Ep 20: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

As we continue to learn the practice of Heartview, let’s talk about our relationships!

God has placed us into four relationships: with Him, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture.  Navigating these relationships can be tricky, but what if there is more going on in our hearts than we initially realize?  What if our origin stories have a large impact on our ability to develop and maintain healthy relationships today – including how we relate to God?  Brian explores the fascinating world of Attachment Theory and how it serves as a signpost back to the desires and ideas in our hearts.  

 

TRANSCRIPTION

Ep 20: Attachment Styles and Spiritual Formation

Intro: Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: journeying together into deep discipleship.

This is Episode 20: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

We’re exploring the Discipleship Dilemma – the fact that our growing to become more like Jesus depends on our knowing Him better, but also on our knowing ourselves better.  Many of us aren’t taught or trained to explore our own hearts, which is the dilemma.  This season, we’re working through a process of learning how to discern our hearts and the hearts of others.

A Brief Review

We call this process “Heartview,” and it’s how we find out what’s really going on in our hearts by exploring the Eight Indicators we all have, with God and trusted friends.  Though our hearts are mysterious and at times deceptive, they express their deepest longings, desires, and ideas through these Eight Indicators.

If we’re willing to dig into our indicators, we become more attuned to our hearts.  And, over time, we learn to become more attuned to other people’s hearts, so that we may love and serve them better. 

Here’s what A.W. Tozer said:

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”[1]

I’m just putting a name to this “self-probing” that Tozer describes: Heartview. I made the word up.

The Bible routinely advises us to search our hearts, discern our hearts, or uncover our hearts.  One of the most famous Psalms, Psalm 139, starts and ends with David’s prayer that God would search him. That He would search his heart. 

                  “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts;

                  And see if there be any hurtful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.”[2]

Proverbs 20:5 says that a man of understanding draws out the purposes in the deep well of his heart. 

We can’t effectively engage in Heartview on our own. We’re too good at lying and deceiving ourselves.  We desperately need God’s embrace and His presence, and He often works through other people in our lives (trusted friends, spouses, and family members who seek our goodness) who are willing to dig deep with us as we journey to become more like Christ.   

Here are the Eight Heartview Indicators: our thoughts, emotions, health, behaviors, relationships, words, time, and money.  You can find these as a visual aid on the Resources tab at www.soilandroots.org. 

Here in Season 2, we’re just introducing the Eight Indicators. Each of them is a vast field of study in its own right.  My hope is that, even as we just scratch the surface of the Indicators, we begin to train ourselves to pay attention to them. 

What do my thought patterns uncover about the ideas and desires in my heart?  Do my thought patterns align with ideas of darkness or ideas of light?  Do I think of myself and others the way that God thinks of me and others?

How about my feelings?  Jesus is a deeply emotional man, and He expressed those emotions freely.  Do I allow myself to feel?  Do my emotions reflect Jesus’ emotions?  Am I sad about the things that make Jesus sad? Am I angry about the things that make Jesus angry?  Am I emotionally numb, or do my emotions get out of control?  What does that tell me about my heart?

What does my health tell me about my heart? Is my heart revealing something about its wounds, its longings, its joys, through my health?

And in the last episode, we explored behaviors.  What do our repeated actions tell us about the ideas in our hearts? Not just our so-called spiritual behaviors, such as prayer and Bible reading, but our repeated actions towards ourselves, our loved ones, God, strangers, and our role as stewards of creation and culture.  Do our behaviors uncover the heart of someone whose identity is wrapped up in God or something else?  Do we behave like works of a divine artist, unique creations of infinite value?  Do we behave like people with extraordinary purpose? 

And that brings us to our fifth Heartview Indicator – Relationships.  What do our relationships tell us about the hidden ideas and desires in our hearts?

Relationships 

God has placed us in four relationships: with Him, with other people, with ourselves, and with creation and culture. All four were broken and corrupted by the fall in Genesis 3. But Jesus is redeeming all things, and as citizens of His Kingdom, we have the honor of working with Him as He restores our relationships. 

