The Self-Empowerment Death Sentence: Mistaking, “Do I Belong?” for, “Do I matter?” part 2
Identifying Failure in Mattering Vs. Belonging Connections
In order to cultivate a healthy sense of belonging with others requires an emphasis on ways to interact with others, understand their needs, and also being safe to communicate your own pain and be understood and not judged. This is especially difficult when the individuals you’re attempting to trust are the ones constantly hurting you. They’re potentially unaware and will often defensively refuse to acknowledge that this is even occurring. This is especially true when people are providing self-care tips to help someone feel like they matter, when the person is seeking out a sense of belonging. Understanding where things break down and identifying how each side feels is key to understanding how to mend those connections.
This process of communication, collaboration, & cooperation can hit snags at several different stages that impact every form of team building from work teams to friendships, to marriages. Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team covers them in detail, but they’re effectively summarized in this two minute video. I’m going to re-contextualize all of them in how these interactions play out for people looking for belonging and being met with answers about self-care, and end with a summary about how to ensure success in creating a better sense of belonging:
- Trust
- Conflict
- Commitment
- Accountability
- Results
The First Stage: Trust
“Trust and purpose mutually reinforce each other, extending oxytocin release, which produces happiness.” — The Trust Factor, Paul Zak. This means that exclusion not only doesn’t produce Dopamine, Serotonin, or Oxytocin, it activates the same neurological areas of the brain that physical pain does. This means that people who have been rejected are overwhelmed with feeling helpless, but also at their core desperate to feel vulnerable.
When they’re met with self-care advice rather than support from the individuals that they’re attempting to connect to, this most often manifests in oversharing intimate details about their circumstances with others they’re less familiar with, because the inner group of people that they are attempting to build trust with aren’t receptive or understanding. They’re checking their own assessment in neutral environments to try to understand the responses that they’re getting being the polar opposite of what they’re seeking, and they need to neurochemically stabilize in order to do that clearly, since they’re being flooded with the exact opposite of what they need.
These individuals are desperate to communicate and are throwing away their personal armor with seemingly reckless abandon. When anxious types fall to avoidance, and avoidant types develop overactive anxiety, the core foundation of trust is the issue that needs to be addressed first because this represents these attachment types’ back being against the wall and them abandoning their own survival instincts, which is when suicidal ideation is at its most dangerous.
Success: Vulnerable communication is the core of achieving understanding. That is fundamentally impossible without trust, and is deeply necessary for healthy survival before one can even begin to think about a focus on thriving. This clarification of clear boundaries is needed to establish mutual expectations and comfort zones, and ensure the removal of any defensive walls being used to push away or control the other party.
The Second Stage: Conflict
Conflict is essential, because this is how issues get resolved. If trust and emotional vulnerability don’t exist — conflict becomes a source of fear. It represents a fight that ends up relying on one or both of the individuals’ defense mechanisms, rather than a tool for clearly expressing and alleviating pain & difficulty.
Most often, people who are at this stage of suffering a sense of belonging and lack of trust adamantly do not want to see a therapist at all. They’re fighting explicitly to be understood by those they seek a connection to, while the people who are self-care centered are convinced that this behaviour is just lashing out at others because that individual doesn’t truly understand their own inner pain.
Most frequently individuals seeking belonging still know and value themselves deeply, and what they lack understanding of is why their own inner feelings are being stifled by external rejection explicitly from the person who they’re in conflict with. However, because they’re aware that their need to belong and be understood is so delicate, they also know that if they’re feeling rejected already and then have a bad experience with a therapist while they’re this vulnerable — they know they’re going to feel like they’re clinically impossible to understand, and their feeling of helplessness, insignificance, suicidal ideation are going to skyrocket out of their own control because they’ll have nowhere safe to turn.
