Hi Sarah,

I think you expressed your wish very, very well. I can really relate to your sense of loss, even though my memory of experiences with therapists are more of frustration and disappointment than fondness.

The wish to belong – and the absence of belonging – are very real to me, too. I was married for 24 years to a man whom I loved, and I believed he loved me. He felt like my soul mate and I think it may have been that way for him, too. We belonged, together. But then he died.

And the lack of a sense of belonging with any anyone else was terrifyingly present. I had adapted to my family by meeting the expectation of others. Psychologists had suggested that they were fake – but I really didn’t see it. I didn’t have a non-fake reference point (besides my late husband and we are/were both a bit off the beaten track) and the years of therapy didn’t help much with that. Yes, I dug some up feelings and long-buried emotions – but then what?

In order to belong, one needs a social environment to belong IN. Yes, there are some things on the client’s end that perhaps are needed, too – but it’s not something that can be clearly enunciated to us by therapists, and the methods they currently have to try to help us “get it”, or something, certainly didn’t work for me. So then, I had a repeat – the social environment of mental health care is not one in which I belong, as a human being, either. As a “mental patient”, perhaps, but that’s not really belonging, as a human being.

It’s an extraordinarily difficult dilemma. One in which illusion and fantasy can seem better than nothing at all.

It may be very cold comfort, but it sounds like you may know some things about yourself that you didn't years ago. You might have learned them without therapy, or maybe have learned other things or more. But that's not what happened.

Can you think of a way that you can use what you now know about yourself to try to find ways where you might build a sense of (real) belonging? What has worked ( a little bit) for me is support groups -- but I tried bunches of them over the last 20 years. Some of them helped, some didn't, some were fantasies, too. So maybe you can think of another route which might work for you?

We all belong -- BECAUSE WE ARE HERE. But sometimes it's hard to feel that way, and also that may not be the way other people look at it and there's nothing you can do about them.