This week I found myself thinking about the psychological cost of assimilation and a deceptively simple question:
What do we ask people to give up in order to belong?
It arose during a conversation about the difference between belonging and fitting in. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the question reaches far beyond any one classroom, workplace or community.
It reaches into how environments shape us.
When fitting in requires something in return
I came to the UK at eight years old and grew up largely in White environments.
You learn very quickly that fitting in can require giving things up.
Ways of speaking. Ways of behaving. Parts of culture. Parts of identity. Sometimes even parts of yourself that are not explicitly rejected but are quietly made to feel less welcome.
Nobody necessarily sits you down and gives you a list:
Don’t speak like that.
Don’t behave like that.
Don’t bring too much of that part of yourself here.
Often, the messages are subtler.
You notice what receives approval. You notice what creates discomfort. You notice who seems to belong effortlessly and who has to work at it.
And you adapt.
Some adaptation is inevitable. We all modify aspects of ourselves as we move between families, workplaces, cultures and communities.
Psychologist John Berry’s work on immigration, acculturation and adaptation offers a useful distinction here. Integration and assimilation are not the same process. It is possible to participate in a wider society while maintaining important aspects of an existing cultural identity.
But there can be a point at which adaptation becomes something else.
When does adaptation become assimilation? And when does assimilation begin to require self-erasure?
Belonging and fitting in are not the same thing
We sometimes use belonging as though it simply means being accepted into a group.
But acceptance can have conditions.
You can belong because you have learned the rules.
You can belong because you have become sufficiently similar.
You can belong because the parts of you that might make other people uncomfortable have been carefully edited out.
From the outside, that may look like successful integration.
From the inside, something quite different may be happening.
This matters when we think about citizenship and integration. It also matters when we think about who is regarded as successful in senior leadership, public life and positions of influence.
The emphasis can easily fall on how successfully someone adapts to what is already there.
But perhaps we should also ask what the existing environment is prepared to change.
Is integration something newcomers do, or is it something communities do together?
Is integration a one-way street?
The psychological cost of assimilation may not be immediately visible
One of the difficulties with the psychological cost of assimilation is that it may remain hidden.
A person can appear successful.
They may achieve academically, progress professionally, develop friendships and participate fully in society.
The adaptation may even become so familiar that it no longer feels like adaptation.
But loss does not necessarily disappear because it has become invisible.
It can emerge later as grief, anger, disconnection, resentment, identity conflict or a powerful desire to reclaim something that had previously been suppressed.
This has made me think again about The Mask of Me and my wider reflections on psychological safety.
I had been asking:
Can I be myself here?
I now think there is another question:
Has being here changed what I believe I am allowed to be?
That is a different psychological proposition.
An environment may not simply prevent us from expressing an existing identity. Over time, it may participate in shaping the identities we believe are available to us.
When belonging turns out to be conditional
I am reminded of someone close to me who married into a family and culture different from her own. She worked hard to integrate and believed that, over time, she had found her place.
Then something changed.
As the children grew, a language she did not speak increasingly became the language of family interaction. Conversations began happening around her that she could not understand.
She described being in a house full of people and yet feeling profoundly alone.
What made that experience particularly painful was the sense of what she had already surrendered in order to build that life: distance from family, language, culture and familiar ways of being.
She thought she had arrived at belonging.
Then she discovered how fragile that belonging could be.
Her story has stayed with me because it raises another uncomfortable question:
What happens when we have given up parts of ourselves to belong somewhere, only to discover that belonging was conditional after all?
When the environment enters the person
This is where the Six Stages Framework becomes particularly useful.
We often look for exclusion in observable behaviour: who was rejected, ignored, stereotyped, marginalised or denied an opportunity?
Those things matter.
But environments also communicate expectations repeatedly and quietly.
What receives approval?
Whose language is regarded as professional?
Which ways of speaking signal: you are one of us; you truly belong?
Whose behaviour is interpreted as confident and whose as aggressive?
Whose appearance is considered appropriate?
Whose knowledge counts?
Who is expected to adapt?
And who gets to remain largely unchanged?
Over time, those messages can become internalised.
The environment no longer needs to tell us what to suppress.
We begin doing the work ourselves.
Self-censorship takes over. We anticipate what will be acceptable, what might create discomfort and which parts of ourselves are safer to leave outside the room.
Eventually, external regulation can become internal regulation.
Research by Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen on belonging uncertainty offers an interesting parallel. Their work explored how concerns about social belonging can make people particularly attentive to cues about whether they fit and are accepted.
Perhaps that is one of the least visible forms of exclusion:
when the boundaries of an environment become boundaries we carry inside ourselves.
At that point, every boundary no longer needs to be explicitly enforced.
We have learned to enforce some of them ourselves.
Belonging without self-erasure
This changes the question we need to ask about inclusion.
It is not enough to ask:
How do we help people belong?
We also need to ask:
How much of themselves are we allowing them to keep when they do?
A genuinely inclusive environment cannot mean that everyone remains exactly as they were. Living together requires negotiation, adaptation and mutual responsibility.
But the word mutual matters.
If adaptation consistently flows in one direction — from those with less power towards those with more — we should be cautious about calling the result belonging.
Perhaps psychologically safer environments are those in which people can both adapt and influence.
Amy Edmondson’s foundational work on psychological safety describes environments in which people can take interpersonal risks without fearing that doing so will lead to embarrassment or punishment.
But perhaps we also need to ask something further:
Can I contribute without first becoming sufficiently similar to everyone already here?
Can my difference influence the environment rather than merely be accommodated by it?
People enter an environment and are changed by it.
But their presence should also be permitted to change the environment.
The newcomer learns. But so does the system.
That is very different from assimilation.
It connects with the wider SSF exploration of psychological safety and the environments we create around people.
Through the SSF lens: beyond the psychological cost of assimilation
The Six Stages Framework asks us to pay attention not only to individual attitudes but also to the environments that sustain, reward and normalise them.
This week’s reflection leaves me wondering whether we need to look even more closely at what environments progressively teach people about themselves.
Not simply:
Are you welcome here?
But:
Who are you permitted to become here?
And perhaps:
What parts of yourself have you learned to leave outside the door?
Because belonging that depends upon self-erasure is not psychologically neutral.
And when people are repeatedly required to become less of themselves in order to become more acceptable to us, the loss is not theirs alone.
We all lose something when belonging requires people to become less of who they are.
The accompanying SSF Visual Psychological Formulations series includes VF010: Belonging That Keeps Us Whole, which brings these ideas together visually by contrasting one-way assimilation with belonging based upon mutual influence.
VF010 brings this distinction into view: one-way adaptation on one side, mutual influence on the other.
Through the Six Stages Framework lens, the question is not only whether people are welcomed into an environment, but what that environment progressively teaches them about who they are allowed to be.
Reflective question
Think about an environment you belong to — a workplace, profession, school, family, community or country. Who is expected to do most of the adapting, and what might they be giving up in the process?
Continue exploring
The Mask of Me and other SSF reflections
Explore further reflections on psychological safety, identity, difference and the environments we create around people.
SSF Visual Psychological Formulations
Explore the growing collection of visual formulations designed to make psychological and systems thinking visible.
A developing series of personal letters exploring race, belonging, privilege and what happens when understanding racism becomes personal.
Start with the Six Stages Framework
Explore how the SSF can help us think about human behaviour, bias, belonging, leadership, psychological safety and systems change.
