To belong is a human desire, which grows in its intensity, the further we move away from being in relationship with our body.
The feeling of belonging is a human experience we all innately desire.
To belong somewhere, to someone … to the earth we walk upon.
For many, particularly those who have experienced trauma during childhood, to belong seems to elude us.
We may have never known the feeling and therefore on some deeper level believe we simply do not belong.
In my early 30s, this was how I felt and how I had felt all of my life so far.
I felt lonely within the family unit of my husband and four children.
I felt lonely in a crowd.
I felt lonely on this planet.
I found it challenging to create friendships and bonds of safety and trust.
No matter what I tried to do to fill the gap, I felt I did not fit or belong.
Our truth is based on how we feel.
We can have an idea, a concept of what belonging may be like, but an idea or concept is not truth to us until we have a felt experience of it.
Our first place of felt experience is within our body and usually when we stop looking externally for a place or people to belong to, we notice we do not quite feel we belong in our own skin and bones.
Childhood sexual trauma and abuse creates a disturbance in the relationship of safety we feel in our body. For a “bad thing” did not just happen in our environment that rocked our internal world, the event violated and happened to our own flesh.
Can we create a feeling of belonging in our body after sexual abuse?
My felt truth and experience is absolutely yes we can.
With patience, kindness and consistency we can create and establish a sense of safety and belonging in our body. Which once we have a relationship with our body as the container of our embodiment, we can then feel in “right relationship” to connect to the world and others.
Not from a need to belong, but from self assured belonging.
Having a felt sense of belonging in our body, changes our felt sense of belonging to the Earth we walk upon and enriches our connection to the relationships we are in and when we are ready expands further into our sense of safety and belonging to the crowds we find ourselves in.
Steps to create the feeling of belonging:
Begin with bottom up.
When we are disconnected from our body, we loose sense of our feet.
I therefore, to create a non-threatening relationship with the body, suggest beginning with your relationship with your feet.
This is to be sensory to invoke feeling in your feet. Rolling a ball using the soles of your feet. Spending time slowly caressing/massaging your feet. Noticing if you can slow down when you walk and soften your feet to the ground as you walk.
Your pelvis is the grounding of you, it holds your root and sacral energy, and is the home to your breath and sexual energy.
When seated in our pelvis, we are “down and in” and feel grounded, safe, alive and solid.
After sexual abuse, we can avoid stimulation to this area of our body and numb out, we therefore want to gently create a relationship with the root and pelvis that is non-sexual.
This can be created by allowing your breath to be in your belly, placing your hand on your belly and exploring the breath in the belly, how it rises and falls.
Non-agenda touch with your belly, thighs, buttocks, noticing the thoughts arise but not following them, simply choosing this new, sensory experience as an act of self kindness.
A pelvic wrap is useful to give your body and pelvis the feeling of being held and comforted. This can simply be wearing a scarf/shawl/blanket around your pelvis as part of your everyday.
Explore ways to move in joy, to celebrate your body. Particularly how you move your feet, legs and pelvis. It is wise to not choose activities that detach you from your body, such as kundalini yoga and breathwork. For these energetically can take us up and away from the ground, which when so highly attuned to disassociation, this is where we comfortably exist. It is wise to move down and into the body first.
All these suggestions if consistent as part of your everyday, begin to lay the foundations of a felt experience of belonging.
When we come home to the body, we come home to the ground, and we are able to relate “wholly” with self and those we love and cherish.
