Episode 27: Christin Fort – Attachment Theory & God

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Intro  

Pete

Before we get started today we wanted to let you know about our October Class called “The Importance of Womanist Biblical Interpretation” taught by Rev. Dr. Angela Parker.

Jared

It’s happening October 25th from 8-9:30pm ET.

Pete

It is, indeed. And this class will cover topics like the foundations of womanist theology, the fundamentals of womanist readings, the significance of apocalyptic literature in womanist thought, and the future of womanist interpretation in biblical scholarship.

Jared

And when you sign up you’ll get: the one-night live class, a live Q&A session, a link to the class recording so you can watch it later, and downloadable class slides.

Pete

And it’s pay what you can until the class ends, then it costs $25 to download.

Jared

And as always, if you want access to all of our classes for just $12 a month, you can become a member of the Society of Normal People. 

Pete

To sign up head to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/womanistinterpretation.

Jared  

Today’s topic on Faith for Normal People is attachment theory and God. And I’m talking about how early relationships might impact our view of God, how important it is to see the Christian tradition for what it is, and some ideas on how to overcome negative thought patterns. Yeah, we cover a lot of ground. And I’m talking with Christin Fort. Christin is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where she specializes in the integration of clinical psychology and biblical theology—what a fit for Faith for Normal People. So don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for quiet time when Pete is going to join me. We’ll dig into how these themes of the conversation have played into our own journeys of adapting faith. But with all that said, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Christin Fort.

Christin  

Jared  

Christin, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you.

Christin  

Thank you. So good to be here.

Jared  

Before we get into the topic at hand, let’s just talk about why you’re interested in this topic. We’re talking about, you know, psychology, attachment theory, and this intersection of faith, which is what your background is in. So maybe give us a little context for why this matters to you.

Christin  

Yeah, thank you for the invitation. I love relationships. I’m not the only human in the world, of course, who loves relationships. But it’s been a privilege to be able to gear my vocation and career towards trying to understand what relationships are, why they are what they are, what allows them to flourish, and—as someone who is immersed in clinical psychology—what gets in the way of relationships flourishing. I’m super interested in relationships between humans, of course. I’m also interested in relationships between humans and the environment at large, but also, in particular, the relationships between humans and God. And that’s really what kind of piqued my interest in attachment theory specifically is, by the time I entered graduate school, I started my PhD, that field of attachment theory had blossomed enough that there were religious scholars and then secular scholars who were curious about the number of religious people who really thought that they could have a real relationship with God and they like “what’s up with those people?” And by the time I got to grad school in the early 2010s, I was able to begin to plumb the depths of relationships not just between humans, but also between humans and God. And attachment theory provided a broad framework that was familiar to many people in my field.

Jared  

Let’s start there. Start with the basics. What is attachment theory?

Christin  

Yeah, so something you’ll notice about me is I love context, a little bit of background to how attachment theory came to be, and then what it is. Attachment theory is a broad theoretical framework or way of just understanding how relationships work between people, but was actually started by a British psychiatrist who studied under one of the first female psychoanalysts, Melanie Klein. Not many people know this, which is why I like to toot her horn, because she’s one of the first people who studied under Freud, but she’s often not discussed in like normal people circles. But she should be. 

And so this guy, John Bowlby, studied under Melanie Klein, and realized that as he was working with her that it wasn’t only important relationships between adults, but also to study the relationships between adults and children, and between children and each other. So he, under the guidance of Melanie Klein, became among the first group of people saying we should understand how children work, how they think, why they are the way they are. And as he began doing his research, especially in his medical profession, and as an analyst (he’s kind of toggling between those two), he discovered that part of why people are the way they are, as children, is because the adults who shape them. Which of course is like “Duh!” to us, but it wasn’t a “Duh” thing back in the day. People actually used to think that children were just mini adults, you know? However we are as adults, we kind of just start off that way, we’re born that way, which is not quite true. 

So attachment theory is birthed out of this idea that something significant is happening, something formative is happening early, early in life, in these pre-verbal times before we even have words to describe what’s going on inside. And what’s happening in terms of how we see ourselves, and how we see the world. Bowlby calls this our “Internal Working Model,” or IWM, the Internal Working Model for how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive the world is actually shaped by our early relationships with our Primary Attachment Figure, or PAF in short-form writing. Primary Attachment Figure back in the day, in the Western world was considered to be the mom. And oftentimes throughout human history, women have done a lot of the caregiving for children, but that has blossomed. So we know that the Primary Attachment Figure could be anyone: a dad, a nanny, babysitter, grandparents, any number of people. And all of that really tries to understand what goes well to create what they call secure attachment relationships, and what goes wrong when insecure attachment relationships take place. And a whole theory has been developed about the patterns, not just what we intuit is happening, but what can we study empirically over time as we’re observing relationships. Attachment theory was born out of that.

Jared  

Okay, so attachment theory is looking at these pre-verbal ways that we form attachments to a Primary Attachment Figure. And that can happen in ways that we would say are secure or ways that are insecure. And so it’s looking at the patterns that, what led to a secure attachment, what led to an insecure attachment, so that we understand that. So if that’s what it is, what impact does that have practically, in terms of what do we see when it comes to secure attachment and how people then develop later? And then insecure attachment and how that develops later?

