Shame-Filled Spirituality

A Shame-filled Attachment Style Spirituality teaches us that the best way to get close to God is to shame and blame ourselves for falling below the standard of perfection. We tell ourselves that if we could just be a little better, we could get close. But we can never quite transform enough, so if we can't become adequately holy, we can at least punish ourselves for not being good enough. We end up trying to get close by proving to God that we know how bad and unlovable we really are.

In childhood, if we get mixed messages about our parents’ feelings towards us, we can’t trust that they actually want closeness. One day they seem to love us, the next they seem annoyed with us, or outright hostile toward us. In the worst situations, we live with the threat of abuse and violence, even on the days when our parents tell us how much they adore us.

We take this to mean that there is something wrong with us, something that makes us undeserving of love and closeness. So we try to become a different person, someone our parents might love more. We can never quite make it there, so in a few different ways, we end up punishing ourselves for not being someone worthy of love. This looks like the kid that continually criticizes himself in his head before his parents get a chance to. If he can find all the faults with himself, he’ll be prepared for the shame that is waiting for him as he tries to get close to his parents. 

In adulthood, this map makes relationships difficult to navigate. We desperately want closeness. We make our desire for connection clear to others, until our shame catches up with us, and we shut down or push others away, fearing they will see us for who we really are. We feel all alone in the world, yet terrified to let anyone close. 

Researchers have called this style disorganized attachment or fearful attachment, because there’s no clear way to seek emotional safety in the relationship. We find ourselves all alone and scared, without a path to safety. I’ve decided to call this way of relating Shame-Filled Spirituality, because the foundation of this style is shame, the belief that I am not good enough to get love and belonging.

This dynamic can play out in our relationship with God. We try desperately to scrub ourselves clean because we want to get close to God. But when that doesn’t work, we try another method: we can at least hate the dirty parts of ourselves. Since there’s a repulsive part of us that keeps God away, we try to placate through showing that we really know how disgusting we are. We end up telling God that we completely understand why we don't deserve closeness.

---

Churches that constantly remind us how far we’ve fallen from God’s ideal often implicitly or explicitly promote shame in the pews. Rather than focusing on God, they focus more on humans and their sinfulness. In the US, this is common in the recent neo-Reformed movement, but the feeling of constant disapproval has also been felt in many Catholic churches as well, such as the often mentioned experience of “Catholic guilt.” 

---

We regularly hear shame-filled messages in the church. We know that because of our sinful hearts, God is repulsed and finds us “thoroughly unpleasing when it comes to a personal relationship,” as John Piper puts it. [2] God only delights in us when we become someone slightly – or wholly – different. Piper continues, “God sees the incremental advances of our transformation by his Spirit and delights in them.” It sounds nice, but it requires us to continually advance forward, step-by-step, in order for us to get the delight that we so deeply desire. In Shame-Filled Spirituality, we can’t rest in our father’s arms covered in pig slop, but he does delight in us changing our attitude and going to put on some fresh clothes.

---

The “Prince of Preachers”, Charles Spurgeon, a revivalist in 19th century England, wrote, “I feel myself to be a lump of unworthiness, a mass of corruption, and a heap of sin,” referring to himself as “all rottenness, a dunghill of corruption, nothing better and a great deal worse.” [3]

Do we have to feel this way about ourselves before we can come to God?

---

 Since it’s difficult for us to become a different, more lovable person, we resort to hating the person we are today, hoping God will see that at least we know we’ve fallen short. So throughout the day, we keep a list of all the things we’ve done wrong and how badly we’ve screwed up in response to God’s grace. In Shame-Filled Spirituality, feeling bad becomes a mark of closeness. President of the SBC, J.D. Grear has said “one of the surest signs that you’ve never met God is that you feel pretty good about yourself.”[4] This means either that getting close to God requires feeling bad about yourself first, or that getting close to God causes you to feel bad about yourself. With our attachment glasses on, we can see clearly that neither of these are a sign of a healthy parent-child dynamic. 

“There is no reason why we should feel safe when God declares himself opposed to and angry with us.”

— -John Calvin

Shame-Filled Spirituality puts us in a terrible place where we actually feel better when we’re distant from God, and feel worse about ourselves when we’re close. Yet, we also need closeness, so we’re caught in a terrible dilemma. Though we long to draw near to God, as we come closer, we can only see disgust in the eyes of the Divine, a nettling feeling that we need to become a little bit better, a little holier if we're really going to be liked. And if that doesn’t work, we can acknowledge outright that we aren’t lovable and we don’t expect true closeness until we’ve completely changed. 

In Shame-Filled Spirituality, there’s no immediate solution to get the closeness we need. We only find ourselves vacillating between judgmental nearness and lonely distance. We’ve completely lost the vision of a father who delights in us, and in so doing, also lost a vision of ourselves as children of God, dearly loved. 

Interested in joining a community that engages and learns about attachment to God and secure spiritual practices? Find out more information about my patreon Secure Spirituality Community.

[1]           https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/what-made-it-okay-for-god-to-kill-women-and-children-in-the-old-testament

[2]           https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/i-know-god-loves-me-but-does-he-like-me

[3]           Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon, p 112, 93

[4]             https://jdgreear.com/3-reasons-gods-holiness-terrifies-us/

[5]           John Calvin's Commentaries On The Book Of Hosea, Calvin, 2012

Shutdown Spirituality

photo by Annie Spratt

Shutdown attachment style spirituality is when we have a pattern of trying to stuff down our negative emotions to get close to God.  It is based on the presumption that emotions like fear, sadness, pain and doubt, are incompatible with the life of faith. So we try as hard as we can not to feel these feelings, often using religious language, saying things like “God is in control, so why should I worry?” Shutting down uncomfortable feelings seems like the path to becoming a person who truly trusts God. We want to show God our best, while we deal with the more vulnerable parts of being human on our own, or better yet, pretend that they don’t exist. 

Parents who struggle with managing their own internal world will often send subtle signals to their children that emotions are not welcome in the family. To get the closeness they need, the children learn to shut down their emotions, because they’ve learned that their feelings actually cause disconnection, since their parents either punish emotional expression or pull away from it. As long as they don’t share too much, they can keep the connection with their parents. In American society, this is much more likely with boys, who grow up to men who have learned their emotions will not be heard or embraced. 

In reality, emotions are designed for connection. If you’ve seen Pixar’s movie Inside Out, you’ve learned about how an attempt to banish sadness overlooks its role in bringing others close: when we cry, it prompts our parents to scoop us up and give us kisses, respond with soothing tones, and hold us close. Without sadness, others wouldn’t know when to come close in our time of need. In fact, without sadness, we wouldn’t know ourselves when to reach out to others. But in a tragic turn of events, some children learn very early on that the emotions that God designed to bring us together actually drives their parents away. These children learn that when they cry, mom gets angry or dad gets uncomfortable. The best way to stay close is to lock their unsightly feelings in the basement. 

If we learn that our parents are not comfortable with emotional closeness, we will walk a tightrope of getting close without getting too close. If we want to maintain connection, then our best strategy is to go in our room and play with Legos when we’re feeling like we might cry. We can’t risk the rejection that might come if we shed tears, so we manage our emotions ourselves and come back for closeness when we’ve regained composure. We can keep connection so long as we can demonstrate that we’re not “irrational” or “unreasonable” or “too emotional.”

Then, we grow into adults who keep others at a distance in order to keep them close, often confusing friends and partners, and ourselves. It’s a paradoxical strategy. From the outside it looks like we couldn't care less about closeness, but actually we’ve learned that if we get too close, we will be pushed away. So the distance becomes a way of maintaining closeness. We avoid it at all costs, our bodies remembering on a non-verbal level that sharing emotions only resulted in rejection by those we love most. We keep connected by shutting down emotions that might threaten closeness. 

