photo by Annie Spratt
Shutdown attachment style spirituality is when we have a pattern of trying to stuff down our negative emotions to get close to God. It is based on the presumption that emotions like fear, sadness, pain and doubt, are incompatible with the life of faith. So we try as hard as we can not to feel these feelings, often using religious language, saying things like “God is in control, so why should I worry?” Shutting down uncomfortable feelings seems like the path to becoming a person who truly trusts God. We want to show God our best, while we deal with the more vulnerable parts of being human on our own, or better yet, pretend that they don’t exist.
Parents who struggle with managing their own internal world will often send subtle signals to their children that emotions are not welcome in the family. To get the closeness they need, the children learn to shut down their emotions, because they’ve learned that their feelings actually cause disconnection, since their parents either punish emotional expression or pull away from it. As long as they don’t share too much, they can keep the connection with their parents. In American society, this is much more likely with boys, who grow up to men who have learned their emotions will not be heard or embraced.
In reality, emotions are designed for connection. If you’ve seen Pixar’s movie Inside Out, you’ve learned about how an attempt to banish sadness overlooks its role in bringing others close: when we cry, it prompts our parents to scoop us up and give us kisses, respond with soothing tones, and hold us close. Without sadness, others wouldn’t know when to come close in our time of need. In fact, without sadness, we wouldn’t know ourselves when to reach out to others. But in a tragic turn of events, some children learn very early on that the emotions that God designed to bring us together actually drives their parents away. These children learn that when they cry, mom gets angry or dad gets uncomfortable. The best way to stay close is to lock their unsightly feelings in the basement.
If we learn that our parents are not comfortable with emotional closeness, we will walk a tightrope of getting close without getting too close. If we want to maintain connection, then our best strategy is to go in our room and play with Legos when we’re feeling like we might cry. We can’t risk the rejection that might come if we shed tears, so we manage our emotions ourselves and come back for closeness when we’ve regained composure. We can keep connection so long as we can demonstrate that we’re not “irrational” or “unreasonable” or “too emotional.”
Then, we grow into adults who keep others at a distance in order to keep them close, often confusing friends and partners, and ourselves. It’s a paradoxical strategy. From the outside it looks like we couldn't care less about closeness, but actually we’ve learned that if we get too close, we will be pushed away. So the distance becomes a way of maintaining closeness. We avoid it at all costs, our bodies remembering on a non-verbal level that sharing emotions only resulted in rejection by those we love most. We keep connected by shutting down emotions that might threaten closeness.
We often feel unpracticed and incompetent in the world of connecting emotionally, so we’re more comfortable with activities that are shoulder-to-shoulder than face-to-face. We’d rather go on a bike ride with a friend than sit down for a cup of coffee. We’ll show up for a building project, but feel anxious when faced with unstructured social times. Church potlucks are the worst, we much prefer a cookout where at least we can manage the grill.
Lack of Emotional Intensity
The liturgy of mainline traditions can harbor shutdown spirituality because weekly worship does not necessarily require emotional engagement, in contrast to evangelical churches that put a prime emphasis on emotional worship. White Baptists churches also often create a culture that allows us to escape into our heads, through pursuing theological knowledge, while escaping the emotions of our hearts.
Researchers have called this style of relating anxious-avoidant attachment or dismissive attachment because we dismiss both our emotions and our need for others, and end up avoiding closeness. I’ve chosen to use the term Shutdown Spirituality, because when it comes to God, we end up shutting down our emotions in order to keep closeness, as well as using faith to shut down our emotions.
The church sends many messages - sometimes subtle, sometimes not - that our emotions are not welcome. Kathleen Norris writes in The Cloister Walk, that she was raised to believe she had to “be dressed up, both inwardly and outwardly, to meet God,” to “be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in his church.” The fruit of the Spirit, feelings like joy and peace, indicate a true connection with God. Therefore, fear, doubt and pain indicate there’s something wrong with our faith.
“Lack of joy is a sin for the child of God.”
Some of us have been taught that the very existence of certain feelings are an affront to God. Francis Chan writes, “worry implies that we don't quite trust God,” suggesting that “Both worry and stress reek of arrogance.” [2] We don’t want to drive God away with our foul-smelling emotions, so we come up with a handful of tools to manage them on our own. Usually this looks like some version of either working extra hard to conjure up feelings of peace and joy, or shutting down altogether, so you don't feel anxious or worried or happy or anything at all. We’ll do whatever we can to keep God close, so we try to subdue our emotions under our control, something we were never capable of in the first place. We stuff our feelings in the basement, hoping that they won’t drive God away.
Shutdown Spirituality makes no room for needs or emotions. We get going on on God’s cosmic mission, and forsake anything that gets in the way. It seems God cares more about fame and glory than our emotions and experience. God begins to feel like a parent who doesn’t notice we’ve had a bad day at school because they're so busy trying to get their own work done. Just as those with a shutdown style will choose completing a task over connecting emotionally, we find a similar portrayal of a God whose primary goal is to accomplish the task of spreading the gospel or establishing a Kingdom, without concern for feelings. In this paradigm, we’ve lost a vision for a God who both invites us into self-sacrificial living and knows us so well that the hair on our heads is counted. Instead, God becomes a cosmic boss who cares more about the cause than being in communion together.
In Shutdown Spirituality we find ways to connect with our faith community that side-steps emotions. We volunteer to organize meal trains or set up for services. We lead a small group, and get knee deep in content in a way that crowds out any room for the more personal parts of the community. We are participating best we can, all the while ensuring things don’t get too intimate.
So our relationship with God can never be the refuge we need because we can’t risk crawling into the lap of a God who will find our worry to be offensive. We can't take the chance of sharing our pain or doubt or fear lest it lead to terrifying disconnection, so we squash our feelings down, hoping it will keep God close. But over time, without the ability to go to God with our stress, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel authentically connected spiritually, or to others in our community. Our practices of Shutdown Spirituality leaves us starved for the true connection we need.
Listen to Amy and I discuss this spiritual attachment style on the Attached to the Invisible podcast.
Interested in joining a community that engages and learns about attachment to God and secure spiritual practices? Find out more information about my patreon Secure Spirituality Community.
Notes:
[1] Anxious For Nothing, 2006
[2] Crazy Love, p. 44, 2013