Suzie Chick

“It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home.” 

Author, Deborah Levy

I’ve recently been considering new areas to move home. It’s certainly proved a tricky search. I have felt overwhelmed at times by choice and underwhelmed at other times with the current state of the UK housing market. My search has forced me to really ponder what is it that make me feel “at home”? And as the fabulous Deborah Levy suggests above, a house doesn’t always make a home.

My wonderings have exposed how incredibly complex and personal this issue is. We all have our own unique sense of home and yet the word is commonplace.  With this in mind, I thought I would try to explore some of the key ingredients to consider in creating our sense of home. 

Shelter 

At its very basic definition, home should be meeting our needs for shelter and safety (as per Maslow’s hierarchy). 

Once this lowest level need is met, I believe we then look to our home to meet higher up level needs such as a place to belong and to gain a sense of identity and status. This might be where a house becomes a home, when it goes beyond our basic needs to something more personal and impactful.

Secure base

In therapy we often talk about the importance of a secure base. This should be provided by our primary caregivers, where we have the confidence as children to venture out knowing there is a safe haven for us to return to. Experiencing this as children, allows us to internalise a secure base within ourselves (like carrying our home within us) which we then can call upon in times of uncertainty and distress. Our home can often come to represent a physical secure base causing us to develop a strong attachment to this space. No matter what we might experience out in the world, our home can welcome us back with open arms. 

If we think back to the messaging over the Covid-19 pandemic, “Stay home, save lives”, home was literally the refuge for survival from a potentially deadly threat. The pandemic certainly changed the way we see our homes and what we want from our domestic environments, just look at the number of people who moved out of big cities to more rural settings for a better quality of life. Home became a place for protection but also isolation from others, including family and friends. We are still unpacking the vast impact of the pandemic, the home being just one of the many facets to consider.

Belonging

As humans we are hard wired for connection and belonging, as Brene Brown often explains. According to research, our evolutionary need to connect and form healthy bonds is as essential as our basic needs for food and safety (slightly tipping Maslow’s pyramid on its side)! Our home can act as a physical container for such connections to be formed. The family we are born into is the very first group we are member of and can inform the way we connect and belong to others outside the home. 

Migration movements naturally place a major role in where and how we feel at home. Some people can feel a strange in-between feeling where they don’t feel at home in the place, they have migrated to but also when they do return to their homeland, they can also feel like a visitor. Home is neither here nor there. Equally experiences of migration can show our resilience and adaptability to making new places feel like home. 

Identity

One of my favourite aspects of home, is the privacy and space it can provide, allowing us to play with different aspects of our identity, or what Professor Hazel Markus calls our “possible selves”.  French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard argues that a house is a nest for dreaming and imagining for its residents. It’s a site for play and experimentation. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan described home as the place where we yearn both for protection and freedom, and where we are able to be fully ourselves. A place where the persona we display to the outside world can be taken off. 

Not always a refuge

An incredibly important point to make around the concept of home, is that this physical space is not always safe and secure for everyone. Home can be more of a warzone than a refuge. A place to avoid rather than seek out. 

For example, during lockdown, there was a 33% rise in reported incidents of domestic violence, contradicting the Governments advice at the time to stay home and stay safe. We have also sadly seen the potential dangers of home with the worrying rise of “ghost children” in the UK due to the pandemic. This being children who never returned to the school system post lockdown, the number of children classed as severely absent rose by 134% from 2019 to now. 

I’d like to end my wonderings with writer Deborah Levy echoing Gaston Bachelard’s idea that desiring a home might be more important than actually having a home. Gaston writes “maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it.” The dream unrealised, never a reality, but always kept alive within us. 

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash