Attached to God: A Practical Guide to Deeper Spiritual Experience

by Krispin Mayfield

Attachment science tells us how we feel in relationships. Do we feel safe and secure? Do we feel tentative or anxious? In the church, we know what we think about our relationship with God, but that can be different from how we feel about it.

This confirms what many 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.

But the reality is that distance happens in all relationships. Couples fight. Good friends can go weeks without a text message. Parents simply can’t be with their kids 24/7. A relationship with God is no different. God sometimes feels close and sometimes feels farther than the moon.

We are built for closeness, and when those we love go “still face,” we can hardly bear it. We feel the distance, even if they’re right in the room with us. And we have to regain connection somehow. Disconnection demands a response.

An anxious attachment style of spirituality is a way of desperately trying to keep close to God.

A shutdown attachment style of spirituality is a way of relating to God that conquers feelings.

A shame-filled attachment style is grounded in the feeling that God loves us but doesn’t really like us.

Secure attachment is a quality of relationship. It’s knowing that when I need you, you’ll be available, responsive, and engaged. Secure attachment happens when children can naturally turn toward their parents, or someone else they love, without much worry about whether they’ll be able to get what they need. The relationship doesn’t have to be perfect, but healthy connection happens often enough that we can count on that person.

Anxious attachment 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. It’s up to you to stay close to God through prioritizing time in prayer, regular church attendance, or scheduled Bible reading.

Shutdown attachment is a pattern of trying to stuff down our negative emotions to get close to God. It is based on the presumption that emotions such as fear, sadness, pain, and doubt are incompatible with the life of faith.

Shame-filled attachment believes 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 transform quite 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 are.

The best way I can think to describe living with an anxious attachment style is like having that smoke detector inside—an alarm that is on constant alert for the slightest sign of disconnection. Any microexpression or slight change in tone is a sign that there’s a problem with the relationship. You keep hawkeyed surveillance on body language, voice, and facial expressions, trying to search for any possible signs of disappointment or rejection.

The problem with anxious attachment is that the more you strive for closeness with God, the less secure you feel. You might feel closer but not any less worried.

It can be difficult to tell whether it is fear or love that is driving your spiritual practices. Your practices become anxious only when God’s presence seems dependent on engaging in these routines. It’s when you worry that in the absence of these practices, God will withdraw.

Perfectionism is one of the sharpest tools in the toolbox of anxious attachment. If you can avoid mistakes, you can avoid abandonment.

It’s important to see the ways that the anxious attachment framework is embedded in our very language. When we use “close to God” as a euphemism for living righteously, it only reaffirms the belief that our connection with God depends on our behavior.

An important, deep need is at the core of the anxious attachment style. Behind your constant clinging is a deep need for a Divine Parent who is close and unwavering. You need a relationship you can count on. Really, you want to know that God’s not going anywhere, which is exactly why you cling as tight as you can.

A connected relationship includes feelings, which are hard to get from a robot. So a paradox happens: you try to stay even-keeled to weather the storms of life and to keep others close. But those in your life often feel shut out by your stoicism.

If you have shutdown attachment, it’s not exactly that you’re hiding what’s going on inside from others, but rather that you yourself don’t know what you are feeling. Friends and family feel like you’re a house with all the shades pulled, closing yourself off from the world. In reality, you’re more like a glass house with a basement that’s locked tight. You don’t know what’s down there, and you don’t know how to get to it. Besides, why would you want to? It’s only bad feelings down there. And even if you opened the basement, you wouldn’t know what to do with those feelings!

It becomes so much easier to be alone because there’s less to manage, so you retreat into patterns that give you solitude and a feeling of safety, protected from the world of emotions that others might bring in.

You avoid deep conversation, intimate moments, and any possibility of meaningful talk. You want to do activities with others because you do want connection, but you can’t risk getting too personal. So you build things together or play board games or do outdoor activities. But what happens when you shut down your emotions with God?

Perhaps the biggest reason you keep your emotions locked in the basement is because you have been told you shouldn’t have them in the first place.

sometimes it’s easier to trust a system of beliefs than a living God who personally engages with us. With a shutdown attachment style, you try to contain the truth of God in a set of doctrinal statements because if we can figure out the left-brained mechanics of it all, we can avoid uncomfortable emotions. But connection with God requires engaging beyond a scientific approach to theology. We end up trusting a dogma, not a Divine Parent.

Spiritual bypass is what happens when we avoid dealing with difficult emotions, trauma, or other challenging parts of life. Instead, we rely on spiritual concepts or platitudes such as “God won’t give you more than you can handle”

Negative feelings about self are ignored in favor of statements of who I am in Christ. It seems that as long as you remind yourself of biblical truths, you don’t have to experience painful emotions. Of course, there is hope for your pain in healthy spirituality, but shutdown spirituality sidesteps the pain rather than allowing God to meet you in it. You think you can keep these uncomfortable feelings in the basement. This seems to be the only way to make sense of the promise of peace and joy that Jesus offers.

