A Shame-filled Attachment Style Spirituality teaches us that the best way to get close to God is to shame and blame ourselves for falling below the standard of perfection. We tell ourselves that if we could just be a little better, we could get close. But we can never quite transform enough, so if we can't become adequately holy, we can at least punish ourselves for not being good enough. We end up trying to get close by proving to God that we know how bad and unlovable we really are.
In childhood, if we get mixed messages about our parents’ feelings towards us, we can’t trust that they actually want closeness. One day they seem to love us, the next they seem annoyed with us, or outright hostile toward us. In the worst situations, we live with the threat of abuse and violence, even on the days when our parents tell us how much they adore us.
We take this to mean that there is something wrong with us, something that makes us undeserving of love and closeness. So we try to become a different person, someone our parents might love more. We can never quite make it there, so in a few different ways, we end up punishing ourselves for not being someone worthy of love. This looks like the kid that continually criticizes himself in his head before his parents get a chance to. If he can find all the faults with himself, he’ll be prepared for the shame that is waiting for him as he tries to get close to his parents.
In adulthood, this map makes relationships difficult to navigate. We desperately want closeness. We make our desire for connection clear to others, until our shame catches up with us, and we shut down or push others away, fearing they will see us for who we really are. We feel all alone in the world, yet terrified to let anyone close.
Researchers have called this style disorganized attachment or fearful attachment, because there’s no clear way to seek emotional safety in the relationship. We find ourselves all alone and scared, without a path to safety. I’ve decided to call this way of relating Shame-Filled Spirituality, because the foundation of this style is shame, the belief that I am not good enough to get love and belonging.
This dynamic can play out in our relationship with God. We try desperately to scrub ourselves clean because we want to get close to God. But when that doesn’t work, we try another method: we can at least hate the dirty parts of ourselves. Since there’s a repulsive part of us that keeps God away, we try to placate through showing that we really know how disgusting we are. We end up telling God that we completely understand why we don't deserve closeness.
Churches that constantly remind us how far we’ve fallen from God’s ideal often implicitly or explicitly promote shame in the pews. Rather than focusing on God, they focus more on humans and their sinfulness. In the US, this is common in the recent neo-Reformed movement, but the feeling of constant disapproval has also been felt in many Catholic churches as well, such as the often mentioned experience of “Catholic guilt.”
We regularly hear shame-filled messages in the church. We know that because of our sinful hearts, God is repulsed and finds us “thoroughly unpleasing when it comes to a personal relationship,” as John Piper puts it. [2] God only delights in us when we become someone slightly – or wholly – different. Piper continues, “God sees the incremental advances of our transformation by his Spirit and delights in them.” It sounds nice, but it requires us to continually advance forward, step-by-step, in order for us to get the delight that we so deeply desire. In Shame-Filled Spirituality, we can’t rest in our father’s arms covered in pig slop, but he does delight in us changing our attitude and going to put on some fresh clothes.
The “Prince of Preachers”, Charles Spurgeon, a revivalist in 19th century England, wrote, “I feel myself to be a lump of unworthiness, a mass of corruption, and a heap of sin,” referring to himself as “all rottenness, a dunghill of corruption, nothing better and a great deal worse.” [3]
Do we have to feel this way about ourselves before we can come to God?
Since it’s difficult for us to become a different, more lovable person, we resort to hating the person we are today, hoping God will see that at least we know we’ve fallen short. So throughout the day, we keep a list of all the things we’ve done wrong and how badly we’ve screwed up in response to God’s grace. In Shame-Filled Spirituality, feeling bad becomes a mark of closeness. President of the SBC, J.D. Grear has said “one of the surest signs that you’ve never met God is that you feel pretty good about yourself.”[4] This means either that getting close to God requires feeling bad about yourself first, or that getting close to God causes you to feel bad about yourself. With our attachment glasses on, we can see clearly that neither of these are a sign of a healthy parent-child dynamic.
“There is no reason why we should feel safe when God declares himself opposed to and angry with us.”
Shame-Filled Spirituality puts us in a terrible place where we actually feel better when we’re distant from God, and feel worse about ourselves when we’re close. Yet, we also need closeness, so we’re caught in a terrible dilemma. Though we long to draw near to God, as we come closer, we can only see disgust in the eyes of the Divine, a nettling feeling that we need to become a little bit better, a little holier if we're really going to be liked. And if that doesn’t work, we can acknowledge outright that we aren’t lovable and we don’t expect true closeness until we’ve completely changed.
In Shame-Filled Spirituality, there’s no immediate solution to get the closeness we need. We only find ourselves vacillating between judgmental nearness and lonely distance. We’ve completely lost the vision of a father who delights in us, and in so doing, also lost a vision of ourselves as children of God, dearly loved.
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[1] https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/what-made-it-okay-for-god-to-kill-women-and-children-in-the-old-testament
[2] https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/i-know-god-loves-me-but-does-he-like-me
[3] Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon, p 112, 93
[4] https://jdgreear.com/3-reasons-gods-holiness-terrifies-us/
[5] John Calvin's Commentaries On The Book Of Hosea, Calvin, 2012