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Transcript of Furnishing the Soul
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furnishing the soul:How Relational Connections Prepare Us for Spiritual Transformation
TODD W. HALL, PH.D.
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1
Table of Contents Furnishing the Soul Process ( page 2)
Introduction ( page 3)
Introduction to Section One: Five Big Ideas about Spirituality ( page 10)
Chapter One
Big Idea #1: Hard Wired to Connect ( page 11)
Chapter Two
Big Idea #2: Unthought Knowns:
We Know More Than We Can Say ( page 32)
Chapter Three
Big Idea #3: Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters ( page 54)
Chapter Four
Big Idea #4: Tipping Points in Spiritual Transformation ( page 84)
Chapter Five
Big Idea #5: Furnishing the Soul for Spiritual Transformation ( page 98)
Epilogue: Mystery, Brokenness and the Goodness of God ( page 138)
Section Two: Individual Report
Section Three: Soul Projects
FURNISHING THE SOUL
Copyright © 2006 Todd W. Hall Ph.D.
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INTRODUCTION:FURNISHING THE SOUL
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I want to invite you to engage in an intensely personal journey—a journey
in which God is shaping and molding you in unique and particular ways
so that the love of Christ will be yours, so that you will embody His love
more and more as you live out your days here on this earth. God has called us to a lifelong
journey of being transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ, each in our own unique
way. “For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his
Son.” (Romans 8:29a). This is the process of spiritual transformation. Put differently, it is
the Holy Spirit enabled process of transforming the core of who we are—our soul or inner
being—into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
A good portion of my days are spent trying to help other Christians in this process
in various contexts, and in some cases the context involves an intense, intentional focus
on spiritual growth through psychotherapy. Being with others in their growth process has
changed me in ways beyond what I can express in words. I count it a tremendous privilege
to journey alongside others in their spiritual growth process. I find the process to be full of
meaning, and I believe this reflects the very nature of our triune, relational God, and how
we as humans image, or reflect His nature. My own journey of spiritual transformation
continues as well, with fits and starts, times of joy, and times of sorrow and despair, times
when I feel God’s pleasure and see real change in my soul, and times when I can’t believe
I’m revisiting the same issue for the millionth time, and yet starting to accept and even
embrace my brokenness. From my experience in my own life, and in journeying alongside
others in their growth processes, I have come to see that this process—the daily grind of
our spiritual journey is at times very difficult, painful, tiring, confusing, and long. And
yet, becoming who God created us to be, and doing this in communion with God, is thevery stuff of life—of spiritual vitality. It is the process through which we become fully
alive and experience God’s pleasure. Becoming like Christ so that we embody His love is
what we really seek in misguided ways through all our spiritual short cuts. It is what we
long for in the deepest places in our soul.
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You may come to this Furnishing the Soul Pack (FS Pack) on a spiritual high,
experiencing God’s love in deeper and more profound ways than you ever have in the
past. You may feel God’s presence and sense His direction for your life. Maybe God has
blessed you recently with some relationships that are becoming very meaningful. Maybe
He has spoken to you in a very personal way recently and you are riding the wave of God’s
presence. Or, perhaps you feel stagnant, like you are just going through the motions with
God. Sometimes it seems like God is there, you get a glimpse of Him, and then, poof , He’s
gone—nowhere to be found. Life may feel like a bunch of Thursdays all strung together,
and you are not sure where God is or where you are; which way is up, spiritually speaking.
Or, maybe you feel despondent; perhaps you can’t remember the last time God showed up
in your life, and you feel like you are ready to give up. You may be desperately hurting and
wondering where God is in all of it. “How could God have possibly allowed this to happen
in my life, and how can He possibly bring good out of it?” you may be asking yourself.
“And even if He can bring good out of it, is it really worth it? Isn’t there another road to
this destination?” Surely God has the latest GPS system and can help you find the quickest
and easiest route there. Is all the pain and confusion really necessary? Or, you may be
shaking your fist at God. You may not be on speaking terms with Him right now. Perhaps
you sought out God, and now it’s His turn. And you’re waiting….. Or maybe God did show
up in your life, but you didn’t like it. Maybe a loved one died, or you lost a friendship, or
a romantic relationship didn’t work out, ….yet again, or your family just fell apart and is
broken seemingly beyond repair.
When things are not firing on all cylinders spiritually, Christians often feel like
there is something fundamentally wrong with them. “Everyone at church is smiling, sowhat’s wrong with me?” you might be asking yourself. You may feel like you missed a turn
somewhere and nobody told you about it, but of course, you feel that you should have seen
it coming. It might boil down to a feeling that you are not trying hard enough, or you’re
just not smart enough or good enough to grasp how this whole faith thing works. Wherever
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you find yourself in your journey with God, I hope and pray that as you engage your heart
before God in working through the FS Pack, you will be encouraged that you are not alone.
And I hope you will see—at least get a glimpse—that though you may not fully understand
them, there are reasons for your experiences—that they are understandable and a natural
part of human experience.
As we will see, some of our experiences in our relationship with God are shaped
by the important relationships in our lives. Some of our experiences can be understood in
light of the ways God works in our lives, although we will never fully grasp the mystery of
how God works in our hearts. It turns out, because God made us hard wired to connect
relationally, we cannot directly change our own character—our soul—by ourselves. We
are profoundly dependent on God and others to help us transform into the likeness of
Christ. What we can do, however, is furnish our soul with relational connections that
prepare us for transformation, and then wait on God to bring about the change. In spite of,
and in light of, all the varied reasons for where you are with God right now, I hope as you
process various aspects of your relationship with God in this workbook, you will come to
know in a deeper way that God is passionately committed to transforming you into Christ’s
image, and that, as Paul prayed for the Ephesians, “… your roots go down deep into the soil
of God’s marvelous love. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people
should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is.” (Ephesians 3:17-
19)
With this in mind, let me orient you as to the goal of the FS Pack. My hope and
prayer is that the FS Pack will help you process your feedback on a deeper level. The FS
Pack is divided into three sections. Section one presents five big ideas about relationalspirituality. Relational spirituality is the model on which the Spiritual Transformation
Inventory (STI) is based, and the five big ideas will provide you with the conceptual
background to help you understand your individual feedback and action steps. Section
two provides your individualized spiritual transformation action steps, and section three
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you may have as you work through the Furnishing the Soul Process; and 2) what the
FS Pack is not intended to do. First, the entire Furnishing the Soul process, including
the STI feedback and soul projects, is designed to open your soul before God. Stated
differently, it is designed to bring to light your gut-level beliefs and values. This can be an
uncomfortable and messy process. There may be aspects of your feedback that bring to the
surface painful experiences, or aspects of yourself you do not like. This is not easy, but it
is critical to the spiritual transformation process. You may feel that some of the feedback
(particularly feedback indicating struggles in certain areas) is not accurate, or is overstated.
This certainly may be true. Your scores (percentile ranks, which represent the percentage
of people in a similar group that scored below you) provide a baseline reference point in
the context of a group of similar people. No test or score should ever presume to fully
“capture” something so complex as your spiritual development. Rather, the scores provide
a foothold—a meaningful jumping off point—for reflection and conversation with God. If
you find yourself wrestling with negative feedback, I would encourage you to bring these
experiences before God with an open heart. Ask God to reveal anything in your heart He
wants you to see and work on. Certainly some aspects of the feedback will feel less relevant
and accurate than others. If you find yourself dismissing some or all of the feedback, it
will be important to explore and understand the meaning of your responses. The important
thing is to reflect on your feedback , and your responses to the feedback , with an open heart
before God.
Second, the point of this whole process is not to “arrive” at a certain score, or to
compare yourself to others. If you find yourself comparing yourself to others or feeling
bad about your scores, there are reasons for this and it will be important to explore andunderstand the meaning of this dynamic as well. This may provide a significant opportunity
for grace and healing. In addition, the point is not to necessarily increase your score in a
certain area over time. As we will discuss in section one, transformation does not occur
in an orderly manner that translates into steadily increasing scores. This kind of change
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typically occurs in a seemingly erratic way that is not predictable, so it is important to
understand the meaning underlying your scores. For some people, becoming aware of their
brokenness in certain areas may lead to lower scores, but this may well represent growth.
It is my hope and prayer that working through the Furnishing the Soul Process will
start or strengthen a lifelong rhythm of furnishing your soul in ways that will continuously
prepare you to experience the depth of Christ’s love for you and to glorify God as you co-
labor in His Kingdom.
Blessings on your journey with God!
-Todd W. Hall
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SECTION ONE:
FIVE BIG IDEAS
ABOUT RELATIONAL
SPIRITUALITY
10
S piritual transformation—how people change and grow to become
healthy, mature human beings living life with and for God—is complex
stuff. In fact, the human brain is said to be the most complex organism
in the universe with an estimated one hundred billion neurons and one million billion neural
connections!1 And the human heart or mind may well be more complex than the brain. We
are indeed, as the Psalmist tells us, fearfully and wonderfully made. To try to capture the
breadth and complexity of the processes involved in spiritual growth in such a short space
would be impossible (even if we could fully understand it). However, in my experience, I
have encountered a significant amount of misunderstanding among Christians about how
the spiritual transformation process works, and does not work. It is important to understand
some basic principles about how this process works, so that you can furnish your soul in
a way that prepares you for spiritual transformation. Section one (Chapters 1-5) outlines
five “big ideas” that comprise a relational spirituality model of spiritual transformation. I
hope this brief overview will provide you a road map of sorts to help you understand and
process your experiences as you engage in the soul projects. Each soul project in section
three incorporates a set of questions that tie in directly with these big ideas.
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CHAPTER ONE BIG IDEA #1
HARD WIRED TO CONNECT
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Picture a mother and her baby face to face, looking at each other.
The mother makes a “kissy-face.” The baby responds by drawing
his lips in, making a sober-looking face. The mother then widens
her mouth into a slight smile, and her baby relaxes his mouth. Both mother and baby then
join each other in a slight smile. Then the mother and baby both widen their smile, until
they are beaming at each other, smiling from ear-to-ear . The entire interchange takes
less than three seconds, yet a basic, but deep communication has taken place. This basic
form of communication is called “protoconversation,” and it is the foundation of all human
communication.
A close-up analysis of these “conversations” shows that they are highly synchronized,
the mother and baby performing an interpersonal duet. Just as two people dancing in synch
with each other gracefully coordinate their every move, mother and baby precisely time the
start, end, and pauses in their “talk,” each coordinating their behavior with the timing of
the other in an intricate emotional dance. The language used in protoconversation is not
words, but emotions. These emotions are communicated through facial expressions, touch,
and tone of voice. The amazing thing we have learned from neuroscience is that these
interpersonal duets are made possible by a direct brain-to-brain link between mother and
baby. The interpersonal duet causes a neural duet between two brains, suggesting that the
very hard wiring of our brains is designed to connect.
In this chapter, we will consider how God created us as “hard wired to connect.” The
Bible establishes a broad framework for this concept. Likewise, contemporary research from
several fields is converging on a relational view of human development, and fleshing out
our biblical understanding of how profoundly relational we are. This scientific convergenceis nothing short of a relational revolution in our understanding of human nature. The most
fundamental revelation of the relational revolution: God hard wired our brains—and our
souls—for relationships.
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Let’s take a brief tour of several windows into how we are hard wired to connect.
First, we will consider a broad strokes biblical framework for the relational nature of our
souls. Next, we will explore three facets of the “relational brain”: how the brain is dependent
on attachment relationships to develop properly, how we catch others’ emotions, and how
the expression of our genes is dependent on attachment relationships. Following this, we
will consider infant research suggesting that infants are profoundly relational from day one,
and even in utero! We will conclude this chapter with a review of research suggesting that
the brain is hard wired to connect to spiritual meaning—what has been referred to as the
“spiritualization of attachment.”2 The relational revolution that has emerged has profound
implications for understanding and fostering spiritual transformation, and the “hard wired
to connect” nature of our souls is the foundation on which the revolution is built.
THE HARD WIRED TO CONNECT SOUL: A BIBLICAL
FRAMEWORK
God in His Goodness, chose to create us in His image (Gen 1:26), so we know that
our humanness somehow reflects God’s nature. While there are undoubtedly different
facets to how we reflect God’s nature, it seems clear that a fundamental aspect of this is
that we are relational creatures. God Himself—the One who’s image we bear—exists as
the three persons in the Trinity, and yet all three persons of the Godhead somehow exist in
perfect harmony as one essence. While it is very difficult for us to wrap our brains around
this concept, the basic idea is clear: God is relational in His very essence. And so it makes
sense that the way we reflect God’s image is in our relationality.
Second, when we look at what the Bible says about the end goal of spiritual
transformation—what we should be striving towards—it also points toward a relational view
of human nature. When a Pharisee asked Jesus which is the most important commandment,
Jesus summarized the end goal of spiritual growth in this way: “You must love the Lord
your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest
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commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt
22:37-39, NLT). Love is all about relationships, the way we relate to others, and the way we
relate, Jesus made clear, stems from our hearts (Matt 12:34-35). This is a biblical term that
basically means the center of the inner person. Our hearts go much deeper than just our
behavior, our will, or our conscious head knowledge. We were designed by God to connect
relationally through love, and to grow in this capacity throughout our lives.
THE RELATIONAL BRAIN
Several lines of research are converging in suggesting an amazing new perspective
on how the brain functions—in short, that the brain is dependent on relationships to develop
properly and to organize itself. The evidence from these studies has led to a new paradigm
of development suggesting that our neural connections synchronize with our relational
connections in an intricate dance, hard wiring our relational experiences into our brain
circuits.3
ATTACHMENT R ELATIONSHIPS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRAIN
Travel with me back to 1947 to a foundling home in Britain. The hallways are busy
with the hustle and bustle of nurses and staff as they attend to the children who have been
placed in their care. There is a large room, full of young children, mostly under the age of
three. Cribs and beds line the room, and toys are scattered throughout. A twelve-month
old boy sits in the corner staring into space, rocking back and forth rhythmically. A two
year-old girl on the other side of the room is crying loudly, but intermittently. Just when
you think she has calmed down, she bursts into tears again, startling you. Several other
children are playing quietly on the floor, each in their own private world. Another has just
watched his parents leave, and he is screaming and pounding on the door. You notice a
little girl in a crib and you walk over to her. She stares straight ahead with a blank, yet
desperate stare. The look on her face tells you she wants to cry, yet she is beyond the hope
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that brings tears. She has not seen her parents for an entire year.
This, sadly, was the typical scenario in foundling homes in Britain and North America
in the 1940s and 50s. These children’s physical needs were met, but their emotional needs
for relational connection were not. What caused things to go drastically wrong is that
nurses were not assigned to take care of individual children, so the children were not able to
develop a stable attachment to a specific caregiver. An attachment relationship is a particular
kind of relationship—a deep connection between a caregiver (or “attachment figure” such
as a parent) and carereceiver. Attachment figures provide—to varying degrees—a haven
of safety in times of distress, and a secure base from which to explore the world. Overall,
they provide children a sense of felt security about themselves and their worlds. Our sense
of felt security comes only from the specific people to whom we are attached.
Any parent has experienced this. When a young child gets hurt physically or
emotionally, they don’t run to any random adult for comfort. They run to mommy or
daddy, or some other attachment figure. No one else will do. To be attached means that
you are “spoken for” by your attachment figure(s). It means someone in this world has
signed up to look out for you; to always be for you.
The children in these foundling homes were not spoken for. There was no one
to specifically and consistently care for them; no specific person they could turn to for
comfort. As a result, they literally withered away, and 10 to 20 percent of these children
died. The cause of death? “Failure to thrive”—loss of the most important person in their
lives.4 In the words of an 18th century Spanish Bishop, “In the orphanage the child becomes
sad, and many of them die of sadness.”5
The children who didn’t die all experienced severe loss. They went through threeclear stages of grief.6 First, they protested loudly, desperately and angrily demanding that
their mothers return. After a period of time, they transitioned into despair. A look of
desparate longing was written on their faces, the hope that their mothers would ever return
slipping out of reach. At some point, when all hope of seeing their mothers again seemed
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to have disappeared, the infants became detached from all human connection. At first, the
staff thought this was a good sign, because the infants became more sociable, and seemed
happier. Things were more pleasant on the wards. But when their parents did eventually
return, the children treated them as complete strangers, only being interested in the things
their parents had brought them. It became clear that something was very wrong with these
children. It was like an internal switch for connection had been turned off. They had lost
the ability to form close relationships, and this would cause profound difficulties throughout
their lives. Many parents became exasperated that, years later, their children still could not
express affection toward them. Something in their souls had been permanently damaged.
How did this happen?
Neuroscience has taught us that the physical brain structures that process our
relational experiences (e.g., a part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex located
between the cortex and subcortex) are dependent on relational experiences with attachment
figures in order to grow and develop in a healthy manner. Neuroscientists refer to these
parts of the brain as “experience-dependent.” For example, when a mother and baby gaze at
each other, or engage in “protoconversation,” it stimulates the growth of the orbital frontal
cortex (OFC). It turns out that these early relational experiences with caregivers (or lack
thereof) are literally imprinted into infants’ brain circuits.
