depressed.  Also included is my biological sister who was raised by a tight ship of having to be grateful for life, and the minute a negative feeling came up for her, her mother told her going for therapy would feel make her feel like something was wrong with her, indicating that having negative feelings are wrong and need to be shut down. That is why she cannot admit to having problems stemming from being adopted, and has to pin it on "It's NORMAL to have problems just like everyone else, I don't want to feel different for being adopted." But this is denial that continues to let her feel like a victim that cannot be empowered to change.

              She says if its possible for ostracization there was no belonging in first place. This is apparent with me, being a scapegoat all my life because I didn't conform to how my mother wanted me to act because I had strong feelings, and it caused me to never I belonged anywhere. She says that when you feel you don't belong, you look for dissimilarities because they are the threat that bring rejection and abandonment, which you feel. People like this feel alone and the opposite of connected to humanity. And the root of addiction is isolation. 

             Adoption causes one to feel this way because we are not accepted for our full selves- the pain we feel is shut down because don't have permission to grieve it. 

             "If you struggle with belonging you are operating in the world from a concept of shame...(Something wrong with you in deep fundamental way).  As a result, you cannot recognize people's attachment to you. To recognize people as attached to you you'd have to see yourself as valuable... And you don't...Obviously if others aren't attached to you if its just you trying to get them to be okay with you being attached to them, there isn't much room for you to feel connected to the world and to feel like you belong." 

            The antidote is to realize that whether you feel connected to the world or not, people are attached to you. When we don't take care of the connections and pull away or take for granted, people feel un-valued so pull away. Ask yourself how to make the person feel like they belong or a part of me. 

             When you dis-include a part of yourself and reject the part, you register non belonging within yourself and this leads to inner isolation and rejection. It will cause more shame and anger. Adoptees do this to themselves when they reject their pain because others reject it. 

            We have to look deliberately for similarities if we want to feel belong. When we see people go through similar situations and pain we feel included in humanity, and belonging. That's why AA groups work well because root of addiction is pain isolation and it fixes that. When I saw others also felt the way I did because of adoption, I felt much better and less alone. 

            We all have an innate belonging to God. Like a paper that is ripped it'll still be a paper. Ownership is recognizing people are part of you and we need it in healthy relationships. Feeling trapped is false sense of belonging and it means person never got true belonging so needs to be free so they see it as enmeshment.  But we have to feel belonging in our singular forms if we want to feel good. It's all about our self concept- if it is bad we will only feel belonging in places we don't want to belong in, and not in places we do. This is why I didn't feel I belonged with "normal" families, and seeked troubled people to befriend. I even dropped all of my friends because I didn't feel I belonged with them, and I felt like a fake around them. I felt they could not understand me because they didn't know about my hidden pain,

          Belonging means to accept people for what they are without trying to change them.  This will give them validation, and it's a way of saying you accept them. I want my daughter to feel belonging for all of her in our relationship. Unlike how my mother connected to me through only seeing what she wanted. She didn't agree with me saying i didn't like her. She tried to pour soap and succeeded in my mouth when I called her a name. That was the moment I felt ostracized again, crying and Crying with nobody there. Then she told me I always felt like a second class citizen, which is because she didn't realize I didn't feel like I belonged with normal people.

              In Scattered Gabor Mate writes (pages 160-162), that when parents do not know how to self regulate their emotions the child can develop ADD because they cannot learn how to self regulate. It works like this, the child has a strong emotion and they are shut down by the parent who shuts their feeling down. It is a vicious cycle because the child reacts with more emotion, not learning the proper way to express himself. Instead of looking at the child as acting, he says, it would be important to see it as reacting- that is to the parent. This would help to understand where the child's behavior stems from and fix it. 

             Children are at the most crucial age for emotional and psychological development because of their dependence on the parents. With better regulation on emotions, a child can be healthier emotionally and feel acceptance for who they are despite their feelings of hostility. Families that have a child or children with ADD tend to have unhealthy boundaries in feelings, in that whatever the child feels the family feels. So when he is angry everyone is angry too. This happened in my family, because my mother did not know how to separate what my brother was feeling with her feelings, and help him deal with his appropriately. Instead she did everything to fix them because it meant she was a bad parent if he was upset. This is enmeshment.  She should have validated his feelings as acceptable, and helped him feel okay. Instead she made us feel like something was wrong with our negative emotions. A person with ADD only feels extreme emotions to all life events, and that's why we have a hard time dealing with any disruptions. And life is meant to have them.I have seen many Adoptive families who cater to all the needy emotions of their adopted children, however extreme they may be, because they fear the reality buster of the child feel grief. It is truly a living nightmare.

          She did not let us have feelings belong and be validated, because of her own negative reaction to them. Therefore, we shut off that part of ourselves and feel we have to act different than who we are or people won't accept us. This is similar to what Teal Swan said about how parents can cause a child to feel scared of true belonging, because they think they cannot be themselves fully with people their in close relationships with due to their experience with having to shut down parts of them to please their caregiver.

           Love,

           A Scattered Adoptee