A shutdown spiritual style latches on to the tasks for God to the exclusion of communion with God.

To share your emotions with God, you first need to know, on a gut level, that God can handle them. You need to know that your sadness or worry will be seen not as a lack of faith that drives God away but as a cry for comfort that will bring nearness. God shows up in your locked basement and says, “Peace be with you,” as Jesus did with the disciples.

With a shame-filled attachment style, getting close to God comes with a cost: you have to feel terrible about yourself. Getting close requires us to come face-to-face with a God who always wishes we were more holy, who is always judging us and disappointed with us.

The worst part of shame is that it provides continual felt evidence that there’s something broken within you that drives others away.

Unlike Mr. Rogers, who likes us “just the way” we are, a shame-filled attachment style feels like God accepts us in spite of who we are, a notion that continually undermines feeling secure with God.

The apostle Paul talks about imitating Christ for good reason.20 In Jesus we see someone who is grounded in his belovedness and who sees belovedness in all others. Jesus clearly shows us that God is love,21 and through his life and teachings, we are called as children of God into that same way of love. But in the modern-day church, the idea of being “just like Jesus”22 has often been taken to mean we should become less like our unique selves, as though there were something inherently wrong with the way God created us.

“Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of spiritual life,” wrote Henri Nouwen, “because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’”

Rather than a God who loves us in spite of who we are, we need a God who delights in who we are, in spite of what we’ve done.

Stepping into secure spirituality means experiencing the truth that God doesn’t just bear with us—God delights in us as beloved children.

“Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence,” wrote Nouwen.34 We all know God loves us, but God’s delight is a whole other matter. We need a God who looks beneath our sin and shame and sees a beloved child.

Believing that God delights in us is not always easy because this story about our unlovability resides in the experiential part of our brains. That means we can’t change it through new information alone. As my friend K.J. Ramsey wrote in her book, This Too Shall Last, “The chasm between who God says he is and who we experience him to be is not crossed by whipping our minds into submission with more theological facts.”36 We need the experience of being accepted and loved before we can change the story.

Jesus’s good news was that God is a better parent than we’ve been told. His teaching centered on what God was like and how God worked in the world. He addressed important assumptions and questions about God.

Jesus came to tell us that God is so much better than we imagined. At the outset, in Luke 4:18–19, Jesus makes his aims clear: to bring good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners and oppressed people, sight for the blind. He came to bring good news to those who suffer most. It is in our suffering that we find the good news.

In a moment of bad behavior, healthy parents affirm the relationship, and then they address the behavior. This helps separate the status of the relationship from behavior, giving the child the message that closeness is not contingent on what they do.6

God continually approaches us, even at our worst moments.

God is not driven away by sin but instead engages with people and their sin. We see a God that connects, then redirects. Never in any of these stories do we hear that the relationship is ever in jeopardy. Perceived feelings of closeness may shift—we will go through the mountains and valleys—but with these possible shifts in mind, we can still know that our relationship is intact.

My wife and I try to teach them that secure relationships are based in the felt safety of knowing there may be ups and downs, even times of distance, but the relationship itself is never in jeopardy.

Meeting a standard is vastly different from living in a relationship where you are loved no matter what. Approval is not the same as connection.

Some of us have been given a picture of a God whose acceptance of us is contingent on our rigidly following a long list of rules. This costs us not only the chance to rest in the arms of a loving God but also the ability to see the Old Testament law as a good gift from the generous heart of God. Contrary to what we’ve been told, this law comes not from a demanding exacting judge but the doting heart of a parent who wants the best for us.

Acceptance into God’s community was not dependent on following the law; the law was given because of being accepted into community. Sort of like, “We’re a family, so let’s talk about how we’re going to live together.”

God wanted a community where the marginalized were taken care of, fairness was displayed among individuals and communities, and ways were established to make amends when people inevitably harmed one another.

It’s important during these times to have your own monuments that can help you hold on to the truth that God has a covenant with you to stay close forever.

It’s not through smothering feelings in faith that he manages them; it is through bringing them forth to God. We don’t need to stuff down our feelings; we need to connect with someone who cares about us. We have a Divine Parent who listens to and empathizes with our emotions. A better strategy than shoving our feelings into the basement is sharing them, but we need to know first that they will be accepted.

In an emotionally intimate relationship we can find true hope because “hope is forged out of the biblical call to dig deep into our innards,” as Dr. Emilie Townes writes, “to tell the truth of what we see, feel, hear, and experience.”

Suppressing the uncomfortable emotions of life keeps the church from seeing the cries of the wounded that we are called to care for and makes those who are suffering feel like outsiders in the family of God.