Christin  

Great question. So this matters—all this like theoretical jargon matters—because in real life, we’re curious about what makes people healthy people? And what gets in the way, and it makes them kind of have this poor mental health, poor emotional health, poor relational health. Attachment theorists will say that it’s the style of attachment that they developed very early in life. And it’s because that early relationship, say with their mom, if they had a secure relationship, which means they begin to view themselves as lovable, as worthy, as whole, all these good things, and they begin to develop this view of themselves that they are good. They have this internal view of themselves, and a view of the world that says “I’m worthy.” 

So if someone in my life, say I’m a toddler and I go to preschool, I’m three years old, and someone takes my toy and someone hits me and someone spits on me and no one wants to play with me, all these bad things happen. If my internal working model says, “but I’m good,” then something else must be going on. Why they’re hitting me, why they’re doing these things, it’s not just because I’m a bad person. “No one wants to play with me because I’m bad.” That internal shaming voice, they say, is mitigated by believing that “I’m actually worthy.” It might be that I did something bad, so maybe Mommy would say “Yes, share your toy,” or “Yes, maybe you shouldn’t do these things that make them not want to play with you.” But not because I’m bad. 

Our internal working model, our view of ourselves, comes from the messages that we receive when we’re really, really young. And if I receive these positive messages, and it’s not just said with words, but it’s reinforced with my parents behavior (that’s actually essential), then I actually begin to believe these things. If that’s not the case, then that insecure set of attachment styles can develop. And I can then say, “Yeah, the three year old doesn’t want to play with me over there because no one ever wants to play with me, my sisters don’t play with me, my parents don’t play with me. It must be I’m a really bad girl.” And I have that view when I’m tiny, even when I’m 1, 2, 3, I don’t know that I’ve been carrying this idea around for my whole life. But then you know, at 38 or something, we can think about, “oh, where’d that come from?” And attachment theory is trying to make sense of where those early views of self and the world come from.

Jared  

Is this internal working model—the phrase that came to mind when you were describing it is a filter or a narrative that then gets reinforced over and over with experiences. It’s sort of like our starting place. It’s the lens through which we see things. And so then it happens to color our experiences. So if our foundational narrative is that we’re lovable, or worthy, then data gets filtered through that. And now some of it may sneak through and still have kind of a shaming effect. But by and large, we’re gonna reframe these experiences from that fundamental starting place versus the other. Is that a way of saying it?

Christin  

Well said, it’s a beautiful, beautiful reframe. Mhmm.

Jared  

Okay. Okay. The next question I have, and this is going to start bleeding into the theological or the God-talk here, right? So let’s, I’ll be your case study here. I grew up in a tradition that said I was unlovable and unworthy as kind of a theological starting place, right, in terms of total depravity and original sin. And it was meant to highlight or amplify God’s love, like, look how unlovable you are and that sort of makes God really good. But I’m curious if there’s been any research or what your opinion is on the interactions or the influence—because I would have grown up in a family system with a lot of secure attachment patterns. And so I didn’t grow up, like I kind of viewed that theological doctrine with kind of a grain of salt, because I didn’t take it that seriously. Because I grew up feeling very loved and very secure. So I’m curious what the interaction is. Because I do think—I guess really, my question is—and this is a dicey way to ask it.

Christin  

That’s okay. 

Jared  

How influential is the messaging of like, original sin and all of that, if we have secure attachment in these, like you said, it’s like, it can be tactile, it can be feelings, it can be hugs and stuff. Can that be dismantled by a theology that gets shared on Sunday? Is it—Am I making sense?

Christin  

I think you are making sense. 

Jared  

Okay.

Christin  

And I hear you asking a broad question of what’s the relationship between what we hear maybe from our parents and our family system and what we may hear at church or in Sunday school or catechism, wherever someone might receive some theological teaching, right? Catholic school. Yeah, any of those kinds of things. I think, yes, I think they are mutually informing each other. And what’s always interesting to me, both in terms of my psychological work, and my theological work is when they actually don’t get along, and we don’t acknowledge it. So sometimes, I’m told as I’m growing up, like I’m super loved, but like my theology in Sunday school says, like, actually, I’m loved, but actually, I’m really bad. Like, wait, but like, wait, what’s happening, right? And it raises actually some questions. And often we just bypass those things, we just kind of hold those two things, not even in tension, just allow the two things that actually don’t coexist very well to coexist. 

And my interest as a scholar is like, can we just acknowledge that some part of this does not make sense? There’s an illogical process here, [Laughs] to try make sense of. I do think, as a practitioner, so as a psychologist who’s in practice, I do—I see over time as I’m working with Christian clients, or post-Christian clients, right? People are working out faith and issues with faith that they eventually are naming some of the breakdown of like “I was told this, I was told that God loves people who are good,” for instance, “and I was good and if this is God’s love for me, this type of suffering, this type of pain, this type of desire to be in a relationship that I can’t find or whatever it might be. Then I have some questions.” I’m like, “That’s a good question!” Somewhere in there, it’s actually a theological question of how are you viewing God and your relationship to God? 

So I do think eventually, we get to a point in time where the rubber meets the road, where we’re like, does this actually make sense? I think what’s interesting to me is I think about my own journey as a scholar, starting as an undergrad student, when I first started studying psychology and theology formally at Wheaton College, I had the privilege of being able to ask questions about like, wait a minute, where did these things come from? It was the first time I was able to hear alternate theologies that wasn’t just like, oh, maybe it’s total depravity. I wasn’t taught that explicitly, but implicitly my tradition—nondenominational tradition—definitely adapted that Calvinistic perspective. And I remember getting to college and taking some theology classes and learning like wait a minute, there are early church fathers and mothers who actually thought perhaps we were created inherently good, what? Also like how do I make sense of the doctrine of you know, creation in the first place? It raised other questions for me.