The way we form and cultivate these relationships tells us a ton about what’s going on in our hearts.  It’s a wonderfully fascinating Indicator.

Because the topic is so broad, I’m just going to focus on one or two points today.

The Importance of Story in Discipleship

Our hearts are most supple when we’re children, so our origin stories have a profound impact on how our ideas and desires are formed.  To understand why and how we relate to God, other people, and ourselves the way we do today, it’s vital that we understand our families of origin and our personal stories all the way back to our beginning. 

Modern Christianity doesn’t always make this connection between our stories and our heart formation, and it doesn’t always want to. I’m not sure how many sermons you’ve heard about how your first few years of life dramatically impact your relationship with God, others, yourself, and your role as a ruler of creation and culture today.

The impact of our origin stories tends to be relegated to Christian counseling and therapy, whereas our church life tends to be focused on theology and worship experience.

May I politely suggest there isn’t nearly as much difference between therapy and theology as we might assume?  If God knows the number of hairs on our heads, He certainly knows our stories better than we do. He is deeply interested in helping us explore how our stories impact our relationships.  That’s a path towards healing. 

Attachment Theory

We’re going to explore the world of Attachment today, and I’m leaning very heavily on the work of Adam Young, the host of a podcast called The Place We Find Ourselves.  He often refers to Dan Allender and the Allender Center up in Seattle, and some of their work focuses on attachment as well.

Young provides a great introduction and definition of “attachment.”

“Neuroscientist Curt Thompson is fond of saying that when each one of us comes into the world, we enter it looking for someone looking for us.  Our deepest desire and highest hope is that there will be someone looking for us, and that this person will always be there for us and will pursue our hearts with a genuine desire to truly know us.  Our greatest need as human beings it to be known, and to know that the person who knows us will be there for us.”[3]

Young goes on to write, “God’s intention for humanity is not that we would merely live our lives next to each other, but that we would be increasingly known by one another. Attachment is the emotional bond that you develop with a person who will be there for you, and who truly knows you.”[4]

Infants, babies, and children have incredibly supple hearts, and because we’re all born with this deep desire to be known, we inherently seek healthy attachment even in our earliest moments.  

Young continues, “As a child, your most important attachment was your connection with your primary caregiver.  This one relationship shaped your brain more than anything else.”[5]

His point is that our primary initial relationships have a profound impact on the rest of our lives: on our emotions and how we express them, on our awareness of ourselves and others, and on our ability to deal with evil. And yes, on our spiritual formation, our discipleship.

And we develop certain styles of relating to other people based on how our parents related to us.

And, in fact, our attachment style impacts our relationship with God. 

Attachment Styles

Young lists six things every child needs from their parent or caregiver:

1. Attunement: Was your primary caregiver in tune with your heart, or were they constantly distracted by their own issues?

2. Responsiveness

3. Engagement: Did your parent want to truly know you?

4. The ability to help you regulate how you handle distress

5. The ability of your caregiver to handle your strong emotions: Could they handle your anger, your sadness, your goofiness, your joy?

6. Willingness to repair relational damage: Did your parents initiate forgiveness and repentance when they wronged you?[6]

The presence or absence of these six things results in an attachment style that may characterize us for the rest of our lives.  Most people who study attachment note four different styles: Healthy, Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized. 

If your origin story involves a caregiver who was consistently attuned to you, chances are you attach with others and God in a healthy manner today.  Your attachment style is healthy. Another name for it is Secure Attachment. 

On the other end of the spectrum is the disorganized attachment style.  We aren’t going to focus on that one today, but a disorganized attachment style normally results from a family of substantial harm and abuse.  The child experiences such trauma in the home, they grow up without any anchor or stability in relationships, and their hearts become broken. They appear highly dysfunctional and chaotic in their interactions with others as they grow up. 

