The End of Belonging. Untold Stories of Leaving Home and the Psychology of Global Relocation

by Greg Madison

The existential migrant, the term I use to describe us, chooses to leave his or her homeland, pushed out by deep questions that can’t be answered at home, pulled into the wide world in order to discover what life is. We are living paradoxes. We need to feel at home but have never done so, we need to belong but renounce opportunities for belonging, we venture out into the unknown in order to experience the homecoming that will finally settle us, but doesn’t.

I think I was compensating. I was compensating for the lack of something. I’m not really sure what that something is, but I felt deficient in some way, very separate from the world of others, disconnected. I was missing that connection that would make my being with other people meaningful to me

One strategy for protecting the emerging self is to build up psychologically defensive layers between self and environment. However, this leads to isolation (as opposed to independence, which is relational), and if we become too isolated we lose the interpersonal element in self-formation. One of the participants, Patricia, described her lack of relationship to other people as threatening her connection to existence itself.

Some participants felt their existence was like a precarious balance between the two extremes of being imploded upon by others and being isolated into disappearance.

He used travel to try to ‘shock himself’ into connecting to the world again. The total unfamiliarity of foreign places, including extreme or even brutalizing situations, was sought in order to break himself open, ‘kick myself alive’ as he says, to return to a more fluid relationship with life. Being able to cope with such foreign or difficult experiences was also significant in developing his sense of self-worth.

Not knowing where to locate can be very unsettling and confusing because it carries the implication of not knowing who one is.

The constant question ‘where should I be?’ can interrupt the task of piecing together a self that feels contiguous, leading to a crisis of identity exacerbated by the need to know ‘who should I be?’ and ‘which life should I lead?’

One attempted solution is to try to live more than one life, but this is unsettling and ungroundin...

Many strategies are employed to try to cope with this confusing and painful predicament. For example, getting along with everyone is one way of trying to feel safe, less isolated and adrift, but paradoxically the strategy of trying to belong everywhere maintains the experience of not really belonging anywhere.

A definition of ‘belonging’ will emerge gradually in the way this word is actually used by participants in their interviews. Initially, we can say that belonging refers to the felt experience that one is accepted; even one’s difference is taken into account and welcomed. In the context of this discussion, ‘to belong’ suggests being native to, to have a right of habitation, notions of equality and connection rather than feeling superfluous or antagonistic. A very homogenous and conforming culture provides particularly difficult terrain in which to take root.

Social rejection was not the source of ‘difference’ but an acknowledgement of it, albeit at times a particularly hurtful one.

Even for those participants who remained popular and actively included in their social worlds, the subjective knowledge of their difference seemed to create a second skin, wherein developed an anxious perspective on daily life. For those who cannot cover over or deny their difference, or ingratiate themselves successfully in various peer groups, the environmental response can be rejecting,

Part of the motivation for leaving home was to find places and people that could welcome her while allowing her to maintain a sense of her own self.

There is a tension between resisting expectations and ending up isolated or even rejected, and trying to meet them while losing one’s sense of personhood and self-direction.

Continually escaping can eventually limit one’s investment in personal and professional development that requires committing to being in one place for a period of time. It seems that both leaving and settling incur potential threats to developing self-potential.

Inez expressed very strong emotions during the interview when she realized that by leaving home she was in fact choosing to exist. She was heeding a call to save her self from a life of ghostly servitude to others’ expectations. Choosing her own existence is crucial for Inez and worth the conflict it caused with her loved ones. Subsequently, now from her own painful experiences as a parent, Inez appreciates how difficult it was for her parents to see her go but she is grateful for the life she’s had as a result.

For Sarah a crucial difference between being with her partner or being with her family is that her partner does not insist on influencing her life decisions, and she values having so much freedom within relationship. Sarah thinks it’s significant that she’s chosen a partner who is the opposite extreme to her parents.

Renata is beginning to understand the experience of not feeling at home. Not feeling at home is like feeling entirely lost.

However, Carl finds it difficult to make a home in England because the historical context of his childhood is not shared with anyone here. He can’t partake in discussions about childhood TV shows and other past cultural references.

Even those people who never really experienced an ideal home environment could describe what that feeling would consist of for them – a place to be oneself, a place to really relax, a source of nourishment and spacious security. ‘Home’ was also conceived as an interaction, a moment when the individual and the environment ‘matched’ in specific and idiosyncratic ways, allowing the feeling of being ‘at home’. The participants often try to live in two different localities, never achieving ‘home’ in either but often assigning the term ‘home’ to the place where one is not rather than the place one actually is. Feeling at home thereby becomes

Though he remains ambivalent about this familiarity, he reminds himself of the loneliness of solitary travel, which he easily forgets when he’s settled and romanticizing adventure. However, the paradox is that loneliness is an integral aspect of travel for Ben, it’s intrinsic to the act, and travelling with a companion would destroy that essential experience. It seems that Ben’s choices revolve around solitude/travel and community/settlement, increasingly complicated by his assumptions about age-appropriate lifestyles.

