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Over the last months i have been circling the topic of belonging, for instance in Practice comes first, Circle of Safety, Alignment and glue, and What exactly is the container, but today i want to bundle the whole thesis up in one place and give it a name. Be advised that all of the below is my opinion. This could get a bit crazy, so fasten your seat belts.

Wired to belong

Alright lets dig in. Humans are subject to the same drive to belong that all mammals are. Oxytocin urges us into the fold of family, clan and tribal affiliations. While once an evolutionary defense against predators, it now brings both hazards and opportunities to the new kinds of group that we are building. Groups that lean towards developmental repair, growth and interpersonal reinvention.

I want to illustrate the first half of our paradox by casting an eye to the animal kingdom. Ostriches have long necks for the purpose of watching out for predators in the long grasses that are their habitat. The smaller the herd, the more time they spend with their heads up watching and less time grazing. The bigger the herd, the fewer individuals that have to be on duty being vigilant for predators.

Lion females synchronize births in their pride, and nurse each other's cubs. Bats cluster together in maternity colonies, reducing individual heat loss. In zebra and deer herds one or two individuals will risk themselves by being on the periphery of the herd to raise alarm for the benefit of the group. Elephants respond to distress calls of other group members with coordinated guarding. Chimpanzees groom each other to reduce parasite load, and reinforce social bonds.

Bonobo juveniles are watched over by groups of adults. Sarah Hrdy points out that humans are the same, as cooperative breeders our infants evolved to expect more than one nervous system to regulate them. When humans sleep, both sides of the brain suspend, whereas in less social species the two hemispheres take turns. Before modern housing, humans took turns keeping watch so others could sleep. Matt Walker studied the Hutterites and they sleep significantly better than the rest of us, with less micro awakenings, simply by virtue of having three generations living in the same house.

Food and eating offers particular insight. Mammals did not evolve to eat alone. As humans our digestion is not just a mechanical process. If we eat alone in a vigilant state, scrolling social media, watching the tv, the sympathetic nervous system remains active. To digest our food we need to be in a parasympathetic state, that's why its called rest and digest. Polyvagal theory tells us that this means being socially connected.

This is why we digest our food better during a family meal or social gathering. Parasympathetic is about the gut and the gut makes feel-good serotonin. There is increased saliva production, we chew slower, insulin has more time to stabilise. There is eye contact, laughter and banter. Firelight, predictable gathering time, shared storytelling, all serve to co-regulate our physiology. Research consistently correlates family meals with improved health outcomes.

Stopping to eat (or ablution) requires surrendering vigilance. Surrender requires safety, and absent locked doors (itself surfacing fear), safety is socially mediated. Our cortisol levels drop when familiar others are nearby.

To digest fully, we must relax. To relax, we must trust. To trust, we must belong.

These are just some examples of the interdependence involved in being a social species. All mammals do these things to varying degrees. It presents as biological and physiological in nature because in order to sleep, to digest my food, and operate my immune system the human body requires a context of social support.

Belonging as not just nice, its metabolic. Belonging is about distributed regulation. This is what being a mammal means. It is neither wrong, nor right, it is just who we are.

Attachment as the mechanism

So part of our paradox is that as a mammal i 'need' to belong, as an evolutionary expectation. Whenever we try to depart from our genetic lineage there is a cost.

This drive to belong is understood to be driven by the mechanism of attachment. Attachment is in turn mediated by oxytocin, and which originally served the useful purpose of discouraging mothers from abandoning or eating their babies.

More recently it was discovered that oxytocin recruits the endorphin system. Endorphins are a natural opioid produced by the body that is similar in composition to morphine, the purpose of which is to reward social connection and stable social bonds.

Today, we can readily see attachment at work in the importance we place on our marriages and children to our sense of well-being. When we see, in films, characters weeping inconsolably over some harm to a loved one, that is attachment at work.