We often feel unpracticed and incompetent in the world of connecting emotionally, so we’re more comfortable with activities that are shoulder-to-shoulder than face-to-face. We’d rather go on a bike ride with a friend than sit down for a cup of coffee. We’ll show up for a building project, but feel anxious when faced with unstructured social times. Church potlucks are the worst, we much prefer a cookout where at least we can manage the grill.

---

Lack of Emotional Intensity

The liturgy of mainline traditions can harbor shutdown spirituality because weekly worship does not necessarily require emotional engagement, in contrast to evangelical churches that put a prime emphasis on emotional worship. White Baptists churches also often create a culture that allows us to escape into our heads, through pursuing theological knowledge, while escaping the emotions of our hearts.  

---

Researchers have called this style of relating anxious-avoidant attachment or dismissive attachment because we dismiss both our emotions and our need for others, and end up avoiding closeness. I’ve chosen to use the term Shutdown Spirituality, because when it comes to God, we end up shutting down our emotions in order to keep closeness, as well as using faith to shut down our emotions.

The church sends many messages - sometimes subtle, sometimes not - that our emotions are not welcome. Kathleen Norris writes in The Cloister Walk, that she was raised to believe she had to “be dressed up, both inwardly and outwardly, to meet God,” to “be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in his church.” The fruit of the Spirit, feelings like joy and peace, indicate a true connection with God. Therefore, fear, doubt and pain indicate there’s something wrong with our faith. 

“Lack of joy is a sin for the child of God.”

— John MacAurther [1]

Some of us have been taught that the very existence of certain feelings are an affront to God. Francis Chan writes, “worry implies that we don't quite trust God,” suggesting that “Both worry and stress reek of arrogance.” [2] We don’t want to drive God away with our foul-smelling emotions, so we come up with a handful of tools to manage them on our own. Usually this looks like some version of either working extra hard to conjure up feelings of peace and joy, or shutting down altogether, so you don't feel anxious or worried or happy or anything at all. We’ll do whatever we can to keep God close, so we try to subdue our emotions under our control, something we were never capable of in the first place. We stuff our feelings in the basement, hoping that they won’t drive God away. 

Shutdown Spirituality makes no room for needs or emotions. We get going on on God’s cosmic mission, and forsake anything that gets in the way. It seems God cares more about fame and glory than our emotions and experience. God begins to feel like a parent who doesn’t notice we’ve had a bad day at school because they're so busy trying to get their own work done. Just as those with a shutdown style will choose completing a task over connecting emotionally, we find a similar portrayal of a God whose primary goal is to accomplish the task of spreading the gospel or establishing a Kingdom, without concern for feelings. In this paradigm, we’ve lost a vision for a God who both invites us into self-sacrificial living and knows us so well that the hair on our heads is counted. Instead, God becomes a cosmic boss who cares more about the cause than being in communion together.

In Shutdown Spirituality we find ways to connect with our faith community that side-steps emotions. We volunteer to organize meal trains or set up for services. We lead a small group, and get knee deep in content in a way that crowds out any room for the more personal parts of the community. We are participating best we can, all the while ensuring things don’t get too intimate. 

So our relationship with God can never be the refuge we need because we can’t risk crawling into the lap of a God who will find our worry to be offensive. We can't take the chance of sharing our pain or doubt or fear lest it lead to terrifying disconnection, so we squash our feelings down, hoping it will keep God close. But over time, without the ability to go to God with our stress, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel authentically connected spiritually, or to others in our community. Our practices of Shutdown Spirituality leaves us starved for the true connection we need.

Listen to Amy and I discuss this spiritual attachment style on the Attached to the Invisible podcast.

Interested in joining a community that engages and learns about attachment to God and secure spiritual practices? Find out more information about my patreon Secure Spirituality Community.

Notes:

[1]           Anxious For Nothing, 2006

[2]           Crazy Love, p. 44, 2013

Anxious Spirituality

photo by Annie Spratt

An anxious spiritual style is a pattern of worriedly seeking closeness with God, fearing that the moment we relax we will backslide into separation. We’re convinced it's entirely up to us to maintain closeness with God. Which means we can never actually rest with God.

In some families, the child ends up feeling that keeping connection rests wholly on their shoulders, a feeling many of us have picked up in our faith communities as well. It prevents us from ever resting in the embrace of a loving parent, and pushes us to anxiously cling like they are a helium-filled balloon, just waiting to fly into the ether the moment we relax our white-knuckled grasp. It’s exhausting, but better than being abandoned to disconnection.

In healthy families, children trust that their parents will respond and rescue them from disconnection, at least most of the time. But what if you grow up in a family where it’s more likely that your cry will be ignored than responded to, moments of distance feel terrifying. You're unsure if you'll be rescued, or if you'll feel abandoned to the utter hopelessness of isolation. It’s a scary thing to be alone in a world where no one comes to save you from the painful feeling of disconnection. So we create a pattern of frantically calling out for help, and eventually focus all our energy on preventing disconnection from ever happening in the first place. 

When we can't trust our caregivers to get close in our time of need, we have to scheme up our own map for closeness. Those early experiences of disconnection feel like the death of the relationship, and because we’re created for connection, a deep anxiety develops. We know that our parents care, but we’re not sure if they care enough. Skeptical that they will help up during the agony of disconnection, our best strategy becomes avoiding any distance at all. Our relationships begin to feel like helium balloons, constantly bobbing and pulling, threatening to fly away unless we grip tight the strings that hold them close. It’s safer to sit next to mom on the bench at the park than take the risk of playing on the playground. What if she’s not paying enough attention when you venture out on your own and get hurt or scared? The best bet is to cling to mom’s skirt, and endlessly keep a sharp eye out for the slightest sign of disconnection. 

Researchers have referred to this as anxious-ambivalent attachment or preoccupied attachment, because we are anxious about and preoccupied with keeping connection - so much so that it’s hard to focus on other important parts of our life. I’m using the simple term “Anxious Spirituality” to describe this way of relating to God because it is driven by an anxiety that fears we will lose the closeness we desperately need. 

---

The emotional intensity of the charismatic tradition can help us quell our anxiety about God's closeness, providing a space to call out and expect that God will show up. However, for some of us, as the intensity fades the anxiety about distance increases, wearing us out over time. 

---

When we practice Anxious Spirituality, we worry about drifting, backsliding, or falling away from the faith. If we don’t keep the connection, who will? Many of us were told early on in our faith that this is what the Christian life is about. Taking on all the responsibility for our connection with God, we have to constantly double check that we are staying close, constantly gripping the balloon string. It’s easy to get locked in a pattern of being as expressive as we can in our spiritual life, trying to keep God’s attention. Or we might make sure to always have a quiet time, or to never miss mass, or to commit to battling whatever sin has become our vice. Then when we can’t do these things, we get the anxious unease that we might not be clinging hard enough. Like Mark Dever, president of 9Marks ministry says, “If you’re not at odds with sin, you’re not at home with Jesus.”[1] So we tirelessly work to make sure that we’re at odds at sin, in order to stay close to Jesus. We continually scan for the tiniest fracture in our connection. It’s exhausting, but it’s better than the alternative – being left all alone.

---

One study that examined connections between mental health and how we relate to God found that an anxious attachment style with God significantly predicted depression and anxiety symptoms.[2]

---

Rather than a loving embrace, relationship with God becomes a precarious balancing act that burns us out over time. We desperately want closeness, and we have learned early on that the best way to get it and keep it becomes anxiously grasping at those we love, including God. It’s a map we’ve received both in our families, but also from the church. We long to collapse into the lap of our Divine Parent, but we worry about relaxing too much. What if we fall asleep on God and then wake only to find that God has slid out from under us, slinking into another room, and we’re left feeling all alone? If the consequences are closeness or eternal separation, of course we’re going to practice anxious spirituality – it’s the only way we know to stay close.