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Jared  

How have psychologists and theologians used attachment theory—I’ve been hearing about this more and more, I feel like more articles, more books, to talk about people’s relationship to God.

Christin  

So I think what’s interesting to me I think, in the mid 90s, early 90s to mid 90s, some psychologists became interested, actually, in trying to understand religious people. [Laughs] So before that, psychology in general has actually always been interested in religious people. So William James, one of the first psychologists—he’s also considered a philosopher—wrote a book about like, the experiences of religious people, trying to understand what the heck is going on with religious people—which is a great question I’m still curious about. 

But I’m mindful of the fact that in the 90s, psychologists started asking questions about religious people and trying to understand why, like I said earlier, we think we have this real relationship with a divine being, and not just like a, you know, I pay homage to the divine being, I offer sacrifices to the divine being, you know, old school style from hundreds and thousands of years ago, but like, “I love this divine being, this divine being loves me.” So that started in the 90s. And also, the reverse also began to happen. So when Freud becomes a psychoanalyst who creates this “talking cure” back at the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, theologians also start reading this. Because theologians, as we know, are normal people. They’re just people who happen to spend most of their time thinking about God. And so they started reading Freud and trying to figure out, can these things go together? And so you actually see, in their scholarship, theologians—starting a long time ago—starting to reference what Freud and other of his contemporaries are writing about. 

And then if we fast forward to kind of like I was saying, the 90s, specifically, attachment theory has its own specific part of psychology. It has become big enough that people are asking questions about the attachment relationship to God. The question there is, if I say—there are four different attachment styles that can develop for a person with another person; a secure attachment style is one of them, then there’s three types of insecure attachment styles, three ways for things to go wrong. They can go very, very wrong in the disorganized attachment style, where you don’t even have a consistent way of engagement. Like everything is so chaotic, but there’s no way of looking at your behavior and saying, “Oh, that’s the type of insecure you are.” And that is kind of broadly understood to be this disorganized or fearful avoidant style. 

But there’s also the two more common styles of insecure attachment, which is the avoidant style, that’s the person who’s like, “I won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with me.” And that’s because we’re trying to avoid rejection. So in order to avoid rejection, I won’t even have any intimacy. It’s easier to avoid being rejected if I just don’t have any closeness. If we’re not proximate, you can’t reject me, because we’re not close enough where you could do that. 

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, that’s the insecure anxious or insecure preoccupied type of person. And that’s the person—I lean in that direction in my moments of insecureness, where I’m like, “Well, wait, you can’t reject me, because I’m going to love you really, really, really hard. And I’ll do all the things” and I go overboard, and you know? All of that. These three different ways of having insecure attachment styles are really common. And attachment theorists are starting to ask questions about relationships between God and humans, are trying to ask the question—that those early relationships that we had with our parents or other early people, does that shape how we relate with God? Or is it possible that developing a relationship with God over time actually can redeem—we might say, to use some Christianese [Laughs]—the insecure attachment styles that we initially had? That view of self-concept.

Jared  

Can I ask then, on the psychological side, when we talk about redemption, I guess whenever we put it in the context of a relationship with God, it can seem like that’s like a supernatural thing. But is that something that can happen with, when you’re older, say, if you have, you know, avoidant or anxious, insecure attachment, can you find a relationship that will help? You know, can you develop or overcome I guess that, through relationships as adults? 

Christin  

Yeah, that’s right. The answer that many people think is yes, it is possible, and whether you’re a Christian or not, but like research does have some good backing behind it saying that you can have an initial attachment style. But over time, this can happen with, for instance, a significant other. Let’s say, you get married, you learn to actually perhaps develop a different and perhaps more secure attachment style. There’s debate around this because attachment styles do seem to persist over time, you still have that proclivity or that leaning, but there are ways to begin to kind of rework those internal working models, or some people might say those automatic thoughts that we have those self-perceptions, that self-concept. 

Jared  

So then when you’re talking about God, it’s the same as a significant other, it’s seeing that relationship as an opportunity to develop a healthier way of seeing yourself or that internal working model?

Christin  

Yeah. I think I would say it’s similar, I don’t know if it’s the same. And this is where some good empirical research needs to continue. I’m hoping some of the students in my research lab will choose that that’s what they want the dissertations to be about, to be able to ask what’s different? Or is it the exact same? Because one of the things that’s significant about attachment relationship, it’s based in proximity. It’s based in closeness. And what we don’t have with God is physical proximity in the way that we experience proximity or closeness with humans. And so we get to ask again, where does the analogy of like an attachment relationship with humans, is similar to an attachment relationship with God? And eventually, that breaks down. And that’s the case with anytime we speak about God, right? Eventually, the words we use don’t really measure up. But yeah, we ask that question in attachment too.

Jared  

So let’s talk more about this attachment theory in token to people’s relationship to God. So maybe can you just map out a little bit what that looks like? Is it sort of, we can identify how we relate to this primary attachment figure and see parallels in how we relate to God? And I guess, I guess my real question is, what’s the value of that? If I am able to say like, “Oh, I have this, oh, and I see it here.” What value does that have?

