I do not belong anywhere is, for me, the complaint I hear most often from clients and course participants looking for help on their way. They see the situation as hopeless, but is it really? What can you do? Who can you be in order to rise above the painful feeling that goes with not belonging anywhere?

With a voice steeped in loneliness

I have often heard and seen it in my course participants and clients. They are convinced that they belong nowhere. Not in the family they come from, not in their circle of friends and not at work. They tell me so in a voice steeped in loneliness, despair and the question of whether they should be here at all. When I ask them what they mean by that last part, they look at me as if they cannot believe I do not know what they want to say. I do know. Very clearly, in fact, but I want to hear them say it themselves. Because when they speak it out loud, I can perceive where they are in their process. They wonder whether they should commit themselves to their life on earth at all. What is the point of it? I do not really want to be here any more. I do not belong anywhere anyway. Everything is so difficult here. As I look at them and listen to them, I feel that it is time for them to change perspective.

You are not alone

If you feel understood or welcome nowhere, do not feel seen or heard, or have the impression that you are the odd one out in the company, and you experience this often, then it becomes an unshakeable belief that governs your life. You think you are the only one, but nothing could be further from the truth. Once a conversation crosses the border of superficiality, you come across this feeling in almost everyone. Everyone knows it. So how is it that one person can deal with it and another is weighed down by it?

‘Something is not right and it is down to me.’

We were all born highly sensitive

Even before you saw the light of day, you could perceive in the womb the atmosphere in which you were growing into a baby. With sharply tuned sensors you saw the light of day and your antennae did their work tirelessly. You perceived when the atmosphere was pleasant and calm, but also when the surroundings were seemingly harmonious while disagreements were at work beneath the surface. You yourself were bathing in a field of light and love. That was the only thing you knew, but you sensed that something was not right. You have gone on doing that. And you have taken it upon yourself. At a certain point you started concluding that it was down to you.

‘Why do you always have to be different from everyone else?’

I know the feeling

I know the feeling of not belonging. When all the children shouted: ‘Yippee, spaghetti,’ or ‘yippee, chocolate mousse,’ I wondered why they were so exuberant about it. And every single one of them, at that. It seemed as if I was the only one who did not consider spaghetti and chocolate mousse the height of a meal. I can no longer count how often I have heard: ‘Hilde, you really are a peculiar one.’ The way it was said sometimes sounded like a compliment, but a compliment with a little judgement attached. Most of the time, though, it sounded like ‘You, disobedient child.’ Or ‘Why do you always have to be different from everyone else?’ While I actually had the feeling that I was doing nothing different at all, but was keeping rather to the background. When bullies at school were assembling their bullying court to make life hard for someone, I could never connect with it. I did not understand why everyone did what the loudest shouter had in mind. I did not belong, and a good thing too. As a child and as a teenager, and later much more so, I asked a great many questions. I got no answers, neither at home nor at school. There were teachers who deliberately ignored my raised hand. Just like you, I could give countless examples, some fairly innocent, others carried out very deliberately.

Your self-image in pieces

It is a double movement. On the one hand you do belong somewhere and on the other you have the feeling that you fall outside the group, that you are the only one who sees things differently. ‘Not everyone has to think the way you see it,’ I was often told, as if that had ever been my wish. Certainly not. I simply wanted to share, to test things out with others, but often I got a figurative red stop sign in front of my nose. It does something to your self-image. After a while it starts to crumble. Is it down to me? Am I not good enough? What am I doing wrong? Why am I not and why do I not behave like the others? You feel bad, rejected, not clever enough and sad. Doubts take the upper hand. Your safety is put at risk. Everyone seems to know ‘it’ except you. Alone in the World by Hector Malot is a book I understood very well back then.

Create your own system

Fortunately there are always signposts nearby to help you. A former colleague who taught German and who saw me struggling with the system gave me a piece of golden advice. He framed the advice with quotations from a German philosopher whose name I have long since forgotten. His advice, though, still rings clear and bright in my ears years later. ‘If you cannot find your way in this system, if you cannot thrive in it, then perhaps it is time to start your own system — one that is entirely yours. Separate from this system. There is no point in continuing to adapt. You can build your own system exactly as it suits you. You will then come into your own better. You can be more yourself.’ Now that was a whopper of a change of perspective. Never before had I been given such advice. As if the light switched on in my head, I took his advice to heart and — most important of all — acted on it as well.

‘The road to a greater evolution is always preceded by the breaking up of all the other roads.’

The puzzle takes shape

I could make an extensive analysis of why you arrive at the feeling of separateness. I would rather show you a few routes that lead you towards connection. You cannot improve or change any situation if you go on looking at it in the same way. So you are going to have to break up your old roads and clear away the rubble. Only then is growth possible. So you are going to have to put yourself, your beliefs, your feelings and your actions under the magnifying glass and bring them into balance. Have to? You do not have to do anything, but then nothing changes either. It is time for a new perspective in order to lay out the puzzle of your life.

Outsiders grow into remarkable adults

There are plenty of examples in history and around you of people who were at odds with their surroundings and felt like an outsider or an oddity, and who built an extremely successful or remarkable life. Precisely because they were different. Just think of Elon Musk or Tom Waes — to name two totally different individuals. And that is the good news. It is precisely because you have the feeling that you do not belong that you go looking for new roads, new insights that were unknown to you before. The opposite is to learn to adapt, which with absolute certainty leads you to a dissatisfied existence. As an outsider you make unconventional choices and go exploring in the world of possibilities. You need strength, daring and courage to go beyond the ‘normal’. But you will like the results. The road to a greater evolution opens up.

I AM, dynamic contact with my source

The most important thing, however, is that you take responsibility for yourself and find the way inward. It is the way that always makes you feel connected instead of separate, regardless of whether you are welcome with a particular individual or group. Becoming aware of your wider consciousness, of your I AM presence, lifts you out of the belittling beliefs that you are not allowed to be here. You experience that they are illusions keeping you away from the path along which you walk your life with pleasure. Do not simply wave this away. Look for the solution within yourself. Find strength, love, wisdom, light, intelligence, healing and more. Your I AM is like a compass that always points you in the right direction and frees you from the beliefs that have kept you small.

A glance over your shoulder in order to look ahead

During the preliminary conversation for a family constellation, the feeling of I am different, I do not fit in here, regularly rears its head. Again we make no extensive analysis of the causes. We let the field that is at work at soul level show where the uneasy feeling has its origin. Usually it is something you are carrying from a more distant past and that in essence does not really belong to you. We literally look over the shoulder at what was, in order to take and to leave what was, to breathe through it and then to turn our gaze to our own life. A greater sense of connection is your reward. Your radiance changes, becomes more loving and more attractive. It is up to you to live this result in your life and to receive its wonders.

Hilde Van Bulck