In the case of the children in the foundling homes, they had very few interactions
with an attachment figure, stunting the development of the brain circuits necessary for
processing emotions and interpersonal experiences. Many of these children got to the point
that they were not able to process, or take in, love. They didn’t have the brain equipment
necessary to do this. In short, love fosters the brain conditions necessary to take in more
love. What makes this even more significant is that these brain circuits go through a growthspurt in the first two years, so relational experiences in the first two years have far-reaching
and long-lasting relational and spiritual effects. This is really quite amazing when you stop
and think about it. God made our brains such that we need healthy attachment relationships
in order for them to grow and develop.
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CATCHING EMOTIONS
I remember walking out of my office one afternoon to get a client in the waiting
room. We walked back to my office. In our usual routine, she glanced at me as she walked
by me to sit down, while I stood by the door waiting to close it. When our eyes met in
that momentary glance and I saw the look on her face, my stomach tightened. A deep
feeling of uneasiness hit me like a lightning bolt. As I sat down, tuning into my experience
while looking at her, a feeling of utter sadness came over me. I would find out moments
later that her relationship with her boyfriend had ended, reverberating a deep loss she had
experienced in childhood.
When I saw my client’s face in that first moment, the expression on her face
traveled through my thalamus, where all sensory information enters the brain, to my visual
cortex, then to my amygdala, which is responsible for extracting the emotional meaning
of a nonverbal message (all in a matter of milliseconds). Instead of alerting brain circuits
that process verbal information, my amygdala then mimicked my client’s emotions in my
own body. This “low road” brain circuit does not communicate directly with the parts
of the brain that process verbal and logical information (the “high road”). The way we
register what someone else is feeling is that our brains create the same feeling in us. In
this way, we “catch” others feelings. This is how I knew what my client was feeling from
a mere momentary glance. I didn’t logically deduce it. I felt it in my body and subjective
experience. Scientists refer to this as “emotional contagion.” The fact that we can catch
others’ emotions so easily suggests that our brains are hard wired to connect us to others
in a direct brain-to-brain, emotion-to-emotion way.
Whenever we look at a photograph of a face that displays a strong emotion, our facialmuscles automatically mirror the expression of the face in the photograph. For example,
in a clever study, people were shown angry and happy faces while their facial expressions
were monitored by miniature electrodes. The angry and happy faces were shown very
rapidly (30 milliseconds) and in between a set of neutral faces, so the participants had no
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clue that they had seen the angry and happy faces. Despite this lack of awareness, they
displayed distinct facial muscle reactions corresponding to the angry and happy faces. This
facial mirroring happens below the radar of our awareness. When we automatically imitate
others’ expressions, it stimulates in us the feelings we display on our faces, connecting us
to the other person whom we are imitating. Recreating the inner “psychophysiological”
state of another person helps us to participate in their subjective experience.
When people look at a face displaying a strong emotion, they not only imitate the
facial expression, but their brains imitate the same neural firing pattern. For example, when
people looked at a photograph of a frightened face while being monitored by an fMRI, their
brains acted like they were afraid. Likewise, when you watch a movie, your brain acts like
you are experiencing what you are watching. This sense of “realness” is what draws us into
movies, and it is orchestrated by our brains. These are examples of how we catch others’
emotions, and this process operates across the entire spectrum of feelings.
Picture a man and woman at a coffee shop (pick your favorite), deeply engrossed
in conversation. As the man is talking, he leans to the side, and the woman then leans
in the same direction. As the man leans back and relaxes after finishing a point, the
woman visibly relaxes. The woman then begins talking. She becomes more intense, leans
forward, and moves her hand up and down to emphasize her point. As she does this, the
man leans forward, as if to listen more intently. They are synchronized. Each person’s
movements dance with the speech of the other, creating an implicit interpersonal harmony
that is regulated by their brains outside of awareness in a matter of milliseconds. This
subjective sense of synchronization creates a shared positive feeling between two people—
a fundamental aspect of “rapport.” Interpersonal synchrony, then, reveals another way our brains are hard wired to catch others’ emotions.
When we catch others’ feelings like this, it creates a brain-to-brain bridge, a “neural
WiFi” connection. The two brains become functionally linked—or “coupled”—crossing
the barrier of skin-and-skull. Each brain is then online with respect to the other as they
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actively communicate and mutually influence each other. In a very real sense, two brains
become “wirelessly” united, forming a feedback loop in which the output of one brain
becomes the input of the other, and vice versa. In neural WiFi, two brains function as one,
each having access to the resources of the other—the information it processes, and the
way it processes information. In short, this brain linkup creates a brain circuit across two
brains. Our brains, then, are designed to literally connect with other brains.
ATTACHMENT R ELATIONSHIPS AND THE EXPRESSION OR OUR GENES
You are probably familiar with the “nature-nurture” debate that poses two mutually
exclusive factors that determine our development. One view holds that nature, or our genetic
makeup, largely determines how our brains develop, and consequently, how every aspect of
our personhood develops. The other view, nurture, holds that our life experiences play the
major role in determining who we will become. In recent years, this debate has completely
imploded. Contemporary scientists consider this dichotomy to be an unhelpful way to
think about our development. Part of the reason for this is that our relational connections
lay down our brain circuits that process emotions, meaning, and relationships. This means
we cannot neatly separate nature from nurture like we once thought we could.
There is now convincing scientific evidence that development results from the
product of experience and our unfolding genetic potential, which sheds more light on our
relational nature.7 Genes have two main functions: 1) they provide a filter for information
that is to be passed down to the next generation; and 2) they have a “transcription” function
that determines when genes are expressed through the process of protein synthesis, based
on the information encoded within their DNA. It turns out that transcription is directly
influenced by relational experiences, which means that relationships influence how neurons
connect with one another forming the neural networks, or circuits, that make up our brains.
Relational connections, then, directly influence the formation of new synaptic connections
in the brain, changes in the strength of neural connections, and the dissolution of neural
connections.8
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The Hardwired to Connect report by the Commission on Children at risk explain this
concept using a helpful analogy. If you think of genes as an alphabet from which “words”
are produced that represent the biochemical messengers of our nervous system, relational
experiences influence which letters are transcribed, how often they are transcribed, and
in what order they are transcribed, all of which determine the content of the biochemical
messages in our nervous system.9 In other words, relational connections influence the
way our genes are expressed, and the expression of our genes in turn changes the neural
networks in our brains. As we will see later, the physical structure of neural networks is
how our brains record or “remember” information.
A more specific window into this general concept is provided by research on
rhesus monkeys. These studies have shown that the way in which genes affect behavioral
outcomes depends significantly on social contexts. One study found that about 15 to 20
percent of rhesus monkeys seemed to carry a heritable trait of anxiety. In situations most
monkeys would experience as novel and interesting, these monkeys became very anxious.
In addition, they produced significantly higher levels of a “stress hormone” called cortisol.
However, when these “anxious” monkeys who are genetically “at risk” were placed under the
care of highly nurturing female monkeys, their anxiety disappeared! The improved social
environment seems to have buffered or removed the genetic vulnerability to anxiety.10
Other studies have shown even more amazing interactions between social context and
genetic vulnerability. For example, in some rhesus monkeys, variation in a gene associated
with the neurotransmitter serotonin seems to create in these monkeys a predisposition
toward aggression and poor impulse control. When these monkeys are raised in nurturing
environments, not only does their aggressive behavior disappear, but they actually thriveand climb near to the top of the rhesus monkey social ladder.11 This is an even more
powerful nature-nurture interaction, in which social experience doesn’t just dampen a
negative outcome; it actually transforms a genetic vulnerability into a positive behavioral
outcome.
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THE RELATIONAL INFANT
Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, was well-known
for saying “there is no such thing as a baby.” What he meant is that we really cannot
understand a baby apart from the baby-mother matrix. Just as there has been a revolution
in our understanding of the brain in recent decades, there has also been a revolution in our
understanding of infants. This revolution has borne out Winnicott’s maxim.
Developmental scientists used to think infants are basically passive and non-
relational. However, infant research in the last thirty years has taught us two broad
principles that paint a portrait of the infant as amazingly relational.12 First, we have learned
that infants’ internal processes influence, and are influenced by, relational interactions.
In other words, what happens inside infants’ subjective experience is impacted by what
happens between them and their relational partner. And what happens between the dyad
affects infants’ experience and ability to regulate their own states. Second, infants by
nature are anticipatory. They develop incredibly complex gut level models that govern their
expectations of how interactions with others will play out. Let’s consider each principle in
turn.
MUTUAL COORDINATION OF INNER AND R ELATIONAL STATES
If you watch a new mother with her baby for any length of time, you will see her
make all kinds of interesting and contorted faces at her newborn. Most parents will only
do this with their babies, because their babies make faces back, which creates a sense of
connection. When mother shows a look of surprise, her baby will raise her eyebrows in
a look of surprise. Most parents, when feeding their babies, open their mouths without
realizing it as they move the spoon full of food closer to their babies’ mouths. Babies
imitate their parents “open-mouth” expression, which facilitates the feeding process.
In fact, infants as young as 42 minutes can imitate and adult’s facial expression.13
Infants are able to sense a match between what they see on the adult’s face, and what they
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feel in their own faces. This is what infant researchers call “cross-modal matching.” This
means that infants can translate back and forth between information from the environment
(e.g., an adult’s facial expression) and information from their own bodies (e.g., the feeling
of making a certain facial expression). This is one way in which infants coordinate their
inner states with relational states, suggesting that infants come pre-wired for relationality.
Neuroscience has taught us that certain regions in each hemisphere of the adult
brain specialize in processing positive or negative emotions. In neuroscience parlance,
these brain circuits are “lateralized” for processing positive and negative emotions. It turns
out that by ten months, infants’ brains are likewise lateralized for positive and negative
emotion. For example, in one study, as an infant watched a video of a laughing actress, his
brain registered positive emotion (EEG activation of the left frontal lobe). As he watched a
video of a crying actress, his brain exhibited a pattern of negative emotion (EEG activation
of right frontal lobe).14 In this study, the infants did not have to match the partners’ facial
expression to be influenced by it. This suggests that simply perceiving emotion in another
creates a resonate emotional state in the infant.
We also see mutual coordination in the way infants respond to interactional events
with their mothers. Picture a mother playing peek-a-boo with her 12 month old baby.
She holds a pillow in front of her face, and then suddenly moves the pillow, exuberantly
exclaiming “peek-a-boo” as her gaze reunites with her baby’s. Her baby breaks into joyous
laughter at the sudden appearance of his mother. This is the way most securely attached
infants respond to some kind of positive interaction with their mothers—with positive
emotions. Not only that, but most normal infants in this scenario respond by showing a
“positive emotion” EEG pattern of left frontal lobe activation.
15
However, by 10 monthsof age, infants of depressed mothers show a very different response pattern. The same
peek-a-boo event triggers negative emotions, and a “negative-emotion” EEG pattern (right
frontal lobe activation) in these infants. These infants’ inner states are still coordinated
with relational events, but the way the coordination is organized is reversed from normal
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infants. However, this demonstrates from another vantage point the close linkage between
infants’ inner states and their dyadic interactions.
If you watch a mother and her baby during a face-to-face interaction, you will
notice that her baby will periodically look away for a few seconds, and then look back.
The mother, on the other hand, will look at her baby the entire time. This is very parallel
to what happens in psychotherapy. When I see clients, I tend to maintain eye contact
throughout the entire session. My clients regulate their level of contact by regulating their
eye contact with me. Infants do the same thing. They have full control over their gazing
behavior, and they actually regulate their heart rates by visually disengaging from their
mothers for brief periods of time. When their heart rate rises above its normal baseline,
they process less information from the environment. In order to regulate themselves and
decrease their arousal level, they look away from their mothers. After they look away for
five seconds, their heart rate returns to its baseline level, indicating that they can process
more information.16 In addition, by six months, infants of depressed mothers have elevated
heart rates and higher levels of a stress hormone called cortisol. These infants appear
to be in a chronic state of elevated arousal and distress. So we see that infants regulate
themselves through their social interactions, and that their arousal levels track with the
quality of their social interactions.
Infant research has taught us that infants have very sophisticated perceptions of
emotion expressed through voice and face. By six months, infants can tell the difference
between a rising pitch and a falling pitch, and they show a bias toward the positive, rising
pitch.17 By seven months in utero, infants’ facial muscles are almost fully developed. At
birth, they are almost on par with adults in their ability to move facial muscles. By sixmonths of age, infants can display the seven basic emotions of interest, joy, disgust, surprise,
distress, sadness, and anger. Their perception of facial emotion is so good that neonates
can discriminate between expressions of surprise, fear, and sadness on an adult’s face. Not
only that, but they mimic these expressions so well on their own faces that if you were
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watching, you would be able to guess which face they were mimicking.18
By ten months of age, infants actively seek out emotional information from their
caregivers to help them understand their environment. In a classic “visual cliff” experiment,
an interesting object was placed on the other side of what appeared to the infants to be a
cliff. They thought if they crossed the cliff (a glass table), they would fall off. If an
infant’s mother displayed a fearful facial expression, the infant didn’t cross. However, if
an infant’s mother smiled, the infant would cross the visual cliff. So infants naturally look
to interpersonal interactions to help them understand their environment and guide their
behavior.19
One of the fascinating ways that infant research has revealed the “relational infant”
is through close-up, frame-by-frame analyses of video clips of face-to-face play between
infants and their mothers and fathers. The goal in face to face play is for the baby and
caregiver to attend to one another and take delight in one another. This situation brings out
an infant’s strongest communication skills and provides an awe-inspiring window into what
Daniel Stern, a leading infant researcher, calls the “subtle instant-by-instant regulation of
social contact.”20
A five-week old infant, Elliott, is filmed with three different people for two minutes
each: his mother, a student, and the principle researcher of the study.21 In the first interaction
with his mother, his mother appears somewhat expressionless, a bit depressed. Elliott is
fussy and avoiding eye contact. The mother begins to shake Elliott, gently but rapidly.
The rapid rhythm upsets Elliott more and he is having trouble calming himself down—a
normal difficulty for his age. At some point, his mother begins to sing “Happy Birthday”
to him and for whatever reason, this seems to work. The moment she starts singing, yousee Elliott’s unfocused gaze shift to alert eye contact. This is the first time the mother has
helped Elliott regulate his emotions. However, eventually he loses interest, and she cannot
find another way to reengage him.
Next the student enters. She is very animated, but much more animated than Elliott.
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She is not tracking with his feelings. She has a wide smile, but Elliott doesn’t look happy.
He frowns and looks quite sober. The student appears to be out of synch with him. Then
she picks him up and sways rhythmically, which seems to help perk him up a bit. They
briefly engage with each other by making eye contact, but then the interaction falls apart
and Elliott begins to cry.
The researcher then enters and vocally matches the rhythm of Elliott’s cry. Then
she gradually slows down her vocals and lowers the volume, and Elliott immediately calms
down. He becomes alert and his gaze focuses. Then Elliott begins to look a bit sleepy, his
arousal level dipping too low. So the researcher provides a more animated facial expression,
but keeps the volume of her voice low in order to increase his arousal slightly, but also
soothe him. As Elliott begins to slip into a slumber, the researcher speeds up the rhythm
with her face, voice, and head. At this, Elliott engages visually with her, and becomes more
alert.
These three interactions illustrate Winnicott’s maxim “there is no such thing as a
baby.” The mother-partner unit, or system, includes Elliott’s ability to regulate his own
emotions, the various levels of attunement by each partner, and the dyad’s ability to navigate
the emotional terrain with whatever abilities Elliott brings to the table. They also illustrate
the transformation of the infant’s internal state, and that this is achieved in the context of
the ongoing, mutually coordinated relational process. The transformation of the infant’s
state turns out to be very important. It is through these split-second interchanges that the
infant learns what to expect in terms of how important interactions will play out. Let’s turn
now to evidence that infants develop complex expectations about interaction patterns.
EXPECTATIONS OF INTERACTION PATTERNS
Infants are amazing in their ability to develop complex expectation models about
various aspects of their environments, and to categorize information. This is not only true
of objects, but of social interactions as well. Many studies have confirmed this holds true
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in a laboratory setting, but there is good reason to believe that what holds true in the lab
also holds true in the real-life social world of the infant. First, social information is far
more salient, redundant, and capable of providing meaningful feedback than information
manipulated in a lab. Second, there is a good amount of direct evidence that infants
generalize relational patterns and develop expectations about relationships based on these
generalizations.
A basic prerequisite for developing such expectations is an infant’s ability to
distinguish mother from a stranger. Infant research has revealed that in the first 15 hours,
an infant knows her mother’s voice. Not only that, but a neonate prefers its mother’s smell
to a stranger’s smell, and prefers its mother’s face to that of a stranger. Researchers infer
this gut level knowledge is based on patterns in an infant’s responses that show a bias
toward his mother’s voice, smell, and face.22 Infants, then, can identify their caregivers in
various ways, which allows them to create expectations about interactions with them.