Christin  

I think for me as a scholar, part of the value is trying to find language to understand, like, psychologically, what theologically we think is really important. So theologically, Christians—and many faith traditions, but from monotheistic traditions, right, Jews, Muslims, Christians, but particularly Christians—think that our relationship with that divine being, the divine other, matters. And so for me, as a scholar, I’m like, “How does it matter? Why does it matter? What’s happening?” So on that end, it matters to me as an academic. 

But practically, again, for normal people, like for all of us kind of just in our normal lives, I think it matters because if we have been able to figure out if we have an insecure attachment style, for instance, how to work towards that redemption, like I was saying earlier, like if I know like, “Oh, like I’m struggling in my relationship with God, my faith is low. Like it’s difficult for me to believe that God is who God says God is, that God will do what God says God will do.” If I can learn some things about what’s helped me in my relationship to other humans, not just any human. The attachment relationship—I didn’t say this earlier—is about a relationship with a really important human, a formative human, which is why we talked about significant others or parents, not just like any random person. But the attachment relationship is the one in which, in some ways, if we switch the metaphor is like the person you… The imprinting process has taken place now, like when a duck is born of like, whoever the first person is, like the, you know, the first animal the duck sees like, “Oh, that’s my mom!” You know, like that type of imprinting relationship is what we’re talking about. Those early super formative relationships. 

So I think it’s helpful for normal people when we’re thinking like, if I need to rework some things, rework my view of myself, that internal working model needs to change. If I want to believe, for instance, here’s an example: If God says I’m fully loved, and I didn’t grow up believing that, my mom never told me that, my dad never told me that, my kids at school didn’t reinforce that. But theologically, I’m supposed to believe this. Is there something that research on attachment theory has about how to overcome a negative internal working model, that I can then learn from? To help me actually begin to flip the script to actually believe I am lovable? And not just like God says I am. God says I am—but are there practical things I could do? Are there people I could be in relationship with who…I realized I shouldn’t just have just general friends, I probably need a mentor, I probably need a best friend who knows to use those words, for instance, in my life. Not just to say “I love you,” but to regularly remind me to end the day with a text that says, “Hey, I love you so much.” Whatever it is, whatever the psychological literature is saying is helpful for flipping a script. How can that be helpful in me believing these things in my relationship with God, not just with other people?

Jared  

Maybe the opposite is also true in that awareness of our attachment styles also sees how maybe we’re drawn to theologies that actually reinforce unhelpful internal working models. So we had a guest on who was talking about having a struggle with her body. And she found solace in a theology that said “your body is bad,” and it was like, “See?” Like, it just reinforced it. So maybe you can say more about that?

Christin  

Oh, my gosh! [Laughs] Yes, I love that you’ve had that conversation. I think in general, we gravitate towards things that just reinforce whatever we’ve been taught, or whatever we want to believe. And that happens for theology, too, like we just gravitate towards any type of theory, or any type of theology and it’s like, “Yeah, that’s what I’ve always been taught.” I think there’s great harm, obviously, when it comes to the body, right, that comes with theologies that say that the body doesn’t matter, that God is actually only here to redeem the soul, that actually, the part of us that is worthy is immaterial. I just think there’s so many problems that come with that from struggles with eating disorders, to cutting, to like “Well, I might as well die now because to live is Christ, to die in vain,” like, you know, you can use any theology, you know? To get to a really interesting and often problematic outcome. 

And I think there’s both great harm in simply reinforcing these, I think, negative theologies that we’ve heard. But there’s also on the flip side, great good in realizing what Jesus could have meant when Jesus said, “I’ve come so that you might have a life that might be full and meaningful.” And I think psychology is doing something helpful in the last century or so to help us understand what a fullness of life could look like outside of material gain, like internally, our interior world and our relational world, what that could mean. And that gets me excited.

Jared  

Yeah. And again, for me, it is also, even just that awareness can be a powerful tool to see how, oh, it may not be that this is the universal, absolute truth of things. It may be that I’m drawn to this because of experiences when I was very young.

Christin  

That’s right. And for me, part of what’s healthy for me in my own theology of how the holy spirit works, what God is up to in the world, is to believe that God can use any of these things to draw me to God’s own self, including broken things. Once I realize it’s broken, I prefer not to stay on that track, or kind of with that particular framework. But yeah, as I think about kind of the fact that just in general, any theology we have, none of it is going to be flawless. It’s encouraging to me to think about, again, that word redemption I mentioned earlier. That God can use that, even if eventually I realize, “Oh, I need to break away from that part because it’s a little too broken for this season of my life.”

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Jared  

Speaking of different theologies, there’s something I think that’s important, because if we’re going to talk about how attachment theory relates to our relationship with God—or maybe this is a little cynical—but I think even to talk about our relationship with God, to use that word “relationship,” it seems only relevant if God can have emotional experiences, if God can interact with us at a relational level. And again, there was this disconnect, like you said, where you’re holding two things together that you don’t realize don’t really go together. Like, for me when you said that my thought was, yeah, I think for the first half of my childhood I just held together, “of course dinosaurs lived on the Earth millions of years ago and of course, Genesis 1-6 is literal history.”

Christin  

Jared  

I didn’t have any disconnect. It was just like both those things lived in my head, as though there was nothing wrong with both of those things. 

