We are social animals, and that doesn’t just mean we like company from time to time. It means that connection and belonging are basic human needs, as essential to our psychological development as food and shelter are to our physical survival.
Older ways of thinking, like Maslow’s hierarchy, placed love and belonging somewhere in the middle of our stack of needs. But we now understand that connection sits much lower down. It is foundational; we need others not only to live with, but to actually become ourselves.
If a child grows up malnourished, the effects can show up for the rest of their lives. Something similar can happen when a child isn’t made to feel that they belong, matter, and are held in mind by others. Without enough of this early sense of connection, a person may struggle to develop a stable, confident sense of who they are in relation to other people.
The consequences can take different forms. Some grow up with an intense and painful need for closeness, that never quite feels satisfied. Others go the opposite way, learning to rely only on themselves, keeping others at a distance as a way of avoiding disappointment or dependence.
The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut argued that we do not build a self on our own. We need other people to recognise us, respond to us, and confirm that we exist in a meaningful way. Through these early experiences of being seen and belonging, we gradually internalise a sense of solidity and worth. When this process is disrupted, people may spend much of adult life searching for in relationships what was missing early on, or insisting that they don’t need anyone at all.
More broadly, we have come to understand that our inner world is shaped by relationships, from the very beginning. We carry those early relational patterns inside us, and they organise how close we feel able to get, how much we trust, and how we manage dependence and independence.
Healthy development doesn’t mean becoming completely self-sufficient. It means being able to lean on others when we need them and to stand on our own when we don’t. As social beings, we need to feel part of something (a family, a community, a culture.. ) to feel real and grounded. Belonging is not a developmental phase to grow out of, but a lifelong requirement.
Image credit: Les Taylor
