How Attachment Wounds Shape the Way You Love—and Pray
Episode Notes
What if the way you pray has more to do with your attachment patterns than you realize?
In this episode, Dr. Alison shares how her own prayer life changed as she became more securely attached—and the surprising shift that she didn’t understand at first. We’ll look at what attachment theory can teach us about the way we experience closeness, why deeply feeling or anxiously attached parts of us may equate intensity with love, and how healing can lead to a steadier, more integrated way of relating—with other people and with God.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why intensity can feel like closeness—even when it isn’t security
- What attachment research reveals about why some relationships feel so consuming
- The subtle shifts that happen as your attachment system begins to heal
- What securely attached people do differently in close relationships
- A simple practice for building greater trust from the inside out
More Resources:
With every purchase of Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, you’ll get exclusive access to her Soul Tending Video Library, including “Boundaries for the Deeply Feeling Woman” and her masterclass “Healing the Wounds That Still Shape You.”
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
I had become less emotionally intense with God my prayers got quieter calmer and less emotionally
fraught And if I'm honest, at first I read that as a problem. It felt strange to me because for
most of my life, I had assumed that intensity was the measure of closeness.
In a way, I put all of my inner drama, all the intensity, all my emotional needs,
all of my fears and insecurities into my relationship with God. And that pattern wasn't entirely
healthy. I was hiding certain wounds instead of healing them. And God,
in his goodness, let that pattern. rise to the surface because the very thing I was using God to
avoid was the thing he wanted to heal.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I'm so
thrilled to be here with you this week. It's been such a treat over these past few weeks to
interact more with so many of you over email. I think because of the book launch and because of all
the workshops and webinars, we've just had more opportunity to engage. And I've heard from so many
of you just such encouraging reports about what the podcast has meant to you.
how you listen to it, whether you're walking your dogs or driving to work and how I've sort of been
a companion to you in those moments. And it's meant a lot to me. It's made me feel more connected
to this community. I try to picture the different people who are showing up here. I have a sense of
so many of us. A lot of us are dealing with a lot of the same things. I know if you're here
listening that we would no doubt have a lot to connect on in real life.
And so it's just been such a treat to have those. back and forth with so many of you.
As you can imagine, the process of launching a book into the world can stir up a lot of parts of my
inner system, not just because it's a lot of work, it certainly is that, but also just because
there's a certain vulnerability in putting a book out into the world, especially this one. carries
a lot of my own story, different aspects of my life and my own areas of wounding and healing that I
haven't shared before. So there's a lot going on internally. And it's just been a lot to me to have
more of that engagement with so many of you. I'm so grateful that you're here. This is such a kind
community. It doesn't surprise me, but whenever I have a chance to interact with one of you in real
life or online or in email, I'm just so aware of what a kind community this is.
And I'm grateful to get to be here with you. And over the past few weeks, even months,
as there's been more noise inside, as there's been more bids for connection coming from my inner
world, you'll know what I mean if you've started reading those first three chapters. I've been
practicing what I teach in the book, which is... rhythm of recognize and return,
this rhythm of recognizing I feel anxious or a part of me feels exposed, return.
I am loved even here. And it's been holding me,
that practice. And it's why I wanted to share with you today my own journey through prayer,
what prayer has looked for. One more time. And it's why I wanted to share with you this week,
some of my own journey through attachment and prayer. What my own journey through connecting with
God, connecting with the source, divine love, that secure base that we have in God who loves us
through prayer, what that journey has been like for me.
And I want to explore with you. And I want to explore with you something today that I find really
fascinating. It's something I've noticed in my own life. It's something I've studied the research
on, and it's something I've noticed in years of sitting with other people. And it's this connection
between our attachment and our relationship with God and how those two things go together.
Here's the observation from my own life.
I had become less emotionally intense with God. My prayers got quieter,
calmer, and less emotionally fraught. And if I'm honest, at first I read that as a problem.
It felt strange to me because for most of my life, I'd assumed that intensity was the measure.
of closeness. The more I felt, the more anguished my heart was, the closer I believed I was to
someone, including God. So when the intensity began to fade, my first interpretation was of loss.
Maybe I was drifting. Maybe something was missing. I now think that interpretation was almost
exactly And understanding attachment, the nature of secure attachment,
is what turned this understanding around for me. It helped me understand this distinct way that I
began to connect with God that felt different than ways I'd felt in the past. So that's where we're
going to go today, to understand what's happening inside us psychologically when we pray.
Because prayer at its heart is how we connect with God. It's fundamentally relational.
And we say this, but do we really feel this? Our relationship with God is on some level a
relationship like any other relationship we have. God is a person.
He's a being with whom we relate. And that relationship bears the marks of how we learn to do
relationships. in the first place. And if you think about how you communicate with your loved ones,
with a spouse or a significant other or your children or your parents or family members,
right? That communication tells you a lot about the relationship and prayer is often the mechanism
by which we're communicating. We're showing the nature of our relationship. with god and if prayer
is how we reach out for closeness with god it makes sense that it would shift as we grow more
securely connected with god when i look back on my early twenties i had a very real encounter with
God. And it came on the heels of an experience of intimacy within a human relationship I had in
college. I actually unpacked the link between intimacy, between that real emotional mutuality and
experiencing God's love in the secure soul. There's such a fascinating neurobiology to that. But
that early season in my young adult life of feeling that love with Jesus was profoundly real.
It's like all the neural pathways. all the synopses in my brain were firing for the first time. And
it really did feel like that experience of first love when the sky seems bluer and the grass seems
greener and everything in the world just seems brighter, right? And your burdens seem lighter. That
first encounter with Jesus felt like that to me. And discovering God as this new,
safe attachment figure settled a lot of parts of my soul. A lot of my old insecurities went away.
A lot of my own...-doubt lightened. But at the same time,
during the years that followed, I leaned so heavily into God that I didn't simultaneously learn how
to build secure connections with other people. In a way, I put all of my inner drama,
all the intensity, all my emotional needs, all of my fears and insecurities into my relationship
with God. And I want to be clear. This was really sincere. This was really real. I would cry out my
worries and my burdens to God with real fervor on my knees in tears, begging God.
I'd stay up all night. I'd tuck away and escape into quiet places away from my roommates,
away from my friends, away from the college campus, and then later away from seminary. You know, I
would often go off by myself and God met me. in those places. God answered so many of those
prayers. And I still pray that way at times. I still go off by myself to spend that deep time with
God. But something else also was going on during this time.
There was a pattern, one that in hindsight, I can see the shape of much more clearly than I could
at the time. It became a little bit of what you might think of as a Jesus and me kind of faith,
just me alone with God, often in crisis, often in emotional distress,
I'd go to that intense private place, pour everything out to God, journal it out,
pray it out, cry it out to God, leave it there, and then put myself together and step back.
into my life with other people, where I was in control, where I was over-functioning,
where I didn't have needs, where I wasn't vulnerable because I didn't know how to trust other
people. I didn't know how to form those two-way bonds with other people. And that pattern wasn't
entirely healthy. I was hiding certain wounds instead of healing them. And God,
in his goodness, let that pattern rise to the surface because the very thing I was using God to
avoid was the thing he wanted to heal. And that story of how things broke open,
how my soul split open, that's in the book, in The Secure Soul. It was a painful season of
splitting open and having to change. What I want to share with you today is that as I began to do
that healing, something confusing started to happen in my relationship with God.
As I began to experience healthy, steadier security within my own soul and with other people,
this happened over the following years. It didn't happen overnight. And in particular, as I met my
now husband and over even the first decade or so of working out the kinks of intimacy and marriage,
Prayer started to feel less like begging and more like taking a walk.
It began to feel less like a crisis and more like a regular conversation.
It began to feel simpler, steadier, less emotionally fraught.
For a long time, that shift felt uncomfortable to me, almost like a distance. As happy as I was,
some part of me experienced that lack of emotional intensity as a loss. And I began to worry that I
was losing my connection with God, even as I was gaining healthier connections with other people.
If intensity had always been my measure of closeness, then less intensity had to mean less
closeness. That was the way that a part of me understood relational math.
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I remember telling a spiritual director during that time, I feel like I'm living my life out loud
now. I'm not tucking my deepest feelings into a prayer closet and then performing.
the rest of my life. I'm just living my one life out loud with God in it. And I said it almost as a
confession. It was confusing to me, like something might be wrong with me. Like what had happened
to that sacred place where I'd go into the intensity of my private world with God and then come out
and live a separate life. It felt almost dishonoring to that season of my relationship with God.
And I want to name something here because this is such a normal. experience,
and it's not often talked about, as we get healthier, as we get healthier,
as we become more secure, as we heal some of those inner attachment wounds, a part of us can miss
or even long for the old intensity, even the old drama of unhealthy ways of relating to other
people or the urgency or the emotional fraughtness that we bring into our relationship with God.
And that doesn't mean that the old way was better. It means it was familiar.
Our nervous systems are wired to read familiarity as safety.
