Finding Your People: The Role of Chosen Family in Healing Part One

By Chels Davies-Kneis, MSW, RSW

4 minute read

Many people grow up believing that “family” is supposed to automatically feel safe, but for many folks, this just isn’t true. For many people, especially queer/trans folks, neurodivergent folks, and trauma survivors, belonging is something that they’ve had to find and build intentionally. 

When I reflect on why belonging matters, I often think about the concept of inheritance. Family is often framed as something we should inherit automatically: a built in source of safety, security, and care. This is where the concept of chosen family comes into play. The task of “finding your people” and discovering where you belong can certainly feel daunting, but it can also be deeply healing.

The People We Choose, and Who Choose Us 

Chosen family is, in many ways, exactly what it sounds like – it’s the family you choose! Chosen family is your network, your circle of support, your people. The relationships that make up a chosen family are intentional, reciprocal, and emotionally significant. These relationships are rooted in care, consistency, safety, and mutual recognition, and can include friends, mentors, romantic partners, community elders, and even relatives. 

Biological connection doesn’t have to be excluded here. In fact, many chosen families include biological relatives. Finding your people is often less about the role someone plays in your life and more about the quality of connection you have built together. Depth, connection, emotional safety, and support can come from unexpected places, and that’s okay! Part of the beauty of building a chosen family is approaching the process with curiosity, and, when it feels safe, openness to being surprised. 

Healing Happens in Relationships

Humans are deeply relational, and we have lots of science to support this. Belonging and co-regulation matter both psychologically and physiologically, and our relationships can shape our identities, coping strategies, sense of safety, and self-worth. As social creatures, humans are constantly learning from one another, not just through information-sharing, but through connection itself. 

Co-regulation is the process of feeling emotionally safer, steadier, or more grounded through connection with another person. For example, I will often invite clients to take a deep breath with me during a therapy session when emotions are intense. It’s not just about the benefits of the deep breath itself, it’s about breathing together and experiencing the grounding effect of the connection with the person sitting next to you. 

Holding Grief and Gratitude Together

While there are many benefits to intentionally building a chosen family, this doesn’t mean it will always feel good. For many people who are most in need of chosen family, there is often pain connected to the family they were born into. 

This is where we find the dialectical tension of grief and gratitude. Dialectical tensions are opposites that exist on a spectrum with one another, while simultaneously both remaining true. A classic example of this would be “hot” and “cold.” They exist as opposites, and yet belong to the same spectrum of temperature. Grief and gratitude exist in much the same way. 

For many people, there is grief connected to experiences with conditional love, emotional neglect, lack of acceptance, estrangement, and harm experienced within their family of origin. There can also be grief for something that was missing, or wished for – not just for things that happened. At the same time, gratitude for the relationships you have built, the safety that you have found, and the life unfolding before you can exist alongside that grief. 

Creating a chosen family rarely happens overnight. It takes effort, vulnerability, and time. Celebrating your efforts, acknowledging the difficulty, and allowing yourself to appreciate the relationships you’ve built can feel just as meaningful and healing as giving grief the space it deserves. 

Building Your Life Around Safe People

Chosen family is not second best. The relationships we intentionally build can be deeply real, sustaining, and life-changing. You are allowed to build your life around people who treat you well – love is not more meaningful when there is a biological connection attached to it. 

At their best, relationships are meant to be affirming and supportive, though healthy relationships can still experience conflict and difficult moments. The concept of “safety” has come up many times throughout this post, but what does that actually mean? In the context of chosen family, emotional safety can look like trusting that hard moments will not automatically threaten your belonging. It means feeling able to be yourself and to be deeply human, including sometimes making mistakes. 

Chosen family, and healthy relationships more broadly, are as much about enjoying life together as it is about navigating discomfort, conflict, and repair. Healing, connection, and belonging are not destinations, they are ongoing, evolving processes.

Belonging Can Be Built

Not everyone begins life with relationships that feel safe, affirming, or emotionally secure. For many people, healing involves grieving what was missing while also learning that connection, care, and belonging are still possible. Finding your people is rarely instant, and it’s rarely perfect, but meaningful relationships often grow through consistency, repair, trust, and shared humanity. 

Belonging builds slowly, through small moments of being seen, remembered, and met again. Over time, those moments start to feel less like exceptions, and more like something steady you can return to when you need it. Learning to recognize and trust that kind of connection is part of the healing process itself. In the next post, I’ll explore how therapy can support that process—helping us understand our relational patterns, and build communities that feel authentic and nourishing.

Thanks for reading! 

-Chels