Christin  

Jared  

And so, in the same way, we talk of relationship with God, or this idea of attachment theory having any relevance to our relationship with God, and yet a theology that says God—the technical term is immutability, right?—God cannot change, God cannot be affected, because anything that’s less than perfect, right—this is old philosophy—but anything that’s less than perfect, can’t be God. And so if any change reflects imperfection, and therefore can’t be God, so how do these go together?

Christin  

Yeah, well, I’ll start by saying, I think as people of faith, for whoever is a person of faith, we acknowledge that faith by definition, at least a definition that I use from the book of Hebrews, means that there’s something I don’t see. So I want to acknowledge that I’m going to hold something like, I believe this is true but I don’t always have the clearest of evidences for it. So as I said earlier, that thing coming about, we’re holding onto two things that don’t make any sense. Faith also doesn’t make logical sense. It’s good to just acknowledge that off the bat, like I mean, [Chuckles] it just, yeah, it sometimes feels like you’re at the blind faith. 

I don’t think that we’re made to always be holding things that don’t go together, though. So I will start by saying some things might not feel like they go together, but eventually enough things should go together that we have a coherent narrative, I think that’s important. 

To your point about that doctrine of immutability, God’s changing or unchanging nature, in this case, is significant to me from my research to talk about a really similar doctrine that often has been overlooked historically, has become much more popular recently, which is the doctrine of divine impassibility. That—immutability is that changing, or in this case, the unchanging nature of God, if God is immutable, God’s character is unchanging. And I think that’s true, I still hold that. I do think that God’s character nature is unchanging. And that’s debatable too, lots of good conversations to have about process theology, and many other things about how God might or might not be changing, which I’m here for those conversations. 

But I also think the doctrine of impassibility, whether or not God can be affected, like you’re talking about, and underneath that umbrella term of God being affected or impacted is whether or not God can be emotionally moved or changed. And I don’t think that Scripture bears that up, and there’s great disagreement in the field about that. And some great Old Testament scholars who have a lot to say about God’s potential passibility and historically, the Church’s stance on God’s impassibility, God’s inability to be moved emotionally. 

I think not just in the person of Jesus, we’re looking at the text of Scripture, yes, Jesus is clearly moved. And the debate is Christologically, right around Christ, like “if Christ can feel it then of course, God can feel it,” and there’s all the questions about, “Wait, is everything that Christ can do, something that God can do?” All good questions. But I think the thing that got me into this deep abstract, philosophical, and theological set of questions as a psychologist, is the belief, this doctrine that humans have been created in the image of God. And there has been great debate over time, and throughout history of what does that mean? So for part of history—maybe people have talked about this in your show—but for part of history, theologically, us being made in God’s image meant that we were intellectual beings. God is a bright, intelligent being and we have the capacity to be bright and intelligent, unlike or moreso—perhaps not unlike—but moreso—and that’s debatable, too—but more than other members of the animal kingdom, maybe that’s how we imagine God. And then there’s a conversation that’s like, right, relational Trinitarian theology that developed like, “Wait, maybe it’s because God is inherently relational, there’s three persons, maybe that’s the image of God!” 

As a psychologist I want to bring the question of: What if God is an affected being? We seem to see in Scripture, both in Old and New Testament, not just in Jesus, but also in the person of God before Christ comes on the scene that God seems to feel a lot of things and God seems to feel them very, very deeply. And I want to ask some questions like, I want to know if I experience emotion, is that because I’m created in God’s image? And that’s where that started from for me. I come as an African-American woman, I come from a people where emotions matter a lot. We express emotions. You can hear it in our voice. You can see it in our faces, of course in our words that we use, whether it’s for singing or whatever it is, speaking, preaching. Emotions are very important to our cultural context. 

So a part of the question for me, as a psychologist it’s like, is there validity here? Is there a theological substance or theological backing for this? And I don’t think we should prooftext, like, “I like that I come from an emotional people, so let me go find emotional things in God.” Like, I don’t think it should go that way. But I do think our cultural contexts get to shape, and they always do shape the questions we ask. And in this case, I got to be explicit about it. I know that I come from people where emotions are important, and my personality accepts that emotions are important, so I want to ask theologically, is there room for this? That’s kind of where it started for me. 

And as a person who was raised in a home where scripture was very important, very, very, very important. I was raised in a very evangelical family, even though we didn’t always use that term as a Black family. I am mindful of the fact that the evangelical piece looked very different terms of politics then it does now so you can just keep that in mind. But theologically what that meant is that we had a high view of Scripture. And I remember thinking, I started reading Scripture on my own when I was in elementary school, I read it cover to cover multiple times and I was like, I see this in God. And so it’s because I see this in God that I had to ask questions of—does my theology start with the text of Scripture, or stop with this way of understanding the world, right, kind of outside of Scripture philosophically?

Jared  

Well, and ironically, not to open up a can of worms. But the fact that we would even have to, even your disclaimer of we just don’t want to put our own context onto Scripture, kind of read into it whatever we want—I think, for me, that’s coming from a place where we’ve had about five hundred to a thousand years of white culture reading that into the Scripture, so that the default is that God isn’t that way. But if you actually read the Hebrew Bible, it’s pretty obvious that God feels things.

Christin  

Correct. It is!