It's what we know, even what we know might actually have been. distressing. And emotional
intensity, whether with God or with another person, has a spike to it. It carries a rush.
It's got a hit of adrenaline or of dopamine, and it can feel good initially, even when the
aftermath of it, even if the hangover is harsh and feels empty or void,
as it often does. And steadiness, emotional regulation,
calm. in a relationship, whether with another person or with God, doesn't carry that same spike,
that same rush of adrenaline. That kind of healthier way of being with someone or with God can
register at first as less intense and therefore can feel initially like it's distance.
And I see this all the time, especially in the young people I talk to and mentor. It's the steady,
secure relationship that feels almost not dramatic enough. parts of you.
It feels too normal. It almost feels too healthy. And because healthy feels unfamiliar,
sometimes it doesn't feel like enough. It's confusing to the parts of us that are maybe still
struggling to understand what safe connection feels like. And we can know with our minds that the
drama, that the ups and downs, that the push and pull, that the intensity of the back and forth
wasn't maybe good for us. But still some parts of us want that rush of connection.
And I just, my heart breaks a little when I watch someone move toward that kind of intensity
instead of toward the real satisfying safety we find. insecure love.
What I couldn't see yet in my own relationship with God was that calm wasn't distance.
It was a new way of being with myself and with God.
And to understand why I want to talk to you about the framework that's helped me understand these
development in our relationships, both with God and with other people. These insights that I'm
sharing with you today come straight out of attachment theory. This is a body of research that goes
all the way back to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and they studied how the bonds, the earliest
bonds that we had with caregivers shaped the way we see closeness for the rest of our lives.
If you think of a child with a caregiver, A child who is anxiously attached.
Researchers have studied this extensively. A child who hasn't learned that a caretaker is a
reliable, trustworthy presence. These children show much more activation.
They cry louder. They escalate more quickly. They protest more frequently.
They reach more often. They cling more. They check more. And this is despite accounting for
personality. Differences, right? Children who haven't learned in their bodies that there's a safe,
trustworthy, anchoring presence who will be there when they call,
they reach harder. They reach more anxiously. It's an intelligent adaptation,
right? If your experience was that connection had to be summoned, that it wasn't always available
to you, then intensity becomes the strategy. Attention isn't something you can count on quietly in
the background. It's something you work up enough feeling to secure. And I want to add a layer here
to the conversation because this will matter to a lot of you listening. This pattern doesn't come
only from neglect or chaos or abuse in your home. Many of you were highly sensitive children,
high empaths, children that are wired to attune to your surrounding by nature.
You're maybe children with a finely tuned nervous system who felt things so deeply.
We talked about this in last night's webinar. And even with good enough parents, loving parents,
those big inner experiences often went unseen or intended.
Not because... was a big dramatic failure but because a sensitive child can feel a flood on the
inside that no one around them really registers and a child who feels intensely but isn't reliably
met in that intensity can learn the same lesson as a child in a harsher home that you have to feel
loudly to be reached to be honored to be seen to be witnessed in the truth of what you're feeling
This isn't about blaming anyone around you. It's about understanding the equation your body may
have learned early on. And this helped me understand something about myself. I was a deeply feeling
child who also didn't want to be a bother. I learned to stay invisible.
I saw what happened to people around me who were too loud or asked too much, and it wasn't always
good.
quiet. And when I discovered this secure base and a God who was always present,
who always loved me, a part of me ran to that God with everything I'd been keeping quiet.
And as I think about my own experience, I see myself in that deeply feeling child,
a child with big feelings who also learned to stay invisible. And when I had that encounter with
Jesus in my early twenties, when I, tasted, I glimpsed that incredible feeling of a secure figure,
a secure base who's always there for me. A part of me just ran to God with all of those emotions
because I had learned that those emotions weren't safe to bring to other people. Again,
I bless that younger version of me for the safety that I found in God. But I also,
with the benefit of hindsight, can see how I put everything into God without balancing out the
other pieces of the equation of learning how to honor what I felt within myself and also learning
to find safe people to be with me in the reality of my embodied life.
That Jesus and me in a bubble kind of faith was actually a sort of escape hatch where parts of me
thought the real relating was happening. And don't get me wrong. My faith was real.
This was real. I encountered God in a profoundly real way that I'll never minimize or disparage.
God met me where I was in that season, but God also wanted me to become a whole.
person. He didn't want me to hide behind him as an escape hatch. He wanted me to learn how to take
some of that security I'd found in him and recreate it in my own soul and in my relationships with
other people. And this is what I think is so interesting because you can see this same kind of
confusion in first experiences of romantic love, especially when there's been attachment wounds.
