How a Need to Belong Drives You Away from God
A social intermittent fast can liberate you from your fears.
A 2023 study from Pew Research found that 83% of people in the United States believe they have a soul or spirit. However, 22% of people consider themselves to be “spiritual, but not religious.” I honestly can’t blame them given the religious extremes that suck up so much of the oxygen on social media and in political theater.
Yet being spiritual without an anchored community can make us prey to many marketing schemes. Perhaps some spiritual communities might use the Bible as a marketing tool to entice those who have fallen away from their Christian churches and are looking for their place to belong. But later, you’ll see these online pastors caught peddling cryptocurrencies to their flock while claiming that God told them to remodel their house.
It’s a shame that our need to belong can be so strong that it throws a blanket over our rational thought. That’s why we need to investigate how our emotions can drive us away from God rather than toward Him.
Yesterday I listened to Jungian analyst James Hollis’ Through the Dark Wood for the millionth time as I drove back from Baltimore. He posed a question that made me pause and reflect:
What do you fear?
He said that if you go back to what you feared as a child, or even consider your current fears, you’ll recognize what unconsciously drives you. While to a certain extent a fear of failure might drive you towards success, it also might keep you on an everlasting cycle of being driven with no place to rest. Our fears can keep us stuck in attachment or aversion.
An intense need to belong can be rooted in the following fears:
Fear of Rejection: This fear revolves around the worry of being excluded or rejected by others. It stems from the instinctive desire for social acceptance and can manifest as anxiety or avoidance of situations where rejection is possible.
Fear of Isolation: Humans are social creatures, and the fear of isolation, or being left alone, is deeply ingrained. This fear can arise from the understanding that social connections are crucial for survival, both physically and emotionally.
Fear of Alienation: This fear is related to feeling disconnected or different from others within a social group. It involves the worry that one's beliefs, values, or behaviors may lead to ostracism or marginalization from the group.
Fear of Loneliness: Loneliness is not just about physical isolation; it's also about feeling disconnected from meaningful social connections. The fear of loneliness stems from the recognition of the importance of social bonds for emotional well-being.
Fear of Insignificance: Humans often seek validation and recognition from others, and the fear of insignificance involves the worry of being overlooked or undervalued within social contexts. It reflects the desire to feel important and valued by others.
While I didn’t intend for this to be a psychological post, I think it’s important to recognize how our unconscious mental states can bind us. We might not even recognize how our fears and unmet needs cause us to act in ways that aren’t rational or logical. And there are plenty of predators in the marketplace who promise to liberate us if we just pay the price. Yet the more we pay, the more we need that fix. There’s always something new and improved to lift us out of our suffering, even though it might only last for a brief moment.
But we know that we can’t ask for a magical elixir, breath practice, or word of toxic positivity to yank us out of our malaise. The only path is through.
It takes a good bit of courage to take a good, honest look at ourselves. I might blame my mother for much of my anxiety, but I also have to reconcile my reaction. Why do I allow her words to hurt me—is it because there’s a deep part of me that believes it’s true? Is it true, or is it a result of cultural, familial, or societal conditioning?
To look deeply at our fears of rejection, isolation, alienation, loneliness, and insignificance, we have to practice a bit of asceticism. We have to go on a bit of a fast. Or maybe you can call it intermittent fasting, where you spend some significant time alone each day.
You allow those fears to return in small doses so you can look at them a little more closely. Psychologists call this exposure therapy. You may see how one of these fears emerged from an episode from childhood. You then see how this fear caused you to do something ridiculous and out of character, such as stalk a guy you thought was “The One.”
True love costs nothing.
This process can take a long time, and it’s not that you can’t enjoy life along the path. You return from your intermittent fast and rejoin your community, but that time of fasting made you aware of the patterns that keep you unconsciously stuck. Perhaps you also find moments in the rest of your day when you recognize your unconscious patterns. You begin to peel each layer of fear away so you can live a little more unencumbered. These layers have become crusty, like dead layers of skin after a bad sunburn.
More and more, you realize that these fears take less hold of you. You realize these fears kept you from a loving relationship with God. Your need to belong was unfounded because you realize that you’ve always belonged. You’ve always been a child of God, but someone told you you weren’t, and you believed that lie. You believed that lie because the world profits from that lie. The world needs that lie of separation and isolation because it needs you to buy that course, that workshop, or that car to make you feel like you belong. But that’s only temporary.
Spirituality is free. True love costs nothing. Your life has value when you breathe this love in and out. God’s love never runs out. It never needs an update. God will never tell you that you don’t belong.
However, you’ll need to drop those habits, choices, judgments, and fears that pull you away from His community. God can’t do that for you. That’s your job.
“We know the principles: the way lies open before us. If anything prevents us from embarking on it, then the fault lies in ourselves.”1
1 The Prayer of Love and Silence, A Carthusian, p. 3