Attachment with God, wk 3 (Shame-filled Attachment)

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Mother’s day is, perhaps, just the occasion to talk about trying to intentionally replace mixed-message, shame-inducing images of God with consistent, loving, mothering images of God. Vince continues our series applying Attachment Science to spirituality.

SPEAKER NOTES

Attachment With God, wk 3 (Shame-filled Attachment)

Context

If you’ve been with us, you’ll know that 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.

  • “Attachment Science”
  • Our 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!

Review

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 (usually mother and baby).
  • There’s also research observing adult partnership relationships
  • Secure attachment 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. - More than “you won’t leave me or kick me out” — it’s feeling loved, and secure in that love.

The new and exciting area of research into Attachment is applying the framework to spirituality.

  • Can Attachment Science help us investigate the images of God we have when we’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!

According to the theory, there are three insecure strategies for attaching with God, which we’ve been visiting one week at a time: shut-down, anxious, and (today) 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 to get God close, 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, which, in the last few decades has unfortunately spread like a weed to influence really all parts of the church landscape in America, but particularly evangelicalism.
    • This is important to note...
      • The research on caregiver and partner attachment suggests shame-filled attachment is the least common insecure-attachment style, thankfully, as it is absolutely the most tragic — it is often indicative of emotional or physical abuse.
      • BUT as we talk about God-attachment, I wonder if this is, sadly, the MOST common insecure-attachment struggle for people, because of the pervasiveness of fundamentalism's influence, well beyond strictly fundamentalist environments. I don't have hard data to back up my wondering; it’s just my educated guess as a pastor for the last 14 years.

Disclaimer

I’ll say more on that, but, quickly, our disclaimer for this series, again…

  • 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,
  • But our church does help people all the time to find trustworthy counseling professionals and therapy settings for investigating our other attachments, like with caregivers or partners, if that's what's coming up for you most this month during our series.
  • Chat with us after the service or send us an email and we’d be happy to connect you with some counseling and therapy resources.

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

  • Next week, 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

The Four Steps

Alright, shame-filled insecure attachment with God... maybe the most pervasive insecure attachment struggle of them all for Americans? Let’s see…

We'll follow the four steps we've been using this series to unpack this…

  • (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?

Notice

  • I think of a friend of mine back when I was in college. I’ll call him Walt. - Walt was incredibly generous, he was the one guy of my friend group at the time with a really high paying job and always took care of everyone as a result, and he didn’t hold that against anyone — he genuinely loved sharing things or experiences meaningful to him with other people. - That drive toward generosity and hosting others was a big part of what made him a spiritual person — he longed to reflect something bigger than just himself — to reflect God, to reflect Jesus. - But what always struck me was that, if faith or God came up in conversation with Walt (and it would because we met in a church), he wouldn’t come alive as though he was talking about the deepest place inside him animating his most core convictions, he would sort of fall apart, always talking about how he was in need of more healing because “if you only knew, Vince” — I would hear phrases like that all the time from him: “if you only knew who I really am…” - Walt showed a lot of the signs of shame-filled attachment.
  • Krispin Mayfield describes it as feeling like God “loves you but doesn’t like you”. - You might have a sense that you should feel grateful to God, but also simultaneously have a sense of coldness from God. - In theory, spiritual connection or closeness feels on offer — maybe you get whiffs of that in nature or music or a prayer from time to time. - But, when you lean in, you inevitably feel like you have to endure some degree of coldness from God first in order to get more.
  • As a result of this feeling of mixed messages, we might get hyperactive or we might disengage, or bounce between those. - Hyperactive is: we brace ourselves and try to get out ahead of our perceived possibility of coldness from God by proving how unworthy we think we are, - by demonstrating “yeah I dislike me too”… If I can’t be liked, at least I can passionately dislike what God dislikes (that is: me), and maybe God will more consistently come close to me as a result. - I would see Walt go through hyperactive seasons like this — leaning in to every opportunity for community or connection with God our church offered, - But he wouldn’t seem more alive through all of this participation, he would seem more ashamed. - And then I would see Walt bounce to disengaging for a season… - (This is where I wonder if a lot of our church sometimes lives) - Disengaging is: we try to hide from our perceived possibility of coldness from God by, ironically, submitting that we deserve coldness, - I wouldn’t see Walt for a long stretch at church, and then when I finally did, rather than him receive that we were genuinely happy to see him, he would chastise himself with something to the effect of “it would have been inauthentic of him to come to church, because he hadn’t been praying or looking to God enough lately”. - Does that sound familiar to anyone?
  • The commonality in both the hyperactive and disengaging seasons is: either way, Walt was accepting the premise (a faulty premise) that to get closeness with God, he had to experience some degree of shame. - That closeness and coldness have to go hand in hand. - Honestly, if that feels true to someone, disengaging makes sense. What a lose-lose situation.
  • If you were with us as we talked about Shut-down spirituality and Anxious spirituality, you may notice that shame-filled spirituality sort of manifests as a vicious combination of both anxious and shut-down strategies at the same time. - The hyperactive shame-filled response is a bit like anxious strategies. - And the disengaged shame-filled response is a bit like shut-down strategies.
  • People struggling with a Shame-filled God-attachment often feel a kind of “damned if I do, damned if I don’t”.

Identify

So, if we notice in ourselves shame-filled spirituality, what false images of God can we identify here? — That my friend Walt, or any of us, have absorbed or been force-fed?

