Viewing entries tagged
attachment theory
When we’re shamefully attached to God, we may accept that God loves us because God has to, but we don’t believe God like us very much. We have internalized the idea that God naturally despises us and sees us primarily as sinners; Christ imputed his righteousness to us to make us slightly less deplorable. When we believe this, we assume we have to perpetually beat ourselves up to be on the same side of God.
When we’re avoidantly attached to God, we choose to go it alone rather than to offer our needs and feelings to our Abba. At some point in your religious upbringing it may have been communicated, however subversively, that to have dark emotions means you are not close to God, forcing you to choose between emotional honesty or relationship. You may have also grown up believing that God does not want you to feel bad feelings, so you pretend they aren’t there in the name of Jesus. Sadly it is easier to trust in a belief system than it is to risk emotional honesty and intimacy with God.
When we’re anxiously attached to God, we constantly worry that we are never doing enough to earn God’s favor. For many in the Christian household, we have been told that “sin is what separates us from God”. This leads to all sorts of anxiety-inducing questions and struggles because it insinuates closeness is directly proportional to our ability to manage our sin. The program can look a variety of ways depending on the values of our denomination of origin.
Knowing God as “Abba”, as Jesus does, is the goal of the spiritual life. What we believe about God, and how we attach to God, shapes our understanding of everything around us and within us. Even the version of God we may no longer believe in still has a grip on the deepest recesses of our minds. Part of the work of developing intimacy is parsing through our stories and gaining language for our subconscious attachments, so we might find healing and hope. Our new series ABBA, FATHER will help us to identify how we connect with God now, and how we can repair our attachment so we might lay claim to the beautiful vision Jesus gives us of Who God ultimately is.