Listen to Amy and I discuss this spiritual attachment style on the Attached to the Invisible podcast.

Interested in joining a community that engages and learns about attachment to God and secure spiritual practices? Find out more information about my patreon Secure Spirituality Community.

Notes:

[1]           https://unlockingthebible.org/2018/04/15-unforgettable-quotes-on-holiness-from-t4g18/

[2]           Hunter, 2017 https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/10140/HUNTER-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Secure Spirituality

Secure Spirituality: A Cozy Cabin

Secure Spirituality is like having a golden key to a cozy cabin that you carry around in your pocket. You don’t need to stay there all day, but you know that if you need some comfort, you can just walk right in, without worry about whether or not the door is locked. Sometimes just knowing it’s there is a comfort in itself. 

With a secure style we know that our parents are tuned into us and accessible when we really need them. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t distracted at times, but we know that if we make it clear we need help, they will come running. If we’re sad or scared or hurt, they will hold us and comfort us. We know that we are loved in a way that looks deeper than our shortcomings or successes. The stability of this relationship creates a shelter as we face the overwhelming parts of life, providing a “refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Growing up with a secure style provides us with a key to a cozy cabin. This gives us a healthy map for getting close to others later in life. We learn to reach out in vulnerable ways, to show empathy for others, and to name and navigate our own emotions. 

Likewise, when we learn early on that we can get closeness with God without jumping through hoops or cleaning ourselves up, we create a pattern for secure spirituality. Connection with our Divine Parent is a refuge, a firm foundation upon which we can engage with the world and deal with the challenges that come our way. In Christian terms, it means that we know nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” [1]

This foundational assurance doesn’t mean everything goes smoo, but it does bring comfort in hard times. When we feel distant, we know it’s part of the life of faith – not something wrong with us. Rather than striving for closeness, we can rest, knowing that God delights in us.  Because God can handle our sadness, pain, fear, and doubt, we don’t have to hide our difficult emotions. When we know that God is always drawing near to us, we don’t have to hate the unholy parts of ourselves, we can just ask for help with them. 

When we can bring our whole selves to God and collapse into the lap of our loving parent, we can enter into the resting state of true communion, like an infant in its mother’s embrace, without fretting about losing that connection. There we can find a true refuge from a scary and chaotic world. When we’ve been taught secure patterns of relating to God, we can actually step into the joy and peace and love we’ve been promised to be part of the life of faith.

But what if we can’t trust that our parents – whether earthly or divine – will reliably respond with love and compassion? What if we learn we can’t simply ask for closeness? Then we need to get more adaptive, and come up with different strategies to keep our parents, or God, close. You can read about those strategies here.

[1]           Romans 8:39

Spiritual Attachment Styles

photo by Nathan Dumlao

What I most significant about attachment to God is that it gives us a framework to understand what’s working and what’s not. Do you feel comfortable coming to God with your emotions and expect comfort? Or – 

Do you feel like you have to continual grip tightly to God, trying to keep closeness? Do you frantically pray, or act rightly, or do whatever you feel brings and keeps God close to you? Do you constantly worry about falling away or becoming distant from God? You might have an Anxious Attachment Style of Spirituality. 

Or do you cling to hard theological facts, constructing a left-brained way of relating to God that is absence of any sense of closeness? Do you prefer to do things for God and for others, rather than connect on an emotional level? You might have a Shutdown Attachment Style of Spirituality.

Or do you find yourself afraid to come close to God, for fear of judgment and disgust from a holy being who hates sin? Do you feel torn between wanting to feel close to God, but also worried that you’re worthless or not worthy of love? You might have a Shame-Filled Attachment Style of Spirituality.

These are four ways of understanding our attachment to God. When we understand these patterns, not only do we have a way to talk about them – we also have a way to move forward in health. 

Interested in joining a community that engages and learns about attachment to God and secure spiritual practices? Find out more information about my patreon Secure Spirituality Community.

For Pastors

photo by Laura Allen

What are the implications of attachment science for ministry?

I wish that every pastor understood three things:

• Our day-to-day relationship with God is based on what we know implicitly — in our heart, not our head.

• Whether correct or not, our heart-knowledge about God exists for a reason. If underneath it all, we believe God doesn’t like me, that belief has been cultivated in some way, possibly from the church itself.

• Being curious and creating space to understand and explore these implicit beliefs about God, without judgement, is the best way to heal our relationship with God and move forward in discipleship.

How we feel about God can actually be very different than what we think about God. This makes our unhealthy attachment patterns with God even more difficult to recognize, because we know all the right answers: God loves me. God’s anger was satisfied in the cross. God cares for me. But sometimes that’s different from how we feel. We’ve been told that because of Jesus’ work, we’re at peace with God, yet we feel the constant hint of disapproval. We might say that we know God loves us unconditionally, but we worry that the moment we slip up God will pull away. 

It’s hard to put words to these feelings, often because we feel like we’re not supposed to have them. A few years ago, a study was conducted [1] where Christians were asked to consider a way of describing God, attributes like kind, patient, responsive, and asked them to identify whether the adjectives were ones they felt they “should believe that God is like” or adjectives that they “personally feel that God is like.” At the end of the study, the researchers found that although people did experience God as a positive figure in their life, participants believed that their experience of God should be much more positive than it actually was. That is, their actual experience was not as positive as they believe it should be. This confirms what most of us already know: in most church communities, we’re afraid to talk about our insecurities with God because we feel we should not have them.

---

“In the Christian faith, for example, clients commonly report believing in a God that is close and forgiving. However, it is not uncommon for these same clients to report experiencing God as distant and unforgiving. They may believe in the concept of grace, yet still feel like they have to earn God’s approval.” - Glendon Moriarity, The Head and the Heart: Perspectives from Religion and Psychology (2013)

---

The vulnerable space of acknowledging these discrepancies is a sacred one. It’s a wonderful privilege to walk into these waters with people, as they tell me things like, “I’ve always been told that ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,’ but deep down, I feel like God doesn’t really want me, and isn't going to stick around. I’ve never really put that into words, it’s just been this background feeling my whole life.” This is the way we begin to step into security with God. When we can slow down and notice how we feel with God, it illuminates our insecurities in a way that leads us into healing. As we bring our painful experiences of faith to the forefront, we can allow God and others to help tend to these wounds – as long as we can do so in a community that has proven itself safe. 

Contact Krispin for consultation on using attachment science to create healing spiritual communities.

Notes:

[1]  Bonnie Poon Zahl & Nicholas J. S. Gibson (2012) God Representations, Attachment to God, and Satisfaction With Life: A Comparison of Doctrinal and Experiential Representations of God in Christian Young Adults, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 22:3, 216-230, DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2012.670027

[2]  Hall, et. al. (2009)

Forming Attachment to God

How do we form different attachment styles to God?

Within the Christian tradition, we all have a relationship with the same God – so why do we end up relating in so many different ways? That’s a million-dollar question that psychologists who research spirituality are continuing to explore. Some believe that our way of relating to God tends to run down two different paths. The first path is when we relate to God in ways that correspond, or mirror, the ways we relate to our parents. This is called the “correspondence hypothesis.” Our parents are caring, attentive and compassionate, and we assume the same about God and reach out easily. Or our parents are harsh and distant, and we expect the same from God, trying to keep from upsetting our Divine Parent the way our parents were so easily upset. 

