A primal aspect of being a human being is the experience of connection. Of belonging to a group, feeling close to other people, feeling safe in their presence, feeling like you’re part of the tribe.

It’s probably easier to define negatively, as what it feels like to not have that feeling of connection. Being lost, feeling that there’s something missing, that you’re not there, that you’re not amongst others, that you can’t go with the flow. You can’t go along with what other people are doing, you resist it, and you feel always outside of it.

A basic feeling of being in the throng, being part of the human race, is something that you may or may not acquire as you grow up. It might be, in some sense, lacking in your developmental environment, your childhood, family, culture, or schooling. How you came to experience whether or not you were welcomed, part of the group. Or whether you were always on the outside in some way.

This can run incredibly deeply, so much so that you might spend your whole life with a slight question mark around yourself. As if you’re just not a part of the bigger thing.

Growing in adulthood from this disconnected way of being to a slightly more connected way of being is an obvious goal of therapy. Part of it can be down to your own experiments in trying to step out of this isolated place into what it feels like to be with other people. And you can do that, to some extent, with a therapist.

You can experiment with being open in a new way, with a therapist, that turns out to be safe and that allows you to learn – allows your body, your mind, to learn – that it’s okay to connect. That it’s actually rewarding, stabilising, and healthy. Because connection is a basic need.