If a three month-old infant watches an event only twice, she will be able to figure
out whether it is likely to happen again, and develop a gut level set of rules that will shape
her expectations with regard to that event.23 Infant researchers call these gut level rule
sets “expectancy models,” or “schemas,” and they believe that expectancy models work in
the same way for social interactions as they do for non-social events. This process is so
foundational that the speed with which three to five-month old infants develop expectancy
models in general predicts their verbal intelligence at two to five years.
Another foundational component of expectancy models is the ability to categorize.
Researchers infer that infants are categorizing when they treat different entities as similar.
They are able to pick up on similarities and develop an average “prototype.” In the firstyear, infants can categorize objects based on sensorimotor information such as shape and
size. They can also classify concepts related to entities. For example, infants can classify
faces by gender at six months of age. Infants’ ability to categorize in general is the basis
for how they categorize expectations about how interactions typically proceed. Relational
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experiences are classified into categories by the end of the infant’s first year. I refer to
expectancy models about interactions as “attachment filters” in chapter three.
Infant researchers have observed the behavior of mother-infant pairs over several
months and found that their facial expressions of emotion, visual patterns, and gestures
were very consistent over this period of time. This suggests that infants’ behavior patterns
are organized based on continuously updating expectancy models.
Another piece of evidence for expectancy models in natural social contexts comes
from infants of depressed mothers. By six months, infants of depressed mothers show
“depressed” behavior with a non depressed, appropriately attuned female. This suggests
that the non-normal pattern these infants display with their mothers is organized enough
that the infant expects that other interactions with strangers will mirror her interactions
with mother. In fact, by 10 months, the brains of these infants mirror the “depressed”
brains of their mothers.
In a set of experiments using the “still-face paradigm,” mothers play with their babies
for two minutes. Then they are instructed to face their infants for two minutes without
moving their face or making any sound. Infants smile and coo at their mothers, trying to
engage her. When she doesn’t respond, they look surprised and then seem to disengage,
while still intermittently trying to evoke a response from their mothers. In a similar
experiment, an infant is shown a video of her mother responding to her in an interaction
that had taken place several minutes earlier, so the mother’s responses did not match the
infants current behavior. Infants showed the same surprise and disengaged response as in
the still-face studies. So we see from these experiments that infants expect their partners
to respond in a contingent way, and when this doesn’t happen, they get upset.How infants cope with the distress caused by violations of their expectations turns
out to be quite revealing. By six months, the way an infant copes with the stress of the
still-face experiment is stable, and predicts the infant’s attachment status at one year.
Infants who smile and coo at their mothers in an effort to engage her tend to have a secure
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attachment at one year. However, infants who do not engage in any sort of positive effort to
engage their mothers tend to exhibit an insecure attachment at one year. The stress induced
by the still-face paradigm seems to trigger the need for comfort and security (i.e., activates
the attachment system which we will discuss in chapter 3), and the way infants cope with
the distress reveals a particular expectancy model that has already developed.
Finally, there are a number of longitudinal studies that provide evidence for the
development of expectancy models in infancy. For example, patterns of mother-infant
vocal rhythm coordination at four months predict attachment status and cognition at one
year. In addition, many studies show that social interactions in the first six months predict
a variety of social and cognitive outcomes in the second and third year.
In sum, we have learned from infant research that mother and infant jointly construct
interaction patterns that are linked to their internal processes. The dyadic interaction and
the infant’s own self-regulation influence each other on a continuous, moment-by-moment
basis. Infants are hard wired to develop complex models of expectation in terms of how
an interactive sequence will unfold. That infants are so amazingly, immediately, and
automatically relational suggests that relationality is part of God’s grand design for human
nature and spiritual transformation.
SPIRITUALITY AND MEANING
We are not only hard wired to connect relationally with others, but to connect to
God’s purposes in order to experience a life full of meaning. Jesus tells us that true life—a
meaningful life—is found in connection with Him: “If you try to keep your life for yourself,
you will lose it. But if you give up your life for me, you will find true life” (Matt. 16:25-26).
What does it mean to find true life? I think it has something to do with finding something
larger than ourselves to live for, something that infuses our lives with meaning. In C.S.
Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch tells Aslan that, according
to the “deep magic,” she has the right to claim Edmund’s life because of his betrayal. Aslan
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snaps back at the White Witch that he was there when the “deep magic” was written. The
White Witch does not fully understand the deep magic and consequently taunts Aslan
for sacrificing his life in place of Edmund’s. Aslan does this because he understands the
paradoxical meaning of the deep magic—that we gain true life in sacrificing our own life
for others in love. As a picture of this concept, Aslan literally gains his life back. Jesus is
talking here about the “deep magic”—the underlying structure or order—that determines
what makes human life meaningful. It is not something we get to decide, and thankfully, it
is not something we can change. In God’s infinite wisdom, he chose to design us—to hard
wire us—such that we find true life in giving our lives away for others.
The interesting thing about our search to connect to meaning is that it comes full
circle in relationships. Spiritual transformation involves at its core connecting to the “deep
magic”—finding that which makes life meaningful—by developing our capacity to live
for the sake of Jesus by serving others in sacrificial love. And John reminds us that these
two ends (loving God and loving others) cannot be separated (I John 4:20). This is the
deepest and most mature form of relationship. The deep magic God has written on our
hearts says that this is what makes life meaningful. So the question becomes, how do we
grow in our capacity to find meaning in our lives? Just as meaning finds its end in losing
our lives (giving up serving our own interests as the ultimate goal) to live for the sake of
Jesus, that is, in relationship, it turns out that attachment relationships are the transmitters
of spiritual meaning, values, and morality. The capacity for spiritual meaning and morality
begins with relationships, and finds its expression in relationships. In fact, there is growing
evidence from research on brain functioning that humans are hard wired to connect to
spiritual meaning and purpose through relationships. This has been referred to by a groupof largely secular scientists as the “spiritualization of attachment.”24
Infants’ “hard wiredness” to connect or attach to others forms the foundation for
the development of conscience, moral meaning, and values. Another way to say this is
that, from the time we are born, we are loved into loving .25 Children, because of their
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biologically primed need to connect, naturally desire to please their parents. Connection
with parents from early on is contingent to some degree on pleasing them; that is, on doing
what we ought to do in the eyes of our parents, particularly with respect to how we relate to
other people. Early attachment relationships, then, form the relational context that channels
a child’s intuitively perceived sense of oughtness. Children sense that certain behaviors are
pleasing to their parents, some are displeasing, and others elicit no attention. Parents and
other attachment figures’ deeply held moral values and sense of meaning—their intuitive
grasp of the deep magic—are passed down to their children through a gut-level way of
knowing that is not conscious or verbal (we will discuss this in chapter two). In sum, our
sense of what makes life meaningful, how we ought to live (whether it is consistent with the
deep magic of relationality or not) is etched into our souls from close attachment figures.
DEPENDENCY IN THE SPIRITUAL
TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
Tuesdays with Morrie is the story of a middle-aged man, Mitch, who becomes
reacquainted with his former college professor, Morrie, when he finds out that Morrie is
dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. They develop a close bond as Morrie endeavors to teachMitch, a workaholic sportswriter, about life through the process of his own death. At one
point, reflecting on our dependency, Morrie says to Mitch, “When we’re born, we need others
to survive. When we’re dying, we need others to survive. But the secret is, in between, we
need each other even more.” Morrie is picking up on a profound truth about our relational
dependency on others. If we are hard wired, or biologically primed, to connect with others,
and we internalize our sense of meaning and morality from attachment relationships, then
it makes sense that the fundamental way we grow and change is through relationships.
Because God designed us to connect relationally, we cannot directly change our own soul
by ourselves. In other words, willpower or head knowledge by themselves simply will not
bring about deep change in our ability to love. We are profoundly dependent on God and
others to help us transform into the likeness of Christ.
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The Bible paints a clear picture of our dependence on God and others in the growth
process. One place we see this is in the concept of being attached to the vine. John 15:1-
6 tells us that we need to remain in, or be relationally connected, to Christ and His body
in order to grow, or bear fruit. Plants need to have roots connected to healthy soil to get
the nutrients they need. If a part of your body gets sick, it heals because it is connected to
your body. In the same way, God designed us to be relationally connected to Him directly
through prayer and His Word, and indirectly by sinking our roots into His body so that we
get the spiritual and emotional nutrients we need—loving and truth-seeking relationships.
So we see here that we not only connect to God directly, but also indirectly through his
Church, the body of Christ. The body of Christ provides the relational connections we need
to grow and develop.
We see this clearly in several passages throughout the New Testament. Peter instructs
us “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer
hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has
received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms” (I Peter
4:8-10). Notice that we administer God’s grace to one another. This is a deep form of relational
connection designed by God to transform us into the likeness of Christ. In Ephesians, Paul
tells us “We will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the
whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up
in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:15-16). Furthermore, in I Corinthians, Paul tells
us, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you has a part of it” (1 Cor 12:27). Each
one of us plays an important role in holding together every supporting ligament in the body
so that we can all grow by having our roots connected to it. In sum, the first big idea is that our souls naturally desire, and are actually hard
wired for relational connections, and it is through these connections with God and others
that we are transformed into the likeness of Christ.
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CHAPTER TWOBIG IDEA #2
UNTHOUGHT KNOWNS:
WE KNOW MORE THAN WE CAN SAY
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Acting teachers will sometimes have their students watch an entire
movie with no sound just to study the nonverbal communication
of the characters. I do this sometimes inadvertently on planes, not
because I am trying to make a mid-career switch, but because I often get engrossed in
a movie even though I can’t hear what the characters are saying. By the time I realize
I should have just bought the headset, it’s too late. But why does this happen? I get
engrossed in the movie because I am following the “between-the-lines” narrative of the
movie—the emotional communication that goes on without words. With some movies—
such as the last Tom Cruise movie I watched on a plane—the words wouldn’t make much
difference anyway; explosions don’t need words. But even for movies that do have more
verbal communication, I can follow the basic plot just by watching facial expressions and
body postures.
I remember one time being at a mall, waiting for my wife to finish a purchase in
a women’s clothing store. I walked outside the store and started watching people while I
waited for my wife. I quickly noticed a couple sitting on a bench about twenty feet away
from me. I could see their facial expressions and body language, but I couldn’t make out
what they were saying. It became immediately obvious to me that they were in a rather
heated discussion. I wondered if the day would come when psychologists hang up their
shingles in malls—“single session therapy while you wait.” This couple could have used
it. I was able to get a pretty good sense for what emotions each spouse was feeling as
they argued. Marital researchers would suggest that as I watched this couple and guessed
what emotions they were experiencing, my physiology was tracking with each spouses’
physiology. These researchers videotaped couples’ arguments, and then had total strangerswatch the tapes and guess which emotions each spouse was feeling. As the strangers
did this, their own physiology mimicked the couples’ physiology. In fact, the more the
stranger’s physiology matched that of the spouse she was watching, the more accurate her
gut level sense of the person’s emotions was.
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A group of single men and women gather in the back room of a restaurant. They
are paired off with each other, sitting in a circle. They converse for six minutes with each
other. When the time is up, they play musical chairs and the men all get up and rotate to sit
across from the next woman in the circle. They talk for six minutes. And so it goes... The
goal? To decide if they want to spend more time with each person they talked to. It’s called
speed dating and it’s a phenomenon that is becoming more and more popular. At the end
of each brief conversation, if the person liked their conversation partner, they check a box
indicating they want their e-mail to be given to the other person. If both people check each
other’s boxes, each person is supplied with the other’s e-mail. Why do romantic seekers
sign up for speed dating? Because we know in a matter of minutes whether we are attracted
to someone or not, in the same way that we know what a couple arguing with each other is
feeling just by watching them.
But how? How did I know what the couple in the mall was feeling? How did these
strangers know what emotions each spouse was experiencing in an argument? How do you
track the plot in a movie without words? And how do you know in several minutes whether
you like someone?
TWO WAYS OF KNOWING: HEAD KNOWLEDGE AND
GUT LEVEL KNOWLEDGE
The conversation between the couple at the mall, the conversations between
two people in the movies, and the conversation between two speed daters—indeed all
conversations—have two “stories” being told simultaneously. These two stories correspond
to what neuroscientists and emotion researchers tell us are two fundamentally distinct ways
of knowing ourselves and others. Scientists used to think that all our knowledge exists in
one, single form, or is processed in our brains in one way. We now know, however, that
there are two distinct brain circuits that process our knowing: what neuroscientists call
the “low road” and the “high road.” These brain circuits are neighbors, but they speak
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different languages so they don’t talk to each other directly. They need a translator. The
high road speaks the language of words and logic. The low road speaks the language of
emotions. So in every conversation and relationship, there is a “high road story” told in the
language of words and logic, and a “low road story” told in the between-the-lines language
of emotions and gut level sensations. You can think of these two types of knowing as “head
knowledge” and “gut level” knowledge. Since the high road is literally “speechless” in
terms of the nature of the brain circuit, it turns out that we know much more than we can
say when it comes to our relationships with others, and with God.
If spiritual transformation is all about relationships with God and others, then it is
critical to understand what kind of knowledge is involved in relationships. What kind of
knowing drives our capacity to love others? And how do these two types of knowledge
work together? We tend to be more familiar with, and biased toward, head knowledge, so
let’s start with this way of knowing.
THE HIGH R OAD: HEAD K NOWLEDGE
Richard came to see me for therapy struggling to make it day-to-day—life as he
knew it was falling apart. His wife had recently left him, several of his kids had cut off
contact with him, and he was not performing well at his job. Understandably, he was very
depressed. It seemed only a matter of time until he lost his job, and then, I feared, things
would get even worse. Richard was a Christian. He believed that God is sovereign over
everything. So logically this would include his circumstances. And Richard believed
that God is good. If we follow this truth to its logical conclusion, it means that there is
no reason for Richard to be anxious or depressed over his situation. Somehow God will
bring good out of this situation. Somehow God is with Richard in this mess. But Richard
was very depressed, and very anxious. He was barely functioning on a day-to-day basis,
sleeping about 2-3 hours a night, eating almost nothing. At work, he would sit and stare at
his computer. Why? Richard’s knowledge that God is good was strictly head knowledge,
traveling down only the high road in his brain.
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Head knowledge is an analytic way of knowing that is linear, logical, language-
based, and conscious. It is linear meaning that one piece of knowledge follows from another
in a sequential line, and each piece of information is processed in our brains one at a
time. Head knowledge is logical meaning that certain premises necessarily lead to certain
conclusions and we can articulate how we arrive at these conclusions. Head knowledge is
also language-based meaning that it exists and is processed in words. Finally, this form of
knowing is conscious, meaning that it requires conscious attention to be processed in the
brain. This way of knowing is processed in a particular circuit in the brain, primarily in the
left and top parts of the brain, referred to as the brain’s “high road.” The high road sends
information to the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center, but it receives no input
from the emotional centers of the brain that evaluate meaning, and process our relational
experiences. We are aware of the high road and we can direct it, which the low road, as we
will see, does not allow us to do.
Why is it, then, that Richard did not have peace in the truth of who God is? A big
part of the reason is that there are different ways of knowing, and knowing this truth about
God is not the same thing as knowing God at a gut level. And knowing about God in your
head can be completely disconnected, as it was for Richard at this point, from knowing God
in your gut.
THE LOW R OAD: GUT LEVEL K NOWLEDGE
The second way of knowing is gut level knowing. Gut level knowing is a way of
knowing based on intuition and emotions, which includes our physiological responses. We
often talk about having a “gut feeling” about something. What we mean is that we thinkwe know something, but we did not come to know it through words or logic, and we may
have no idea how we know it. The knowledge just impresses itself on our awareness. The
term comes from the fact that a gut feeling is literally a physiological response in our body,
and this response is registered in our brains. Recognizing changes in the emotional states
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of others involves a gut level way of knowing; that is, it is based on the perception of subtle
variations in facial expressions, and in changes in our own physiological and emotional
states. The fascinating thing about this is that gut level knowing is a processing system
in the brain that is very distinct from the system that processes head knowledge. The two
ways of knowing involve different circuits in the brain. The gut level knowledge system
is referred to as the brain’s “low road.”26 This brain circuit involves primarily the bottom
and right parts of the brain. In particular, the load road sends information through the
amygdala, which tags our experiences with meaning. It operates below our awareness,
automatically, and very rapidly.
