Have you ever felt a sense of uneasiness or emptiness inside you when everything was going well? I'm talking about those times when you knew something was missing but couldn't figure out what it was. How did you get out of this feeling?
Or were you able to? Do you keep yourself busy so that you don't become a slave to this feeling? If we're a little confused, let's start: How do we feel like we belong, how do we understand that we don't belong?
Belonging is the ability of a person to feel accepted within a social group and to form strong bonds. Especially in early adulthood, when this sense of belonging is combined with a person’s search for meaningful connections, it can also manifest itself as “reaching out to someone else who understands you.”
After the simplest definitions of the sense of belonging, the definition of not belonging is just as complex. Belonging; because it is inherently dependent on many variables and emotions, it shows itself as a situation that is difficult to define when felt and to experience when not felt.
That is why it is very difficult to describe in words. In order to define this journey that started with the existence of man, let us tell it by telling a story, as our first hominid ancestors did.
I want you to think that you are traveling on the subway on your way home from work, and you feel lonely and alienated in the crowd. Maybe this loneliness and alienation also makes you feel different from everyone else.
Everyone is in a rush to get somewhere, but you feel like you are not part of that crowd. You look at the faces of people on the subway; some are immersed in their phones, some are reading books... They all seem to be attached to something, but you don't feel attached to anywhere.
If you can empathize with this situation, if you have integrated with the story, or if you are at a time in your life where this feels exactly like this, the name of the bittersweet feeling in your heart is not feeling like you belong.
Many psychologists, such as William James, Paul Ekman, Richard and Bernice Lazarus, have developed various systems related to emotions .
The emotion wheel was developed by Robert Plutchik in 1980 and is perhaps the most popular research on emotions.
Robert Plutchik, in his study on the wheel of emotions, divided emotions into 8 basic categories and divided each of these emotions into 3 different levels. These basic emotions are: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and expectation .
We cannot see the sense of belonging in any of the 3 different breakdowns. Why did Plutchik, who defined emotions in such detail and successfully, not include the sense of belonging?
Because Plutchik's wheel represents basic emotions and their combinations. A sense of belonging is often associated with combinations and subcategories of basic emotions. So a sense of belonging can be considered a common set of many emotions and their subcategories.
Let's try to place the sense of belonging on this wheel together, what emotions and subcategories can it be combined with? Joy, trust, sadness?
In fact, belonging is a state of well-being that encompasses these and much more than these feelings.
Belonging includes intense emotional states such as feeling safe, love, acceptance and value, acceptance without judgment, emotional support, emotional connections with other people and places, and an environment where one's views and existence are respected.
The absence of even one of these emotional states can cause a person to feel alienated enough to question their identity.