Attachment with God, wk 2 (Anxious Attachment)

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Continuing our look at how Attachment Science can help us improve our relationships with God, Hayley and Vince turn our focus to anxious insecure attachment. (Art by Laura Porter for verywell.com)

Question: https://forms.gle/BCB2RavyeFat5XQn8

SPEAKER NOTES

Attachment With God, wk 2 (Anxious Attachment)

Context

This month we’re engaging a framework from psychology as a way to improve our images of God, and, in turn, our relationships with God.

• And that framework is “Attachment Science”
• A major source for this is the author and counselor Krispin Mayfield, and his book Attached to God. (Details in #references in Discord)
• And we’re also grateful to a team of therapists in our church who met together several times to help us plan this series!

Overview (Interview style)

I’m sure many of us have heard “attachment theory” as a buzz word as of late. Vince, why don’t you give us an overview of what attachment science actually is.

Attachment Science is the study of how we try to get and keep connection.

• Attachment can be secure or various styles of insecure
• Most of the research has been done observing child + primary caregiver relationships.
• And more recently there’s been a lot of research observing adult partnership relationships
• Secure attachment, the theory says, is...
  • I feel you are there for me, if I am distressed I believe you will come,
  • If we detach for a moment (a drop off at school, or you’re gone for a work trip, or there’s conflict),
    • I trust that you will come back.
  • It’s more than “you won’t leave me or kick me out” — it’s a feeling of being safe, being loved, being secure.

Krispin Mayfield’s book — which we are drawing from — is part of research that’s doing something new with thinking about these strategies for connection. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, it’s applying this framework to spirituality.

• Can Attachment Science help us investigate the images of God people have when they’re trying to get and keep connection with God?
• Are those images like a good caregiver or partner who establishes secure attachment with us?
• Or is our image of God like a less than good-enough caregiver or partner who leaves us insecurely attached?
• If so, maybe our image of God is not worthy of being called God!

Sadly, I think a lot of people have images of God that aren’t worthy of being called God. Which makes connecting with God in a healthy way difficult!

The three insecure God-Attachment styles, which we’ve been visiting one week at a time, are shut-down, anxious, and shame-filled…

1. Shut-down (or avoidant)
   • When it seems like our feelings or needs can’t be handled or aren’t welcome with God, perhaps because of others’ feelings or needs, we learn the shut-down God attachment strategy.
   • We use distance to manage our relationship with God.
   • I suggested this can correlate with the Progressive Protestant Mainline and Progressive Catholic settings.
2. Anxious (or preoccupied)
   • When it seems like we can never quite do enough to please God, we learn the anxious God attachment strategy.
   • We frenetically manage our relationship with God.
   • I suggested this can correlate with “Catholic guilt”, with many Black Protestant churches, with most Pentecostal or charismatic settings, and with Evangelicalism — including most non-denominational churches.
3. Shame-filled (or disorganized)
   • When it seems like you need to try to prove how unlikeable and unworthy you are, because you’re never quite sure what to expect from God, it might be closeness but it might be coldness — it’s unpredictable and confusing — we learn the shame-filled (or disorganized) God attachment strategy.
   • We shame ourselves to manage our relationship with God.
   • I suggested this can correlate with fundamentalism, and specifically with views (I don’t endorse) of “Jesus dying for your sins” that leave people with a split-personality view of God: Loving Jesus but Angry Father.

Disclaimer

• As we talk about insecure God-attachment strategies, it may bring to mind insecure caregiver-attachments or partner attachments in our lives.
• In some cases, that can be really useful when we’re hoping to improve our relationships with God
  • because our most important human relationships can reveal a lot about our relationship with God
• AND you may find, as we do this, that your personal interest to learn more about the Attachment framework is focused more on your caregiver and partner attachments than on your God attachment.
• We totally get that! If that’s the case, we want you to know that while we’re keeping our focus for our messages and discussion groups on “Attachment with God” (because that’s what a church is best suited to speak to), our church does help people all the time to find trustworthy counseling professionals and therapy settings to do personal growth work and ask those kind of questions.
• We’d be SO glad to help you find the right setting or therapist for that for you! Chat with us after the service or send us an email and we’d be happy to help!

That said, we want all your questions that are about God-Attachment,

• May 18 is going to be a Question and Response message, so...
• Submit questions you’re okay with being public in Discord
• Or submit questions anonymously at brownlinechurch.org/attachment
• Also join in our first Discussion group today after service!

Transition

Today’s focus: we’re looking specifically at Anxious insecure attachment with God.

