The shadows of 'tribe' and belonging

Musings from a feminine perspective

A couple of weeks ago I managed to spend a weekend in a very uncomfortable and unpleasant state, fully immersed in my pain body.

It was the first time in some years that I attended a sex-positive event and it quickly became clear that I was not in resonance (the topic of why could be a whole other article!). I ended up spending most of the time on my own, nervous system in full activation, while everyone around me seemingly connected and enjoyed themselves.

When someone who I knew from my past (I used to create sex-positive spaces for those who might not know that about me) asked me how I was doing and I shared how the speed and intensity wasn’t right for me, they replied somewhat incredulously “but aren’t you a professional?!’.

Ouch.

Feeling gaslit and totally ‘out,’ I couldn’t find a way to safely bring my hurt into contact with anyone and ended up leaving early, licking my wounds.

Having painful experiences of being ‘out,’ which I call the ‘tribe wound’, is something I think most of us probably have one version of or another, but I don’t hear it being talked about a lot. There’s been so much focus on how our attachment wounds show up in our romantic partnerships, but very little around how our relational wounding shows up in the context of a group of people.

But with the increasing collective movement towards community, it’s going to show up more and more.

Anyone who has experienced being ejected or feeling unsafe or disconnected from a group knows how activating for our nervous systems and incredibly painful it can be.

I’ve had this in so many different versions over the years.

And just like in romantic partnerships were we recreate patterns and seemingly attract the very people who trigger our deepest wounds (in order to wake up to and integrate our shadows), so too do we often unconsciously create scenarios that surface similar dynamics and feelings within groups.

If you think about the history of mankind, it’s really only a blink of an eyelid that we haven’t been living in tribe in.

Imagine for a moment, how for countless generations our ancestors were living in close-knit communities, where you would recognise everyone you come across in your day-to-day life. Imagine how it might feel when your sense of identity is not just that of being a single, separate sense of self, but also include the web of relationships you are part of. Imagine fully knowing your place and how unquestionable your sense of belonging to the land and its people would probably be. And imagine how existential it would be, should this belonging be questioned or threatened.

Simply stated, we are hard-wired for tribe and so it’s no wonder that this phenomena can touch such a tender place in us.

I think that when we take the above into consideration and look at the sense of separation and isolation that we’ve normalised in our current stage of humanity, it explains a lot. For example, how common it is to fill the painful hole from our unmet longing for belonging with addictions, distractions and numbing behaviours. Or the focus and importance we give to getting all our relational needs met through romantic relationships, when those needs need to be met through the web of relationships we are embedded in.

And, how vulnerable we are to being exploited.

There’s plenty of events these days where for the mere price of a ticket you can consume the experience of ‘tribe,’ and an increasing number of mainstream businesses who are using ‘community’ built around brands to boost revenue and retention.

Amongst the booming personal growth workshop industry, there are often large shadows at play, that combined with the amplified fields these workshops create, can cause pronounced and often traumatic activations of tribe wounding.

Many facilitators have unconsciously turned their own personal tribe wound into their gift: there is something that feels familiar and therefore safer to us about our role of always being a little on the outside and a little bit different. And yet this is also potentially painful, especially if we don’t have much of a life or community outside of our work and use our work to get our needs met.

The shadows of the facilitator are always revealed in the group, meaning that participants can unconsciously volunteer to experience the loneliness and disconnect the facilitator is not in contact with.

The previous ‘final time’ I went to a sex positive event about three years ago, I again left early because within the first opening exercise I became acutely aware that I was volunteering to experience the disconnect the facilitator and everyone else was not willing to feel.

If you consider how it is often facilitators with narcissistic tendencies who are the most successful in the industry, our predisposition for tribe and longing to belong can create intensely dysfunctional situations. Participants will repeatedly cross their own boundaries and sacrifice their needs, encouraged by the facilitators who seemingly feed off participant’s self-betrayal as evidence of their own power. Behaving according to the leader’s desires is rewarded with more belonging and any straying away (through e.g voicing dissent) is punished with disconnect and purposeful triggering of the tribe wound.

With the recent fascination in cults and cult dynamics (anyone else a fan of cult documentaries?!), it seems there is a kind of collective processing and awareness slowly emerging around the shadows of our need to belong and our vulnerability to exploitation connected to this.

Independent of cults, self-betrayal plays out on a smaller scale in most group situations, where the underlying belief for most of us is that in order to belong, we can only show certain sides of ourselves and thereby sacrifice our autonomy and sovereignty.

In spiritual groups, the belief of “we are all one” can lead to a sickly sweet mantra of ‘love and light,’ pushing anything outside of this narrow bandwidth into the shadows. In sex-positive groups this can look like jumping into merging, speeding our way into connection too quickly, in order to bypass our vulnerability and lessen the pain of separation.

But this isn’t real connection or tribe.

I think that comes from claiming our individual selves with our individual quirks, desires, needs and boundaries and embracing our true diversity in order to feel our connection and belonging. It comes from leaning into the tension and friction that this naturally evokes, rather than avoiding it and learning to expand our capacity to hold it all.

Perhaps we are at a stage in the evolution of our consciousness where, unlike our ancestors, we can have an appreciation for our sense of being a separate self and can explore what belonging is like when we include this into our felt sense of intrinsically being part of something greater.

We get to dance with a foot in bath worlds and embrace the paradox.

I’d love to know what you think….