The second path of relating to is finding God to be just the opposite of our parents. In this path, we find that we reach out to God to compensate for the support and love we didn’t receive, if we grew up in a dysfunctional family. This is called the “compensation hypothesis.” Our parents were conditional and judgmental, and we find that God accepts and loves us unconditionally. For these people, they find that God gives them the love and care they felt starved of in their early relationships. 

However, this line of research has often started with the assumption that our parental experiences are the primary factor in forming how we relate to God. Other research has considered what types of theological teaching encourage different ways of reaching out to God, in healthy and unhealthy ways. One study looked at different denominations and found specific patterns for the ways they reached out to God during times of stress.[1] It’s important to look not only at our own family of origin, but also the messages we received about God, especially early on in faith. 

Then, there’s another piece that makes the difference between the impacts of our theological tradition and of our parents even more difficult to decipher. Research has found that parenting styles in cultures correlate with belief about the character of God [2]. That means having a view of God as harsh and judging makes it more likely that a parent will have harsh parenting practices. If our church culture emphasizes that God is gracious, and full of compassion, slow to anger, and merciful, we would expect to see similar parenting practices. If we have a church tradition that emphasizes wrath and punishment, then we will expect punitive parenting. If you grew up in a faith community, it’s hard to tell what part is parent and what part is church culture and teaching, when it comes to learning about connecting with God.  

None of us have received a perfect understanding of God. Our specific relationship with God is built on who we are and our unique experiences. Yes, our parents impact our perception of God. But our relationship with God is also impacted by the church we grew up in, our current faith community, and the dominant theology of our larger culture. Then there’s our specific theology, traumatic experiences, as well as our gender, sexual orientation, culture, personality, and psychological health [3]. And of course, our relationship is also impacted by direct experience with God. 

Read about the different styles here.

Notes:

[1]           http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2006/12/attachment-to-god-interlude-why-are.html

[2]           Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.

[3]                Louis Hoffman PhD, Sandra Knight PhD, Scott Boscoe-Huffman MA & Sharon Stewart MA (2007) Chapter 13. Diversity Issues and the God Image, Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 9:3-4, 257-279, DOI: 10.1300/J515v09n03_13

Scientific Spirituality?

photo by Rod Long

Scientific Spirituality?

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth were leaders in understanding how to talk about the quality of relationship between a parent and child, founding one of the most important developmental models in psychology known as Attachment Theory, which looks at how early bonds between parent and child impact how a person views themselves, others, relationships and many other life factors. 

But the question arises: can we take a theory based on observing thousands of infants and their parents and look at relationship with God through the same lens? With hesitation, many researchers have said yes. Granqvist and Kirkpatrick stated that when it comes to comparing a person’s relationship with God to parental relationships “these resemblances are more than interesting analogies and in fact reflect genuine attachment processes.” That is, beyond an abstract model for spirituality, we actually feel our relationship with God, and it engages the part of our brain that longs for connection.

Four Aspects of Attachment

In attachment theory there are four aspects of an attachment relationship that are clearly present with the relational God presented in scripture. The first is that we have a drive to seek and maintain closeness with God. Infants cry, whine and show a host of other behaviors to get or maintain closeness with their parent, which is termed “proximity seeking.” Some researchers have suggested that prayer is the primary way people seek closeness to God, especially during times of stress. However, it seems that any sincere religious action is an attempt to get or stay close to God. This includes attending religious services, reading spiritual books, going to Bible studies, fasting, giving to the poor, confession. 

We spend a lot of energy trying to determine the nature of our relationship with God, and much spiritual talk is about the amount of distance. We sing in Sunday services asking God to come near. We pray and read our Bible to remain “close with the Lord.” We worry that our sin separates us from God. So much of our spiritual life is oriented about drawing near to God, and keeping nearness. We want to be close to God, knowing that we can rest in divine embrace whenever we need. We want to know that our day-to-day life matters, and that God knows and cares about our world. 

Sometimes we want so badly to be close to that we actually keep our distance. We’re afraid things might go awry if we get too close, so “close enough” is better than outright rejected, something we see infants do with harsh parents.

A second aspect of an attachment relationship is perceiving God as a haven of safety, a clear theme throughout the whole of scripture, and perhaps most apparent in Psalms. In fact, Psalm 46 goes so far to call God a “place of safety” (NLV), or otherwise translated as refuge or fortress. Isn’t this why we run to our parents when we’re scared or injured? Being near a parent creates felt safety (an attachment theory term) during times of distress, and throughout scripture, God’s people have sought him to experience this. Research indicates that many seek closeness to God following traumatic events, illness, injury, and the death of a loved one.

A third aspect of attachment relationship is God as a secure base from which to explore from. As children, we need to know that our parent is reliable -- and not going anywhere -- in order feel secure enough to explore our environment. My daughter needs me to stay on the bench if she’s going to explore the new playground, so she can come back to her secure base when she’s ready to return. Granqvist and Kirkpatrick have pointed out that an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God can “provide the most secure of bases” in which to explore the world. Jesus’ promise to always be with soothes our need to be able to lean on someone and know that we can depend on them when we need. 

A fourth aspect of attachment relationship is grief due to separation or loss of the object of attachment. While pop culture has portrayed hell as a place of flames and torture, many have identified the most painful part of hell is simply eternal separation from God, a thought that can cause anxiety for some. In fact, this anxious response makes complete sense when one understands attachment drives, and looks at relationship with God through this lens. If there is a chance of being separated from our Divine Parent forever (not to mention loved ones), it only makes sense that we are on edge and worried about maintaining closeness.

Attachment is all about trust. Can we trust that our caregiver is available, responsive and engaged? If we have this trust, then we have a secure attachment. If attachment is all about trust, we can definitively say that we can understand relationship with God as an attachment relationship. The Bible most often refers to this trust as faith. When Jesus says, “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’” He is telling us that we do matter to God, that he is engaged and responsive, therefore we can have faith in God, or in other words -- secure attachment. 

Blame Mom?

Should I Blame My Mother? 

Attachment science asserts the obvious: our earliest relationships have a significant impact on how we view ourselves and the world. However, it would be a mistake – that Freud already made - to believe that one single model holds all the answers to who we are as people, and that our parents have complete influence over our mental health.

We are both biological and social beings. How we operate in the world and who we become is impacted by a long list of factors, including our relationships, experiences, genetic make up, and more. In fact, the field of epigenetics studies how our experiences after birth dictate the way the genes we were born with are expressed. In his book, Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope, Johann Hari shows that while there are genetic dispositions for depression, it is always triggered by experience (whether or not we know what that experience is). 

It’s tempting to look back into our own history and try to determine our attachment style with our parents. Sometimes it’s obvious, but many times it’s not. As a therapist, I find delving into the past helpful only to the extent that it helps us find a coherent narrative for why I feel the way I do now, and how to operate in new ways that takes us toward health. 

One study found that 30% of participants changed their attachment style over the course of four years. That doesn’t necessarily mean for the better, either. Unfortunately, we can start out on solid ground in a securely attached family, but other significant relationships or circumstances can change our attachment style. In other words, it’s not always our parents’ fault. 

Feminist critiques of Attachment Science have rightly pointed out that it has been used to blame women, especially those who seek careers. However, those who used the research to suggest this did so wrongly. Attachment is about being tuned in to the emotions and needs during difficult times in a child’s life. Parents don’t need to be around all the time, they just need to be responsive when we have points of connection.

Different Types of Trauma

Children who grow up in healthy families can still show signs of attachment insecurity for a variety of ways. Dr. Karyn Purvis worked with children who have experienced the extreme abuse and neglect, but she also worked with children that looked as though they’d gone through trauma, but grew up in healthy families. It was puzzling why these kids struggled so much, until she realized that attachment relationships are only half the story of early experiences. She lays out six trauma risk factors that can all impact a person’s mental health.

