There are many paths up the mountain.

This handout gathers the heart of a conversation between Donna Stichbury and Kirsty Denny on their podcast, Attached, A Different Lens. The question that opened it all was simple and enormous: can you tell me about a time you didn't fit in, or you felt you didn't belong.

Gabor Mate says children need two things, authenticity and a sense of belonging. When there is a danger of not having both, a child will choose belonging every time. It is a survival response, not a character flaw.

Donna spoke about carrying a hole from the start of her own life, a wound that stays quiet when she is regulated and opens up when her nervous system activates. She named something important here, that when a wound activates and people see it as who she is, that is not the truth. It is the nervous system, not the person.

The conversation kept circling back to a Brene Brown line that shaped everything else said: if I have to be like you, I fit in. When I can be like myself, I can belong. Fitting in asks a person to adjust and shrink. Belonging only asks a person to show up as they are.

Kirsty shared her own early memory, standing at the edge of the kindergarten yard watching the other children with longing and no idea how to join in. She found ways to be busy alone, on the swing, at the easel, so the not fitting wouldn't show. That early pattern followed her into university, into motherhood, into the space between conventional parenting and the crunchy granola crowd, never quite landing in either.

What stood out is that this was never really about the other children, or the other mums. It was an inside job, the belief formed early that she didn't belong, layered over every new situation since.

Donna offered a gentle way to understand why something lands hard for one person and rolls off another. If a wound is not activated, an experience simply passes through you. If it hits, that is useful information, an invitation to look at the wound and the need sitting underneath it.

Much of the conversation turned to something society rarely teaches well, how to repair after a rupture. Donna teaches Circle of Security, where one of the central ideas is that the greatest gift you can give your children is making mistakes and coming back again.

Donna also spoke honestly about non-contact, and why it is sometimes necessary. Going non-contact from family is rarely about a lack of love. More often it is someone trying to find the thinking space they need so they stop projecting their own unresolved wounds, and stop the cycle landing on their children. It doesn't have to mean forever. It means creating enough space to do the inner work that nobody ever showed either of them how to do.

One of the lightbulb moments Donna shared was about a client with a huge social justice need, someone gifted at advocating for others. The real insight was that this need was pointing inward, this person needed to extend that same fierce advocacy to herself. What shows up in our personality needs is often exactly what we need to give ourselves.

Near the end, both women reflected on where they actually feel they belong. For Donna, it was standing at Castle Hill in Christchurch, in wild and rugged nature rather than anything manicured. For Kirsty, it was the wild land itself, and the world more broadly, having moved from England to New Zealand as a small child and never quite landing under one label.