Emotional Attachment Style From God and Your Parents

Written by: Matthew Sabatine

Image credits belong to: whoismargot | Pixabay

Emotions can be annoying when you are unable to identify them. When you are able to finally identify that you are “needy”, for example, that can make you assume you are weak. 

Growing up in the Church, I was not sure if God allowed me to feel very much, even though I often felt very intense, sentimental, resentful, and excited feelings. I was told that I should never worship my feelings. I was never sure what it meant to worship my feelings, but I often worried that my endless fixations on my emotions and their intensity was the dirty act of self-worship and idolatry (i.e., extreme reverence for something other than the God of the Bible). 

Grappling with depression, grief, and shame involves the kind of emotional intensity that seems to obstruct progress in the world. Perhaps many of us would like to argue that the world would be a better place without these emotions and that more logic will improve everything. 

Even though I am an atheist, I still think that our contempt toward these emotions can profoundly influence how we assume or imagine the God of the Bible to feel and think toward us. Ultimately, this is about how we judge ourselves through that man-invented phantom of the mind. 

“That’s because emotion is the very energy around which the brain organizes itself. Without emotion, life would come to a standstill. It is the means by which we experience and connect with God, others, and ourselves in the most basic way possible.”

Dr. Curt Thompson–Anatomy of the Soul, pg. 90

Dr. Thompson even says that emotions have great significance and value to God. God “experiences us through them.” 

“The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” (Genesis 6:6) 

Dr Thompson asks, "How do we feel as we reflect upon and connect with God's experience of pain and sorrow in light of his having made us? Such passages reflect how the people of God have experienced him over the centuries and illustrate how powerfully emotion links us to God." 

Well… if you ask me, this passage of Scripture reflects bizarre emotions from God. I often encountered this passage in Church and small group meetings. Many have contended with it throughout history. So, it is worthwhile to comment on it. 

Regret is a negative emotion that has led many to make difficult and irrational decisions. Regret implies a mistake that one wishes to undo. How am I supposed to feel about an all-knowing, all-powerful being’s negative emotion toward something for which he created and was directly responsible? I would never want to be the source of someone's regret, especially when that person has the power to eradicate me. And if I sincerely believed in the God of the Bible, I would feel unsafe. Perhaps that is what I felt as a young boy, reflecting on this story of God eradicating the human race because of all the relentless wickedness. 

Dr. Thompson makes an interesting point about attachment styles (i.e., how you relate to others in intimate relationships) in relation to the god of the Bible. 

A person’s ambivalent/anxious attachment style is traceable to a childhood during which the parent was inconsistent and intrusive. Sometimes the parent would engage with the child when the child preferred to be alone. Other times, the parent deprived the child of attention, comfort, and sensitivity when it was needed. The parent’s anxiety prevented him/her from properly reading and responding to the child, making the parent’s behavior unpredictable for the child, and then leading the child to conclude that the world is generally unsafe for his/her emotions. 

“Those with this attachment pattern filter the Bible through their own spiritual stories, making it likely that their actual, experienced sense of God will be understood in those emotional terms. When anxious, they will more likely sense God to be unpredictable and unreliable, with little sensitivity; their mental images and emotional sensations convey God’s intrusion into their lives and his displeasure with them. They comprehend with their left brains the ‘facts’ they read in the Bible that they are instructed to ‘take on faith’, but their right brains, due to lack of neural associations, may not incorporate the attendant emotional qualities associated with those facts.” (pg. 127)

Perhaps an ambivalent/anxious attachment style would explain my aversion to the God of the Bible as I find him to be ill-tempered, militant, and intrusive. Nahum 1:2-6 describes him as “jealous” and “wrathful”. He heaps vengeance on his opponents and refuses to vindicate the guilty. He displays his power through calamitous weather. Maybe it is just my ambivalent/anxious attachment speaking through me when I say this, but I think it is natural for anyone to flee from this god regardless of attachment style. 

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