Stress during pregnancy. This can be anxiety, depression, or chronic stress, and even happy things like finishing a PhD program. It can include things like financial stress, work stress or anything that causes hardship (things that a loving, healthy mother can’t always control). 

Birth trauma. Another experience that mothers have no control over, babies that are born amidst this sort of stress come into the world ready to fight to survive. This creates trauma symptoms in the nervous system that can play out in many ways.

Early hospitalization. If you’ve ever been through a significant medical procedure, you know how intrusive and scary it can be. Now, imagine being very tiny and helpless. Children go through medical treatment for such important reasons, and the traumatic impact of those early experiences can show up later (and be a surprise for parents!).

Abuse Children who are overtly harmed by those in their life through words, emotions or violence.  

Neglect Children whose needs – whether clothing, food or emotional connection – go unmet. 

Trauma Car accidents, witnessing violence, fleeing war – these are things that healthy parents can’t always protect their children from. 

Here, we see that only two of six common causes of childhood trauma are from malignant parents. That’s not to say that there aren’t harmful parents that can have a significant impact on their children, but that’s not all there is to the story of our development. Early traumatic experiences can significantly impact our attachment style. So maybe there is great reason to blame your mom – and maybe there isn’t.

Good Enough Parents

It’s actually pretty hard to screw up as a parent. The concept of “good enough parents” is that parents can maintain a secure attachment to their children through responding empathically during times of need half the time. So, it doesn’t mean being attuned all the time. In fact, in recent years attachment researchers like Dr. Edward Tronick are examining the importance of rupture and repair. This is what occurs when a parent totally misses it – yet, they notice their children’s upset and respond with compassion. Parents don’t need to get it right all the time, they just need to notice when there’s a rupture, and work to mend it. 

Fearful

Photo by Javier Esteban

Disorganized and Fearful Attachment

This style is most commonly understood to come from parental abuse or neglect, and is estimated to show up in 5% of the US population.

The worst part about harsh parents is the confusion it creates within a child. One part of you wants to be close to your parents, because biologically, you are designed to go to them for safety and security. Another part of you knows there’s a risk of criticism, judgement or even violence. This is the plight of children who are abused — whether emotionally or physically. They find themselves caught between two strong drives: a longing for closeness that comes into direct conflict with the drive to stay safe. You can stay far and feel lonely, or you can get close and take the risk of being judged and criticized or hurt. Like a cold front meeting a warm front, we find ourselves in a tornado of conflicting emotions. There’s no true solution, just a choice between two bad options.  

Imagine being a child who desperately wants closeness, but you know that getting close to mom includes the risk of harsh criticism or rejection. Sometimes you can get the affection you need, but many times you get just the opposite. Some days, you can talk with mom and everything is okay. But on the wrong day, mom will explode with vitriol, using whatever complaint is handy to give license for her internal rage to lash out at you: Why isn’t your room clean, you’re such a slob! Or just look at you, I told you if you kept eating that much you would get fat! 

Fear Without Solution

Researchers have called this attachment style “fear without solution,” because children naturally turn to their parents during times of fear, but have no solution when the source of the fear is the parent themself. 

Or imagine living with a parent who never outright says what you’ve done wrong. But when you step a toe out of line, dad ices you out, brimming with silent rage. Mom gets quiet too, and it’s like the whole world has stopped and you’re all alone in a terrifying place. In a split second, you find yourself stuck in a still-face moment for hours, and the silence says, I wish you weren’t here or worse, I wish you weren’t my child. To be clear, your dad might not be thinking those things, but the message comes across loud and clear to a child.

And how does a child get close to a parent that may be nurturing and loving one day, but drunk and violent the next? Without any need for words, the physical harm says, I despise you. Beyond the physical pain lies the excruciating suffering of feeling unwanted and disliked by the person who is supposed to delight in you and hold you close.

Then, there are children who never get the closeness for which they yearn. No abuse, but a soul-crushing absence of attention or care or comfort. Imagine being a child in a family where everyone seems happy enough, but nobody knows you at all. No one asks what your day was like, or has the time to get to understand your world. You don’t get your parent’s attention when you need it. The absence of connection tells you, You’re nothing but an inconvenience; you’re not worthy of connection or belonging. 

And all of these interactions communicate a common message: I don’t want to be close to you because there is something wrong with you. The child then is caught in a catch-22. They can either isolate themselves to feel safe yet desperately lonely, or they can try to get the closeness they desire with the risk of painful message from their parent that they are broken and repulsive.

If these dynamics seem familiar, https://www.childwelfare.gov has definitions of childhood abuse for clarification. If these parent/child dynamics were present in your home growing up, contacting a local licensed mental health provider may provide clarity and steps forward in healing. 

All Rotten Inside

These experiences create a sense that there is something wrong with us, a deep sense of shame. Dr. Karyn Purvis spent her life working with children who’d experienced the worst types of disconnection that the world can offer, dedicating her work to children “from hard places,” a term she coined for those in foster care or had experienced other forms of attachment trauma. She found that children often talked about feeling completely rotten inside, a sense that there’s something at their core that’s vile and disgusting. Others psychologists have talked about the feeling that “there’s something clearly and palpably bad about self, something that deserves judgment or disgust.” Attachment textbooks are full of vivid descriptions of this terrible feeling, “a sense of deformity, degradation, or worthlessness...ugliness and undesirability,” or feeling “revolting and untouchable ...unfit to live among other human beings.” When we get the message that we are not worthy of closeness, it creates a sense that there is something deeply wrong with us at our very core.
           
The worst part of the shame is that it provides us continual felt evidence that there’s something broken within that drives others away. It’s a feeling within that makes us feel disgusting. We can’t get close to others until the shame is gone — until we’re fixed. Yet, many of us lost hope long ago of ever being fixed, or good enough, to actually be close with those that we love.

Because this shame is both subtle and ever-present, it’s tough to even recognize. As I work with clients to put a name to this feeling, they often tell me they didn’t think to name it because they simply knew it as normal life. Like oxygen, it’d been there as long as they could remember, such a constant fixture throughout the years that it was hardly worth mentioning. It’s become such a part of our self-concept that there are moments it’s hard to look inside and see anything but a disgusting goo. Though hard to put a finger on, it drives our relational worlds in drastic and enduring ways.

It makes intimacy incredibly difficult, because of the fear that others will see what is inside you and be disgusted. Connection feels like the risk of others finding out how terrible you are, and running away — leaving you all alone. It puts you in a position of longing for closeness, but also fearing it at the same time.

We go through life condemning ourselves for being so selfish, or self-focused, or annoying, or dishonest, or whatever it is that makes us unworthy of love. We grow into adults, believing that these aspects of our personality make us unfit for relationships. If only we could change, maybe just a little bit more, then we could get the closeness we need. After all, that's the message we've gotten from parents: there's something wrong with you, and if you could just be a little less like yourself, I would like you more. We hate the parts of ourselves that keep us from love, precisely because we want so badly to be loved.

Even when it’s not a conscious thought, our body language actually communicates that we know we are unlovable. We self-isolate through shoulder slouches, looking at the floor, avoiding eye-contact. We don’t expect closeness, and our bodies show that we believe we don’t deserve embrace. And when others do come close, we get nervous that they will see that there’s something wrong with us.

Steps Toward Healing

We are harmed through relationships, and also healed through them. Find a safe, healthy community can be a great step out of shame. But it’s important to find communities that are aware of shame and trauma – unfortunately some spaces actually perpetuate rather than relieve shame.

Internal Family Systems therapy can be helpful for a fearful attachment style.

If you experience shame in your relationship to God Original Blessing by Danielle Shroyer is immensely helpful

Dr. Curt Thompson’s book The Soul of Shame is also a great read on shame, the heart of this attachment style.