Unfortunately, this stage of conflict is also subject to the tribal “Us Vs. Them” biases where conflict becomes a zero-sum interaction about winning an argument and controlling the other party’s actions. This can subconsciously cause individuals who want others to embrace self-care to be hurtful with the other person until they’re so utterly broken that they surrender to therapy in a state of complete helplessness — rather than in any remote active interest of self-improvement. Therapy becomes the focal point for success, achievement, and victory of the self-care individual, and the marker of loss, helplessness, and defeat for the party seeking belonging. This means that any sort of harsh treatment is justified and delivers dopamine and serotonin to the victor and reinforces their isolating, “self-care-&-therapy-fixes-everything” attitude.
Success: It is imperative to ensure that conflict always serves to increase trust in both parties and never to decrease trust in either party. Both sides need to know that they’re being listened to to be understood — not just heard enough to be responded to. The goal is for both sides to be supported, and never just placated. Interactions that take place with clear mutually respected boundaries and never defensive walls.
The Third Stage: Commitment
Commitment is where attachment types can flare up especially hard. This is where anxious types most feel that they’re going to be abandoned, and avoidant types most often feel that they’re going to be tied down. This is where personal insecurities result in subconscious activation of survival mode panic, and resulting in self-sabotage because the impulse to protect yourself against the worst case scenario gets accelerated. This is where issues can all-too-easily arise if any issues with trust and healthy conflict aren’t addressed first. Any commitment made without trust, and without a clear path to alleviate a source of conflict becomes a begrudging acceptance of obligation that serves only to form deeper resentment between both parties.
What happens most often is that uncomfortable commitment enables procrastination. Procrastination rewards dopamine to the person putting things off, but increases stress and instability of the task that has been committed to. This causes stress and increases the potential for negative conflict, which then reinforces the impulse to retreat & procrastinate more. This negative cycle helps to disconnect from the commitment emotionally, which is why not only is procrastination actually a form of self-harm but it’s also harm being delivered to the other person as well. It is prioritizing the needs of the self as higher than the needs of the other person and of the value of the connection between both parties. When commitments result in something that’s less than what was attempted, any negative conclusion reinforces the procrastinator’s impulse to detach, and the other individual’s need for them to contribute.
This frustration is going to cause both sides to experience pain, but if self-care is the only path taken to alleviating that pain, the damage between the two of them is never assessed. It’s an expected casualty that’s ignored, but it becomes the focal point for the person who doesn’t feel like they belong, since the commitment was about increasing the sense of healthy belonging, and that is being sacrificed for self-soothing that doesn’t at all heal that gaping wound.
Success: Commitments are the lifeblood of connections. If there’s a reason that a commitment can’t happen, the conflict that arises has to be a space where vulnerability is allowed, and a new commitment can be established mutually. Otherwise it will succumb to the allure of self-defeating disconnection tactics of one side taking control forcibly in order to provide short-term dopamine for themselves in exchange for sacrificing the trust reward of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin for both parties.
The Fourth Stage: Accountability
Accountability is the crux of where the integrity of an individual is tested in a public space. This can be fear-inducing, but it when a the demonstration of private trust is potentially a matter of public scrutiny. This is where judgement for ones actions are central, but also where a blame-shifting struggles can take place if communication hasn’t been made clear.
For individuals who are seeking belonging, but given self-care advice this is where the crux of the issue usually begins. With self-care, any time an individual wants to belong, if everything else is stable, they just have to care for themselves well enough and the belonging they want is naturally going to occur within their environment. The issue is that if circumstances have caused an imbalance of trust, conflict, and/or commitment, such that those things are becoming more and more one-sided — the accountability becomes one-sided as well.
This can start when both parties get told to focus on self-care to remember their importance and how much they matter. This is an over-focus on how the individuals matter to themselves in an attempt to make them remember what they mean to one another. This doesn’t help the party who is only struggling with belonging, as this just provides them with isolation & avoidance of connection to who they’re struggling with. Additionally, with self-focus no one is being held accountable for improving the connection, so they have to take responsibility for ensuring that it gets addressed.
This is seen as neglecting their own self-care to focus on others, and criticized or even used to claim that they are the source of the problem, because they’re not caring for themselves. This is ignoring that human being need to have a stable sense of belonging to be established before they can take steps to focus on esteem. Connection is treated as impossible until both individuals are stable and healthy, and it is ignoring that destabilization of that connection directly contributes to an inability for individuals to be stable and healthy.