In contrast to head knowledge, gut level knowing is not linear. Rather, it is holistic,
nonverbal, based on emotion, and operates outside of our awareness. Instead of adding pieces
of information up one at a time (linear), this way of knowing integrates many sources of
(primarily nonverbal) information from different brain systems such as visual, physiological,
and auditory systems. Gut level knowledge does not fundamentally exist in words. If you
think of these different ways of knowing as different ways of transmitting information or
different “codes,” there is a verbal code (head knowledge) and a nonverbal code that transmits
information through physiological sensations, gut level meanings, and emotions. Emotion
researchers refer to this as the “subsymbolic code.” In other words, it is information processed
in a system that does not use symbols like words. This information—such as the sensation of
your stomach tightening—exists in a code, or language, below symbols. It is more direct and
immediate than symbolic knowledge. This system is not readily accessible to our conscious
awareness, so we are not easily able to articulate the basis for how we know things in this way.
In other words, we can think of this type of knowing as “unthought knowns.” It involves thingswe know about ourselves, God, and others, but which we do not think in words. Indeed, we
know much more than we can say.
Gut level knowledge includes what is referred to as “primary emotions,” “categorical
emotions,” and images. Before we go any further, it will be helpful to define what I mean by
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emotion because there is a lot of misunderstanding about emotions. Some Christian leaders
and branches of the church mistrust emotions, viewing them as unpredictable drives that
can lead us astray in our relationship with God. In this view, emotions are inferior to head
knowledge of truth. These concerns stem from a misunderstanding about emotion that is
not informed by current scientific knowledge. Emotion is the nonconscious and automatic
way we evaluate the meaning of our experiences. Emotions provide a powerful source of
information. And because they are processed automatically and outside of our direct control,
our emotional responses provide the clearest window into the deepest level of our soul—the
meanings we connect to relationships and events in our lives. We cannot manipulate the
emotional meaning we assign to events, so they reveal what we really believe at a gut level
about ourselves and others in our relational world. If we want to be transformed at the very
core of who we are, then our emotional responses must be the starting point.
Primary emotions are the most basic form of emotion, which involve shifts in basic
brain states. They are so diffuse that they cannot be given a label like “anger” or “sadness.”
Events are tagged with an initial meaning by our brains by way of these basic emotions, as
either good or bad. The brain then assigns more elaborate meanings to them by chunking
them into a category such as sadness, anger, happiness or surprise. There are seven of these
categorical emotions that have been found to be universal across all cultures.
Let’s take a look at some fascinating research that illustrates gut level knowing.
“Patient X,” as doctors call him, suffered two strokes that severed the connections between
his eyes and the rest of the visual system in the visual cortex. His eyes could take in
signals, but his brain didn’t know the signals were there, and couldn’t decode them. It
seemed Patient X was completely blind. When he was shown shapes or photos, he hadno idea what was in front of him. But when he was shown pictures of people expressing
emotion, like an angry face, he was able to guess the emotion on the face at a rate far better
than chance. Brain scans conducted while Patient X was guessing the emotions showed
that his brain used a different pathway than the normal pathway for seeing. Normally,
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visual input travels from the eyes to the thalamus that processes sensory data, and then
to the visual cortex. In Patients X’s case, his brain sent information from the thalamus
straight to the amygdala, which computes the emotional meaning of the nonverbal message.
So Patient X was feeling the emotion on the faces that he could not “see”—a condition
known as “affective blindsight.” He “knew” the emotions on the faces through this gut
level knowledge, not through conscious, verbal knowledge.
In another dramatic illustration of gut level knowledge, 59 patients who had
attempted suicide in the previous three days were interviewed by the same psychiatrist.
The faces of the patients and psychiatrists were recorded during the interviews. One year
later, 10 of the 59 patients made another suicide attempt (the “reattempter” group). The
researchers attempted to predict which patients would reattempt suicide using two types
of information: the psychiatrist’s predictions written immediately after the interviews, and
the nonverbal communications between the psychiatrist and patients. The psychiatrist’s
written predictions correctly identified whether or not a patient would reattempt for 29% of
the patients, whereas the nonverbal analysis correctly classified 81% of the patients assessed.
In addition, the real predictive power came not from the patients’ facial behavior, but from
the psychiatrist’s facial behavior. With patients who ended up reattempting suicide, the
psychiatrist frowned more, and showed more animated facial expressions and a higher level
of speech.
Researchers suggest that the psychiatrist’s negative expressions and increased facial
activity was serving two purposes: regulating his own internal state, and communicating
with his patient. It appears that the patient created a synchronized emotional state in
the psychiatrist, which in turn influenced his own nonverbal behavior. This is how the psychiatrist “knew” that a particular patient would reattempt. He didn’t know this in
words (head knowledge), but he knew this in his body, facial expressions, and subjective
experience—literally in is gut.
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As I outlined in chapter one, infants know far more than we once thought they
did. Much of the infant research literature demonstrates not only that infants are innately
relational from day one, as I emphasized in chapter one, but also the existence of a powerful
gut level knowing system. Infant researchers call this “presymbolic” knowledge. The
parts of the brain that process this gut level way of knowing are online at birth and fully
developed by about 15 months of age.27 A fascinating infant study demonstrates gut level
knowing. Researchers in this study had women read a Dr. Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat ,
aloud to their babies in utero for 15 hours.28 At birth, the babies preferred a tape recording
of The Cat in the Hat , heard in utero, to hearing their mothers’ read a different Dr. Seuss
story. What this means is that infants who hear their mothers’ voices during pregnancy are
able to distinguish slight variations in nonverbal components of speech such as intonation
and rhythm. This is a beautiful picture of God’s creativity and wisdom in creating this gut
level knowledge system.
Other research indicates that a mother’s emotionally expressive face is the most
powerful visual stimulus for the infant and leads to intense gazing between the mother
and her infant.29 Likewise, an infant’s gaze evokes the mother’s gaze, which creates a
mutually reinforcing form of interpersonal communication between mother and infant. In
fact, there is evidence that a woman’s eyes dilate in response to an image of her baby, and
pupil dilation is associated with the positive emotions of pleasure and interest. The pupils
act as an interpersonal, nonverbal communication device. As we reviewed in chapter one,
infants, as early as two months, have a deep knowledge of relational patterns in a system of
knowing and remembering that does not exist in language.
While this gut level way of knowing is critical in infancy, it is not uncommon for people to assume that we “graduate” out of this way of knowing once we start talking.
Especially in Western societies, we tend to believe verbal, analytic ways of knowing are
superior. However, gut level knowing actually continues throughout life and turns out to
be very important in relationships.
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Let’s go back to speed dating for a moment. One of the interesting things about
speed dating is that when you compare what people say they want in a mate to what they are
actually attracted to in the moment, they often don’t match up. Our conscious ideal doesn’t
always match our gut level knowledge. Kim came to see me for therapy due to difficulties
in romantic relationships. She was very anxious and feared rejection, and yet was involved
with a man who was quite rejecting. When she would need contact he would push her
away. She would become more drawn to him and seek him out, despite the fact that this
was not what she wanted in a relationship, and she knew this was not good for her.
Now, which is the real Kim—the one who wants a caring man, or the one who
is instantly drawn to a rejecting man? Both in some sense, but the point is that our gut
level knowledge wins out when it comes to how we actually relate to others. Although it
may not be consistent with our head knowledge, our gut level knowledge reveals how we
construct the meaning of our relational worlds. This is the starting point for any deep level
of transformation. In short, gut level knowledge is the foundational way of knowing in
relationships. It is this way of knowing, not head knowledge, that drives how we actually
relate to others; that drives our capacity to love. The reason is that this way of knowing
is automatic and not under our direct control. As we will see below, head knowledge is
important, but it must be integrated with gut level knowledge in order to affect our ability
to love God and others.
UNTHOUGHT KNOWNS ABOUT GOD
In The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer stated: “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.”30 Just as there are two “stories” in every conversation, there are two “stories” to our
relationships with God: what we say we believe about God (the God of the head), and, in
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Tozer’s words, what we “actually believe about God” (the God of the gut). The God of our
gut is the story told between-the-lines of our verbal God-story that is told in words and
concepts. It is the God-story told by the way we live our lives.
In some sectors of the Church, we tend to ignore or discount our “between-the-
lines” God-stories, particularly when they are negative. We prefer to emphasize our verbal
God-stories. We know how to change them; how to get results. We focus on what we know
about God; what the Bible says about God. This is understandable—our head knowledge
about God is linear and predictable. When we do occasionally acknowledge and read
others’ between-the-lines narratives, and try to help them grow, these stories don’t seem
to respond. There don’t seem to be any clear-cut rules for how to change them. They are
messy. In exasperation, we just ignore them, hoping they will go away.
In fact, some authors have assumed that our relationships with God are fundamentally
different than our relationships with other humans, because God is, well, God. There is
some truth to this; our relationships with God are different in certain respects because we
are relating to an all-knowing, all-powerful, loving God. This idea is enticing precisely
because God is God. Unlike human relationships in which both parties are fallen, finite,
and culpable for ongoing difficulties, in our relationships with God, this is not the case. So
it’s not too hard to get from there to the idea that we should always feel close to God; that
we should always trust God; that we should never doubt His love; that we should never feel
abandoned by God.
However, the empirical reality we face-off with every day in the Church, and in our
individual lives, is that we do struggle in our relationships with God. We feel abandoned
by God at times, even though we read in His word that He will never forsake us. At timesHe seems far away; like He doesn’t care about what we are going through, even though
we know the Bible tells us that His love is so deep and so wide, that we will never fully
understand it. This is captured well in a song by Chris Rice:
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How far are you? How close am I?
I know your words are true, When I don’t feel them inside
Still I believe, You’ll never leave
So where are you now?
You’re all I have, You’re all I know
Your breath is breathing in my soul
Still I am gasping,
Aching, asking
Where are you now?
This perspective amounts to ignoring our mysterious, unpredictable, gut level God-
stories. The idea boils down to an assumption that the ways of knowing that drive our
human relationships somehow don’t apply when it comes to our relationships with God. In
this view, we have a “psychological” part of us involved in our human relationships, and
a “spiritual part” that handles matters having to do with God and morality. This presents
the possibility of a radical disconnect between our relationships with humans on the one
hand, and with God on the other hand. This view, however, doesn’t square with what the
Bible has to say about the human soul, or with contemporary research on the association
between our patterns of relationship with humans and with God. Let’s take a brief look at
a biblical perspective on this, and then contemporary research in this area. We will see a
convergence between these two perspectives suggesting we all tell two God-stories using
different languages.
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THE UNIFIED SOUL
The Bible paints a picture of the human soul as being a unity. The Hebrew concept
of the soul in the Old Testament is of a unified entity, not several different parts. The will,
mind, emotions, and desires are unified and function together. Another place we see this
in both the Old and New Testaments is in the biblical concept of the heart that we briefly
mentioned in the first big idea in chapter one. The heart is described as the seat of wisdom
(skill in living) (Prov 15:14), volition, motives, desires (Exod 35:5; Ps 21:1-2; Acts 8:22;
Rom 2:5), and emotions (sadness, 1 Sam 1:8; joy, Prov 15:30; fear, Deut 28:65; uncertainty,
John 14:1). In other words, all these different facets of our souls function together as a
unified whole. What this means, then, is that there is not a separate part of us that relates
to God. Our humanness infuses every aspect of our relationship with God.
In my work in psychotherapy, my experience has been that people’s gut level
knowledge of God is inevitably similar to their gut level knowledge of their relationships
with attachment figures. There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence, but the
parallels are usually pretty striking. My experience resonates with a biblical picture of our
souls as a “psychospiritual” unity.31 From this perspective, it is not possible to separate
gut level relational processes from “spiritual processes,” or, to separate “psychological”
and “spiritual” domains of functioning. They are woven together in such a way that we
cannot neatly separate them. Just as our gut level knowledge drives how we actually relate
to others in general, it also drives how we relate to God, and our capacity to love. Our
gut level relational knowledge is how we evaluate the meaning of any aspect of spiritual
functioning, because it is automatic and not under our direct control.
I had been seeing Mark in therapy for about two years when he began to withdrawfrom his relationship with God, and gradually pulled out of his spiritual community. At
first he was unaware of the meaning of this behavior, and he avoided discussing it with
me. When we did process the issue, he felt extremely sad and became aware of a sense of
abandonment by God. This experience of abandonment was being told between-the-lines,
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partly by his withdrawal from God and church. In other words, it was an unthought known,
a gut level experience of God for which Mark had no words and little awareness. Part of
what contributed to Mark’s between-the-lines God-story was years of experiences of his
mother being inconsistent in her care, and ultimately abandoning him in a way.
As we talked more about his withdraw from his church, Mark experienced a
stronger sense of abandonment by God. I suggested that this may be linked to a series of
recent rejections he had experienced in close relationships, and ultimately to his experience
of abandonment by his mother. This resonated with him, and he was gradually able to
put words to his gut level experiences, further articulating the meaning of his sense of
abandonment by God. As a result of this, the God-story Mark was telling bewteen-the-
lines of his verbal, head knowledge story of God became more clear. This illustrates that
Mark’s pattern of relationship with God was being driven by his between-the-lines God-
story. In order to help Mark grow in his relationship with God, I had to listen for the story
between-the-lines, and in order to do that, I had know the language of emotions.
CORRESPONDENCE VERSUS COMPENSATION
Attachment researchers suggest that God clearly fits the definition of an attachment
figure. Just as with parents or other attachment figures, we turn to God for comfort and
safety when we are distressed. There is a substantial body of research that supports this
idea. As the saying goes, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In addition to providing a
“safe haven,” God provides a secure base for us to not only explore the world, but to be
salt and light; to co-labor with Him in the work of His Kingdom. So if our relationship
with God is an attachment relationship, then it makes sense that we would experience Godsimilarly to the way we experience our primary human attachment figures. But then again,
maybe God fills in when our attachment figures fall short.
One way attachment researchers have explored this question is by examining the
patterns in people’s relationships with humans and with God to see if the patterns in
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one domain (humans) correspond to the other (God). Researchers have tested whether
a) individuals’ attachments patterns with people correspond to their attachment patterns
with God, or b) whether, for people who have insecure relationships with humans, God
compensates for these insecurities by functioning as a substitute attachment figure for them.
Attachment researchers call this the “compensation versus correspondence hypothesis” and
it provides an important lens into our unthought knowns about God.
On the surface, the results of the research in this area present a rather inconsistent
picture. On the one hand, a number of studies suggest correspondence—that the dynamics
of our relationships with God are similar to the dynamics of our human attachment
relationships. For example, people who are securely attached in their current relationships
tend to perceive God as more loving, less distant and controlling,32 and tend to feel closer
to God.33 In addition, people who report a secure attachment history in their childhood
are more likely to hold orthodox Christian beliefs.34 In addition, people who are anxiously
attached to their romantic partners are very likely to have an anxious attachment with
God.35
On the other hand, several studies have provided partial support for some form
of compensation—the idea that God functions as a substitute attachment figure for those
with insecure attachments with humans. For example, attachment researchers tell us that
those with histories of avoidant attachment are more likely to experience a sudden religious
conversion during their adolescence or adulthood.36 Women with insecure adult attachment
styles in romantic relationships are more likely to have “found a new relationship with
God” over a four year period than women who with a secure attachment history.37 In
addition, women with an anxious attachment history are more likely to have had a religiousexperience or conversion during that time than women with avoidant and secure histories.
Researchers have also found that people with negative views of themselves—classified
as preoccupied (negative view of self, positive view of others) and fearful (negative view
of self and others)—show a greater increase over time in religiosity relative to those with
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positive views of themselves.38 Another study found similar results—that a significantly
higher proportion (16.3%) of those with an insecure attachment history with their mothers
reported an increase in the importance of their religious beliefs during their adulthood (after
age 22) than those reporting a secure attachment history with mother (6.5%).39
So if we
look at all this research, at first glance, it seems like there is support for both compensation
and correspondence models. How do we make sense of this?
In order to shed some light on this question, my colleagues and I applied the two
ways of knowing we have discussed in this chapter to the domain of spirituality. In other
words, we distinguished between “implicit” (gut level knowledge) and “explicit” (head
knowledge) modes of spiritual knowing. The basic idea underlying our study is the core
idea of this chapter: that gut level knowledge is the foundation for how we evaluate meaning
in the “spiritual” domain, including our experience of relationship with God, rather than
explicit, head knowledge of God or religion.
In this study, we measured attachment categories in the human domain using a
measure of romantic attachment.40 The basic idea is that human attachment predicts
“implicit” aspects of spirituality that tap into gut level experiences, but does not predict
explicit aspects of spirituality. The implicit measures we used were forgiveness, spiritual
community, anxious attachment to God, and avoidant attachment to God. The explicit
measure tapped into religious commitment and frequency of spiritual practices. We defined
these as explicit because we have more control over these aspects of our spirituality than we
do over our gut level experiences.
There were four attachment classifications based on positive and negative views of
self and others: secure (positive view of self and others), dismissing (positive view of self andnegative view of others), preoccupied (negative view of self and positive view of others), and
fearful (negative view of self and others). Our results supported our predictions. We found
differences between the attachment groups (the exact differences we predicted) on three
of the four implicit measures of spirituality, but no differences on the explicit measure of
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spirituality. People with secure and dismissing human attachment patterns reported higher
levels of forgiveness than preoccupied and fearful people.41 Secure individuals reported
higher levels of spiritual community than the other three attachment groups. In addition,
we found that preoccupied and fearful individuals reported higher levels of anxiety in their
relationships with God. In contrast, as we predicted, there were no differences among any
of the four attachment groups on their level of explicit spirituality.