Tara Brach’s Self-Compassion meditation can be a helpful daily practice for shame.

Personally, I’ve found Gentler God by Doug Frank and In the Shelter by Pádraig Ó. Tuama have been transformative for me in regard to the ways my fearful attachment shows up with God. 

The Therapist Uncensored Podcast has this episode on Disorganized Attachment.

Dismissive

Johnny Cohen

Dismissive & Anxious-Avoidant Attachment

Imagine that you’re four years old and running toward the playground. But before you even make it onto the bark mulch, your feet trip, and your body is caught by the concrete. Your knees feel the impact, and you notice a little blood leaking out of a scrape. You feel tears well up within you, but you hold them back long enough to determine if someone will respond if you let them out.

Looking back at your mom, she’s already turned her face downward, immersed in a book. Based on your life up till now, you already know how she will react if you interrupt her. She’ll say she’s sorry, while her eyes narrow, and she purses her lips together in annoyance, betraying her true feelings. While she says the right words, everything else tells you that she’d rather you not have the feelings you have. So in a quick, subconscious moment, you make a decision. You decide it’s better to sit with throbbing knees than to feel like a bother. Especially when you’re already feeling physical burn, the subtle rejection would just be too much. 

The pain continues, but there’s nothing to be done. You try your best to push it out of your mind, trying to focus on the playground, finding something new to play with or explore. A new activity is nothing like a hug, but it’s better than sitting and feeling sorry for yourself. It’s better than actually feeling how much you need a hug. Distraction is a second-best strategy for dealing with your pain, but it’s all you’ve got. 

After a while, this process is not even a decision anymore. You know that if you’re in pain, or sad or scared, your best bet is to try to handle it on your own. Ignore or distract. By the time you’re an adult, the emotions barely register. You don’t feel much, and so you don’t need others to help you when you’re feeling bad. You’ve stopped hoping that you’ll get the response you truly long for. If mom doesn’t like you when you’re crying, it’s best stop crying — and decide that you’re okay on your own.

When Emotions Drive Disconnection

In a family like this, shutting down emotions keeps mom close. If our parents don’t like our emotions, or can’t handle them, we will learn quickly that the best strategy to maintain closeness is to keep our feelings under wraps. So we come up with ways to shut down our emotions. 

Parents have different ways of discouraging their children from sharing emotions. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” is an obvious message that sadness isn’t welcome. But there are other subtle ways that caregivers, even with the best of intentions, can send this message. Consider the mother who can’t handle her son’s tears when he can’t have more candy after dinner, so she swoops in saying, “Oh honey, don’t cry!” and allows it, rather than setting a healthy boundary. While the son gets what he wants, he begins to notice that mom isn’t all that comfortable with his big emotions. So, the child is thrown into a terrible dilemma between showing emotion and maintaining connection. He learns that his emotions have a way of increasing mom’s anxiety, rather bringing her close. He has to choose between feelings and closeness. To avoid a moment of disconnection, he does his best to stuff down his emotions. 

Then, we grow into adults who feel we must keep our ugly emotions away from others to keep them close. The best strategy is to continually shut down your emotions. So, we fill our days with activities, just like the toddler exploring the playground, trying to ignore his need for a hug. On weekends, you’ll see us working around the house, plugging away at a personal project, or immersed in a solitary hobby, like video games or reading novels. We’ve learned to manage emotions by a simple strategy: ignoring them. 

Without emotionally supportive caregivers, we have learned to rely only on ourselves, and in the process, have learned to work hard to survive. Our independence earns us countless rewards in our US culture that praises a rugged individualism that pulls itself up by the bootstraps. Like a Clint Eastwood character, we face the day ready to single-handedly take on the world. We just focus on what needs to be done. We talk about our natural distaste for emotion, claiming, “it’s just who I am,” or we appeal to the pragmatic, “what’s the point of emotions anyway?” Life is just better when everyone stays calm. We consider ourselves logical and solution-focused. Without being clouded by emotions, we can clearly see problems and solutions. We’re the person you call during an emergency. 

In the middle of solving a problem, we can get frustrated with others’ emotions that only seem to complicate the process. Which is where the rub happens. Shutting down emotions doesn’t always work when it comes to those we love. Reflecting on our own self-sufficiency, we find ourselves puzzled by why others seem so emotional and so needy. Dragged down as they cling to us for closeness, we feel suffocated by the intimacy they try to push on us. Without realizing it, we often find ways to wedge a little breathing room in our relationships. While we just want to keep emotions at arm’s length, others feel differently. They want to know that there’s a human heart beating inside, and they want to know our thoughts and feelings. Part of a connected relationship includes feelings, something that is hard to get from a robot. So, a paradox happens, where we try to stay even keel to weather the storms of life, and to keep others close. But so very often, others in our lives feel shut out by our stoicism.

Locked in the Basement

It’s not exactly that we’re hiding what’s going on inside from others, it’s that we don’t know ourselves what we are feeling. Friends and family feel like we’re a house with all the shades pulled, closing ourselves off from the world. In reality, it’s more like a glass house with a basement that’s locked tight. We don’t know what’s down there, and we don’t know how to get to it. Besides, why would we want to? It’s only bad feelings down there. And then, even if we did open the basement, we wouldn’t even know what to do with those feelings that are down there! We’ve never had someone to help name or tame those uncomfortable feelings, so we’ve just shut them away. It’s best to just force the basement door shut, leaving the mess of sensations and feelings on the other side. 

So we believe, and would have others believe, that we simply aren’t emotional people. But really, it’s not that we don’t have feelings; we’re just ignoring them. And ignoring emotions is not who we are, it’s just the best strategy we’ve come up with so far. We actually have much more going on under the surface than it appears from the outside. This aversion to emotion is actually a way of surviving our internal world. If we never had anyone there to help us calm down our emotions, they feel chaotic and overwhelming. Ignoring them doesn’t mean they go away, it just means that they’re swirling around in a way we don’t know how to process or talk about them. So we have to figure out how to manage them on our own. So we distract ourselves in a variety of ways, or just do our best to ignore them.

Healthy Emotional Connection

For a frame of reference, let me explain the way emotions should work. When my daughter was three, we took her to a Peacock Lane, a neighborhood block in southeast Portland that decorates for Christmas, where most houses go above and beyond, choosing some sort of theme like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Star Wars. It’s festive and noisy and only open to foot traffic for the month leading up to Christmas. 

A root had grown under the cement block, causing a ridge in the sidewalk. It was completely imperceptible on the dark and crowded street, yet just tall enough to trip a toddler. My daughter fell, even while holding my hand. As soon as I heard her crying, I whisked her up into my arms. I checked for hurt knees, but she wasn’t hurt, just shaken up. “Oh,” I said in a soft, soothing voice, “that must have really scared you.” As I held her close, she quickly calmed down. 

In less than one minute, I taught my daughter some important things about her emotions. After tripping, she had a feeling in her body that expressed itself in tears. I helped her translate that bodily sensation into a word she could talk about: “scared.” And then, I taught her how to manage that feeling, which was to come to dad, knowing I will hold her close and talk in soothing tones until she is able to move on from the emotion. She also learns that emotions are for connection. If I cry, dad comes and dad holds me. She’s beginning to understand what emotions are all about and why they are important in relationships. 

But imagine if instead of holding her, I subtly shamed her for her feelings. What if I said, “You’re fine,” with a slight tinge of disgust in my voice. Or if I hadn’t noticed at all, the sounds of the crowd overwhelming her tiny voice. And what if this happened over and over again, teaching her that emotions either have no value, or worse, they cause rejection and disconnection. What if she learned that crying only makes dad angry? Then, emotions do the opposite of drawing others close — we learn that they cause the still-face moments of disconnection.