Let’s look at the other two attachment styles: Avoidant and Ambivalent. 

Avoidant Attachment

In describing what causes avoidant or ambivalent attachment, Curt Thompson wrote this, “We can grow up in homes in which the food finds the table, the money finds the college funds, and the family even finds church each Sunday; but somehow our hearts remain undiscovered by the two people we most need to know – our parents.”[7]

If the child doesn’t experience these six things she needs as a child, she’ll probably develop either an Avoidant attachment style or an Ambivalent attachment style.  She isn’t conscious of it, and it isn’t her fault.  Her tender, young heart is forced to adapt to a situation that isn’t healthy or secure, even though it looks healthy and secure from the outside.  Her toddler’s heart does what it must to survive. 

Back to Adam Young.  He says that someone with an avoidant attachment style relates like this:

·      She feels comfortable with distance and separation

·      She enjoys relationships at times, but never really needs others

·      She focuses on the cerebral and the analytical in order to avoid the pain of missed emotional connections with others

·      She can recall facts about her life, but has great difficulty remembering memories of family experiences where there was authentic emotional engagement

·      She may idealize her parents

·      She minimizes or downplays hurtful experiences

·      She believes that family life has little to no effect on how she developed

·      And she insists that the past has little to no effect and influence on her life.[8]

These are all strong signs of avoidant attachment. In effect, a young child who grows up with parents who will not or cannot know the child and aren’t attuned to the child will unconsciously shut down their heart.  To protect themselves from future harm, the child’s heart simply refuses to engage.  Again, this doesn’t happen consciously, and it isn’t the child’s fault. 

Someone who is avoidantly attached doesn’t really have dreams or big ideas; the possibility of failure is too much to handle.  They have some friends, but not close friends. They may not even know what a close friend is supposed to look like.  They may be married, but intimacy and oneness are things they struggle with. 

And they have a hard time relating to or hearing from God.  After all, if her heart was formed to believe no one wanted to know her when she was a child, why would God want to know her now? She may be a faithful Christian. She sings the right worship songs and does all the right Bible studies.  And yet her heart remains numb.  Inside, she wonders why so many people seem to walk so closely with Jesus, but she can’t. 

And so, she assumes something is wrong with her.  She may not consciously say it, but she thinks of God as somewhat distant.  That He may be angry with her or that He disapproves of her.  That’s not what she reads in her Bible, but it’s the idea her heart embraces.  After all, her friends hear from God. He seems to speak to their hearts; He encourages them and whispers words of grace to their spirits.  But she doesn’t hear from God apart from encouraging verses in the Bible.  That only reinforces the idea that she is somehow faulty. 

Ambivalent Attachment

Let’s take a look at ambivalent attachment. 

Adam Young says that someone who is ambivalently attached suffers from an inner franticness. This child may have experienced some of the six things every child needs from their parents, but the care was erratic, unpredictable, and unreliable.  The child’s heart learns very quickly that mom and dad cannot be relied upon for consistent care.  His heart realizes that his parents have other priorities, and they drift in and out of a desire to know their own child. 

So, his heart isn’t sure what to do, and this causes anxiety and uncertainty.  And he will often become hyper-attuned to his parents. He responds to his parents’ emotional needs instead of the other way around. 

Young lists the following characteristics of someone who is ambivalently attached:

·      He has difficulty regulating anxiety

·      He often experiences intense emotions

·      He feels frantic inside as he struggles to find relief

·      He believes that unless he dramatically expresses pain, no one will respond

·      He is plagued by a deep-seated fear that he is going to be rejected or abandoned, and that makes it difficult to trust anyone.  He needs constant proof and validation that he is loved.