The partisan nature of attachment

There are down sides. Oxytocin is often misunderstood as a feel-good hormone related to social connection in general. This is not quite true. Oxytocin strengthens social bonds with the people we care about. It has the opposite effect on people outside our circle. It actually serves to increase our disregard and even hostility toward outsiders and strangers. I was once at a massage workshop where two unfamiliar practitioners decided to take some nasal oxytocin resulting in one of them having a full blown melt down.

Five years ago, during the first week of the pandemic, i wrote a blog piece called: The real virus is anxiety. It included these horrific statistics.

As i ponder that data, how often do i shed a tear for any of this? If i really were becoming more conscious, and i really did aspire to create a more encompassing sense of relational capacity, my question is, oughtn't I weep? This is just the reality of the in-group bias that is a side effect of attachment.

So now we are starting to build a picture of the shadow sides of attachment. In addition to in-group bias, it also includes things like group think, where groups drink the same cool-aid and wallow in each others confirmation bias. Done to extreme, this can lead to the formation of cults, but even progressive movements like AR practice groups risk, via this exact same mechanism, becoming mini fiefdoms unable to examine their institutional blindspots,

The suppression of diversity

Belonging traditionally required us to surrender some or much of our autonomy. Traditional village life in the middle ages and on through the industrial revolution tended to be intolerant of difference. It demanded conformity. Odd balls like artists, healers, those with nontraditional sexuality, and racial minorities were mercilessly persecuted.

The crushing of individual expression was a good part of what propelled people in droves to the cities. Especially from 1900 onward, and its a trend that is just now reaching its zenith. We were seeking not just work, but anonymity, not for its own sake but just to be allowed to be who we are.

At its worst, belonging means colorful or original thinking is seen as being disloyal, dissent becomes risky, and the result is that diversity becomes homogenized away.

Creative change needs diversity

I have this sense lately that truly original ideas are more or less non existent, and limited to rare random biological mutations. The vast majority of what we call innovation being instead just a combination of two or more other ideas that already exist. This is the brain as a association machine, linking one thing with another thing to get a third thing. Artificial intelligence has the same basic limitation. You can throw more and more compute at these models and they improve up to a point, but seem fundamentally incapable of actual creativity. And because the neural networks that power these large language models are modeled directly off the way the brain is constructed it seems to me that both the models and our brains share the same basic limitation.

Therefore, if we are interested in change and invention we NEED diverse inputs. The more inputs the more possible outputs. So if belonging means narrowing the contribution gene pool, then the outcome will be impaired innovation. For high diversity groups, conformity is the very last thing we want.

Biologically, change is hard, slow and metabolically costly. It places the organism at great risk. This is why groups organized around belonging also end up being organized around stasis and comfort. The more tightly fused the identity, the harder that identity is to revise. Finding people 'of like mind' is fundamentally about reducing the challenge to our world views. It's about staying the same, its about trying to avoid the cost of change. We see this in political spaces that can not hold multiple truths, complexity or nuance.

The regulation draw card

But we are STILL not done with the shadows. There is the important matter of the coregulation deficit. Let's see if i can explain.

One one hand our nervous system biologically expects co-regulation. And yet for the last 80 years our culture has torn people out of their community contexts. This asked us to (try to) self-regulate, and the result was a cult of independence and self-sufficiency. Cynically, i would say that all we got was a loneliness epidemic, a depression and stress epidemic, and a diabetes / metabolic syndrome epidemic. Good news for makers of SSRIs, fast foods, alcohol and sugary drinks, but bad news in most other respects.

One of the consequences of this biologically unhappy situation is that now, propelled by this hunger for belonging and regulation, people are starting to be drawn back into community. I call this the regulation draw card, and define it as the sub-conscious quest to find someone to regulate me.

Co-regulation is such a powerful biological expectation that, it draws us to community in a similar way that sex-drive powers the dating industry. But there is a risk in that this hunger for regulation might over-power or drown out our other important values, callings and aspirations.

Said more plainly: what if my desire to be held, shows up before my capacity to hold others, or myself? Who is doing the holding? Who holds the holders?