Our findings suggest that when we look at the level of the dynamics of our attachment
relationships, or our gut level relational knowledge, our dynamics with God parallel those
with human attachment figures. However, our attachment dynamics do not predict more
explicit dimensions of our spirituality that have more to do with our head knowledge
system. We have more intentional control over this and over our commitments. This is
good, because, as we will see, it allows us to actively participate in furnishing our souls.
However, we must understand that the explicit realm of our head knowledge system does
not directly change, or predict, our gut level dynamics with God.
Some people, when they hear this idea, fear that this means their relationships with
God can never grow beyond the maturity of their early human relationships. This does not
mean that our relationships with God can never change or grow beyond whatever relational
shortcomings we inevitably experienced in childhood. Rather, it means that transformation
in our relationships with God comes through our gut level way of knowing in relationships
in general. And because our soul, or heart, is unified, it means that this kind of change
happens at the core of our soul and flows out into all our relationships. Changes in our
relationships with God tend to coincide with changes in our human relationships because
they reflect deep, gut level changes in the core of our soul.In sum, a neuroscience perspective suggests, and research supports the view that,
just as every relationship and conversation has two “stories” being told, each of us has two
God-stories we are telling at the same time: our verbal God-story, and our between-the-
lines God-story—our unthought knowns about God. Our gut level knowledge system,
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then, applies to our relationships with God and our spirituality as much as it does to human
relationships. Let’s take a closer look at the nature of our between-the-lines God-story.
OUR BETWEEN-THE-LINES GOD-STORY
How do our between-the-lines God-stories develop and affect us? To help us
better understand this, we can turn to the work of Ana Maria Rizzuto, an Argentinean
psychoanalyst, who was one of the first to develop a comprehensive theory of what she
called a person’s “God representation.”42 The introductory chapter to our between-the-
lines God stories is, in our experience, “the birth of the living God.”43 Rizzuto collected
extensive case histories on people in order to systematically study the relationship between
how people develop psychologically, and how their between-the-lines God stories develop.
Our current scientific understanding about the two ways of knowing, Rizzuto’s pioneering
research, and numerous studies that have followed in this tradition, allow us to begin to
paint a general picture of our between-the-lines God-stories—who the co-authors are, and
how our stories affect us.
CO-AUTHORS OF OUR BETWEEN-THE-LINES GOD STORIES
Our between-the-lines God-stories begin to be told in the earliest periods of our
lives, within the context of relationships with attachment figures. These stories represent
our gut level knowledge about who God is to us, and who we are to God. As we have
seen from the infant research we reviewed in chapter one, infants are profoundly in tune
with, and affected by, their earliest relational experiences. Their internal experiences
synchronize with their relational experiences, and their brains literally develop a brain-to- brain connection with their attachment figures. This brain-to-brain linkup then produces
a physiological state in the infant that mirrors their caregiver’s state. In addition, these
experiences, and the corresponding neural WiFi connection, then lays down synchronized
brain circuits in the infant that create stable patterns of interaction with her attachment
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figures. In the warp and woof of the moment-to-moment mutual coordination that goes on
in these interactions, the infant develops a gut level sense of who she is to the important
people in her life. It is here that the infant experiences “the birth of the living God.” So
our current understanding of relational development would suggest that the key co-authors
who write our between-the-lines God stories with us are our primary attachment figures—
mother, father, grandparents—anyone who played a special role in our lives that caused us
to develop an attachment bond with them. A number of studies have supported this idea.
For example, one study explored the influence of parents as co-authors of people’s
between-the-lines God-stories. These researchers wanted to know whether both parents
act as co-authors, and whether an idealized parent gets to write more of the story. They
found that if a person idealized a particular parent, their image of the idealized parent did a
better job of predicting their God image than the non-idealized parent image. When these
researchers created a composite score to represent a participant’s overall parent image,
these composite parent scores matched the God image scores more closely than scores for
mother or father did by themselves. So we see that both parents (assuming they are both
attachment figures), provide the relational context for the writing of our between-the-
lines God stories. In addition, if we idealize one of our parents, that parent becomes first
author.
As I noted previously, a number of studies have shown a link between people’s
experiences of attachment figures and their experiences of God. For example, one study
found that people who have more mature relationships in general are more likely to
experience God as loving and benevolent. In addition, these researchers found that people
with less mature relationships were more likely to experience God as wrathful, controlling,and irrelevant. Another study found similar results, but also showed that people who used
more mature defenses, or ways of coping with psychological pain, were more likely to
experience God as loving. Likewise, those who used less mature defenses were more likely
to experience God as wrathful. Since maturity of relationships in general stems from our
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gut level knowledge of our primary attachment figures, these studies also suggest that
attachment figures co-author our between-the-lines God-stories.
Spiritual mentors in our lives, who function as a type of authority figure, also co-
author with us our between-the-lines God-stories. John Bowlby, the founder of attachment
theory, observed that people become attached to groups and institutions such as schools,
colleges, work groups, and religious groups.44 People can actually become attached to a
spiritual community, but this often occurs through a spiritual leader or mentor. This can
be a secondary attachment, but people also develop primary attachments to a spiritual
mentor or pastoral figure with whom they develop a close relationship. This can be a
formal spiritual mentor or an informal spiritual mentor. In either case, a spiritual mentor
represents God to the person to a certain extent. In other words, they act on behalf of God
because of the nature of the relationship. We look to them in a special way to help us figure
out who God is, and how He might feel toward us. In this way, such spiritual mentors co-
author with us our between-the-lines God stories.
Part of the way spiritual mentors co-author our between-the-lines God stories is
by modeling their own relationships with God and spiritual lives for us. There is some
fascinating evidence to suggest this. For example, attachment research suggests that parent’s
attachment to their own parents, as measured by a narrative interview assessment (the
Adult Attachment Interview), predicts their children’s attachment to them, even better than
their current parenting. This would suggest that a person’s spiritual mentor’s attachment
to God would predict their own attachment to God. This is speculation at this point, but
it suggests a potentially powerful role that spiritual mentors may play in co-authoring our
gut level God-story. This co-authoring likely happens through modeling. Seeing up closehow a spiritual mentor experiences, relates to, and responds to God—their own between-
the-lines God story—can profoundly shape the story we tell between-the-lines about who
God is to us.
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Finally, as we engage in relationship with God, God Himself becomes a co-author
of the story we tell about our relationship with Him between-the-lines. This is not the God
of propositions in the Bible. In other words, our head knowledge of God does not directly
contribute to our between-the-lines God story. It only gets to write on the lines. As we
will discuss in chapter five, we can translate between the two languages our God-stories
use. But relational experiences with God, through prayer, through His Word, through
people, and through circumstances, can all directly shape, or help us write our gut level
God-stories.
HOW OUR GOD-STORIES AFFECT US
Speed dating, which I mentioned earlier, is based on the idea that our gut level
knowledge tells us very quickly whether we are attracted to someone. One female speed
dater describes the kind of man she wants to marry. The list is complete—warm, sensitive,
caring, committed, responsible, etc. Yet when she enters the speed dating fray, she is
immediately attracted to a very different kind of man. A man who is creative and passionate,
yet irresponsible and fairly self-centered. She is telling two different stories about who she
wants to be with—one story with the written, consciously thought-out list, and the other
with her emotions and attraction in the moment. And the two don’t match up. Likewise,
all of us have two God stories we are telling at any given time, and they don’t always match
up. How does the degree of synchronization of our two God-stories affect us?
First, we can presume that the more consistent the God-stories we tell are with each
other, the more we are growing. If you observe mature Christians, you will see that the
stories they tell with their lives is in synch with their written story about God’s goodness
and love. When these two ways of knowing God synch up, it creates a sense of resonance
and well-being in our experience. This, in turn, fosters our ability to respond flexibly to
others in love—to be open to others’ needs. This may serve as an integrating function,
resulting in approaching our relationships, life decisions, and stories with self-reflection
and a sense of perspective.
Second, when we experience a disconnect between our two God-stories, it creates
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a sense of dissonance. Indeed this is the reason many people leave the church. Their
verbal God-story is on target. They know, more or less, what the Bible teaches about God,
and how they should live their lives. But the other God-story they are telling—their gut
level experiences and relationships—doesn’t match up at all. Sometimes, this becomes
unbearable, and people leave the church. The chronic sense of distance from God, or anger
at God, continually grinds against their head knowledge. If someone in their community
doesn’t help them tap into their between-the-lines story by listening to it, sometimes the
only way they can cope is to cut off the grinding dissonance. We will return to this in
chapter five, but bringing our two God-stories in line with each other involves telling
our between-the-lines stories in relationship, which requires us to link the two ways of
knowing. Sometimes we need someone to listen to our between-the-lines stories to help
us gain access to them. This is one of the primary roles of spiritual community, which we
will discuss in more depth in chapter five.
Finally, a general way our between-the-lines God-stories affect us stems from the
fact that they are a function of our “low road” brain circuits. While they are fluid to some
extent, they are also quite stable, a topic to which we will return in chapter four. Because of
this, our between-the-lines God-stories function as a type of “attachment filter” that shapes
our feelings, beliefs, expectations, wishes, and fears in our relationships with God. So our
gut level knowledge of God—the stories we tell about our relationships with God through
out emotions and nonverbal communication—biases our experiences of God in ways that
shape how we relate to Him and to our spiritual communities. And it is to our attachment
filters that we turn our attention in chapter three.
In summary, the second big idea is that there are two distinct ways of knowing, head
knowledge and “gut level” knowledge, and it is our gut level knowledge that drives the
quality of our relationships with both God and others. We know much more than we can
say when it comes to our relationships, and it is these “unthought knowns” at the core of
our souls that must be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
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CHAPTER THREEBIG IDEA #3
GUT-LEVEL MEMORIES
AS ATTACHMENT FILTERS
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When my children were younger, we bought Disneyland passes in an effort
to take advantage of our proximity to the “happiest place on earth” (and
the most expensive). When we started talking about getting passes, I
remember thinking that I had gone to Disneyland several times as a young child, but I
didn’t really remember much about it. So what was the point of spending the equivalent of
a second mortgage on our house to take our kids (then about two or three) somewhere they
wouldn’t remember? While we were in line to buy the passes, I said to my wife, “Do we
really want to do this? You know, they’re not going to remember any of this when they get
older.” She gave me a “look.” I get the “look” in many different situations, but basically the
reason her razor sharp analytic mind doesn’t lay into me is that her look says, “I don’t know
even know where to start with you.” She literally doesn’t know where to begin. Guess who
ended up going to Disneyland many times that year?
This was all said in jest, but part of the reason my wife gave me the “look” is that she
knew that our children would remember trips to Disneyland, just like they would remember
soccer games when they were too young to know which direction to kick the ball. It’s just
that they wouldn’t remember these experiences in words. Neuroscientists tell us there are
two fundamentally distinct types of memory. One of these types of memory—the type
that records our Disneyland experiences at two years-old—is what filters our moment-to-moment experiences in relationships with others and with God.
TWO KINDS OF MEMORY
What is something you remember about your day yesterday? Take a moment and
jot it down. Now, notice that when you were recalling an event from yesterday, you were
aware of the fact that you were recalling it. Do you always know when you are remembering
something? It seems like a strange question, doesn’t it? Of course, when you remember
something you are aware that you are remembering it, you may be thinking. Well, actually it
turns out that we do not always know when we are remembering something. To understand
why, we have to unpack two types of memory recorded in the brain that have critical
implications for understanding our capacity to love.
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Just as there are two forms of knowing that we discussed in big idea #2, we have
learned from neuroscience that there are two very different kinds of memory that are
processed in different circuits in the brain. These two types of memory map onto, and
support the two ways of knowing. When you remember an event from yesterday, this is
what neuroscientists call “explicit” memory, which is what we use in “high road” head
knowledge. The brain structures that support explicit memory do not even begin to come
online until 18 months of age. These brain structures are not fully developed until close to
the age of three.
If you remember the capital of Alaska, for example, that is a type of explicit
memory referred to as “semantic” memory (Juno in case you are wondering). Semantic
memory is verbal; that is, it is information that is packaged in words. Remembering
something that happened to you yesterday is another example of explicit memory known
as “autobiographical” memory. It is memory of yourself in time. This type of explicit
memory is packaged in images, and to be truly “autobiographical” it must integrate gut
level knowledge from the right brain. Neuroscientists tell us that the distinguishing factor
about explicit memory is that you have to be consciously paying attention to encode this
kind of memory in your brain. Another key characteristic about explicit memory is that
when it is operating, you are always aware that you are remembering something.
In contrast, gut-level memory—what neuroscientists call “implicit” memory—is a
completely different type of memory that supports gut-level knowing. The brain structures
that support gut-level knowledge are the same structures that support gut-level memory.
And, as we mentioned in the second big idea, these structures are online at birth, and
almost fully developed by 15 months. Gut level memory is not verbal. In other words, itis not memory of facts that can only be captured in words, or of events in our lives that can
be easily captured in words. Instead, this kind of memory is recorded and packaged in a
different “language” or “code” than words—it is recorded in our emotions, perceptions,
bodily sensations, and our body’s “readiness” to respond in certain ways. The amazing
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things about gut level memory that make it so critical to our spiritual transformation, and
so misunderstood at the very same time, are that: 1) it does not require conscious attention
to be encoded in the brain; and 2) we are not aware of it when it is operating.
Now, if you think about your relational experiences, what kind of “knowing” goes on
when you talk with a close friend? It is not knowledge or information in the form of a verbal
proposition, like “God is the sovereign creator of the universe,” or even “my friend has a
good sense of humor.” Our relational experiences are composed of gut level knowledge
based on the way our brains evaluate the meaning of our experiences; that is, based on
emotion. In other words, relational experiences involve knowledge or information that is
packaged in intuition, feelings, and gut level senses that go on outside of our conscious
awareness. The brain actually records this kind of information from relational experiences
in the same package, or “code” in which it originated. This is gut level memory. Because
these memories are stored in the form of “emotional meanings,” they are not accessible
as conscious, verbal packages. In other words, we remember how important people in our
lives feel about us not in words, but in our emotions, bodies and images—in our gut-level
way of knowing . This also means we remember all of our relational experiences from day
one in gut level memory, and these memories act on us without us knowing it.
How, then, does this powerful form of memory that goes on without our conscious
awareness act on us without our awareness or cooperation? As our brains process our
relational experiences and encode these in gut level memory, they search for patterns or
themes so that we don’t have to start from scratch to make sense out of familiar situations
each time we encounter them. Over time, experiences in our attachment relationships that
are similar, in terms of their subjective sense of meaning, get chunked together and functionas “attachment filters.” Attachment filters are the “expectancy models” we develop in
infancy by the end of our first year, as we discussed in chapter one. As the brain continues
to look for patterns in our experiences, the meaning it tags to our experiences gets run
through these relational filters. In other words, our relational filters bias how we experience
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relationships automatically and without our even knowing it.
In the movie, The Truman Show, actor Jim Carrey plays a man whose life is a TV
show, broadcast to millions, unbeknownst to him. He just lives his life from one day
to the next. In one scene, a group of reporters interviews “the director,” the God-like
figure, played by Ed Harris, who determines Truman’s future. One of the reporters asks
the director, “How do you explain that Truman has never figured out that his whole life
is just a television show?” The director replies, “We all accept reality as it is presented
to us.” Like Truman, we are directly aware of what we see through the filter, but not of
the filter itself. We simply experience these relational filters as the reality of our present
experience. Our attachment filters are like our own individual “Truman show.” In short,
memories of relational experiences with emotionally significant people are etched in our
souls and become filters that shape how we feel about ourselves, God and others, and how
we determine the meaning of events in our lives.
ATTACHMENT FILTERS
We all have unique attachment filters to some degree because we all have unique
relational histories. However, research in the area of attachment relationships has identified
four common attachment filters. These attachment filters are formed in a few close attachment
relationships, but they influence our gut level processing in all our relationships to some
extent. Let’s take a closer look at the attachment system, how our attachment filters have
a powerful influence throughout our lives, and then at each of the four specific attachment
filters. In chapter four, we will turn to the topic of how attachment filters change.
THE ATTACHMENT SYSTEM
The attachment system is a system in our brains that influences and organizes our
memory, motivations, and emotions with respect to important caregivers.49 God designed
this system to motivate infants to stay physically close to their caregivers, and to establish
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communication with them. This system operates throughout our lives, but the need for
physical closeness in infancy shifts into the need for emotional closeness, or what attachment
researchers call “felt security,” as we become adults.
