"Jeong": A Korean Word for the Felt Sense of Connectedness

Jeong, the Korean word for a felt sense of connectedness.

Source: Victoria Romulo/Unsplash

When I reflect on the deep roots of many of our human difficulties, I often come to the conclusion that we may be suffering from a collective attachment disorder. Whether it’s in our troubled relationships with one another, over-dependence on material objects, or the over-exploitation of the natural world, it is easy to speculate that these behaviors are motivated by an explicit belief—or perhaps more often, an implicit one—that we are “missing something.”

The feeling of "missingness" can be subtle, in a way we can’t quite put a finger on it. Yet, when it is deep and drives behavior in unhealthy ways, a developmental perspective may give historical clues to a weak sense of safety and security in attachment to a primary caregiver.

As childhood becomes adolescence and then adulthood, a deep sense of belongingness in the world may be lacking; unconditional dignity and worth of self may be missing. If we didn’t feel deeply, fully, and completely confident from our earliest days—if we didn’t sense that we were loved without any conditions—then at some point, the search to experience the feeling of belonging or worthiness takes over.

It might be through romantic relationships, power in a career, things that are symbols of value, or attention from people who do not know us. With it comes the expectation that the compensatory people, status, money, or objects will eventually fill the void. But they don't.

In the worst cases, a lack of a sense of belonging can drive people to dangerous, narcissistic, and even sociopathic behaviors that reflect no concept for healthy relationships and may even take delight in destroying them. The gradations of this kind of behavior in so many areas of life cause me to wonder if many modern life troubles spring from a “global attachment disorder.”

The Role of "Jeong" in Attachment and Belonging

A paper published in December of 2024 in Frontiers in Neuropsychology sheds some light on this idea. Drs. Sung Lee, Katie Cullen, Sung-ryun Rim, and Carlee Toddes contend that the feelings of bondedness and loss may be much more important to human experience, creativity, and health outcomes than we commonly give them credit for outside of specific areas of psychology. This ambitious paper covers a lot of territory and includes a Korean cultural perspective. I will summarize some of its key ideas in a series of articles, beginning with this one.

The authors write that in Korean culture, the sense of bondedness is recognized as jeong, or a subtle yet vaguely pleasing feeling in the physical body. For English-language speakers, jeong overlaps with affection, love, or attachment, yet it does not equate precisely to any one of them.

I asked Dr. Lee to explain jeong a bit more, and he offered that jeong can be felt not only between family or friends or with a pet. It is also the feeling of connectedness to a beloved old sweater, the familiar landmarks of one’s hometown, or even one’s humble office cubicle.

Jeong can also extend to people or things in even more subtle, unexpected ways. For example, it could be a sense of connectedness to a fellow student whom one does not know yet but sees regularly in a classroom, or to aspects or trappings of a space that one is hardly consciously aware of. A healthy prisoner in a jail cell will even develop jeong for the guard who regularly gives them meals.

Jeong can also mean a kind of hygge, the Danish word for the feeling of coziness when one gathers around a fireplace with friends. Jeong is, in most cases, platonic and reflects the sense of belonging to some person, place, or thing—even a sense of oneness.

Dr. Lee and colleagues do take measures not to romanticize jeong. They point out that it is also the feeling that drives nepotism or hazing rituals, and it can be cultivated as a tool for manipulation.

Why Jeong Can Be Useful to English Speakers

As a nuanced feeling-concept, there are benefits to understanding jeong in the English language. Two of these aspects are described below.

Jeong offers a general-purpose word for the felt sense of connectedness not limited to couches or fireplaces. Once I got the gist of jeong and its subtlety, I could appreciate how what I have called a “global attachment disorder” can also be described, in a perhaps more nuanced way, as the universal need for jeong.

Whether one’s jeong comes from family members, friends or acquaintances, a cherished animal companion, a palpable sense of the divine, or even a felt connection to a physical place, we all need a continuous supply of it. Jeong may be a key ingredient for what clinicians call the “therapeutic alliance,” the sense that the care provider and the client are on the same team and aligned toward the same overall goal.

Attachment Essential Reads

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Running to Stand Still: Why We Get Stuck in Inaction

Dr. Lee and his colleagues also argue that jeong has a biological basis and may depend on endorphins and enkephalins, those feel-good molecules that act as our brain’s natural pain-relievers and are also released with social laughter, physical massage, exercise, and other states of pleasure. Their theory that jeong relies on physical molecules that are produced in the brain, heart, and many other organs may explain the biological basis for health and behaviors when we are feeling in states that reflect connectedness. This may help us understand more holistically what a “felt sense” of something is.

In my next post, I will introduce the shadow of jeong, a feeling known to Koreans as haan.