How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Relationship with God
Dear readers, today we're delving into an intriguing topic, bridging spirituality, neuroscience, and human development. Brace yourselves as we traverse my favorite thematic terrain.
Understanding Attachment: The Role of God, Neuroscience, and Human Development
Let's start with the fundamental understanding that attachment is inherently wired into our brains. It's crucial to acknowledge that a solitary neuron cannot sustain itself. Bereft of other neurons' input, it perishes. Hence, while discussing attachment, remember its divine origin.
Attachment: The Divine Creation and Its Role in Our Lives
Each child is born with a unique, genetically predetermined temperament, to which parents react. The parents' reaction, in turn, catalyzes the development of a specific attachment pattern in the child with each parent. This phenomenon explains why siblings may exhibit stark differences despite being reared in the same household.
British researcher John Bowlby paved the way for attachment theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, "Attachment," revolutionized the understanding of emotional bonds formed between infants and their primary caregivers, typically their mothers. He further explored the implications on children when these bonds were disrupted, strained, or neglected.
Although I'm tempted to delve deeper into these concepts, I encourage you to further explore them independently. What's crucial to remember is that our earliest bonds also impact our perception of God.
How Attachment Patterns Influence Our Relationship with God
Our attachment patterns, manifested through our neural networks, influence every facet of our lives. These attachments mold our self-perception and beliefs about our capabilities. They also shape our relationships with others. As promised, let's probe into how our attachment styles primarily influence our relationship with God.
Our dominant patterns become the lens through which we perceive and make assumptions about God, since these patterns form our neural networks (which God, as our creator, wouldn't bypass when inviting us into a personal relationship).
Our interpretation of God's story, as recounted through the lives of biblical figures, is biased by our personal narratives, brains, and neural networks—representing memory, emotion, and attachment—and the extent of our mental integration. While we don't exclusively listen through these 'headphones,' our spiritual 'audio system' is undoubtedly influenced by them.
Our earliest patterns instruct us how to handle emotions. If we tend to dismiss or avoid emotions, we lose the opportunity to encounter God within them.
Emotions: The Divine Signposts in Our Brain
God beckons us through our emotions. These emotional signposts are divine messages encoded in our brain activity, and it's our duty to stay vigilant. What holds your attention? Remember, what we concentrate on, expands. Attention is the gateway to wholeness.
It's essential to realize that we all have facets we overlook, primarily our emotions. We seldom bring our emotions to God. As previously discussed, we're seldom taught to heed our emotions or physical sensations.
However, consider this: could honoring our emotions equate to honoring God?
Honoring Emotions: An Act of Honoring God
Psalm 86:11 states, "Teach me Your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness. Give me an undivided heart that I may fear Your name."
Here, an undivided heart symbolizes an integrated mind—a reflection of God's way. The 'fear' mentioned isn't the primitive brain's response but awe in the face of God's power, grace, and beauty. Living undivided signifies embracing integration of all aspects of our being and our brain.
Renowned practitioners like Dr. Thompson and many others propose that we can develop a secure attachment by allowing ourselves to be known. I urge you to let your story intertwine with His, to seek to be known by God. God is subtly shifting us from profound insecurity to security. This sentiment resonates with Apostle Paul's words:
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" 2 Corinthians 5:17