Jared  

Like, a lot of times in sort of white biblical scholarship, there’s an accusation of African-American or liberationist, or whatever adjective we want to use, kind of reading into the text, and it’s like, well, that’s just because there’s a default, that we’re like completely washing over things that are very obvious, like God has emotions in the Hebrew Bible, that’s pretty clear.

Christin  

Love that you’re highlighting that, 100% that’s true. And before like, before theology was white broadly with a racial group, right? It was a specific thing. It was like German, or it was like, it was specific. And if I think about Germans and emotion, just take one sec, you know? That literally tells you so much if you thought about how culture and theology go together.

Jared  

And all of like, the top theologians for two hundred years were German. And so—

Christin  

Right, exactly.

Jared  

It’s like, oh, so wait, this isn’t exactly how God is. This is how all the people who were writing all the theologies were.

Christin  

Exactly. And of course, we recognize theology existed before the Germans, right? So we go back to like early, early church, right, the immediate ADs, you know, then we can see that there were ideas about trying to preserve a view of God, that was not one that God was whimsical. And that’s actually where this idea of divine impassibility came from. If the Greek gods sleep with whoever they want, fight with whoever they want, kill whoever they want—if they’re ruled by their affections, or their emotions, our God is not like that. And that was a really important type of theological statement to make. It still is. But at the same time, we get to look at the Hebrew text like you’re saying, and see, well, God has some kind of emotions. 

Just as an aside, one of my favorite texts is the book by Abraham Joshua-Heschel on the Prophets. Where as a Jewish theologian who’s not Christian, who also was super involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and other things I love about his life as a practitioner, as an activist. And as a Jewish theologian, he said that if we’re going to speak about the emotions of God, we have to speak about them appropriately. And if God does have any emotions—and Abraham Joshua-Heschel and I disagree, [Laughs] and he’s obviously a really prominent person to disagree with—but he talks about the fact that anything that we see affectively about God is always in relation to humans. And we have to be careful, we get to ask that theological question, is just because I see God relating to humans in this way, does that mean God is always like this outside of engagement with humans? And that’s another set of theological questions to have. But my point is, I think even before we get to whiteness and theology, and European-ness and theology, there was theology before Europeans took over. And it’s really important to remember, and there were good questions that were being asked on both sides. 

Jared  

But yeah, and you know, as much as this is about attachment theory, I think one of the throughlines of our conversation that you keep highlighting, which I think is very important, is the value of respecting our tradition. And seeing the tradition for what it is and the value that it brings, but also then the pitfalls that it brings. And that’s important, because, again, if you’re reading theology from 19th century German scholars, and your belief is that there’s only one right way to see this and that context doesn’t matter, we’re just getting to the rightness. Rightness doesn’t have a context. That can really color how you then see, that’s the lens through which now you’re reading older traditions, and you’re reinterpreting those now through the lens of the 19th century Germans, and then kind of we keep compounding how we see the traditions instead of seeing them in their own right. Similar to what we just said about the Hebrew Bible, where we’re reading it through a lens where we’re saying, God is impassable, therefore whatever I see in the Hebrew Bible cannot lead me to the conclusion that God has feelings.

Christin  

Yeah. And I think for me, this is the part that the word evangelical, at least that tradition, has something for me—though, again, politically, I’ll always distance myself from it from here on out—but I think it’s significant to me to be able to say that even scholarship seeks historically to look at the text first, right. And we can look at other traditions like the Catholic Church that talks about multiple things we look at, we look at tradition, we look at the word of the Pope, we look at, you know, a mandate including Scripture. Evangelicals tend to say we get this from Martin Luther, like sola scriptura. We start with Scripture, it’s only about Scripture, that’s all there is. Even if we start by looking at Scripture, we always start by acknowledging—I say to this to my students all the time in class, I do believe that objective truth exists. And that’s debatable as an argument by itself. But I happen to still believe that [Chuckles]. objective truth exists. But I can only perceive objective truth subjectively, because it’s also impossibility. And so, I think God in God’s mercy knew that before deciding to enter a relationship with us. And so with all the nuances and complexities, and just the things we get wrong, I think God is like, God’s here for it. We’re just gonna be here in the midst of you bringing your subjective lenses for all the good and all the ill that comes with it and I think that’s welcomed.

Jared  

Okay, we’ve gone a lot of places, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey. But as we wrap up, I want to come back to this idea of attachment theory in our thinking about God and God’s relationship to humanity. What’s the value for everyday people, and I’m thinking here of our audience, who are maybe searching for a different way of thinking about God, and definitely a different way of relating to God. How is your work—and it doesn’t have to be attachment theory specific—but just your work. What of that may be a helpful next step for people in terms of how they think, how they practice? I mean, one thing that you said earlier that I thought was very practical was having friends in your life who know the right words to use, that even though they’re trying to affirm you, there may be a specific way that can overturn some of these things. And if you know what that is, to be able to ask those people to use those words. That’s like so helpful, and so practical. Are there other things like that?

Christin  

Yeah, broadly speaking, I think as a psychologist I find it really helpful, especially as a practicing psychologist, I think it’s really important to always pause and engage in what I call these self-checks. Where I’m just checking in with myself, like, how am I doing? That’s become really popular thinking about mindfulness, kind of techniques, and you know, those types of things like “what’s happening between my body, my mind, and my spirit?” And I think it’s important to do in our relationship with God, to engage in the self-checks, to be able to say, “How am I feeling towards God? What am I thinking about God? Am I even thinking about God at this point in time? How am I behaving? Is there a discrepancy between when I say these things about how I experience God that I don’t actually feel that?” I think when we engage in those self checks, it’s important not to stay only in our own heads, but to welcome some safe others into our experience of God and with God, and in our experiences of ourselves. 