It only makes sense to lock our emotions in the basement, if early on in life we found that showing emotions like sadness or worry didn’t draw others close. Instead, if we were subtly or explicitly punished for sharing distressing emotions, we learn quickly to not show them at all, and if possible, not feel them in the first place. 

So, refusing to share our emotions isn’t a way of icing others out, it’s actually a way of keeping them close. Over the course of a lifetime, locking away emotions becomes an automatic response, occurring outside of consciousness. Many of my clients have learned so well to deftly lock away emotion, that they have trouble interrupting the process when their spouse asks, “but what are you feeling?” It’s already gone to the basement, untouched and inaccessible. 

Those who automatically shutdown their emotions create a biological pattern in their brain that dismisses input from the insula, the part of the brain that helps us interpret bodily sensations as emotions, as well as read body language from others. Overtime, accessing our emotions, as well as reading others, becomes increasingly difficult. Our brain has shifted in order to help us avoid emotions.

Emotional Fire Hazards

After spending so much time and energy suppressing our own emotions, it can be frustrating when others don’t do the same. As creatures made for connection, others’ emotions trigger emotions in us. It’s like taking great care to be safe on the Fourth of July, and all your neighbors start firing off airborne fireworks, inevitably landing in the driest part of your lawn. Just to be safe, not only do you hose down your own space, you start trying to extinguish everyone else's yard. And others notice, as they feel you take a cold wet spray to their emotions. 

We prefer to be alone, putting up high walls to make sure that stray fireworks don’t set our yard on fire. In fact, it becomes so much easier to be alone because there’s less to manage, so we retreat into patterns that give us solitude and a feeling of safety, protected from the world of emotions that others might bring in. 

Inevitably, it becomes hard to connect with others. Someone important in your life tells you about their feelings and expects the same from you. You reach inside and find nothing, because it’s all locked in the basement. Realizing you have nothing to show, you feel like you’re letting the other person down. Over time, we develop performance anxiety when it comes to emotions bee have no idea how to actually emotionally connect.

So we just avoid getting on stage. We avoid deep conversation, intimate moments, and any possibility of meaningful talk. We want to do activities together, because we do want connection, but we just can’t risk getting too close and personal. So we build things together, or play board games, or do outdoor activities.

The Path to Healing

The way we increase our connection with others is by sharing our emotions with them. But that’s tricky if you don’t know what your emotions are. There are some helpful books about emotions, but because this way of relating to emotions was formed at an early age, our bodies have created a pattern that can be difficult to break – unless we work with our bodies. 

Mindfulness and body scans can be very helpful, but it’s important to recognize the goal of the body scan is not to calm down or to feel nothing, but rather just the opposite – it’s to slow down enough to notice things like a tense stomach or heaviness in the shoulders. Emotions, in some sense, originate in the body as sensations, and then our brain interprets them. So, knowing our emotions starts with noticing our body. 

Working at an ADHD clinic, I’m used to working with clients who have shorter attention spans than the rest of the population. Doing these practices need not take long. Try this three-minute body scan. Frequency is more important than time spent. If you can find a time to do this twice a day, you’ll start on your path to noticing your emotions, and being able to share them with others. 

Yoga or other ways of connecting with your body in a mindful way is another way to increase awareness of emotions. 

Being curious with others can be helpful: saying, “I think I’m feeling sad, but I’m not even sure why” is a great starting point. 

Working with an Emotionally Focused Therapist or experiential therapist can also be helpful. 

Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman are great books to read on the topic. 

Check out my Attached to the Invisible episodes on Dismissive Attachment Style and Dismissive Attachment with God.

Read more about what this attachment style looks like in relatonship to God.

Sign up for my Secure Spirituality Newsletter to get monthly emails about attachment, spirituality and practices for more secure relating to God.  

Preoccupied

Photo by Luke van Zyl

Preoccupied & Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who is really clingy? Like, can’t-catch-a-breath, stuck-to-your-side sort of clingy? I don’t mean, celebrating half-year-anniversaries and leaving love notes in your lunch every day. I mean, constantly fielding a barrage of text messages, the day-in-day-out demands on your attention, the expectation that most, if not all, nights will be spent together. It’s an exhausting assignment: constantly trying to reassure, walking on eggshells, and making sure your partner knows that the relationship is solid. 

Or perhaps you are the clingy person. Under the right circumstances, we all have the propensity to become suffocatingly clingy. As a couples therapist, I’ve seen boomer-generation men who have spent their whole lives swimming alone in the cultural streams of individualism go through a tectonic life change, and suddenly become as needy as a lovestruck teenager in their first relationship.

 If you’ve felt this desperate never-ending need for reassurance, you know what it's like to live with an anxious attachment style. You also know something that can be hard to see from the outside: it’s even more exhausting to be the one clinging so desperately than it is to be clung to. Let me explain:

You’re five years old, and the sun is hot and barnyard smells waft through the air, tickling your nose. It’s the county fair, mid-July, and your grandparents just bought you a bright red balloon with our favorite cartoon character on it. It bobs and tugs, threatening to fly away in the deep blue sky at any moment. 

First order of business, as soon as money was exchanged, was to tie it around your wrist. But at five years old, it’s hard to trust that the tie is really going to hold, so with white knuckles, you grip the string in your little hands all afternoon. The sweat makes the already-too-thin curling ribbon slide through your fingers, so you have to constantly pull it back down, ensuring that it doesn’t get too far away. About two feet above your head feels like a comfortable distance, which happens to be right at the level of bumping all the adult’s faces, but letting it any higher make you feel nervous.

You spend the afternoon eating corn dogs, sliding down burlap sleds on slides, watching a hypnotist show, and looking at animals. All the while, your attention is always split, a little bit allocated to ensuring the balloon isn’t slipping from your hands. It’s hard to be fully present, to explore the fair and notice everything, with your mind on the balloon. It’s better than losing the balloon, but it’s also exhausting, in a way that’s almost hard to put your finger on. 

This is why we call it preoccupied attachment, you are so preoccupied with the state of your relationship, it’s hard to focus on much else. 

Where it Starts

In some families, the child ends up feeling that keeping connection and closeness rests wholly on their shoulders. It prevents them from ever resting in the embrace of a loving parent, and pushes them to anxiously cling like they are a helium-filled balloon, just waiting to fly into the ether the moment we relax our white-knuckled grasp. It’s exhausting, but better than being abandoned to disconnection.

In healthy families, children trust that their parents will respond and rescue them from disconnection, at least most of the time. But what if you grow up in a family where it’s more likely that your cry will be ignored than responded to, moments of distance feel terrifying. You're unsure if you'll be rescued, or if you'll feel abandoned to the utter hopelessness of isolation. It’s a scary thing to be alone in a world where no one comes to save you from the painful feeling of disconnection. So we create a pattern of frantically calling out for help, and eventually focus all our energy on preventing disconnection from ever happening in the first place. 

When we can't trust our caregivers to get close in our time of need, we have to scheme up our own ways to get closeness. Those early experiences of disconnection feel like the death of the relationship, and because we’re created for connection, a deep anxiety develops. We know that our parents care, but we’re not sure if they care enough. Skeptical that they will help up during the agony of disconnection, our best strategy becomes avoiding any distance at all. Our relationships begin to feel like helium balloons, constantly bobbing and pulling, threatening to fly away unless we grip tight the strings that hold them close. It’s safer to sit next to mom on the bench at the park than take the risk of playing on the playground. What if she’s not paying enough attention when you venture out on your own and get hurt or scared? The best bet is to cling to mom’s skirt, and endlessly keep a sharp eye out for the slightest sign of disconnection. 