Attachment relationships, as we mentioned earlier, are relationships in which a child
looks to a caregiver to provide a haven of safety in times of distress, and a secure base from
which to explore the world. Most infants respond differently to their mothers in comparison
to other people by three months of age. This is the beginning of the development of an
attachment bond. By six to nine months of age, most infants become attached to a primary
caregiver.50 This means that they have developed a specific bond with a caregiver and no
one else will do for providing a haven of safety and secure base. When a child has become
attached to a caregiver, people are not interchangeable in providing emotional security.
Some children never become attached, but the vast majority become attached to someone.
Attachments develop with only a handful of people, but have a profound impact on our
ability to relate and function in many ways.
One of the main functions of the attachment system is that it establishes a relationship
in which an infant’s immature brain literally uses the mature functions of the parent’s brain
to help her organize and regulate her own functioning.51 In a secure relational environment,
this leads to attuned, or contingent communication. In a secure attachment relationship,
the parent will respond to her infant in a way that is sensitive to her child’s emotional
communication, which can expand positive emotions, and soothe negative emotions.
For example, imagine this scene. A twelve-month old infant is playing on the floor
while his mother is in a nearby room. He begins to whimper, and then to cry. His mother’s
heart immediately begins to accelerate, and her state of mind changes as a result of hearingher baby cry. Her physiology is registering her baby’s distress. She feels a growing sense
of tension and tightness in her stomach as her baby’s cry intensifies. You can see this in
her nonverbal signals: her facial expression mirrors her baby’s distress, and the timing and
tone of her voice matches her baby’s emotional signals. She picks him up, looks into his
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eyes, her face mirroring the distressed look on his face, and she begins to say in a tone that
matches the intensity of his cry and communicates empathy: “What’s the matter?” She
repeats this phrase rhythmically, gradually decreasing the intensity of her tone. The baby
begins to calm down, and gaze at his mother. The tightening in her stomach releases, as if
a pressure valve has been opened. She experiences the sense that the world, is, once again,
OK.
This is an example of contingent, or “in synch” communication. It is much deeper
than words being exchanged. It means that one person allows his or her state of mind to
be influenced by another’s state of mind. Another way to say this is that emotions are
contagious.52 When we register a feeling in someone else, certain brain circuits mimic
that emotion in our own bodies. In this example, the mother’s sensitivity to her child’s
emotional signals allowed her state of mind to become aligned with her child’s. The shifts
in her own internal world are one of the main ways she becomes aware of the subtle, rapid,
nonverbal signals sent by her child in the gut level system. This allows the mother to get an
“insiders” view on what her baby is experiencing. Edgar Allan Poe captured this idea well
when he stated: “When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are
his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible,
in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments
arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.”53
In addition to getting a feeling, literally, for what her baby is experiencing,
the mother’s own internal shifts communicate nonverbally to her baby that he is being
“understood.” This is a much deeper sense of understanding than simply telling someone
in words that you understand what they are experiencing. Obviously, a twelve-month old
infant would not understand this verbal message anyway. But the beauty of this system that
God created is that he doesn’t need the verbal, head knowledge system to be online in order
to feel understood. The mother’s state directly influences his through nonverbal channels
of communication. The baby knows at a gut level that his mother understands what he is
experiencing. In other words, he is “feeling felt” by her.54
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Sensitivity to emotional signals is the hallmark of secure attachments, which have
positive effects on almost all aspects of development, as we will see below. The essence
of this kind of attunement is the capacity to tune in to signals (mostly nonverbal) that
indicate the need for connection or, at times, separateness. In this way, the attachment
figure’s brain activity directly influences the brain activity of the other. The amazing thing
about this is that “in synch” emotional communication literally creates brain circuits in the
child that foster healthy patterns of communication and emotional well-being. We pass
down our brain circuitry to our children through our emotional communication. However,
emotional communication in the attachment system is a double-edged sword. Non-
contingent emotional communication will also lead to the development of brain circuits
that are associated with certain patterns of communication and dysfunction. These are
different forms of “insecure” attachment that we will review below.
I want to hasten to reinforce here what I mentioned in chapter two: that the gut
level way of knowing continues throughout life and is the foundational way of knowing in
relationships. Likewise, our need for nonverbal attunement, or contingent communication,
continues throughout life. As adults, we use a lot of words in our communication, but the
core of our connection to God and others is a deeper form of emotional communication.
Attachment relationships can have different patterns, which we are referring to here
as “attachment filters.” These patterns are composed of enduring ways in which we access
memory, regulate our emotions, relate to others, reflect on ourselves, and tell our stories.
We can have different attachment filters in different close relationships, but usually we have
one central attachment filter at the top of a hierarchy that predominates.
These attachment filters are organized strategies for maintaining relationalconnections with attachment figures, sometimes in the face of less than ideal relational
circumstances. Within each of these organized strategies, an attachment filter is composed
of a set of variations of a gut level feeling about ourselves and gut level expectations about
how emotionally significant others feel toward us. These two aspects of a filter usually fit
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together, such as a feeling of yourself as unimportant and an expectation of others being
indifferent toward you. So there can still be quite a bit of variability within these four
common attachment filters.
INFANT AND ADULT ATTACHMENT
In order to understand the different attachment filters, it will be helpful to have some
background on how they were identified and how they operate over time. The history of
this research is really quite fascinating. I will give you a reader’s digest version here, but
if you are interested in more detail, there are several good overviews available.55 John
Bowlby, a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who wrote from the 1940s to the early
1980s, founded what is now called “Attachment Theory.” He was trained in Freudian
psychoanalysis, which did not emphasize the importance of relationships for psychological
development. In his work with children, Bowlby became convinced of the importance
of early relationships for later development, and began to formulate the idea that human
infants have an inborn “attachment system” that promotes physical closeness to caregivers.
This idea was later expanded to emphasize a sense of connection or “felt security” that
becomes encoded in gut level memory as an attachment filter.
Bowlby worked closely with a colleague, Mary Ainsworth, who in 1963 developed
what is now called the Strange Situation experiment, which she used to study the attachment
patterns of twelve month-old infants and their mothers.56 The strange situation was
designed to assess differences between twelve month-old infants in the organization of
their attachment behavior toward their mothers. The procedure consists of a series of three-
minute episodes lasting a total of about twenty minutes. The infant is observed in a playroom with toys, first with mother, during which time most infants explore their environment
while keeping an eye on their mother. In this episode, there is not much variability in
infants’ behavior. However, variability increases dramatically as the procedure continues.
Next, the mother leaves the room, then returns, then a stranger enters with the mother in
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the room, and the mother then leaves the infant with the stranger alone. The entrance of
a stranger with mother still in the room reduces exploring behavior in almost all infants.
However, when the mother leaves her infant with the stranger, the behavior of over half the
children changes abruptly, and clear differences in the organization of attachment emerge.
The strange situation procedure provides the opportunity to observe how an infant uses her
caregiver for comfort and a base for exploration, and the balance between attachment and
exploration behaviors as the situation unfolds.
A number of early studies used the criteria of strength of attachment to describe
patterns of attachment.57 Strength of attachment refers to whether, and to what degree, an
infant protests when her mother leaves for a brief period. This approach emphasizes the
amount of a behavior but does not take into account the underlying meaning of the behavior.
As Ainsworth gained more experience observing infants with their mothers, she came to
conclude that this quantitative approach to evaluating attachment patterns was not only
insufficient, but could actually be misleading. For example, as we will see, anxiously attached
infants exhibit strong protest when their mothers leave—more than secure infants—which
could appear to be a sign of a more healthy attachment from a “strength of attachment”
perspective. However, these infants are not able to gain comfort from their mothers, and
are severely disabled in their ability to explore their environments. The combination of
these behaviors reveals an underlying insecurity in the infant’s attachment. So, it became
clear over time that the security of an infant’s attachment is the most important dimension
in evaluating it.
While infants’ responses to their mothers leaving was revealing, it turned out that
their responses to reunion with mother after a brief separation were even more revealing.Secure infants show an organized sequence of behavior in which they welcome mother and
approach her, seek to be picked up or to remain close to her, and then return to the task of
play and exploration. Two other patterns of reunion behavior can be seen: one in which
infants show disinterest in their mother’s return and typically avoid her, and another in
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which infants show an ambivalent response—seeking physical closeness and yet resisting
mother at the same time.
Observing infants’ behavior throughout the entire strange situation reveals three
attachment classifications consistent with the reunion behavior noted above. The majority
of infants in most samples are securely attached , and show a pattern of actively playing and
exploring, seeking contact with their mothers when they become distressed after the brief
separation, being easily comforted by their mothers, and quickly returning to play. About
twenty percent of infants in most samples are insecurely attached and avoidant (insecure-
avoidant). These infants don’t seem to be bothered when their mothers leave and avoid
her when she returns. Often times these infants are more friendly toward the strangers
than toward their own mothers. It turns out, however, that even though these infants’ do
not show overt behavioral distress when separated from their mothers, their physiology
goes through the roof—their heart rate and blood pressure increase significantly. So we
can see at a physiological level they are indeed distressed, but they have already learned
to automatically cut this information off so they are not aware of it. Finally, about ten
percent of infants are classified as insecurely attached and resistant (anxious-resistant).
(This is also referred to as “ambivalent” attachment). These infants go back and forth
between seeking contact and pushing their mothers away in a display of anger. Later, a
fourth classification labeled disorganized attachment was discovered in which infants show
bizarre and dissociative behaviors, such as freezing and not being responsive. It appears
that they do not have an organized strategy for achieving proximity to, and felt security
with their caregivers.58 This may be because their attachment figures are frightening, or
show frightened behavior themselves. So the very person the child is supposed to go to forcomfort causes fear, which puts the child in a horrible bind and causes a breakdown of any
organized coping strategy.
I mentioned earlier that contingent communication in secure attachment allows
the child’s brain circuits to use the adult’s more mature brain circuits to regulate their
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emotions. In contrast to this, in an insecure attachment, a child is not able to use their
parents to regulate their emotions. Their gut level emotion system becomes unbalanced
in different ways because it is not regulated by their parents. We can see this during the
strange situation lab task. Avoidant infants don’t cry when they are separated from their
parents. This would be a way to elicit comfort from an attachment figure and is a normal
response to separation at this age. Avoidant children don’t cry because they have learned
that shutting down their emotions is the best way to cope with pain. Their gut level knowing
and emotion system is unbalanced on the deactivation side of the spectrum. Resistant or
ambivalent infants are distressed and preoccupied with their parents throughout the lab
task, and are not comforted by their parents when reunited. They have learned to cope with
pain by hyperactivating their negative emotions and need for others since they get little help
managing their painful emotions. So they are unbalanced on the hyperactivation side of the
spectrum. Disorganized infants engage in bizarre behaviors such as freezing with a trance-
like expression, and clinging to their parent while at the same time crying and leaning away
from their parents. In short, we can see that stable patterns of emotional communication
and coping with pain are well in place by 12 months of age.
These patterns appear to be fairly stable into adulthood. How we know this brings
us to the next step in the development of our understanding of attachment. In the early
1980s, Mary Main (a former student of Mary Ainsworth), Nancy Kaplan and Carol George
(former students of Mary Main) stumbled onto a very interesting discovery. They were
conducting a longitudinal study of attachment, and were interviewing a group of six year-
olds (who had previously been studied as infants). They decided to interview their parents
about their own attachment histories. They went into this with no agenda or theory—theysimply wanted to explore the lives of these parents. As they were interviewing the parents,
they discovered that the way they told their stories about their past attachment relationships
allowed them to predict the Strange Situation classification of the parents’ children. 59 This
led the development of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which is a semi-structured,
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narrative assessment of an adult’s “state of mind with respect to attachment.” This state
of mind reflects an engrained pattern of emotional communication. In essence, the AAI
evaluates not so much the content of a person’s attachment story, but rather the way they
tell their story.
Adults who idealize their own parents but cannot provide clear memories in support
of this (classified as dismissing-avoidant adults), generally have children who behave in
an avoidant manner in the Strange Situation. Adults who stray from the AAI questions,
or who show intense anger toward their parents (i.e., preoccupied adults) typically have
children who are classified as ambivalent. In contrast, secure adults whose stories about
their relationships with their parents are coherent and believable tend to have children who
are secure in the Strange Situation. The striking factor about this research is that several
studies have conducted AAI’s with mothers before the birth of their children, and find
a strong correspondence between mothers’ prenatal AAI interviews and their children’s
strange situation classification at one year of age.60 This rules out the possibility that the
association could be due to some influence of the child’s interactions with the mother. In
short, there is clear evidence that we pass our attachment filters—engrained patterns of
emotional communication—down to our children. This happens through our relationships,
and specifically through our emotional communication that relies heavily on nonverbal
channels.
In addition to being passed down through the generations, attachment filters are
also fairly stable across many years, although they can change. A number of longitudinal
studies have been conducted linking infants’ Strange Situation classifications with their
AAI classifications 15 to 21 years later.
61
In about two-thirds of the cases, individuals’attachment filters remained the same up to 20 years later. However, some studies have shown
less continuity over time, but in most cases the lack of continuity is referred to as “lawful
discontinuity” because there were clearly identifiable events, situations, or relationships that
changed the person’s attachment filter. So developmental research has taught us that our
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gut level knowledge system develops attachment filters that remain online throughout our
lives. They store our gut level knowledge of “how to be others,” biasing our perceptions,
and creating patterns of emotional communication. It also reveals a fundamental principle
we will come back to: that our gut level attachment filters are encoded in narrative form,
and the way we tell our stories “carries” or enacts our deepest beliefs about ourselves and
significant others, including God.
Around the same time that the AAI was being developed in the mid-1980s, another
group of psychologists began to apply attachment theory to romantic relationships. The
basic ideas was that romantic relationships are a type of attachment relationship and so we
should see the same basic attachment filters in romantic relationships that we see in infants
and adults in general. These researchers used primarily self-report questionnaires, and as
a result, this research developed as an entirely separate tradition (self-report tradition) from
the Strange Situation and AAI tradition (or interview tradition).
Originally, this self-report tradition used the three attachment filters that had been
identified in the interview tradition: secure, dismissing (parallel to “avoidant” attachment
in infants), and preoccupied (parallel to “ambivalent” attachment in infants). Later,
this tradition shifted from these attachment categories to a model with two dimensions:
attachment-related anxiety, and attachment-related avoidance.62 Secure attachment is
represented by low anxiety and low avoidance. Preoccupied attachment is represented by
high anxiety and low avoidance. Dismissing attachment is represented by low anxiety and
high avoidance. A fourth category, “fearful” attachment, was later added that is manifested
by high anxiety and high avoidance.63 Although each tradition has a different approach to
attachment, and different ways of studying it, we have learned a tremendous amount from both traditions. Let’s consider the four primary attachment filters.
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SECURE ATTACHMENT FILTER
If you have a secure attachment filter, it means that you believe, at a gut level , that
emotionally significant others will be available and responsive when you need them. Others
will be reliable, and you can count on them. People with a secure filter have experienced
this enough in the past that they expect it of attachment figures without consciously
thinking about it. They are typically open to their own need for others and to others’ needs.
Expecting that emotionally significant people will be there for them when they need them
provides a secure base from which to focus on the needs of others. This is what frees us
up to love God and others. Let’s take a look at what research has shown us about secure
attachment filters, or what we can also refer to as a secure attachment style.
People with secure attachment filters develop a particular set of ways to regulate their
own emotions: they consciously acknowledge emotional distress, they display their distress
to others in close relationships, they tend to solve problems actively and effectively, and they
actively seek support from others when they need it. These are hallmark characteristics of
people with secure attachment filters in terms of how they manage and use their emotions.
They do not have to think about this. It happens automatically because their relational
experiences are run through the secure attachment filter at a gut level. That is the positive
side of gut level knowing. The negative side is that you cannot just “think about it” and
develop these secure relational strategies, because they are hard wired into our brains.
We have also learned from attachment research that securely attached people are
able to manage their emotional distress well.64 For example, individuals with a secure
attachment are able to easily access negative emotional memories without experiencing
high levels of distress.
65
In addition, when secure people recall a negative memory, it doesnot tend to trigger other secondary negative emotions. This combination of findings is very
significant because it suggests that secure people can bring painful emotions online without
this triggering a cascade of other negative emotions.66 So, for example, they can process
sadness over a specific situation without that triggering anxiety. This allows them to work
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through painful events and memories without becoming overwhelmed.
Another interesting characteristic is that securely attached people tend to express
emotion openly and to disclose personal information with significant others. For example,
they are very perceptive about situational cues when determining how much they should
disclose in a particular relational context. They tend to disclose about the same amount
as others do to them, and they usually feel good about how much they disclose to others.
Secure individuals also tend to be attracted to partners who disclose a lot, and who disclose
personal information about themselves.67 Secure people show a lot of wisdom in deciding
how much to reveal to others, and they do this in a way that keeps them emotionally refueled
and promotes a sense of connection with others.