  • Again, sadly, I think we can identify some of the most popularly held images of God in American religion.
  • One I often refer to is the Split Personality God — Loving Jesus but Angry Father God. - Which one will you get when you pray? It’s unpredictable! And yet the pray-er is supposed to have faith. - We would never tell a child to “just have faith” if their caregiver was unpredictable in this way: kind one moment, but abusive the next! - Open one moment, closed the next (like our image on socials for this week’s message). - Again, the question attachment science helps us ask is: is our image of God less loving than a good caregiver that establishes secure attachment? If so, then that image of God is not worthy to be called God! - The Split Personality God is most associated with one specific interpretation of “Jesus died for your sins” (which we don’t teach here at BLC, but it is the most prevalent interpretation in American religion) - About how there is an Angry Father God that demands punishment, but then there is Loving Jesus who talks the Angry Father God down from punishing us by taking the punishment himself. - At BLC, we teach that Jesus died for our sins, but NOT because there is an Angry Father God that demands punishment and death in some cosmic way, - RATHER because humanity, in our unresolved pain and blameshifting, so often demand punishment and death in very on the ground ways.
  • Another false image of God we might name here is the God who begrudgingly accepts you in spite of who you are rather than delightedly accepts you because of who you are - Shame-filled spirituality has absorbed an image of God who tells us the most true thing about us is that we are rotten to the core, unless saved. If there is love and acceptance in your story, it is secondary. - This is the opposite message of the God we evoke every week here in our prayer of confession. - We begin that prayer with the reminder that the most true thing about every one of us is that we are loved by God. - Love and acceptance is not secondary: it’s primary; it’s the source of the river! - As we flow down that river, we will inevitably have to face failures, temptations, regrets, mistakes, limitations, our desires for revenge, sin (to use that religious word) — absolutely! This is the human condition; what it means to be alive. - BUT those realities are not where the river starts. The river starts with loved.
  • This is another way psychology is a gift to theology: distinguishing between shame and guilt - Guilt is a recognition about a choice or a behavior being negative for us, - and, in an appropriate context, can be helpful information — - don’t paddle in that direction as you’re going down the river, paddle in another direction. - BUT shame is when we internalize negativity — when it becomes about who we are - This is never helpful. It leads to hiding, isolation. - If our image of God inflames hiding and isolation rather than openness and relationship, then that is not an image worthy of being called God.

Replace

The great 20th century Catholic Mystic and writer Henri Nouwen put it this way:

“Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life, because it contradicts the sacred voice that call us the beloved.” (Henri Nouwen)

Pointing to the God who calls us beloved, who delightedly accepts us because of who we are is how we can begin to replace shaming images of God with images of God actually worthy of being called God. slides off

Jesus, just like us, inherited a tradition that included harsh, severe images of God (those are in the Hebrew Bible), but what was his preferred image for God as he received his tradition and passed it on?

God as loving parent.

  • Like how much I delight in my 3 year old Eden,
  • But even more so, God delights in us, God delights in you. picture off
  • We’ve mentioned already in this series Jesus’ intimate image of “Abba Father”,
  • But here’s another loving parent image from Jesus, especially poignant on Mother’s Day, and especially poignant against our current backdrop of the Trump administration unabashedly fashioning itself after Imperial tactics.

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to [Jesus], “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’… Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:31-32, 34)

Herod, the Empire’s puppet King of the region, is a Fox. Jesus, the one who shows us God, is a Mother Hen — consistent, protective, loving.

She would sacrifice her own body to save us from the foxes of our world.

And yet, isn’t it true we are so often not willing to let her?

But NOT because we’re rotten; because we can get so stuck in our insecure strategies for attachment.

How God longs to be our mother hen right now — consistent, delighting in us, protecting us,

  • in the exhaustion of modern life for all of us of the working masses,
  • in the oppression of modern life for those of us particularly in danger from foxes — people of color, our queer community, those of us without financial safety nets.

God is not mysteriously behind the foxes, nor behind the random chance and bad luck of life.

If that’s where we are looking for God, we will feel insecurely attached forever.

God is that Mother Hen force in life, that if we stop to pay attention, we can feel —

  • Delighting in us, not tolerating us.
  • Gathering us up, in the midst of any terror.

One more Psalm for us, as we’ve had a Psalm in response to each insecure attachment...

PSALM 91

1 You who live in the shelter of the Most High,

who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,

2 will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;

my God, in whom I trust.”

3 For God will deliver you from the snare of the hunter

and from the deadly pestilence;

4 God will cover you with [feathers],

and under God’s wings you will find refuge;

God’s faithfulness is a shield and defense.

visual off

Observe

The last step is observing.

As we’ve been going back to, secure attachment with God is something we have to feel, so for our guided prayer today, we have another practice to try, and we encourage you to observe how you feel after about God's reliability. visual off

Get comfortable in your seat and we’ll start…

  1. Think of someone who likes you, who is delighted to see you (could be a mother, father, friend, partner, mentor, child, niece or nephew, even a pet)
  2. Close your eyes and imagine their face… what does their face look like when they see you? Does mouth turn into a smile? What other things does their face do? (Scrunch of the nose? Does their shape of their eyes change? Does a dimple appear?)
  3. Notice how your body feels in reaction to their delight — Shoulders? Gut?
  4. Without putting pressure on yourself, gently consider that this is a better picture of God than any shame-filled image you’ve inherited.
  5. Ask yourself: if God delights in you this way, how might this change your style of relating to God?

Prayer

Psalms, LukeVincent BrackettAttachment With GodComment