Accountability is defined by the nature of the relationship between the individuals that has been committed to and mutually agreed upon. Changes to that underlying commitment should always be mutual discussions that are the equally contributed decisions and understanding of both parties — never the demands and actions of a single party acting out of their own interest with the other party forced to react.
Success: Ensure that all commitments have an equal weight of accountability between each party according to their abilities. Every individual is accountable not only to themselves, and to the other person, but to their relationship with that person as well — as lovers, friends, partners, teammates, coworkers, etc. Strengthening that relationship is only possible when accountability is met with understanding and open integrity, and it has to be motivated by love & passion and not out of fear.
The Fifth & Final Stage: Results
Results are what everything is building towards and is how you can asses what lies beneath. While things that fail in the later stages are often simple to correct, all-too-often any invisible difficulties that have managed to fester at a deeper level but are finally emerging and causing painful results are treated as inevitable. They people who worry about belonging will dive in with their whole being to discover and fix that wound no matter at what level it originates, whereas the people who worry about mattering need to recover from that crack finally emerging into the open.
Self-care treats damaged relationship struggles as things to be recovered from, rather than things that can be recovered for. The issue is that this type of recovery only focuses on the now, and allows the damaged state to exist. This lingering break with results forces both parties heal individually and adapt to the issue with results as the current norm — rather than focusing on resetting the norm into a healthy state to allow the parties to heal. For individuals who struggle with belonging, this is just telling them that they need to give up the lost sense of belonging or mattering to that person completely, and focus only on caring about themselves — which doesn’t correct anything they struggle with, and only makes all of the struggles more significant as they just put on a strong face.
While for surface-level damage to results, self-care provides a temporary reprieve before the humility needed for taking accountability for ones responsibility with poor results — for anything deeper, this most often serves as justification for escaping from the results because the pain that’s coming from far deeper is now openly apparent to others. It fuels justification for removal of connection and emotional distancing.
For individuals seeking belonging, their focus is always on correcting and improving end results. This is because that connection with the relationship of interacting in cooperation and collaboration with another person gives them the strength they need to address anything broken no matter how deep the break goes. This is because they don’t worry about mattering because they already know that they matter. This is never in question when they have a sense of belonging — but when they’re not allowed to address the fractures in their sense of belonging, everything else gets forcibly pushed down along with it. Unless the type of help is adjusted to actually address their needs for community care, the damage from only looking at self-care will persist until they’re finally broken enough to need to be treated as someone who doesn’t know that they matter.
For individuals who worry about mattering, results are deeply personal public reflections and can fracture them to the core. It is a break in the armor that protects them. Until they can heal and remember their own worth, results serve as a reflection of who they are, and they can’t imagine being capable of building or maintaining connections to belong to something that surfaces a gaping wound out to the open air. Because this wound is seen as more severe and also more well-understood, they get a sense of belonging without asking for one, and all of the healing that they need to do is within their own control.
These two separate things cannot both be treated with self-care, because it is ignoring the key fundamental aspect that they each require belonging to function, while one needs the healing of self and the other needs the healing from others. Results matter, but they are usually not the thing that dictates the action, but rather they point to things below that need to be addressed and owned. They’re also not reflective of the entirety of the individuals who are responsible for them, but only one facet of their current relationship efforts. That connection is more than the sum of its parts and it cannot be regarded as a negligible factor when change is needed.
Healing has to be something that comes from the bottom up while also repairing from the top down. A bandage to stabilize and prevent deeper infection and a medication to heal the wound. In either case, the differences between individuals who need to know that they matter, and the individuals who need to know that they belong have to be supported with the care that they need.
Success: Results have to be met with the accountability of the individuals who set out to achieve them. Success is not always a result of a healthy process, and Failure is not always the result of a broken process. Clear accountability is able to be accepted when there is a commitment to the relationship, so that the conflict that arises from shortcomings is able to be shared in an environment of trust, where vulnerabilities are safe to explore and support —so that it’s always clear that you not only matter, but that you also belong.