So I think about the fact that for me, part of what’s been grounding practically is to have groups of people, women and men, but often women in my world, where I can be honest about like, I want to believe God for these things. God says that God is going to be faithful in these ways but I’m really struggling. And so for me, I’ve gleaned some of the practical tools of a self-check of mindfulness of like, checking in with my thoughts. So acknowledging that it’s a negative thought, and I can let it pass, I don’t have to fixate on it. That’s a tool that I received from psychology, and I can use that tool in my relationship with God. But I bring other people into that relationship with God, I welcome other people. 

So for like, traditional Christian circles, that can mean a small group or an accountability partner, or someone who gets to hear kind of what’s happening in my head, about how I’m relating with God, or what I’m thinking about who God is, or what God has said to me. And I guess all of this is framed for me in this idea of, growth is really important. So wherever I am with God—if I still believe God exists, right, if I’m in that space—there’s always room to keep growing. And so I want to bring other people into my world in a strong, hopefully secure type of relationship with me to help me to then strengthen or develop a secure relationship with God. And that means being authentic and honest with myself about where I am. Saying, “I’m not doing super well.”

So here’s an example of a psychological thing. I think about the fact that in a season several years ago in grad school, I was super overwhelmed. And I realized that actually, every winter I always became this overwhelmed. Like not just like, “Ugh, life is hard.” Like I got super anxious, super discouraged, and borderline on hopeless. And once I got to the third year of that happening, I was like, “Okay, this is a pattern.” And usually when I think about the things I struggle with, I like to keep them to myself. That’s my preference, actually, you know? Suffer and bring it to Jesus and you know, we’ll figure it out. But I really do think community actually matters. 

I remember talking to a group of women (I still meet with regularly 13 years later) and I remember telling them about 10 years ago, “I’m really struggling every winter. I watched my thoughts spiral out.” It looks like some form of depression is happening and some form of intense anxiety and it tends to let up around March or April, but it’s really bad. And it gets to the point where I’m actually concerned about my own wellbeing. I’m praying and I’m doing all these things. I’m not—I don’t think that’s enough. And I remember them saying, “we both will join you in praying over you, praying for protection, praying for wisdom, praying for insight, like, should you take meds? Should you go to therapy more? Like what are other things you should be doing to discern with you in this community of discernment?” 

But they also said that in many ways, they got to be the voice of God to me when I was having difficulty hearing God’s voice. So then they would come in, like next year. “Hey, hey, it’s November. I remember you said that winter is hard. How are you doing? Where are your thoughts? How much have your thoughts spiraled?” And to me, that’s not just being good friends psychologically, this is actually a prayer group where we were meeting, talking about things going on in our real lives. And they get to be to me the hands and feet of Jesus. To be able to say, “This is what’s going on and we don’t want you to bear this alone, and because you shared this with us, we won’t make you be the person who has to bring it up again. We remember that it’s November/December. We know it’s, you know, January/February. How can we carry this load with you practically, and not just like, bear one another’s burdens, in the biblical sense, that’s all theoretical.” I feel grateful for those types of experiences. 

Jared  

Wow, that’s a lovely way to wrap up in terms of a vision for how we can find support in the again, kind of when it comes back to attachment—not to generalize something that’s very specific—but having those voices in our head, that are countering the tape that’s running that may not be to our benefit.

Christin  

100%. And those women really are, they do become like a significant other, they become—those two women in particular, right? They are those strong, secure voices that are helping to flip the script for me.

Jared  

Excellent. Well, Christin, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Christin  

It’s been a privilege.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time

Pete  

With Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Alright, so Jared, talking about attachment theory and attachment styles is, I find very, very interesting. But I got to, it’s… I’m new to this. So [Laughs] just I mean, for the benefit of maybe the three other people who are as dumb as I am out there, just, you know, rehearse a little bit of what’s behind it, so we can talk more intelligently about it. 

Jared  

Yeah, I think it’d be good to review. And again, I’m no expert at this either. So I’m more just, you know, kind of replaying how I’m understanding what Christin is sharing. And that is, there were psychologists who understood how we interact with people in our life, primarily what’s called the primary attachment figure, the person that we kind of ascribe a lot of connection and meaning to, in a pre-verbal context, like before we can even talk. That—that relationship is really important for how we relate to other people later in our life, and how we relate to other people later in life based on that early connection, is the attachment style. Because what happens is that—that early relationship creates what Christin calls this Internal Working Model, like it’s the tape in our head that tells us whether we see ourselves as lovable, worthy, whole, secure, or unlovable, unworthy, unwhole. And I’m sure those are binaries that are on a spectrum, right? Like you, you can be somewhere in there. 

And then that manifests in these attachment styles. And so she talked about four different ones, but one is secure. So that is you know, primarily you view yourself as lovable, worthy, whole and so you’re kind of a contained unit. And so in relationship to another person, you’re not anxious or avoidant, there’s not a lot of emotional discomfort in that relationship, you’re sort of secure in that attachment, because you’re secure in yourself is how I would kind of frame that. 

