By: Michelle Nortje
If humans are wired for connection, why do relationships often feel like hard work or confusing?
Many clients have shared some version of this question with me. They notice themselves pulling away from people they care about, overthinking simple interactions, not feeling fully satisfied by relationships, or feeling flat or disconnected in moments that “should” feel warm. Sometimes we have a longing for closeness but no clear sense of how to move toward it. At other times, even the idea of connection feels really overwhelming, as if we’re not quite sure we have the energy required, or if it’s really what we want.
It’s easy then, in these moments, to draw critical conclusions: “I’m not good at relationships”, “I don’t really need people”, or “People don’t care about me.”
But what if the difficulty connecting isn’t about a lack of desire or motivation for building connection?
What if it has more to do with losing touch with the underlying system that helps us find our way toward it?
We Are Wired for Connection
Connection is not a preference or personality trait. It’s a fundamental biological human need.
Decades of research in attachment theory, developmental psychology, and neuroscience point to the same conclusion that human beings are regulated through relationships. For example, infants cannot stabilise their own nervous systems without a caregiver’s presence. Their heart rate, skin temperature, stress response, and emotional states are shaped through repeated interactions with another mind and body.
This need doesn’t just disappear in adulthood. Studies on co-regulation show that even as adults, our physiology, like our heart rate variability, stress hormones, and emotional arousal, continues to be influenced by safe, attuned contingent connection with others.
In this way, the pull toward connection is already built into our biological system. And yet, knowing we have the need for something doesn’t necessarily mean we know how to meet the need!
Feelings as a Kind of Compass
One way to understand this gap between knowing about a need and meeting it, is to look more closely at the role of feelings.
In affective neuroscience, feelings are not seen as vague, unimportant or “soft” experiences. They are understood to have been generated by evolutionarily old brain systems that track how well our needs are being met. Researchers like Jaak Panksepp and, more recently, Mark Solms, have described core affective systems (such as SEEKING, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF) in the brain that organise behaviour around survival and connection.
From this perspective, feelings function as a kind of special internal guidance system. Feelings signal when something matters, when something is missing, when something feels safe, or when something feels off. In this way, help orient us toward what we might need and tell us if we are doing a good enough job of meeting that need.
For example, a sense of warmth might draw us closer. A flicker of discomfort might invite caution. A feeling of loneliness may nudge us toward reaching out.
When we are in contact with these feeling signals, connection is not something we have to think our way into, as we already have the map.
When Guidance Gets Disrupted
For many people, however, this internal system might not feel very clear or accessible.
Sometimes feelings are too intense. The nervous system can then become flooded or hyper-aroused, making closeness feel overwhelming or unsafe. In response, the system might have learned to downregulate too quickly (avoidance, shutting down, detaching).
At other times, feelings are muted or distant. There is reduced access to interoceptive signals or uncertainty about not really knowing what you feel. Without these signals, it becomes really difficult to know what we want, never mind how to move toward it.
There can also be misinterpretation. A surge of physiological arousal (like a racing heart, tight chest, or nausea) may be interpreted as danger, rather than as longing, excitement, or vulnerability. The body signals that something is important, but the mind categorises it as threat without exploring further.
And often, there is an internal conflict. The same person may activate both approach (seeking closeness) and avoidance (protecting from overwhelm), leading to a sense of push-pull; being drawn in and pushed away at the same time.
These patterns are not random flaws. They are learned adaptations to difficult and confusing experiences. The nervous system then over time simplifies our responses about how much feeling is tolerable, how it is interpreted, and whether it is safe to act on.
When Connection Becomes Something You Have to Figure Out
If feelings are what guide us toward connection, what happens when we can’t access or trust them?
Connection then starts to shift from something intuitively meaningful into something effortful or confusing.
Instead of sensing our way to meet the need, we try to over-think our way forward:
- Am I being too much?
- Do they actually want to hear from me?
- If I express this need will I be rejected?
Cognitive control steps in where this feeling guidance system is offline or uncertain. Interactions and connection can then become overanalysed or avoided altogether. Closeness may feel like something to manage carefully, rather than something to move into naturally.
Without access to our internal signals, connection becomes something we try to figure out like a tricky maths problem, rather than something we can feel our way into more organically.
The Misunderstanding
Sometimes, this can look like disinterest, detachment, or low capacity. But more often, it suggests a disruption in the feeling system that helps us recognise and respond to our own needs.
The longing for connection may still be there but the path toward it feels unclear.
So when we think something like “I don’t need people”, it’s more likely something closer to “I don’t know how to find my way to them from here.”
Relearning the Language of Feeling
If this is true, then the work is not about forcing connection by following set rules or ‘performing’ it more effectively. It is actually about slowly re-establishing contact with the internal signals that make connection possible.
This begins in very small ways:
- increasing awareness of bodily states (interoceptive awareness)
- naming emotional states, even when they seem vague (shown to improve emotional regulation)
- gradually expanding tolerance for feelings, rather than immediately avoiding or overriding them
For some, this process involves learning to stay with feelings that once felt overwhelming for just a little bit longer. For others, it might be discovering feelings that have long been out of reach.
This is about developing a different kind of relationship with one’s own internal world that is curious, patient, and gradually more trusting. And unfortunately, there is no quick fix method!
Finding a Way Back
In order to meet our inherent needs for connection then, it seems to require a rebuilding of trust in the internal system that helps us recognise what we feel, what we need, and what draws us toward others effectively.
The difficulty, then, is not that connection is unnatural or that we don’t need other people. It’s that, at one time or another, we all lose access to the very signals that help us find our way. And often, the path back to others begins with first feeling our way back into ourselves.
Feature image: Canva