Infant researchers have studied mother-infant communication patterns by looking at
the degree of synchronization between their vocal rhythms. Secure dyads show a midrange
balance of synchronization. In other words, they show clear correspondence between
communication signals, but each member has the freedom to vary responses, which in turn
are registered and responded to in a contingent manner. What this fascinating study suggests
is that secure people are marked by a certain fluidity and flexibility in their emotional
communications with others. They get the gist of the incoming message, and acknowledge
it nonverbally, and their brains help them to feel what the other person is feeling. But their
brain circuits don’t lock them into feeling exactly what the other person is feeling.
This is exemplified by good psychotherapists. They are able to register a clients’ gut
level states, such as depression, communicate acknowledgement of them nonverbally, and
yet not completely enter into the same emotional states as their clients. There is a brain-to-
brain link that causes them to mirror their clients’ emotions to some extent, but they havethe flexibility to bring new ways of being into the relational experiences. In this way, their
brains circuits literally influence and rewire their clients’ brain circuits.
Attachment researchers tell us that secure people also develop effective ways to
cope with stress and solve problems. These individuals tend to be curious and actively
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seek new information that helps them grow.68 They don’t tend to get rigidly fixed on certain
information so much that they discount new information that might cause ambiguity or
confusion. Even if new information muddies the waters, people with secure attachments will
still wrestle with this new information. And this includes information about relationships
as well. Their internal secure base helps them to update their gut level sense of who they
are with and to others, and their gut level expectations of others. As a result of this, securely
attached individuals are typically more confident about their ability to flexibly adapt their
beliefs to accommodate new information.
One of the ways secure individuals cope effectively is by seeking support when
they need others to help them manage their emotions. For example, when secure women
feel anxious, they are more likely to seek support than less secure women. 69 In addition,
secure women tend to feel comforted by support from their romantic partners, whereas less
secure women tend to withdraw emotionally and physically from their partners when they
are distressed.
Attachment researchers have observed a particular pattern in the way secure people
tell their stories on the Adult Attachment Research. Their stories tend to be coherent and
collaborative. They tend to stay on track with the interview questions, and with the context
of the interview. In addition, when they tell their stories, secure individuals are able to
access and convey the emotional meaning of their stories, and yet still structure them in
a logical and coherent manner. Because they are emotionally engaged, their stories are
believable.
One of the fascinating things about this research on the AAI is that secure individuals
do not have to report only positive memories of their early attachment experiences in orderto be classified as secure. They can report negative, painful experiences, but it is the way
they tell their stories that distinguishes them as secure. This is referred to by attachment
researchers as “earned secure attachment.” They tend to show a sense of perspective and
balance in talking about their past attachment relationships. In other words, they may
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recall painful experiences with an attachment figure, but they are able recognize various
factors, including themselves, that may have contributed to them. In this, they often convey
an implicit sense of forgiveness. They do not become overwhelmed by pain when they
recall painful events. They are able to stay in the present and emotionally engaged while
describing such events. What is being revealed in all this is the person’s organized pattern
for dealing with attachment-related information. Research tells us that the attachment
processes revealed in secure AAI narratives are the very same processes involved in
developing healthy, mature relationships.
In summary, the breadth of research on secure attachment, or attachment filters,
reveals a strikingly coherent picture of an organized strategy for approaching relationships
and emotional meaning. We can presume that a secure attachment filter develops early on
from repeated experiences with caregivers who are consistently emotionally available and
responsive. They learn from these experiences a strategy for regulating their emotions that
allows them to be aware of their emotions, and to use others in a balanced way for support.
They have learned that their own emotions will not overwhelm them, and that expressing
their emotions to others will lead to a positive experience of connection. They learn that
they are capable of managing their own distress, with the help of others who are there for
them, and that others will provide comfort when they need it. These experiences are all
recorded in gut level memory and then filter all relational experiences, particularly those
with whom we have some measure of connection or attachment.
So what does this look like with God? As we suggested in chapter two, people bring
their secure attachment filters to their relationships with God. I think Ana Maria Rizzuto
was right that our “God filter” is not an exact replica of our attachment filters with humans.However, this is gut level knowledge about ourselves and attachment figures, one of whom
is God. And as we have discussed, we cannot control this type of knowledge. So it stands
to reason that for those with secure attachment filters, these experiences and expectations
will operate in their relationships with God, biasing their experiences of God toward a
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sense of felt security. This does not mean there will not be difficult and painful times in
their relationships with God. Rather, it means that they tend to expect God to be available
and responsive, to genuinely care about them, and to welcome the expression of emotion,
including negative emotions.
My colleagues and I found strong support for this in the study I reviewed in chapter
two. We found that secure people showed a stronger sense of connection to a spiritual
community than any of the other three attachment groups.70 In addition, we found that they
experienced less anxiety in their relationships with God than preoccupied and dismissing
people. This allows secure people to process difficult experiences in relationship with
God, and to stay connected to God even in the midst of dark and difficult times. These
times can result from life situations, and times when God seems unresponsive, what St.
John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the soul.”71 Regardless of the nature of
the difficult experience, a secure attachment filter provides a secure base from which to
process and grow through trials.
PREOCCUPIED ATTACHMENT FILTER
People with a preoccupied attachment filter expect others to be unreliable. That is,
sometimes others may be available and responsive, and sometimes they may not be. And
they do not feel like they can predict how this will play out. People with this attachment
filter have developed a strategy of hyperactivating—shifting into high gear—their need
for others when they become distressed. The strategy here is to try to pull attachment
figures into providing comfort and care. There is a tendency for people with this filter to
become preoccupied with unresolved emotional pain, and to demand that others take care
of this pain. This also makes it difficult to notice and attend to others’ needs—that is to
love others. Let’s turn now to a closer look at what research reveals about preoccupied
attachment filters.
Attachment researchers suggest that a preoccupied attachment style develops from
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caregivers who are inconsistently available or responsive to an infant’s physical or emotional
needs.72 In this relational environment, an infant has a strong need for connection, but an
equally strong fear of rejection and separation. Because of the inconsistent responsiveness,
the infant becomes preoccupied with staying physically close to their caregiver, because
they have no internal sense of felt security. For them, being physically alone is equivalent to
being emotionally alone. So they develop an organized strategy for dealing with distress—
they hyperactivate their attachment system, or their need for others. The result of this is
that their emotional distress becomes elevated, and they become totally focused on gaining
support and comfort from their caregivers.73 You can see this filter in the clingy child who
is frightened to venture very far away from her mother.
Attachment studies have taught us that preoccupied people, it turns out, have easy
access to painful emotions; however, they have difficulty regulating their emotions. For
example, they recall negative memories more quickly, and more strongly than people
with any other attachment filter.74 Preoccupied individuals also experience all emotions,
regardless of whether they are the primary emotions associated with a particular memory,
as very intense. So for example, if they recall a predominantly sad memory, this will cause
emotional flooding, bringing online other negative emotions like anxiety. They do not seem
to be able to experience one negative emotion by itself without becoming overwhelmed
with global negative emotions.
Neuroscientists would tell us that this is due to the brain circuitry that has been laid
down as a result of their early relational experiences. Their brains tag a negative event
with all the negative emotional memories that are stored in the low road brain circuits as
a big ball of emotional pain. Because the emotional meaning of their pain has not been
processed in relationships, becoming linked to different brain circuits and to their ownhigh road brain circuits, the ball of emotional pain doesn’t get transformed. It remains in a
potential state of activation that can be tapped into from many different “low road” angles,
without the preoccupied person being aware of what is being triggered.
The way preoccupied people disclose information about themselves fits their
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organized strategy for dealing with relationships and emotions. For example, they disclose
about the same amount of personal information as securely attached individuals. However,
they have difficulty adapting the level of their self-disclosure to situational cues. In
addition, unlike secure individuals, they generally do not respond in kind to others by
disclosing things on the same topic.75 What is interesting, however, is that they tend to like
high disclosure conversations. So we see here a complex pattern of self-disclosure that
represents an organized strategy for dealing with close attachment relationships, emotion,
and distress. Preoccupied people tend to focus on their own needs and feelings, and are
somewhat oblivious to whom they are disclosing information, and what the other person
has shared.
Recall the mother-infant study of vocal rhythm matching I mentioned earlier. These
researchers found that with preoccupied dyads, their communication was excessively
matched. In other words, each individual acts as a tightly bound mirror to the other. What
we see here is a lack of flexibility that is characteristic of securely attached dyads. For
example, when an infant shows distress, this triggers a flood of negative emotions, and
their hyperactivating attachment strategy. This, in turn, causes the mother to mirror her
baby’s emotional state in an attempt to regulate her emotions. This causes a reversal of
the normal parent-child roles because the mother, instead of bringing new calming way of
being to her baby, is compelled at a gut level to focus on managing her own emotions in
dyadic interaction.
As we mentioned earlier, attachment researchers tell us that secure people tend to
seek out new information and adjust their beliefs and expectations to accommodate new
information. It turns out that preoccupied people don’t tend to do this. Instead, theytend to reject or ignore information that will cause ambiguity, and they have difficulty
revising their gut level beliefs based on new information.76 In fact, preoccupied people have
a particularly difficult time revising their gut level beliefs about themselves and others. For
example, in their evaluations of themselves, they focus on their weaknesses. This creates
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a lot of internal distress, which in turn exacerbates their negative view of themselves.77 In
addition, preoccupied people are less likely than secure people to revise their perceptions
of their partners, even when their partners behave in ways that don’t fit their gut level
expectations.78
Preoccupied people seem to be resistant to taking in new information about
their partners.
When preoccupied people tell their stories on the Adult Attachment Interview,
attachment researchers have observed that their stories are incoherent in a specific way—
they tend to trail off into irrelevance. What this means is that they get off track from the
specific topic or question, often times because they become flooded with emotional pain.
They are not able to manage their emotions, while at the same time stay on task with
the interview. They also provide very long and vague descriptions. Because of this it is
difficult to follow their train of thought. They become wrapped up in their emotional pain,
and lose track of the context of what they are doing, and of the other person to whom they
are talking. It is not hard to see how this causes difficulties in relationships.
In summary, since their caregivers have not been emotionally attuned to them
consistently, preoccupied individuals have difficulty regulating their own emotions
effectively. They do have an organized strategy for doing this, but it involves hyperactivating
thoughts, feelings and behaviors related to attachment relationships, which are predominantly
negative. They have greater accessibility to negative memories than to positive memories,
so they are prone to ruminate on their distress. And as we mentioned before, this tends to
activate other painful memories, causing a cascade of painful emotions all mixed together.
This, in turn, makes it more difficult for preoccupied people to be aware of and respond to
others’ needs.What does all this mean for preoccupied people’s relationships with God? Just
as with secure folks, this attachment filter we have described above operates in their
relationships with God. So, these individuals are prone to feel abandoned by God, and
to experience their relationships with God as unstable. For example, my colleagues and
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I found that preoccupied people experience less of a sense of connection to their spiritual
communities, and more anxiety in their relationships with God than secure people.79 In
addition, preoccupied people view God as less loving than those with positive views of
themselves.80
They tend to engage in clingy, help-seeking forms of prayer, desperately
seeking to hold on to a bond that feels very fragile.81 The pain they experience in their
relationships with God becomes part of the entire package of global emotional pain in
their lives. If they touch on a painful nerve in one area of their life, it will often spill over
into some aspect of their relationships with God, and vice versa. Preoccupied people tend
to use God and their spiritual communities to help them regulate their emotions. This is
normal and healthy within certain limits, but it becomes rather extreme with preoccupied
people. Help in regulating their emotions is part of what they need to grow, and something
that can be provided in a healthy spiritual community.
DISMISSING ATTACHMENT FILTER
In contrast to those with a secure attachment filter, people with a “dismissing”
attachment filter expect others to not be available and responsive to them. They expect
emotionally barren relationships with significant others, and tend to be emotionally distant
in their relationships. 82 As a result their brains have developed a particular strategy for
dealing with this: to deactivate, or shut down their need for God and others. This leads
to difficulty feeling connected to others, being aware of their own feelings, and attending
to others’ needs. Let’s take a closer look at what research reveals about this attachment
filter.
Attachment researchers tell us that a dismissing attachment style develops fromrelationships with caregivers who are emotionally unavailable and unresponsive to an
infant’s emotional or physical needs. For example, dismissive parents are not very attuned
to their infants’ emotions. In other words, they just don’t intuit or sense what their babies are
feeling or experiencing. As a result, they communicate in ways that are not contingent with
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their infants’ needs. For example, in the mother-infant study of vocal rhythms, researchers
find that dismissing parents’ communication signals are almost completely independent of
their infants’ communication signals. Recently, a colleague of mine came in to his office
across the hall from mine, and appeared to be rushed and lost in thought. I asked him how
he was doing. He replied “Not much” (probably assuming I had asked something like
“what’s going on?”). His answer didn’t match my question because he wasn’t tuned in to
what I was saying. This is how it is in the nonverbal realm of emotions in a dismissing
dyad. Each member of the dyad communicates almost as if they didn’t hear the other—
emotional ships passing each other in the night.
This causes their children to develop a disconnect between their emotional
experience (gut level knowledge) and language (head knowledge). So instead of the two
knowledge systems working together seamlessly, the logical system in the left-hemisphere
comes to dominate the infant-caregiver relationship. The high road system then functions
independently as a subsystem in the brain, rather than working in tandem with the low
road.83 As these infants record these experiences in their gut level memories, they tend not
to express affection or emotional needs. In contrast, they deactivate their need for others.
Since they don’t develop a sense of felt security from their relationships with
their caregivers, attachment researchers tell us that they find an alternate way to comfort
themselves, one that does not require a positive relational environment. By deactivating
their need for others, their brains become wired to regulate their emotions by themselves.84
In other words, these dismissing people distance themselves from the source of distress and
the potentially frustrating attachment figure, and cut off negative emotions and thoughts.
Likewise, they incorporate a conscious image of themselves as strong, highly self-reliant,and above needing other people. They view others who need people as weak. From one
perspective we can see this as a creative adaptation to feeling emotionally alone. This
strategy works in the short term, but it bites them on the back end in terms of their ability
to process emotions, function in relationships, and process information in general.
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Unlike secure people, who can bring their painful emotions online and tolerate them,
and preoccupied people who tend to experience a flood of painful emotions when one comes
online, dismissing folks keep themselves at arms length from their internal emotional worlds
by keeping all emotions at bay.85
This is a “front end” (automatic) defensive strategy. For
example, dismissing people have less accessibility to memories of sadness or anxiety than
either secure or preoccupied people. Interestingly, the memories dismissing people do tend
to recall are emotionless. This is probably because they are not very attentive to emotional
information.86 In other words, dismissing people make a gut level preemptive strike against
emotional experiences in close relationships by segragating them from awareness.
In addition to the frontal assault on emotions, dismissing people also use a “back
end” defensive strategy. They tend to deny experiencing anger, and yet show more intense
physiological signs of anger and hostility. There is a major disconnect here and this is
precisely the cost of their attachment strategy. If you ask them about anger they will tell
you that other people around them are angry, not them.87 This is what psychologists call
“dissociated anger.” Another way to say this is that dismissing people show a disconnect
between their conscious claims and their unconscious dynamics. For example, they report
low levels of death anxiety on self-report measures, and yet show high levels of death
anxiety on a method of assessing this that bypasses conscious awareness of their emotional
life.88
This defensive style serves to keep dismissive people from being aware of emotions
that they experience as dangerous to their (brittle) sense of self. However, gut level
indicators of these emotions are still there, such as physiological arousal. Because they
are also unaware of this gut level information, it can seriously dysregulate them and theywill not know why this is happening. This style also fosters a paranoid and hostile stance
toward others, which maintains the negative cycle of emotionally distant relationships.
Consistent with dismissing individuals’ avoidance of close relationships, attachment
researchers tell us they don’t tend to disclose personal information to others. 89 As we would
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expect, dismissing people are less satisfied with their relationships than secure people.90
When you ask women about their relationship satisfaction, their partner’s level of comfort
with emotional closeness predicts their relationship satisfaction.91 We also know that
dismissing individuals avoid conflict more than people with a secure attachment filter, and
show more stonewalling behavior (cutting off communication) in romantic relationships.92
Dismissing people’s strategy for regulating their emotions—to deactivate them—
also has a negative effect on their thinking. For example, situations that bring out positive
feelings often lead to new ways of thinking about things—new ideas, novel approaches to
solving problems, etc. Dismissing people miss out on this information that comes along with
positive emotions.93 They also miss out on information in other areas. Dismissing people
tend to avoid emotional distress by lacking curiosity, not looking for new information, and
discounting the importance of new information that may create ambiguity.94 Because they
are not open to new information, dismissing people tend not to transform and update their
gut level beliefs and expectations about themselves, others, and the world. This keeps them
in a negative cycle.
Attachment researcher suggests that dismissing people’s views of themselves are
also distorted in ways that are congruent with their deactivating emotion regulation strategy.