There's a reason we call it falling. In love, the intensity, the highs and lows can feel like the
deepest closeness you've ever known. And for parts of you, it may well be. But relationship
research complicates this story of what's happening. Work and research by people like John Gottman
on what actually predicts lasting, secure partnership points somewhere much less glamorous.
It's not the couples with the most dramatic intensity who tend to thrive over time. It's the ones
marked by steadiness, responsiveness, repair after conflict,
a felt sense of the other person as a reliable base. Psychotherapist Harville Hendricks makes a
related point. He talks about how we're often drawn most intensely to partners who reactivate our
oldest attachment wounds, precisely because those parts of us are aching to be met.
So the intensity is real and it's formative. But it isn't the same thing as security.
A relationship can light up every neural pathway, every part of you that longs for closeness and
still not be the steady companionship a life is built on. Which brings me to the part of this
theory of studying it and writing about it that reframed everything for me. The part of it I wish
I'd understood sooner. If you think about a secure child with a...
parent, a good enough parent, what they talk about in psychology. Not a perfect parent, but a
parent who is attuned enough. These securely attached children look less engaged with the parent.
They play across the room. They don't cling. They don't constantly check.
They don't feel more distressed to keep the connection alive. And it's not because this child loves
less or feels less. It's the opposite. This child trusts the bond so completely that she no longer
has to monitor it constantly. And researchers call this the secure base.
The child explores freely precisely because she knows the caregiver,
the one who loves her, is there. The child who seems less preoccupied with her parent is often the
one most secure in relationship. So when I think about the calm I'd been confused by in my
relationship with God, the quiet I didn't understand that I worried might be a sign of drifting.
In retrospect, I recognize that was the same.
quiet, earned security. It was the end of hypervigilance,
the constant low-grade monitoring of whether the connection was still there.
It was a whole body embracing of God is already with me.
No matter what I am feeling, God is already here. That sentence started to characterize my prayers.
It wasn't a distant soul talking. It was the signal of a soul beginning to rest moment by moment,
breath by breath in secure love.
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Now, when I look back, I'm aware that that shift that I began to notice happened through countless
small movements over time. And there are a lot of reasons why it happened.
Part of it was learning to pay attention to the different movements within my own soul to stop
compartmentalizing emotions over here that were only for God and the over-functioning over here
that was only for other people.
feeling in my soul throughout moments of the day and bringing those different movements to God.
And part of it happened right alongside my human relationships getting healthier. I met and dated
and married my now husband and I started learning for the first time really how to brave a hard
conversation, how to stay present to myself when I felt misunderstood,
how to let someone stay present to me when I was messy or emotional,
how to be seen in my vulnerabilities in all of who I am and not disappear or hide,
how to walk through the ordinary rhythm of day-to-day life alongside another person.
And all of those things taken together over time led to a different way of being,
not only with other people and with myself, but also with God.
Now, there's a deeper principle underneath all of this. It's one I lay out in The Secure Soul.
But the idea is this. Love, our experience of love,
didn't begin with belief. It began with relationship.
Long before you form any ideas about God or what love is like, your body is already learning what
love feels like, whether love is safe. available, responsive, or fragile.
And those early experiences of love settle first, not in your thoughts, not in your mind,
not in your beliefs, but in your nervous system. Trust is formed in the body long before belief
takes shape in the mind. You can know God loves you on one hand and not feel that love reaching the
deepest recesses of your soul. The same thing is true with our human relationships.
You can know a friend loves you. You can know a spouse loves you and not feel that love in your
body. There's some really fascinating research in psychology that explains how this might be
happening. The research shows that human beings are born with an innate relationship. capacity for
spiritual awareness a felt sense of connection to something larger than ourselves but like any
capacity this capacity for connection doesn't develop in a vacuum it's strengthened or constricted
by the relational world you're raised in which means the way you first learn to reach for the
people who held you early on becomes quietly the template for how you learn to reach for God.
So as I slowly learned in my own life through imperfect, ordinary human love and through learning
to witness and hold my own self, I learned that I could be fully seen and still be loved and that
felt sense of connection grew. And it flowed straight into how I related to God in a real sense my
marriage and my own inner work were discipling. my prayer life what i'd once called living out loud
wasn't a loss of spiritual intensity it was integration it was the closing of that split between
the private place where the real feelings lived and the performance everywhere else so what does
this look like practically every day i think of it as a simple rhythm i lay this out of the secure
soul a practice of recognize and return It's countless moments throughout the day of recognizing
I'm anxious, recognizing I'm tired, recognizing I want to please someone right now,
and learning to return in that moment always to love. I am loved even here.
