How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.
(Psalm 13)
How does it feel to read these words? Does something in your heart leap with consolation? Does it feel uncomfortable? Do you rush to the end to lay claim to the psalm’s conclusion?
In our current series ABBA, FATHER we are exploring how the modern theory of attachment styles might speak to our relationship with God. It is important to recognize that quite often is is not the acts of faith - prayer, worship, scripture reading, and so on - that are the problem; sometimes our relationship to the things of faith has been skewed by how we understand love. Attachment theory is meant to give us language for relationship patterns that we imprinted upon in the first year or two of life that tend to become a pattern in adulthood if we don’t recognize and repair. We learn this language not to simply become a victim of personal history and blame our parents for how we’ve been screwed up, but to forge a clearer path towards health. We can develop new patterns of attachment that help us grow and move forward in our stories.
Last week we explored Anxious Attachment. This week we will discuss Avoidant Attachment, what it look like in relationship to God, and how we can repair.
We develop Avoidant Attachment when we sense that our emotions are too much for our caregivers. There may have been a consistent yet subtle message of discomfort in our parents when we felt big feelings, that made us believe our feelings are a nuisance. Perhaps we were told to go to our rooms to cry it out before we could be in decent company; perhaps it was more direct commands like “boys don’t cry”, or the insistence, “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”. What was communicated to us when we were small is that, at the end of the day, we have to choose between emotions or relationship. When we believe this, we tend to lock our feelings in the basement and throw away the key.
Whereas folks with anxious attachment tend to press in aggressively when they sense disconnection, people with avoidant attachment will deal with conflict, either perceived or actual, by pulling away. This usually happens by ignoring difficult feelings or distracting ourselves until the moment passes. In later life, we notice that we might feel dragged down by other’s feelings or bids for closeness. Our loved ones might confess they feel like we’re shutting them out. Slowly we lose the capacity to engage and interpret what is happening within us, so it may very often mean that when someone asks what we are feeling, we honestly can’t give an answer. The frustration comes because the deepest part of us craves safety, closeness, and vulnerability, but we simply don’t know how to get there.
Part of the problem is that we speak of “positive” and “negative” emotions in our culture. This language implies that there is a set of feelings that we are supposed to chase after, and another set that is not acceptable. When we fully embrace the belief that only a half-range of emotions are valid, we start dismissing information from the insular cortex, the part of our brain that reads bodily sensations and interprets them as feelings, such as tightness in the chest, raised heartbeat, or chills on our skin. Over time if we continue to ignore or distract ourselves we lose the capacity accurately name what is happening within us. Not only that, but the insular cortex is the same part of the brain that develops compassion and builds interpersonal relationships. People who struggle with avoidant attachment are less likely to be able to notice, understand and enter into the feelings of others.
The truth is that our dark emotions - that is, those we naturally try to keep in the dark - cover over ability to fully experience the light emotions, those we would deem more desirable. This is akin to how oil and water do not mix in their restful state in a container - they separate with the oil fending up on top. Unattended-to feelings like sadness, anger, disappointment, or anxiety act as a buffer to us experiencing a full life when they go unacknowledged and processed. There is no amount of ignoring or distracting that can bypass these feelings to get to the good stuff of life.
So what does Avoidant Attachment look like in relation to 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. It has been noted in traditions like the Reformed Church that sometimes the insistence on intellectual robustness creates little space for emotional freedom, hence the designation of being “the frozen chosen”. In the Pentecostal tradition there can be a spirituality that insists we constantly move “from glory to glory”, that our spiritual ascent is always to be charted upwards and to the right, so to feel sad or angry or in doubt is to denigrate the sacrifice of Jesus and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.
Sadly it is easier to trust in a belief system than it is to risk emotional honesty and intimacy with God. We might term this “left-brained spirituality”. The left hemisphere of our brain is the part of us that is analytical and concrete, craving doctrinal clarity and control, explanations and rationale. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is the part of our brain that engages in more abstract thought, reaching upwards and outwards for experiential knowledge. The advent of the Enlightenment, as valuable as it has been in many ways, has over-privileged left-brained thinking when it comes to what “truth” is - the only truth of value is concrete and verifiable by cold analysis. This has bled into the Christian religion in which we believe what makes us good Christians is having all the right beliefs and clear answers apart from our experience. Unfortunately left-brained spirituality tends to bypasses difficult emotions by covering over them with religious cliches, whether it be phrases like “God is in control” or Bible verses that shut down any curiosity about our emotions for the sake of preventing us from engaging our doubt. People who struggle with avoidant attachment often become spiritual lone rangers, tucking away their feelings and doing much more for God than spending time with God. Rather than coming to Abba with our feelings, we will simply declare over ourselves platitudes and move on.
