What Does Your Attachment Style Tell You about Your Relationship with God?
- Krispin Mayfield LPC, Author
- Updated Feb 23, 2022
Everyone has an attachment style – it’s the way you relate to others. Do you tend to be clingy or stand-offish? Do you avoid conflict or jump headlong into it? Do you avoid getting too close in relationships? These are all aspects of your attachment style, and they impact not only how you relate to loved ones or friends, but also to God.
Attachment science is the study of how we relate to our loved ones. The field started by trying to understand how babies try to get closeness from their mothers, then expanded beyond parent/child dynamics to understand how couples connect, and most recently, researchers have found that it even helps us understand how we relate to God.
Do you continually seek a close emotional connection with God, worrying that you might drift away if you don’t try your hardest? Are you someone who prefers to connect with God by learning theology? Do you often feel like you’re falling short, or that God is repeatedly disappointed in you? The answers to these questions might tell you something about your attachment style.
Researchers have found that when it comes to seeking closeness and connection with others, there’s a predictable pattern we can expect. Some of us will spend immense amounts of energy on our relationships, others will keep a comfortable distance. Some of us alternate between both. Some of us worry about our relationships continually, while others would rather organize to-do lists than spend time reflecting on their relationships. Yet all of us feel insecure at times, and there are three primary ways we tend to deal with it. This pattern forms your attachment style.
Typically, we approach most of our important relationships in the same way. When you’re worried about a relationship, you might get anxious and reach out to your partner in overwhelming ways – like sending one (or ten) too many text messages. Or you might tell yourself, “I don’t really need closeness,” and stuff down those uncomfortable feelings. A third response, when we feel distant from others, is to blame ourselves. We tell ourselves things like, if I was a better friend, other people would want to spend time with me. Then we engage in critical self-talk, hoping we might become a better person that people will want to be around. Now let’s look at when your attachment style shows up in your relationship with God.
The Three Different Attachment Styles
An anxious attachment style is when you try to prevent feelings of distance from God at all costs. You desperately try to keep close to God. It looks different from person to person, but the common denominator is the constant worry about losing connection with God. It’s when you feel that the weight of maintaining the relationship falls squarely on your shoulders. When you practice an anxious attachment style, you worry about drifting, backsliding, or falling away from the faith. If you don’t keep the connection, who will?
It could look like passionately engaging in worship to try to keep God near. It could look like inflexible spiritual activities: afraid to miss a church service or a quiet time. Or, meticulously trying to not sin in order to stay in God’s good graces. It’s marked by an anxious feeling that’s always whispering, “if you don’t try hard enough, you’re going to lose closeness with God.”
If you have this attachment style, it’s likely that you are emotionally open with God, but also worried about the state of your spiritual life. You might notice both a longing to feel close to God and a slight resentment that it feels like you have to try so hard.
This attachment style has created many passionate, expressive, and devout followers of Jesus. But for many, rather than a loving embrace, a relationship with God becomes exhausting and burns us out over time. We desperately want closeness, and we have learned that the best way to get and keep it is through anxiously grasping at those we love, including God. While the devotion is admirable, when it feels like it’s up to you to keep a connection with God, you can never actually experience the rest and peace of relationship with God.
A shutdown attachment style is a way of relating to God in a way that shuts down our feelings. It seems that our anxiety or sadness means we don’t have faith, and therefore those feelings could get in the way of connecting with God. In this style, feelings are framed as the opposite of faith, and building a framework of theological knowledge is the bedrock to connection with God. Emotions have little room in this way of relating to God, and believing the correct theological facts provides a bypass around grief, worry, and other uncomfortable emotions.
If you have a shutdown attachment style, you might feel most comfortable in acts of service, and that can often be a gift to your community. You sign up to set up chairs or mow the lawn or do other helpful things. Doing tasks feels easier than interacting with others in social situations, like Bible study or other small group activities. Or you might tend toward analytical thinking that can be helpful in facilitating a robust theology in your faith community.
You stuff down your emotions to try to keep a connection with God. However, when you only connect with God through your “left brain,” you miss out on intimacy with God. You don’t get a chance to experience a connection with a God who wants to step into your emotional world and be with you in your worry or sadness.
A shame-filled attachment style develops when you know that God loves you but you’re not sure he likes you. Falling so far below God’s standard of perfection, you shame and blame yourself for being so wretched, even though God has chosen to love you. You try to get close to God by proving that you truly know how bad and unlovable you really are, hoping that he will have mercy on you if you beat yourself up enough.
You end up feeling stuck between wanting closeness with God, but worrying about being judged or criticized if you get too close. It creates a push-and-pull in your heart that makes it hard to feel emotionally safe with God. Attachment science has taught us that connection is rooted in the delight of a parent. When we feel like God is disgusted, not delighted with us, it can be hard to feel connected.
A shame-filled attachment style puts us in a terrible place where we feel better when we’re distant from God and feel worse about ourselves when we’re close. Yet we need closeness, so we’re caught in a terrible dilemma. Though we long to draw near to God, as we come closer, we can see only disgust in the eyes of the Divine. We experience a nettling feeling that we need to become a bit better, a little holier, for God to like us. And if that doesn’t work, we can acknowledge outright that we aren’t lovable and don’t expect true closeness until we’ve completely changed.
Those of us with a shame-filled attachment style often understand, in a visceral way, the gravity of being human, as well as the magnitude of connection with the Divine. We can create spaces in the church that allow for brokenness and admission of failures. But also we can often feel like there’s no true way to connect with God, so long as we’re as defective as we feel we are.
Understanding Your Attachment Style
If you’ve developed one of these attachment styles, there is a way forward to relating to God in a different way. Jesus’ story about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) shows us that we can connect with God without striving, stuffing down our emotions, or berating ourselves. The prodigal son never has to work hard to reach his father, he doesn’t have to hide his needy emotions, and he doesn’t have to be perfect before he’s embraced. His father runs to him, while he’s still dirty from traveling, and shows how delighted he is to see his son. Jesus wants us to relate to God like this kind of father, who meets us in our insecurities.
There are a variety of factors that form our attachment style with God – the family and the faith community we grow up in, as well as life events, just to start. But more important than understanding the why, when we begin to understand what our attachment style is. When you understand your attachment style, it can point us down the path to more security, and relating to God like he’s presented in the story of the prodigal son.
Since these attachment styles tell us how we reach out for connection during times of insecurity – like the times we feel distant from God – they help us understand helpful ways to reach out for connection. There are a variety of spiritual practices that vary depending on your attachment style, which can help develop new ways of connecting with God. Learning your style is the first step, opening up a new way of understanding your personal relationship with God, and what will help you take steps toward feeling secure.
Photo credit: ©Getty Images/monkeybusinessimages