It's retraining your nervous system, your mind, and your heart to recognize there is a secure base
of love always. available to you in every moment, in every breath,
no matter what you're feeling, no matter what is happening around you or inside of you. You can
train your nervous system to return to that love countless times. throughout the day.
I still have those scheduled times with God when I wake up in the morning and I meet with him or
before I go to bed at night and I kneel before my bed and talk to God about what's on my mind. But
no longer is it that divide of talking to God and then going through the rest of my day.
Instead, I'm learning to Practice the presence of God as Brother Lawrence taught us in the
beautiful book by the same name. As I recognize the movements within me throughout every moment of
the day. Recognize I'm nervous.
Let me just say the refrain there. Recognize I'm anxious. Return I'm loved.
Recognize I'm lonely. Return. I am loved. Recognize I'm irritated.
Return. I am loved even here. And what I've noticed as I practice this rhythm is there's a
different connotation, a different calmness in my relationship with God.
My connection with God feels more grown up. It feels more steady and less fraught.
It feels like the steady ground that's holding me throughout the ups and downs. And I realize what
is happening with God is what happens in any long committed relationship over time,
the kind that changes and grows and deepens over years and yet at its core doesn't change at all.
It's that strange feeling of looking at the person beside you, whether it's a spouse or a child or
a friend or a loved one, someone you've known for decades and realizing that everything has changed
between you and yet nothing has changed. It's recognizing that experience of withness,
someone over and over, ordinary day after ordinary day, who stays near you and is in it with you.
And this is who God is, not a distant figure you have to summon with enough intensity,
but a steady. loving withness, a witness, a constant presence in the crisis and in the calm,
someone who is with you when your prayers are loud and fervent or whether they've gone quiet,
a presence that is close as your next breath.
That kind of presence is the ground a secure soul grows from. So I want you to hear me say this
today, wherever you find yourself as you're listening, whether God feels close, Whether you're
crying out with everything in you or sitting in a strange, unfamiliar kind of quiet.
Whether you're in a fervent season or a grieving season, whether your prayers are pouring out in
tears or coming out in a single sentence whispered over the kitchen sink or maybe not coming out at
all right now. None of it is wasted. All of it matters.
God's loving presence is. It is a fact. It is with you. And every season you're reaching for,
God has been part of how you're being formed. What if the answer to the question of closeness with
God is to recognize that God's loving presence has been with you all along?
Every time you return to a hurting part of yourself with compassion, you're strengthening new
pathways for closeness.
receiving the love of another person someone who sees you and stays your nervous system learns that
closeness can be safe every time you offer a prayer to god a new attachment tether is formed every
time you risk receiving the love of another person someone who sees you and stays your nervous
system learns that closeness can be safe and over time these new pathways grow stronger than the
old ones what once felt like a wall of disconnection becomes a bridge of trust So again,
wherever you find yourself today, know this, God is the loving presence who does not leave.
In the beginning, he didn't love from afar. He walked with humanity in the cool of the day.
Love was known as a presence. It was felt in the body. It was sensed in nearness, in the ordinary
of the day. As I've learned to sense God's presence with me in the ordinary movements of the day,
it doesn't mean that God hadn't been there on all the other days. Every part of me was finally
learning what it feels like to trust the fullness of love. Every part of your soul is slowly being
rewired for love. And the very places in you that ache the most become the soil most fertile to
receive it. This is the sacred work of learning to return again and again.
To love. It's my belief that every part of your soul is slowly being rewired for love.
And this is the very reason I tried to lay out my story and this practice in the secure soul.
This isn't abstract work and it isn't peripheral to our spiritual lives. To me,
this is the sacred work of learning to return again and again. If this episode resonated with you,
I hope you'll pick up a copy of my new book, The Secure Soul. It will be out in your hands on
Tuesday. I packed it with tips and insights from my work as a psychologist of religion, where I've
studied the way our attachment wounds shape our relationships, not only with other people, but with
God. And I also packed it with stories from my own real... And when you order now,
you can still get all of the pre-order bonuses, including my soul-tending video library, which
includes the Healing the Wounds Within Masterclass, the recording of my live soul-tending
roundtable, and the Boundaries for the Deeply Feeling Woman Workshop. You can order the book
anywhere books are sold and find everything over at thesecuresoulbook.com. Thank you for joining
me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to
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with a steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God,
you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.