Put another way, the narrative of independence inadvertently created such a large backlog of unregulated nervous systems, that the chickens are now coming home to roost.

This regulation deficit is just another name for developmental trauma. Being raised in this culture of independence readily leads to parenting styles that were inadvertently but tragically uninformed by the genuine secure attachment needs of infants. This leaves a legacy of painful hidden scars.

So for better and worse, one of the challenges we face when trying to build more leaderless / leaderful practice organizations involves the legacy imprints that we each bring along with us. For better, because they motivate us to try to reinvent, to heal, and to harvest the gifts of 'post traumatic growth'. But for worse, because these residues can be stubborn, and tend to be unconscious and invisible. Such is the profound neural impact of things we learn in the formative preverbal years of life.

So, these are all some of the things that those of us with designs to (re)build community would be wise to watch out for. Simply stated, the paradox of belonging is that we need each other to regulate, and yet high belonging groups risk becoming not only partisan, myopic, and change resistant, but which also become accidental trauma recovery groups, and don't know it.

The real tragedy here is when either my primal 'need' to belong, or my regulation deficit, are so great that i lose sight of the primacy of our practice agenda.

Now that this it is all in written down in one place, the gravity of it is indeed rather striking. Deep breath...

A path forward

So, then, what might a path forward look like? This is obviously a big question, in the order of, answer to life, the universe and everything. What i have just now is some threads.

One thread points us in the direction of, not less belonging, but a more skillful kind of belonging. Not choosing between attachment and autonomy, but building groups that are strong enough to let members shine in their own way, and change as they are feel moved to.

One thread points in the direction using attachment as a transitional tool, a bridge if you like. See the Circle of Safety. The short version there is about co-opting the principle of attachment to create a safe haven within the group from which to leverage or stretch into edgier work.

One thread is to say that groups that adapt around the paradox of belonging will benefit by incorporating a base of safety, regulatory practices, and slowing down around reactivity. They will have strongly distributed authority in order to harvest diverse gifts.

One thread is seeking a belonging that is grounded not just by alignment, but by skillful authentic relating. This speaks to an attachment that has matured beyond enmeshment, that is more able to empathize, be vulnerable, accessible and engaged, that can respond, adapt and co-create.

Another thread is such groups will need to be able to cope with difference without fracturing or collapsing. Here a particular capacity for difficult conversations seems like a big deal. This ironically is conflict as a regulatory practice. A practice to restore regulation. Attachment theory is clear on this, secure bonding is not the absence of rupture. It is the presence of reliable repair. Infants routinely mis-attune with caregivers, and what anchors their security is being supported to return to the fold quickly.

In AR, repair is commonly expressed as, Disconnection as a path to connection. Broken bonds grow back stronger. Holding multiple truths. Valuing dissent and being able to tolerate discomfort. Seeing, in this new aspirational realm, diversity as a strength or gift. Where one person is sensitive to and can point out an issue. Another slows the conversation. Another reminds the group of shared purpose. And still another offers humor.

A final mitigating measure might be to cross pollinate our groups. We can buffer the temptation to conformism by belonging to multiple overlapping groups. In such a way that no single group carries our identity load, thus diluting the tendency towards ideological capture.

Wrap up

From this aspirational frame, each group member that successfully expresses desire clearly, enacts their agency, and offers skillful feedback, serves to contribute new building blocks into our collaborative construction or shared field. This tells us that these are not just any old communication skills, but actually tools of evolutionary change.

These phrases that we have been throwing around like, being able to 'hold our identities lightly', 'sharing what we can hold', and having an ability to hold our emotional experience at arms length, suddenly take on new and clearer meaning when we consider attachment and regulation. These practices not only resource 'leaning into our edge', but more fundamentally, they permit us to be in the room together in the first place.

This all speaks to the quiet potential for a maturation of belonging. From its inception as fusion, to then cultivating differentiation, and finally toward integration and creative recombination. In this way safety is not comfort or the absence of difference, but the presence of practices that can work with and digest difference. Phew!