The Good News is that we can repair our avoidance and learn to be honest with God in all things.
CS Lewis once wrote, “we must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” God doesn’t need us to impress God with our competence, God desires our honesty and vulnerability. It’s fascinating to realize that as many as two-thirds of the Psalms are lament in some form or another. Some resolve the dark emotions by the end by remembering Who God is and what God has done, but not all. In them we find David, the Sons of Korah, and others crying out their fear and frustration, sizing it up to what they know God’s heart to be. For David especially we see that he did not choose between his faith and his feelings, his relationship and his emotions. He held them together in a creative tension that arises out of his people being known as Israel: “those who wrestle with God”. It is imperative to bless, if we believe the Scriptures to be divinely ordained, that God chose records of lament and doubt to be part of the songbook for God’s people.
I cannot tell you how many times I have sat with someone in spiritual direction who, when they start to feel a feeling and perhaps even being to cry, immediately begin to apologize for the vulnerability. This is a common symptom of our society - we have internalized the idea that our feelings are an embarrassment and a risk. In truth, it is our feelings that become the very thing that bonds us to one another and to God. The dark moments in life, far from being the thing that chases God away, are actually the opportunities for us to draw close and experience intimacy. After all, it is no surprise to God what is happening within us; Abba wants us to know it, embrace it, and open up to Him.
In Matthew 7:7-12 Jesus begins to wind down his magnificent Sermon on the Mount by speaking of our relationship to Our Father. He contrasts the attunement and response of God to that of our earthly parents, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” “Father” is not an earthly metaphor we use to describe what God is like; God is the Perfect Father by whom our earthly parents are understood (with grace, of course). When we are encouraged to ask, seek, and knock, more than getting what we want we learn to trust God for what we actually need. It is no secret that children sometimes ask for bad things, and it is their parents’ job to know what is truly best for them. I find that so often in my own life, I think I want left-brained answers and plans and analysis, but what my heart really desires is closeness, presence. This is what we trust God for.
Instead of avoiding our dark emotions through spiritual bypass, we can bring them to our Abba and trust He is listening and will respond. My therapist once told me, “your feelings are like your children, you don’t let them drive your car but you also don’t lock them in the trunk”. Our feelings do not dictate what is true, such as is the struggle of the anxiously attached person, but neither do we stuff them away and hope they don’t come back as the avoidant person might. Our emotions are meant to ground us in the present moment, inviting us to live a truly abundant life. Engaging our emotions honestly in the presence of God affects what we say we believe. Maybe the little platitudes and cliches we have relied on to plaster over our pain reveal themselves to be more true than we thought when we actually pass through hard times. Welcoming God into our dark emotions may change what we think about the character of God, melting away bad theology that gave us the impression God is distant and dispassionate, disdaining our supposed weakness.
PRACTICE:
Write a psalm of lament that addresses your inner world. This is a chance for you to hold faith and feelings together - honesty helps us to come to terms, without shame, with the gap between what we claim to believe about God and our current experience. Lament goes well with the practice of remembering we engaged with last week. Recalling Who God is and what God has done in the past encourages us to boldly ask for what we need today.
Set a timer for 10-15 minutes to make sure you give yourself a chance to explore your feelings. It may not come easily at first, and that’s okay. It is why you’re participating in this practice, exerting the muscles of emotional attunement. Answer the following questions and then arrange them in poetic form when you have finished.
What are you struggling with, either within you or around you? You might be drawn inwards to a feeling of loneliness, or brokenness in a specific relationship. You might be wrestling with external issues like homelessness or the Israel/Palestine war.
What are you feeling about that struggle right now? Articulate that to God. Remember that feelings aren’t followed with the word “like” or “as” - to say “I feel like you’re not here” is an accusation. Use a feelings wheel if you need to find just the right words for your emotions.
What do you want to ask for? Write down the first things that come to mind, and then ask yourself, “but what do I REALLY want?” You may be craving something deeper. How do you want God to move?
Wait. Listen. What do you sense God speaking to you? Does what you hear from God sound like Love? This is especially hard, as it may require you to not rush to fill in what you think God would probably say, but to hold space for God to actually speak. The answer may surprise you or it may not, but it’s important to reflect on whether it sounds like the heart of God or not.
Remind God Who God is. The authors of the psalms often spoke about God’s character and qualities, and how God had spoken or acted in the past. This was their confidence to ask for response in the present.