Many of the participants express the importance of independence, freedom, and choice, on the one hand, while emphasizing the need for approval, acceptance, and belonging somewhere, on the other hand.

Coping in foreign places demands an exaggerated degree of self-reliance, potentially leading to isolation, and in turn possibly generating a fragile sense of self.

A prime motivation for leaving is to find a place where feeling ‘at home’ is possible, but the search itself can result in not belonging anywhere, the recognition of which can be devastating.

She hopes they are forging identities that will exceed the belonging offered by any one place, thus truly achieving the freedom of nomads. However, realizing the consequences of her lifestyle now, Kathy considers that she could have done things differently, but what? Given that she had to leave, what could she have done? Perhaps it is best that she could not foresee the difficulties ahead.

Once Renata feels herself settling into a place she feels an opposite pull to keep looking for ‘more’. This keeps her always in a first phase of settling, getting to know a place, surviving, feeling unsettled, settling but needing more, then off again. But now she finds herself increasingly wanting the payoff that could come from staying in one place, achieving new goals by sinking in deeper, maybe having a family.

Marta perceives staying away as intricately interwoven with her desire to fulfil her potential.

The individual connects with an inner motivation, or ‘call’ to realize their potential.

Contrary to his depiction of the world, 98% of people still do not migrate at all, preferring to settle in permanent or long-inhabited homes and small localities, even within big cities30

Interesting number

‘Home’, whatever it is, is without doubt particularly significant for most individuals, but it certainly does not unequivocally possess the features ascribed to it above. Participants in this research have not typically experienced the cozy archetypal abode and the ‘authentic communication’ typical of the ‘homely relations’ that constitute a ‘true home’32. In contrast, these individuals report not feeling at-home in their original house, feeling suffocated rather than cozy, leaving the family habitat in search of the very at-homeness

Maybe that's the thing that distinguishes the participants?

‘When we start to feel not totally at home in our dwelling or, conversely, when we seek a broader home in another place, it is likely that the soul is demanding recognition’

Papadopoulos believes that when a home is lost, the psychological containment that it offers breaks open and disintegration can result, on all levels, individual, family, and social.

we may begin to consider the implication that the sort of complexity experienced by cross-cultural people inevitably generates a kind of unheimlich sense, a not quite fitting-in anywhere. What does this mean for a world that is increasingly demanding that we become cross-cultural, global, citizens? Perhaps we are witnessing the end of belonging, at least belonging of a certain kind.

Existential migration suggests that we are not-at-home not because we have been exiled from home, but rather because we have been exiled by home from ourselves.

Homecoming, then, is not the return home to a geographical place, but more a return from our superficial commercial hominess back into the mystery of the world. These ideas have obvious relevance to the increasing globalization and market-dominated forms of living in the 21st century.

We are in danger of entering an era of lostness, the end of belonging in either its restricted conforming sense or its open authentic sense. It is disturbing to witness the reactive backlash that is growing against this global lostness. In reaction to feeling lost we have seen recent attempts to assert the most vicious manifestation of ‘home’ by forceful imposition: for example the rise of nationalism, tribalism, religious fundamentalism, these are all complex phenomena but on some level they are efforts to reduce the world to the security of sameness.

the Irish writer John O’Donohue presents ‘belonging’ as the human attempt to bridge the gap between isolation and intimacy. It is, he thinks, far more important than status, achievement and possessions, and without a true sense of belonging, life is empty and pointless. At the heart of individuality there is a profound necessity, a hunger to belong,

Our life’s journey is the task of refining our belonging so that it may become more true, loving, good and free. We do not have to force belonging. The longing within us always draws us towards belonging, and again towards new forms of belonging, when we have outgrown the old ones70.

Life is meaningless unless it is self-directed, and some degree of personal space is necessary for the kind of contemplation that allows free choice. Migration can offer escape from encroachment and protection for freedom and independence. To feel unfree is deeply distressing, approximating the death of one’s individuality.

When the dust settles perhaps it is not some incarnation of global hominess that will appear but rather the dawning realization that no one really belongs anywhere on earth anymore. That we have achieved a world where precious little real difference is left.

still for some of us the ideal is not to be at home, but to be longing for home, forever on the way home. That feeling, that tragic sublime homelessness, is where we feel most alive, and where we most belong.