Hayley, any experience? 😀

Story from Hayley

• Who me? Anxious?
• In Attached to God, Mayfield uses this phrase “Are we okay, are we okay?” To characterize anxious attachment.
  • And when I look back at growing up in an Evangelical church context, this reminds me of altar calls.
  • At the time, I had never met an altar call I didn’t like
• One particular experience comes to mind-
• I remember being at a high school youth group retreat
  • I do want to preface this story with saying that these retreats felt really helpful and fun and I have fond memories of them. There are just pieces now that I can name as problematic and unhelpful in developing my picture of God
  • It was the last night of the retreat and you’ve got the dimmed lights and the emotional music — emotionally charged overall
  • And there was a big cross at the front. I don’t remember the exact prompt from the pastor but it was something along the lines of being encouraged to consider what was keeping us from God and to re-commit our lives to Christ by coming up and writing that on the cross
• Captured this ongoing feeling of have you really invited Jesus into your heart? (Wording I heard a lot)- maybe you should do it again. Are you really good?
• So I went to the front, this really drew on my perfectionistic tendencies, there’s so many things I could write. I don’t remember what I wrote. And sat back down.
• But the reason this comes to mind with healing insecure attachment is because I had a gnawing feeling of “this can’t be the landing place”. All these insecurities “keeping us from being good with God” up on a cross
• So I went back up, after asking for vague permission to “do something”. (Feeling bold. Maybe my attachment to God was insecure but I was confident that I was pretty cool in the youth group world)
• And picked up some paint and wrote the word forgiven in pretty cursive across the cross. And it encouraged other people to come back up and write new words too — loved, redeemed, made new etc.

I love that instinct you had that “this can’t be the landing place” — the “recommit to God, recommit to God, recommit to God” energy felt “insecure” in a way that you could clock.

Instincts like that is what we want to help people learn to trust in this series of messages.

The Four Steps

Last week I tried to offer four practical steps as a way Attachment Science can help us follow those instincts.

• (1) Noticing evidence of Insecure Attachment strategies for connection in our personal relationships with God.
• (2) Identifying the False Images of God we’ve absorbed or been sold or force-fed that lead us to resort to those Insecure Attachment strategies for connection.
• (3) Replacing intentionally those False Images with a better image of God, from Jesus.
• (4) Observing the results in our self-reported experience of spirituality — Do we feel more reliability in our relationship with God?

Let’s move through those four steps looking at your experience, Hayley, and other observations of anxious God-attachment.

How do we notice it?

Notice

• Mayfield: High alert for constantly monitoring the perceived distance from God - if you relax your grip, you’ll lose connection.
• I can remember having an ongoing sense of being so afraid of any disconnection
  • Internal fear but also an external fear - what if other people don’t think I’m close to God?
  • Is it fear or love driving the practices?
• Actual disconnect was talking all the time about trusting God, putting faith in God, and not actually trusting that my connection with God was good enough

  • Behavior based: Am I praying enough? Am I reading my Bible enough?

  • Identity based: Am I good enough? How can I be sure?

  • Yes, or experience based in Pentecostal settings: am I having all the most sought after ecstatic spiritual experiences?

• That constant need for reassurance is a big signal of anxious God attachment.
  • With human relationships someone from the outside might be able to observe this more clearly in another,
  • But with relationship with God, it can be hard to distinguish between fervent devotion and frantic insecurity in someone else.
  • It’s about how it feels to that person when they’re really honest
• Last week, shut down attachment, was more about alienating, despondent feelings;
• This week is more about exhausting, perfectionist feelings.
• Mayfield asks the question that deeply unsettles someone who grew up evangelical:
  • Is it possible to focus too much on your relationship with God?
  • If it’s because of insecurity, yes!

So, what are the false images of God we can identify behind why we end up anxiously attached to God?

Identify

• The emphasis on a relational God was a gift that Evangelicalism gave me. And it was a complicated gift. God’s accessible with a disclaimer? Closeness with God came with prerequisites

• Even thinking about altar calls — messaging for adults that trickled down was the encouragement that each and every day you had to re-commit your life. Being truly faithful was a daily decision you had to make over and over again.

  • But then, in my context, the actual formal “give your life or re-commit your life” in a public way to Christ was way more common in youth ministry settings. For children.

• Often phrased as “mountain top” experiences. But that’s a lot of labor, to keep climbing mountains over and over again in order to really feel closeness. And then what do you do in the valleys?

• Yeah, I would describe the God who establishes an anxious attachment with us as:

• The God of self help (emphasis on self),

  • with a Bible verse slapped on so the self help is “Biblical”,
  • but not a co-laboring, co-suffering God.

• The God who is happy to be with you, but needs you to get it together first.

