How to never feel alone again
Loneliness is an epidemic, says author and researcher Dr Brené Brown. But learning not to be lonely and finding a sense of belonging will require us all to come together, she tells Brigid Moss
Stop trying to fit in and embrace what you believe, says Dr Brené Brown
Have you ever felt lonely surrounded by people, like you don’t belong, or as if you’re lacking the squad everyone else has? Then Dr Brené Brown’s new book, Braving The Wilderness, is for you. In it, Brown tackles what it is to feel like an outsider – and how to find true belonging. If you’ve seen Brown’s first TED talk, The Power Of Vulnerability, currently at 31 million views, or read one of her three bestsellers, you’ll know she’s no stranger to uncomfortable topics, including vulnerability but also shame, imperfection and courage. Brown’s work is compelling because she’s not a self-help guru, but a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, whose theories are born out of thousands of interviews with real people. She also brings her theories to life using her own stories. “Not because I like people to know all about me – I’m actually an intensely private, introverted person – but because I think it helps the learning and humanises what I’m talking about,” she tells me on the phone from Houston.
In Braving The Wilderness, Brown has tackled belonging. It is a human need most of us are missing, she discovered while doing the research for her 2010 bestseller, The Gifts Of Imperfection. “What are the needs that, if they’re not met, you can absolutely predict there will be suffering? The two needs that really emerged were love and belonging.” True belonging, says Brown, is becoming increasingly hard to feel in a world that’s divided, divisive and aggressive.
The book opens with a veritable heartbreaker of a story. Having just moved to Houston and enrolled in a new school, Brown tried out for the Bearkadettes, the cheerleading dance team. This, for a 13-year-old who’s moved towns for the fifth time, who’s done eight years of ballet, is going to be the moment where she really belongs. But, when she turns up in a black leotard and grey shorts for the audition, alone, all the other teens are dressed in blue and gold. “No one had told me that you were supposed to get decked out in school colours.”
As you might guess, she doesn’t get in, underlining her feelings of being friendless and alone, not cool or fitting in. But, she explains, it was her parents’ reaction that began her real belonging crisis. “My parents didn’t say one word. Not a single word.
The silence cut into me like a knife to the heart.” It allowed her to make up the story to herself that they were ashamed. “Whether I made Bearkadettes or not, to know that I still mattered was essential in that moment, but I think my parents, like many people raised in their generation, just, you know, stiff upper lip.”
What happens if you don’t feel you belong anywhere? “These are the moments that, when left unspoken and unresolved, send us into our adult lives searching desperately for belonging and settling for fitting in,” she explains. Not belonging in our family has the power to “break our heart, our spirit and our sense of self-worth.
It broke all three for me”.
Brown tells how it sent her on a teenage vortex of rebellion and weed, and she dropped out of university. Then, aged 22, she met her husband-to-be, Steve. “It’s hard to keep telling yourself you’re not enough when someone really sees you and believes that you’re everything,” she says. While Steve went to medical school, then trained as a paediatrician, Brown went to university, then graduate school. She tackled her array of addictions – “drinking, smoking, caretaking and overeating” – at AA. They got married and had children Ellen and Charlie (now in school and starting university). What would have happened if she hadn’t met Steve? “I’m pretty sure I would have found my way, but it would’ve probably taken longer.”
Despite her TED talk going viral and her work going global, Brown continued to feel like an outsider, even as she was researching belonging. There was one quote from an interview with a heroine of hers she’d read years before – American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou – that stuck with her, as she could not agree with it, and did not want it to be true. It was: “You are only free when you realise you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all.
The price is high. The reward is great.” But Brown began to realise the quote sums up her and her interviewees’ experience. “True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are,” she writes. This was the moment she began to shed her internal picture of the girl who didn’t fit in, she says. If that seems like the opposite of what you were expecting, that belonging is about finding your people or fitting in, it was the opposite of what Brown had thought, too.
This is where the title of the book comes in: Braving
The Wilderness. The wilderness is where you go when you stand up for what you believe and are yourself – however hard that might be. For example, it was where Brown – who grew up in a hunting family – found herself when she told a group of people who were anti-guns that she was looking forward to her son learning to shoot clay pigeons. “Everyone in that group literally took a step back from where I was standing, and now I’m alone in the wilderness. I may get yelled at, laughed at, walked away from, put down, humiliated, questioned, interrogated, I don’t know. But what I do know is that every time you choose yourself and what you truly believe over fitting in and making other people happy, your heart gets stronger and you get more clarity about who you are.”
There is a second element to belonging that came out of Brown’s research, and it’s about how we treat each other. “I was interested in writing about belonging because, as a qualitative researcher, I could sense how lonely people were getting, how disconnected people feel, but I did not know the research would take me into cultural divisiveness. That was surprising to me,” she says.
In the book, Brown writes how the world feels ‘heartbroken’. “We’ve sorted ourselves into factions based on our politics and ideology. We’ve turned away from one another and toward blame and rage.” And we’re scared. Most of us, she goes on to say, are either staying quiet or picking sides. You’re either Brexit or Remain, you’re left or right, for or against.
“There’s no way you can write about belonging against the reality of the world today and not have to talk about the increased polarisation and divisiveness. You can’t do it unless you are pretending or ignoring,” she says. Then, laughing, she adds, “I wanted to pretend and ignore, trust me!”
Brown has created what amounts to a manifesto for connection and belonging in this divided world, her Four Elements of True Belonging (see overleaf).
FIRST, YOU NEED TO BE CIVIL, NO MATTER WHAT.
I spoke to Brown a few days before the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was deliberately run over and killed by a car driven by a white nationalist. In a Facebook
Every time you choose what you truly believe over FITTING IN, you get more clarity about WHO YOU ARE
I’m not for shaming and name-calling – EVER. But we’re getting used to it and it makes our culture DANGEROUS
Live talk three days later, Brown refused to call the nationalists white trash, because that would be dehumanising them. “Shaming and name-calling, I’m not for it – ever. But we’re getting used to it and it makes our culture incredibly dangerous.”
She believes that if we treat each other civilly, if we abhor violence, name-calling and the demonisation of groups of people, if we can see people on the other side of the political spectrum or who are in any way different from us as people and connect with them, if we stand up for what we believe in, then we are on the way to feeling the shared humanity that is essential for true belonging.
Brown also believes joining together in a positive, respectful way is powerful. She went with her daughter to the 2017 Women’s March on Washington in January, where they experienced the human connection that happens when people do this. “You saw a really civil, respectful protest that was thoughtful, that had the potential to really effect change. You saw collective experiences of pain and joy, which were very important to be a part of,” she says. They also saw some of the destruction of property that happened on the outskirts of the march, and the riot police, and Trump supporters abusing some of the estimated 500,000 marchers.
Depressing? Brown is hopeful things can change. “Mercifully, it will take only a critical mass of people who believe in finding love and connection across difference to change everything,” she says.
Braving The Wilderness: The Quest For True Belonging And The Courage To Stand Alone by Brené Brown (Vermilion, £12.99)