Other People Feel This Way Too
I entered the catering hall nervously, unsure what to expect for my first end of season hockey dinner. My youngest son walked in ahead of me, leaving me alone as he found a seat with his teammates. My husband was running late and wouldn’t be there for another hour. Having attended many athletic dinners for my three sons over the years, I anticipated finding an empty seat at a table with people I had spent time with on the sidelines throughout the season. While this wasn’t my favorite type of social event, I had settled in to the rhythm of high school sports dinners over the years. I assumed this experience would be similar and prepared for the familiar and tolerable level of discomfort that accompanied me into these situations.
As I entered the room, a friendly mom greeted me and asked where I was sitting. Hoping she would ask me to join her table, I responded that I didn’t know. “Oh, well,” she replied, smiling broadly. “My table is full. Have a great time!” As she turned away from me, I felt my heart sink and my anxiety rise. I moved cautiously to another table, recognizing parents from the team. “Hi!” I faked a smile and tried to appear nonchalant as I inquired about open seats. “Sorry, this table is full.” My heart pounded fiercely as I glanced around the room. “RESERVED” signs were posted on all the tables around me. I felt confused and disoriented as I wondered, If we’re all on the same team, who are these tables reserved for?
Gradually, my mind absorbed the reality that groups of parents had organized and reserved tables for themselves. I walked out of the room, overwhelmed and broken-hearted. There I was, a seasoned clinical psychologist, an experienced yoga practitioner with decades of self-exploration work behind me, on the verge of an emotional breakdown at a high school hockey team dinner.
Feeling like a middle-school outsider, I approached the woman running the event. “There are no seats for me,” I managed to say, barely holding back my tears. Noticing my distress, the kind-hearted woman invited me to pull up two chairs at her table. Seeing no other options, I joined one of the tables RESERVED for those who had bonded on the bleachers. As I slowly regained my composure using every emotional regulation strategy I had ever acquired, I scanned the room and noticed the one table at the back of the room without a RESERVED sign. That was the table where my seat was, the table set for those of us who hadn’t bonded, who hadn’t been asked. My seat was at the table for those who didn’t belong.
Later that week, I processed the experience with a close friend, also a psychologist. “This isn’t your tribe,” she consoled me. While I knew that I didn’t fit in with the other hockey moms, I also knew that the feelings I had at the team dinner were not unique to that specific experience. In fact, I reminded my friend, I had spent five days feeling excluded during a yoga retreat led by a teacher I adored on the heavenly island of Anguilla with my husband, my closest friends, my brother and several other like-minded yogis. When I walked into the hockey dinner, I did so with a life-long predisposition to feeling like I didn’t belong. The reserved tables, pre-arranged groups and absence of secure companions had been the perfect storm to trigger in me a familiar and deeply felt sense of not being a part of something that other people are part of.
I have noticed that individuals who were raised in a family environment or community in which they felt seen, welcome and accepted often have an emotional buffer against painful experiences of exclusion that threaten to derail those of us who grew up feeling less securely held. While the absence of a sense of belonging in childhood can be uncomfortably carried into experiences throughout the life-span, the opposite can also be true. Having a strong inner sense of belonging sometimes provides the emotional resilience to tolerate being excluded without being devastated. It’s as if those who learned in childhood that they were a welcome part of a community can walk into a room with the assurance that even if things don’t go well, the experience is not a reflection of their belong-ability.
Born into the shadows of my father’s trauma as a Jew in Europe during the Holocaust, my childhood experience reflected his pervasive experience of being unwanted. I wasn’t blessed with the warm embrace of a secure and stable family home or a welcoming extended family. As I moved through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood, I tried to counter my tendency to feel like an outsider by searching for the perfect person or group, believing that once I found that corrective situation, I would no longer feel the pain of being on the outside looking in.
As I aged, I witnessed many comings and goings of people and groups in my life, my children’s lives and the lives of friends, family members and patients. I learned that friendships and social groups can be fragile and that even secure relationships can end through death or other forms of separation. I realized over time that the feeling of security that comes from belonging to an external relationship has the potential for dissolving when life brings its inevitable changes. With maturity came the recognition that the antidote to feeling like an outsider would have to come from within.
As a mental health professional and human being, my concern as we enter the darkness of winter in the midst of a pandemic is for those who hold a fragile sense of belonging and may feel particularly isolated, excluded and alone during the holidays and over the next few months. Human beings are inherently social beings. We are meant to gather, connect and communicate with each other. In this unusual episode of our lives, we don’t have the freedom to come together in our churches, synagogues, yoga studios, gyms, schools, bars, restaurants or family homes. We are prevented from engaging in social gatherings that have traditionally provided us with a sense of community and warm feelings of belonging. Under these extreme circumstances, even the most belonging-resilient among us may start to feel vulnerable, alone or isolated. As we move into this darker period together, I want to share with you two strategies I use and teach for coping with the painful feelings of not belonging.
Painful AND Survivable:
In the aftermath of one particularly heart-breaking experience in which my family was excluded from a long-standing community tradition, I became aware that while being or feeling excluded can be excruciatingly painful, it is also survivable. As I processed the experience, I allowed myself to feel vulnerably and deeply as the emotions flared. I learned that I could tolerate the intense emotions of feeling lost, afraid, hurt, angry and betrayed. This strategy of expanding capacity for emotional resilience is a powerful tool for coping with life’s painful moments. If we avoid feeling difficult emotions, we never learn that we can tolerate them. If we lean in and expose ourselves to the sharp edges of human emotional pain, we empower ourselves to recognize that we have the capacity to endure the challenges life may bring.
Other People Feel This Way Too:
When life inevitably challenges us with experiences that are difficult to tolerate, it is common to add insult to injury by believing that we are alone in feeling the way we do. It is hard enough to feel alone, lonely, sad and excluded. To feel that you are the only one who feels that way is even harder. Tara Brach, psychologist and meditation teacher, offers a comforting reminder that no matter what we are feeling,“other people feel this way too.” This simple statement can be used as a powerful mantra in moments when the heart feels broken open. Her recommendation is to place your hand on top of your heart and tell yourself, “Other people feel this way too.” This practice reminds us that even in our darkest moments, there are always other people who feel or have felt what we are feeling. Therefore, we are never alone.
When the resources outside are not available, we have to search inside ourselves for strategies to help us through these challenging times. While our feelings may be painful, they are survivable, and others feel them, too. You are not alone.