• Or, again slightly differently in Pentecostal settings, the God who is happy to bring you an ecstatic experience of transformation, but takes little responsibility in the mundane of life to help you maintain that.

• The “3 steps to a great life” God —

  • full of practical advice,
  • but who feels unavailable for help or processing disappointment

• God is a traffic cop, a hall monitor, a disciplinarian.

Okay, let’s replace this image of God with a God who establishes secure attachment with us… That’s a big part of the story you shared, Hayley…

Replace

• With the painting on the cross story, almost a working out in real time that the image of God, and image of a relationship with God, that I was working with wasn’t all the helpful. Something didn’t feel right.

• At the time, I think I’d say it wasn’t complete. There was more to the story than judgment. Now, I’d say it wasn’t the right story to begin with.

  • Judgment portrayed as the precursor to acceptance and love
  • Instead of beginning with love and security

• Might be helpful to clarify- Replacing judgy Jesus, reprimanding parent, disciplinarian God — is not doing away with considering sin

  • Replacing the “make the daily re-commitment to know you’re right with God” as
  • There are ample opportunities to remember you are loved and then act in ways that increase love and justice in the world - that is a daily decision

• Yeah, this is where psychology is such a gift to theology,

  • The therapist Carl Rogers talked about the power of “unconditional positive regard”
    • an attitude of warmth, no matter what is what creates the conditions for lasting trust and growth in a person.
    • Thinking about God on those terms is so helpful!
  • Unconditional positive regard is God’s attitude toward us.
  • That doesn’t mean that God is an overly-permissive parent afraid to tell us no, or that God has no expectations (it doesn’t mean we don’t talk about sin, dysfunction, revenge, regret, failure)
  • It means God prioritizes long term relationship building over short term obedience.
  • God wants us to follow the divine lure toward goodness, beauty, justice because we feel trust, not because we feel anxious.

• I mentioned last week, if we’re taking our cues from Jesus, his preferred metaphor for God is “Abba Father” —

  • an intimate, parental image
  • a God who listens, is available, stays with us through thick and thin, is in pain when we’re in pain, trusts us to take risks.
  • That’s God as magnetic (drawing us in), not God as electric fence (so look out! don’t stray too far!)

• I would call this the God of Psalm 23 (most famous bit of whole Bible?) —

  • “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me”
  • It doesn’t say “even though I walk through the valley… God will explain why I’m in this situation so I can get myself out and back to connection with God.”
  • NO! It says “God, you are with me, your rod and staff comfort me” — in the midst of the valley!
  • This is the open and relational view of God and life we teach in this church: a God who is alongside us, in the flow of time, our fellow experiencer, NOT high above, removed, outside of time, controlling life.

Well, to close, our last step is observing how we feel experimenting with these more intentionally-Jesus-like images of God —

What sort of questions should we be asking of ourselves? Or things should we be looking for?

Observe

• Can I step away from the relentless striving and checking in and embrace instead mystery and rest?

  • Mystery is not a withholding from God. When our view of relating to God is filled with frenetic anxiety, a desire for a step by step plan for re-establishing connection, we miss out on curiosity and wonder
  • Curiosity comes from openness, and openness comes from security
  • Security and certainty are not the same thing.

• Loosening the grip, interrupting the anxious spiral of “are we good? Are we good? Are we good?” Invites in rest.

  • You don’t have to keep ruminating, you can rest.
  • Mayfield uses the image of being able to “fall asleep in safe arms”

• We need healing practices that guide us in being able to rest in safe arms

• That’s Jesus’ invitation: Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden… and I will give you rest.

• So I want to lead us in some Contemplative prayer

  • It’s a style of prayer we often teach here that can be water in dry land for anxious attachment.
  • Last week was meditative on the content of a scripture;
  • This is sort of the opposite — it’s no content; it’s rest for our over-active content-heavy minds
  • It’s a Trust fall. If I just rest will God and I be okay? The only way to find out is to risk the trust fall, and find that God indeed has unconditional positive regard for you. visual off

Prayer

• 3 minutes of silence
• Follow your breath
• Come back to a word or short phrase
  • Love.
  • Peace.
  • I look to you.
  • “You are okay.” I am okay.
• When you find yourself distracted, kindly bring yourself back to your breath or phrase.
  • That’s not doing it poorly, that IS the practice — consider it a pump of the barbell.
• So no judging yourself allowed!
• Unconditional positive regard!
• As you do this, imagine alongside you Jesus, unconditional positive regard personified!

Try this again multiple times this week. Set a timer for yourself on a lunch break, or while kids nap, or early in the morning before anyone else is up.