Anger

The other term for this attachment style is “anxious-ambivalent,” which is a confusing term. While we often consider “ambivalent” to mean the absence of any strong feelings, it actually indicates an experience of having two strong conflicting emotions. When Ainsworth observed children with an anxious-ambivalent attachment, she noticed that they were incredibly distressed when separated from their parents but would push away when the parents returned. They both wanted their parents close and were incredibly upset with them at the same time. We see this occur in adult relationships, where a preoccupied partner will show a lot of anger toward their partner, but it’s because they don’t feel close, and they want to feel secure. They are angry that the relationship doesn’t feel as stable as they want it to.

Healing for this Attachment Style

Therapy 

There are a few different types of attachment-informed or attachment-compatible types of therapy.

Community

Those with anxious/ambivalent & preoccupied attachment tend to focus intently on one person in their life, usually their romantic partner. It can be helpful to consider who else in your life is important to you, and challenge yourself to invest in friendships in your community. 

Emotional Regulation

Those with this attachment style typically have difficulty calming down, because they didn’t have a secure relationship early in life that helped their nervous system practice regulation. Specifically focusing on emotional regulation through guided meditations, working with a therapist, or finding coping skills can be incredibly helpful. That being said, we know that co-regulation with someone who really care about you and can listen to your emotions is one of the best coping skills we have as humans. 

Spiritual Practices 

Having an anxious-ambivalent attachment with God can be utterly exhausting (something my co-host, Amy and I talk about on this episode of Attached to the Invisible). Finding symbols and reminders of God’s unending delight and love can be helpful. Sometimes it’s helpful to create your own art, or perhaps read a book like “Beloved” by Henri Nouwen. 

Learn More!

Read this article about what this attachment style looks like with God.

Amy and I talked about this attachment style and what it looks like in relation to God in a couple of Attached to the Invisible Podcast episodes.

And here’s another podcast episode on the topic:

Therapist Uncensored Episode 60: Preoccupation in Relationships: Signs and Solutions to Anxious Attachment

Attachment Styles

People tell me all the time that the attachment styles are confusing. There’s good reason for that:  attachment is an academic field that can’t be boiled down to a basic personality test. That being said, there’s immense benefit to understanding your basic attachment style. 

There’s an initial division between secure attachment and insecure attachment. There is one secure style of relating, but three insecure styles of relating. No one fits squarely in a box – and no one is secure all the time. It’s helpful to understand what strategies you use during times of insecurity. We all find ourselves on the attachment spectrum somewhere. Even those of who would qualify as “secure” are on the spectrum toward an insecure way of relating. You will likely find yourself in at least one (if not more) of the categories below.

These three insecure was of relating go by different terms, which is often where we get lost. Perhaps what is most confusing is that Dr. Mary Ainsworth, who first created these categories, used the prefix of “anxious” for both anxious-ambivalent and anxious-avoidant attachment styles, drawing on Freudian terms that were popular at the time. I find remembering the terms easiest to remember if you let ‘anxious’ simply translate to ‘insecure,’ as an indication that the style is not secure. 

The Therapist Uncensored podcast talks about these strategies on a spectrum - a very helpful concept they discuss in this episode.

photo by Bundt Kim

If you’re an audio or visual learner, this short animation on attachment styles will be a helpful place to start, before we proceed.

Anxioius-Ambivalent & Preoccupied

You likely tend toward this attachment style if you identify with 3 or more of the following:

·      When it comes to relationships, you’re always worried, “are we okay?” 

·      You tend to be clingy

·      Your emotions are big and visible to others.

·      You worry about being left/abandoned. 

·      You get angry with your partner when you feel them step back from the relationship or it feels like they don’t care. 

Learn more about this style here.

Anxious-Avoidant & Dismissive

You likely tend toward this attachment style if you identify with 3 or more of the following:

·      You like to be around others, but you don’t care too much about “deep conversations.”

·      You’re allergic to clingy people.

·      You like to think logically through problems, and emotions just get in the way.

·      You’re perfectly find spending time alone. 

·      You spend much more of your free time doing tasks than spending time with others. 

Learn more about this style here.

Disorganized & Fearful

You likely tend toward this attachment style if you identify with 3 or more:

·      You worry about sharing your feelings with your partner.

·      You want intimate relationships but worry that others will reject you if they really get to know you. 

·      You push and pull in your relationships.

·      You feel on-edge with significant others, as though you are performing to keep closeness.

·      You really want a close relationship, and you end relationships abruptly when you aren’t satisfied with them.

Learn more about this style here.

Online Attachment Quizzes

Take an Attachment Quiz at The Attachment Project
Take Diane Poole Heller’s quiz at her website.
The Science of People also has an attachment quiz.

What Is Attachment?

Attachment science is the study of how we connect with others. it’s a field based on the simple fact that we are a social species, and we do not thrive on our own. So, when we feel disconnected, or we need extra closeness—like when we’re sad, or scared, or in pain—we find ways to reestablish connection. Attachment, at its most basic, is observing the strategies we use try to reestablish connection and closeness, especially when we’re upset.

Consider a time when you felt sad: 
Did you go get a hug? 
Did you retreat from others, worried that your sadness might upset them, and cause disconnection? 
Did you make a big show about your feelings to make sure that others notice you’re sad? 

These are all strategies for gaining or maintaining connection. Attachment science is all about observing how humans get and keep connection, and the founder of attachment science,  Dr. John Bowlby, believed that there are no bad ways of seeking connection. He believed that children are wonderfully innovative creatures who crave connection and will use whatever means necessary to get the closeness they are built for. Whatever way they choose­—even if it’s obnoxious—is a testament to the drive for connection. 

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

photo by Ray Hennessy

Growing Toward the Light

Imagine a houseplant that grows sideways after it’s been shut up in a dark room for a week, reaching toward the crack of light between the curtains. We don’t ask, “what’s wrong with the plant?” but “what’s wrong with its environment?” Growing toward the light is exactly what it was designed to do, even if it looks different than the other plants.

Likewise, children will grow in whatever direction brings them close to their parents. Some children learn that behaving well only invites silence, so throwing a fit is a clever escape from the feelings of disconnection. Other children learn that behaving perfectly keeps their parents happy and connected enough, so they tirelessly work to be good enough. We will do whatever it takes to know that we matter to those we love. We will forge our own way through the unknown, and create our paths as we go.

Unfortunately, some of us learned how to seek closeness in the dimly lit room of an unhealthy family system. Rather than growing straight up toward the sun, we had to get more creative. We learned that pulling on mom’s skirt every five minutes is better than feeling she doesn’t care at all. Or that sitting next to dad while we hold in our tears is better than the threat of disconnection, the terrible feeling of isolation when you’re told to “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Or we learned that trying to contort ourselves into someone more lovable holds more hope than accepting that we’ll never be loved. But these strategies were never going to work very well in the first place, they were simply the best strategies we had at the time. As we’ve forged in the wilderness, we’ve created our own maps, sometimes growing sideways instead of upward, because it made the most sense in our context. 

The ways we learn early on to seek closeness set a blueprint for the rest of our lives, creating maps we continue to refer back to, embedded in a deep, non-verbal part of our brain. This is what attachment science is about, observing the ways we reach for connection when we need it. 

This map is unlikely to change unless we intentionally engage in a period of healing and learn some new ways to get connection through the experience of loving relationships. Without examining them, we will continue to revert back to those early strategies — whether they work very well or not. 

Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy (an attachment-based therapy I’m trained in) has demonstrates how we use these same strategies in our adult relationships, in this video with Dr. Ed Tronick, who developed the “Still Face Experiment.” It’s perhaps one of the best ways to see our attachment systems in action, and the way it drives us, as Bowlby said, “from the cradle to the grave.”

Learn about your attachment style here.