·      He is always watchful for relational disruptions and has a deep need for resolution

·      He feels that he is too needy, and he doesn’t deserve to be loved the way he needs

·      He suffers from self-criticism, insecurity, and a sense that something is always wrong with him

·      He relies heavily on others to validate his worth, often seeking approval and reassurance from others

·      He assumes the role of a pursuer in his relationships.[9]

We sometimes think the word “ambivalent” means that someone doesn’t care.  But that isn’t correct. It means being confronted with too many messages or contradictions and not knowing what to do.  It’s like the proverbial “deer in the headlights.” 

If we break the word down, “ambi” means “both” and “valent” means “to be strong.”  So, to be ambivalent is to be caught between two or more strong things.

Someone who is ambivalently attached doesn’t really know what to expect from relationships and is deeply insecure about most of them.  They can also be easy marks for narcissists and other predatory personalities outside and inside the church.  Because someone with an ambivalent attachment is constantly searching for affirmation and security, a predatory person will quickly identify them and give them exactly what they want… until their usefulness has dried up.

A person with ambivalent attachment is unsure about his earthly relationships but may also be insecure and anxious about his relationship with God.  Does God love him based on how he performs, based on how many Christian things He does?  This isn’t what he reads in Scripture, but his heart struggles to relate to God as a loving Father, someone who wants to be known and to have an intimate, secure relationship with us.    

Scripture may make him nervous.  The parable of the talents (we’re rewarded based on what we do with the time and resources we have) seems to contradict the story of the thief on the cross (a man who enters Paradise with no real credentials besides recognizing Jesus for who He is just hours before he died).  Well, which is it?

How does an ambivalently attached person know that God really accepts him and truly wants to know him? He isn’t sure if anyone wants to truly know him.  When things go badly, is God punishing him?  When things go well, is there just some other shoe that God is waiting to drop?  He struggles to rest in the presence of God because his heart hasn’t been formed to rest. 

The person with avoidant attachment has a heart that assumes no one wants to know him, so it gives up, shuts down, and goes into a protective mode.

The person with ambivalent attachment has a heart that doesn’t know who wants to know her, and she lives a life of quiet, often unconscious, franticness, unsure who to trust, how to trust, or how to just be still. 

The formation of an avoidant or ambivalent attachment style in the human heart is not the person’s fault.  It’s unconscious and a result of growing up in a family of origin with its own deep challenges. But as we mature, we can identify the signs of each, and recognize that hurting people hurt people. People with an avoidant or ambivalent attachment style may end up treating others the way they were treated – even unconsciously.  

And that provides a wonderful opportunity to grow into more of who Jesus is, as we surrender our attachment style to Him and embrace a formative process of time, habit, intimacy, community, and instruction.

So there’s a brief introduction to attachment style, and identifying our attachment style can be a very positive step forward in our spiritual formation. It’s a great indicator of what’s going on in our hearts. 

If you talk with God and your close friends and discover you have a secure attachment style, fantastic.  But if you talk with God and your spouse and discover there are signs you have an avoidant or ambivalent attachment, that can be a difficult discovery.

Though it’s the necessary step in exploring our stories and then digging deeper to understand how our hearts may move toward secure attachment.  That opens up a world of possibilities, including a deeper, more trusted relationship with your spouse, your kids, perhaps your parents, and friends.  And it will most likely result in a deeper, more emotional, more intimate relationship with God.

Three Types of People

Besides attachment style, it’s also important to consider how Jesus related to different types of people. 

Adam Young and several others have noted that there are three major categories of people in the world: garden-variety sinners, wicked people, and evil people. These same categories apply to people outside and, yes, inside the church.

A garden-variety sinner is a person who goes about their lives, generally seeks the good of others, feels bad when they screw up, and tries to make things right.  They are repentant.

A wicked person is not some movie character who shows up with a broomstick and casts spells on people.  A wicked person is someone who refuses to repent. 

They may be the nicest people in the world, and they may say the right things, but at the end of the day, they refuse to turn from their sins.  They cast blame on others, and they bob and weave through difficult conversations.  They deflect, they triangulate.  Gaslighting may be in their toolbox.  They will strenuously avoid being seen as the bad guy.