And then there’s three insecure attachment styles, which are the disorganized fearful, which is kind of a combination of the others that it’s hard to really articulate at, I mean, at least I’m sure there, in the literature, maybe that there’s ways to articulate it. But the other two that I was more familiar with before going into this are the avoidant and the anxious. And the avoidant attachment style is, it’s better to say, “Well, I don’t need you,” kind of thing, or I run away from intimacy in these moments, because the attachment feels too uncomfortable, or it’s too, the potential for feeling unworthy and unlovable, to have that reinforced is too great and so I might as well not even go there, so I avoid that. 

And then the other is anxious or preoccupied, where you kind of need it so much that you’re going after it. And so the classic relational challenge with this is if you have someone who’s avoidant, and someone who’s anxious, you have like the pursuer, who is constantly like, we might call them quote, “needy,”—although it’s probably not the best way to say it—like needing of attention, needing to feel loved, needing to feel connected all the time. And the avoidant person is kind of like, this is too much, I feel smothered, I feel trapped. And so they’ll kind of run away and that just actually makes the anxious person more anxious, like they notch it up even more. And so then you go round and round in a cycle which can, you know, be a harmful pattern. So that’s kind of the overview, the summary from the episode that I would take.

Pete  

Jared  

Pete  

You know, like depending on maybe the phase of my life, where I was, and growing in areas over the years, you know, where maybe, you know, probably having a good nurturing mother and father, when I was young, probably did a lot because I never felt really—I never felt unworthy. I felt other things when I was young, like, I’m not, it’s not that I’m unworthy, but that I might not be able to do something. 

Jared  

Pete  

And I probably got that signal from somewhere, but that was maybe post-verbal. I don’t know if that’s pre-verbal. So. I think once we start verbalizing and thinking and analyzing and abstracting, you know, we can start putting these pieces together a little bit differently. But the model is great, you know, because those early years, people tell us, you know, they’re not “do whatever you want for the first six months.” No, they’re crucial, those first six months are, for children, to how human beings develop.

Jared  

And then Christin, you know, I would say, for me, I would be mostly probably secure. It feels weird saying that, because, but I think that’s probably true, as I reflected. If I have a tendency would be more toward the avoidant than anything. But I do think that, you know, Christin, one of the main reasons we had this conversation with Christin was, the interesting connection she makes with how that might affect our relationship to God. And that was helpful for me to think through, “Oh, I think I might have avoided a lot of the damaging aspects of evangelicalism in my experience.” Again, that’s not everybody’s experienced, but in mine, like, a lot of people have shared, the things that were hard for them, or harmful, or hurtful for them, didn’t affect me in the same way. 

And I wonder if it’s related to this, in that kind of having that secure attachment style, it wasn’t—that theological tradition or the way it was manifested in you know, my growing up, couldn’t really prey on my like insecurities, or the idea of being unlovable or unworthy or unwhole. If you already have a tendency to think that, then things like total depravity are going to like, they’re gonna reaffirm what you kind of already think about yourself. So you’re gonna be like, “Oh, yeah, exactly. I had this suspicion I was unlovable and now the person up front who has all the authority is telling me I’m unlovable, and then I just double down on it.” Where for me, I was like, “Oh, this is kind of clashing,” with actually how my intuition is guiding me about who I am and how I am in the world. And so I think that kind of protected me in some ways. I don’t know. How does this, as you’re hearing about it, and maybe new to you, how does it impact how you’re thinking about God or church or…?

Pete  

I mean, I think it might clarify some things for me that I’ve pondered over the years, but never really put language to it. But you know, the avoidant style. Well, that’s me too. You know, and I think—again, not not to defend myself for overly contextualizing this—but I think a lot of men [Chuckles] have trouble with intimacy. 

Jared  

Pete  

Right? That’s sort of like, I’ve heard this for many, many years and I think it’s true. And so that affects things like, you know, people say, being in God’s presence and prayer, for example, I’m just like, “I just want to sit on the couch and be left alone.” “Do you hate God?” “No, I just, I don’t know, I just, I don’t know.” 

You know? That kind of thing. And it’s, I would like to think that God understands our dysfunctional attachment styles, [Laughing] right? I’m not worried about what God is thinking or anything, but it does affect my willingness to even be alone with myself sometimes and my thoughts. I want to do something to move out of that uncomfortable space. So, and I’ve tried to think about where did that come from in my life? I don’t really know, and I don’t have to know. But it’s interesting to me, like, why did my personality develop the way that it did?

Jared  

Alright, well, I’m hoping you know, a lot of Faith for Normal People when we launched this was the hope to have us kind of be more real and have people on who can really talk about how these concepts play out in our emotional lives and relational lives. And while it’s uncomfortable for me, even sitting here, you know, kind of getting real.

Pete  

Jared  

I think it’s helpful. So I think we’ll have more of these conversations in the future.

Pete  

Yeah. And again, things that we might not feel comfortable with just conceptually, especially me, right? In this case, it’s like, “Oh, this is new. Oh, crap. Another thing to think about.” But hey, that’s why we’re here. You know, and we do the work. That’s one thing about having guests on that we do, we actually wound up doing the work as a result. 

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

See you, folks.

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.         

Pete  

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Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode if you email us at info@TheBibleForNormalPeople.com    

Outro  

You just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Prescott, Steven Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Jessica Shao, and Lauren O’Connell.   

Outro