In the church, these folks typically show up as genuine, heartfelt, and earnest.  They can be hard to spot. I’ve been fooled several times in my career.  But they target Christian communities because of the transparency and intimacy Christians try to embody.  That type of community feeds them.  

A wicked person can appear as a very mature, very loving Christian.  It takes time and some keen eyes and ears to uncover their true intentions. 

An evil person is a wicked person who intentionally seeks to harm others.  Not only are they secretly unrepentant, but they’ll also willfully inflict harm on others if it serves their purposes.

The point is that Jesus related to each group differently.  And so, if we want to become more like Jesus in our relationships, our hearts can learn to recognize each group and to wisely interact with them as Jesus did. 

Contrary to what shallow Christianity may assume, Jesus didn’t divulge Himself and His heart to every person He came across.  He related to the adulteress, the woman at the well, and to His disciples differently than He did with the Pharisees, the sneaky lawyers, or people attempting to exploit Him. 

You can see the same pattern in the lives of Peter and Paul in the Book of Acts.  They possessed a relational wisdom and judgment that we can learn from. 

As we evaluate who we are in relationships with, are we currently embroiled with someone who is wicked or evil?  Is there someone in your life who looks like a wonderful Christian on the surface, but whose words, emotions, and behaviors suggest they have ulterior motives?  Are they seeking your goodness, or are they seeking something else?

If we realize we have some wicked or maybe even evil people in our lives, are we relating to them differently? Are we taking our cues from Jesus?  Jesus invited everyone to follow Him, but He didn’t give His heart to everyone.  He was always in complete control of who He related to, and how He related to them.

Let’s Sum Up

We’ve touched on just two small pieces of what is an enormous and fascinating Heartview Indicator – Relationships. 

Can we identify our attachment style?  It normally takes some courage and support to determine whether we are avoidantly or ambivalently attached, but we go through this difficult process so we can learn to love better. To love more deeply, to increase our compassion. 

God wants us to rest in Him, but that’s pretty hard to do if our hearts weren’t formed to feel or to rest.  Any attachment style that isn’t secure means we have some dark ideas in our hearts, and they’re almost always Core Ideas of identity, value, power, purpose, and love.  If our attachment style indicates we have some wounds in our hearts, let’s meet God there and welcome His healing.

What about the people we relate to?  Are we attached in an unhealthy way to someone who is wicked or evil?  Again, they may be very nice people.  Wickedness often shows up as an Angel of Light. 

If we are in such a relationship, are we relating to them with the shrewdness and caution that Jesus modeled?  Or are we suffering in a relationship with someone who does not have our best interests at heart?  What does that tell us about the ideas and desires deep down in our soils?

How we relate to people and who we are in a relationship with are powerful, insightful indicators of what is going on in our hearts.  

But it’s not the only one, and next episode we’re going to tackle one of the most unpredictable and probably least reliable Heartview Indicators – the words we speak. 

Thanks for listening! 

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[1] Willard, D. (2002). Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (p. 100). NavPress.

[2] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Ps 139:23–24). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.

[3] https://adamyoungcounseling.com/free-documents/

[4] https://adamyoungcounseling.com/free-documents/

[5] https://adamyoungcounseling.com/free-documents/

[6] Young, A. (Creator). (2018, April 17). Why Your Family of Origin Impacts Your Life More Than Anything Else [Audio podcast episode]. The Place We Find Ourselves. https://theplacewefindourselves.libsyn.com/2-why-your-family-of-origin-impacts-your-life-more-than-anything-else

[7] Young, A. (Creator). (2018, April 17). Why Your Family of Origin Impacts Your Life More Than Anything Else [Audio podcast episode]. The Place We Find Ourselves. https://theplacewefindourselves.libsyn.com/2-why-your-family-of-origin-impacts-your-life-more-than-anything-else

[8] https://adamyoungcounseling.com/free-documents/

[9] https://adamyoungcounseling.com/free-documents/