For example, they rate themselves as lower than secure and preoccupied individuals in
their similarity to others.95 In addition, they underestimate how similar they are to others,
especially when they are distressed. How this works is that dismissing individuals react to
threatening situations by inflating their positive view of themselves, and perceiving others
as different. So basically, when threatened, they think, “I’m great, and others are different
than me (i.e., not so great).” Part of how they appear to achieve this psychological slight ofhand is by attributing negative aspects of themselves to others.96 This serves two functions:
it increases their sense of self-confidence in the face of distress, and increases distance, and
decreases connection between themselves and others. In short, dismissing people maintain
a conscious, albeit brittle, view of themselves as self-reliant, and they short circuit their
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emotional experiences, keeping others at arms length.
Attachment researchers have found a consistent pattern in the way dismissing people
tell their stories on the Adult Attachment Interview. They tend to lack a sense of coherence
because they make statements that they are not able to support. In other words, their verbal
stories and their between-the-lines stories don’t match up. For example, they frequently
report that their childhoods were very positive, but then they can’t provide any memories
that support this. They also tend to insist that they can’t remember much, if anything, from
their childhoods. This fits with the idea that dismissing people deactivate their gut level
knowledge of attachment-related information.
Dismissing people tend to play out this same pattern in their relationships with God.
They may consciously acknowledge needing God, but they will rarely actually rely on
Him in difficult times. When they are distressed, they generally continue their self-reliant
coping strategies, keeping God and their spiritual communities on the periphery, while
focusing on head knowledge about God. For example, my colleagues and I found that
dismissing people experience less of a sense of belonging to a spiritual community than
secure individuals.97 They also reported less spiritual friendships—friendships that foster
an intentional component of spiritual encouragement—than secure people. In addition,
dismissing people are less likely to believe in and have a relationship with what they view as
a personal God.98 In other words, dismissing people who believe that intimate attachments
are undesirable or dangerous don’t think an intimate relationship with God is a possibility.
It’s just not something that even shows up on their radar screen because they don’t have the
experiential hooks (attachment filters) on which to hang the experience.
One interesting finding we should note is that dismissing individuals will sometimesrespond to a disruption in an important relationship by increasing religious behaviors or
involvement. This contradicts their normal strategy. It seems likely that they may initially
react to such distress with their typical strategy of deactivating their felt need for closeness.
However, if the stress gets too severe, and too disorganizing, this may neutralize their
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normal coping mechanisms of short circuiting painful emotions, leading to a flood of
painful emotions. This in turn may drive them to God and their spiritual communities for
support and comfort. We know that the hyperactivation and deactivation strategies both
serve the same function of regulating our emotions, and it may be that each strategy serves
as a back up for the other when one becomes overwhelmed by high levels of stress that push
a person out of their normal pathways of coping.
We also get a fascinating window into dismissing individuals’ relationships with
God through studies that have looked at prayer through an attachment lens. Dismissing
people tend to engage in types of prayer that minimize a sense of closeness to God.99 In
fact, when they become more distressed, and need support more (even though they don’t
show it), dismissing individual spend even less time in types of prayer that foster emotional
connection with God. In short, while keeping God at arms length emotionally, dismissing
individuals tend to relate to God through their “high road” head knowledge.
FEARFUL ATTACHMENT FILTER
Attachment researchers suggest that fearful attachment is a combination of the
preoccupied and dismissing attachment styles.100 Like the preoccupied attachment filter,
people with a fearful attachment filter want to have close relationships, and need a lot of
comfort and reassurance from others. However, like people with a dismissing attachment
filters, fearful people tend to avoid close relationships, even though they desire them.
Fearful attachment develops from caregivers who tend to be inconsistently available. In
addition, these caregivers tend to express negative and frightening emotions either in front
of, or toward their children.
101
As these repeated experiences are encoded in gut level memory, it is natural that these
children develop a gut level view of others as uncaring, or outright rejecting and hostile,
and a view of themselves as unworthy and unlovable. Unlike preoccupied people who view
themselves as bad, but view others as a source of potential comfort and security, fearful
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they stay on the outskirts of the community. Yet, they showed the same level of anxiety in their
relationships with God as preoccupied people, both of which were less than secure people. So,
this suggests that their experiences of pain and fear of rejection in their relationships with God
are similar to preoccupied people’s. In short, fearful people desire a close connection to God and
a spiritual community, but their gut level experience tells them that seeking connection leads to
rejection, so they stay on the periphery of the community, and keep God at arms length.
AN ATTACHMENT FILTER IN ACTION
Fred came to see me in the hopes of saving his marriage. Fred and Bonnie had been
arguing for several years and things had hit a crisis point. Fred was very angry at Bonnie. For
quite a few years, he felt she had been pursuing her own agenda, not committed to him or the kids.
Bonnie separated, saying she wanted to work on the marriage, but Fred didn’t see any signs that
she was following through on this. He became more angry with her and began to express this
to her very overtly. Bonnie began to express deep-seated anger and disappointment passively,
by withdrawing and refusing to communicate with Fred, with the exception of an occasional
out-of-the-blue outburst. A typical interaction during this time would look something like this:
Fred would try to talk with Bonnie about their marriage, probably with an angry tone, and she
would withdraw, disagree with him, question him, and eventually refuse to talk about the issue
anymore.
Now, let’s take a quick detour to explore Fred’s attachment filter so you can understand
how and why Fred processed these interactions as he did. Fred’s attachment filter was a version
of the preoccupied filter. His father died when he was very young, and his mother was angry
and vacillated between neglect and abuse. At times Fred was left on his own to figure life out
even when he was quite young, and at other times, his mother would verbally attack him with
tremendous hostility. As a result, Fred developed an attachment filter of himself as being badand unworthy of care, and a gut level expectation of others as being highly critical of him. So
Fred expected this from Bonnie, not consciously, but this filter automatically biased him to
experience this in his interactions with Bonnie.
Let’s return to Fred’s typical interactions with Bonnie. In some ways, Fred’s attachment
filter caused him to elicit from Bonnie the very responses he most feared, but that were also
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most familiar—withdrawal and criticism. He would communicate in such a way as to induce
in her bad feelings that would lead her to respond in this way. (Bonnie also did her version of
the same thing). In addition, once Bonnie responded, Fred’s filter caused him to perceive her
questioning and withdrawal as a critical rejection, a feeling that was very familiar from his
relationship with his mother. He would experience many choices she made as an attack against
him. This was the emotional meaning produced automatically as a result of his attachment
filter. It was difficult for him to appreciate how he had helped create his wife’s responses, and
her own gut level self-protective motives involved in her responses and choices. After the first
round of one of these interactions, Fred’s preoccupied attachment filter would lead to a strategy
of hyperactivating his need for connection, coupled with an angry demanding tone. So he would
become overwhelmed with the pain of rejection, and pursue talking about the issue with Bonnie
in an angry way, which was his way of trying to maintain some semblance of connection in an
insecure attachment relationship.
We can also see Fred’s attachment filter play out in his relationship with God. He was
actively involved in a church and was growing in his relationship with God. Yet, when we
discussed his relationship with God, he clearly felt that God was critical and not accepting of
him. This would hinder him at times from praying, and from getting closer to those in his
spiritual community.
In summary, the third big idea is that we remember how important people in our lives
feel about us not in words, but in our emotions, bodies and images—in a gut level type of
memory. And, related to this, memories of relational experiences with emotionally significant
people are etched in our souls and become filters that shape how we feel about ourselves, God,
and others, and how we determine the meaning of events in our lives.
You will return to exploring your attachment filters with God in the soul projects in
section 3, but as a brief exercise to illustrate the point of this big idea, as well as how it may applyin your own life, take a few moments to reflect on the following question, and write down your
answer: “Imagine that God begins thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when
you come to mind?”
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CHAPTER FOUR BIG IDEA #4
TIPPING POINTS
IN SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
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The great French mathematician Poincare describes a breakthrough in his work:
“Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and
thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came
to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty,
that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical
with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” 106 Poincare had been working on this problem
for a long time, but the solution did not come during an episode of conscious, deliberate
thought about the problem. Rather, it came in a flash when he was not focusing on the
problem. Spiritual transformation, likewise, shows up in a flash, but not without hard work
behind the scenes.
We have discussed how our attachment filters shape or channel our deepest
experiences of ourselves in relationship with God and others, how we actually relate to
God and others, and how we automatically evaluate the meaning of events in our lives. If
this is the case, then it is our attachment filters that need to be transformed in order to find
true life. Anything short of this gut level change is a spiritual short-cut that simply does
not work.
The “deep magic” of God’s design tells us that this is the only way we can truly
grow in our capacity to love God and others. We can clearly see this deep magic in many
of Jesus’ teachings. For example, Jesus tells us, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and
a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matt. 7:18). In addition, listen to what Jesus said to
the Pharisees in this regard in Matthew 23:25-26: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and
Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are
full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish,and then the outside also will be clean.”
The Pharisees cleaned virtually everything except their gut level capacity to love
God and others. In other words, the fruit of our lives—our love for God and others—flows
from our deep, gut level knowledge, or our attachment filters. This is the character of the
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tree, and the inside of the Pharisees’ cups that Jesus is referring to in these two passages.
It is also important to point out here that Bible makes it clear that our sin is a gut level
condition (Gal. 5:17, 19-21), not superficial thoughts or behaviors. What this means is that
our sin nature operates as a gut level filter that permeates our attachment filters in ways far
beyond our awareness. The main point here is that the type of transformation required to
make us more like Jesus in our ability to love is a very deep transformation that addresses
the root causes of our inability to love—that is, a transformation of our sin-permeated
attachment filters, which operate outside of our conscious awareness and beyond our direct
control.
With the background of big ideas #1-3 in place, we come to a critical idea: how our gut
level knowledge, or attachment filters, change so that we become more like Christ in living
out the greatest commandments—to love God and love our neighbor. Now, there are two
ways our attachment filters change: directly and indirectly. First, there are certain ways our
brains process gut level relational meanings (“emotional information”) that directly causes
changes in our attachment filters. This happens in the “low road” brain circuits. Second,
there are processes that we can intentionally engage in to foster change in our gut level
ways of knowing God and others—our attachment filters. In other words, there are things
we can do to furnish our souls to prepare us for—or to indirectly bring about—spiritual
transformation. In big idea #4 here, Tipping Points in Spiritual Transformation, we will
focus on the direct causes of change and how they work, and shift to how we furnish our
souls in big idea #5.
WHY ATTACHMENT FILTERS ARE STUBBORN
Jim came to therapy struggling to maintain romantic relationships. His parents
were quite distant and uninvolved which led to an attachment filter that could be somewhat
captured as: “I am unimportant and important people in my life will neglect me.” His
attachment filters caused him to perceive women as not genuinely interested in him, or to
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choose women who were not, and he would in turn respond by putting a wall up and subtly
pushing women away until they eventually did leave. He also experienced God as very
distant, and struggled to maintain a sense of connection to God. He also put up walls with
God and his spiritual community in various ways. A comic strip illustrates this principle.
It depicts a man who isolates himself behind three layers of castle-looking building and then
says “If you really loved me, you come find me.” Jim helped to create the very relational
dynamics that caused so much pain.
The first major point that we must grasp, then, is that this kind of change does not
come easily because attachment filters are stubborn. There are several reasons for this.
First, our attachment filters are the only way we have to bridge a connection between
ourselves and others. Our attachment filters are strategies for adapting to less than ideal
(to varying degrees) attachment relationships. These attachment filters were necessary
when they originated in order to cope with and maximize a sense of relational connection
with our attachment figures. However, as we discussed in big idea #3, our filters become
engrained pathways in our brains. Jim’s dismissing attachment filter was an adaptive, yet
insecure way to attach to his parents in the face of neglect. Keeping people at a certain
distance is the only way he knew how to be with others. Because of these engrained low
road brain circuits, Jim only knew one between-the-lines story to tell. It became a very
stable pattern in all his relationships.
Here is a way to think about how this happens in our brains. Let’s say you approach
a field with high grass, and you need to cross the field, so you pick a spot and walk through
and trample down the grass. When the next person approaches the field to cross and they
see the path you trampled down, where are they most likely to cross? That’s right, theywill most likely walk through the path of trampled grass that you created, further trampling
the grass. Then with each successive person, it becomes more likely that they will cross
through the same pathway. Our brains work the same way when it comes to memory.
Our attachment filters become engrained in gut level memory through changes in the
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physical structures of the brain that make it more likely that the filter will be activated in
the future.
As a result, we bring old adaptations to new situations and relational experiences
with God and others because this is the only way we know how, at a gut level, to connect
with others. And because we are hard wired to connect, any kind of connection that is
familiar, even if it is distorted, gets tagged in our brains as being better than no connection
at all. So leaving our attachment filters behind can feel overwhelming and scary, and is
not an option under our conscious control because of the way our brains process gut level
knowledge.
Second, our attachment filters operate in such a way that they are self-reinforcing .
As we just mentioned, our attachment filters are engrained pathways in our brains, so
we are prone to channel our experiences through the pathway of our filters. When this
happens, it affects what we perceive from others in our relationships in such a way that we
end up playing a role in reinforcing our own filters. Jim had a tendency to perceive people
to not be interested in him. Some fascinating neuroscience research supports this idea.
For example, depressed people have a decreased ability to detect facial emotion, and brain
imaging studies show that depressed people have less blood flow in the right hemisphere
where facially expressed emotion is processed.104 Even if someone is supportive, depression
will cause people to not pick up on this at a gut level, and so they become unable to use the
facial expressions of others to help them feel better and change their filters. This further
intensifies the person’s depressed state and attachment filter which may include a sense of
themselves as worthless and of emotionally significant others as unloving.
Our attachment filters not only affect our relational perceptions—how we interpretexperiences at an automatic gut level—but they also influence how other people relate to
us. We respond to others based on the way our experiences are run through our attachment
filters. Jim’s perceptions of others lacking interest in him influenced how he related to
them. Likewise, the depressed person who does not pick up on contingent, supportive
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emotions on a friend’s face then enters a state of mind of self as worthless and others as
unloving. This in turn causes the person to either lash out in anger, or to withdraw. As you
can imagine, when the friend tries to reach out and be supportive, and gets either an out-
of-the-blue outburst of anger, or withdrawal, in response, it doesn’t foster further relational
connections. In fact, it fosters just the opposite. The friend is likely to now respond back
to her depressed friend out of anger or by pulling away. And this creates a negative cycle
that reinforces the depressed person’s attachment filters. She feels that, once again, people
are not there for her.
In short, when it comes to the negative aspects of our attachment filters, we all work
against our own growth and healing because we are trying to connect in the only way we
know how. And this is not a conscious choice we are making; there are no other ways of
connecting in our relational tool boxes. As we will see, we are dependent on God and
others to show us a different way of connecting that is more loving. So we can see how
these relational cycles play out over and over in our lives and are resistant to change.
The net effect of the stubborness of our attachment filters is that the negative aspects
of our filters—and literally our low road brain circuits—need to be destabilized as part of
the process of transforming them. A client of mine was struggling with some disturbing
intrusive thoughts for a period of time. They were so disturbing to her, that she feared
telling me what they were. She was afraid I would reject her in some way. After talking
around the issue for several sessions, she mustered up the courage to tell me at the end of
one session. I listened and told her I could understand why her thoughts were so disturbing.
We set the next appointment and the session ended.
More important than what I said, however, is that the way I communicated was inthe same emotional range in which I always talk to her, and that I was open to joining her
in her emtional state. In other words, my way of being with her did not change, and did not
become rejecting at a gut level, when she expected precisely that. When I asked her at the
beginning of the next session about her experience of telling me about her thoughts, she
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said, “You didn’t react, and I don’t understand that.” My non-rejecting, empathic response
destabilized her insecure attachment filter. It created a chink in her attachment armor that
was one small step in the transformation process.
It turns out, then, that changing our ability to love God and others is a long process
of destabilizing the structure of attachment filters with many periods of seeming futility
in which no change seems to be happening. But something is happening as we cooperate
with the behind-the-scenes work of the Holy Spirit. God is preparing us for transformative
moments, and our brains are making neural connections that will pave the way for a “tipping
point” that will shift our ability to love God and others.
HOW ATTACHMENT FILTERS CHANGE: SPIRITUAL
TIPPING POINTS
Jim and I processed his struggles for several years and the pattern didn’t seem to
be changing. He grew discouraged and wondered if things would ever work out for him
in a relationship, and if God would ever show up again. I certainly couldn’t predict how
or when this was going to change either. This part of Jim’s story illustrates that spiritual
transformation doesn’t happen in a predictable, orderly, or proportional manner.
At some point, in the midst of a period of seeming futility, a “tipping point” will
occur. The concept of tipping points captures what scientists call “nonlinear change,” a
property of self-organizing systems such as the human brain. Malcolm Gladwell, in his
book The Tipping Point , uses the concept of nonlinear change to help us make sense of
how ideas, trends, and products spread through our society like an epidemic.105 Spiritual
transformation, it turns out, also operates according the principles of nonlinear change,
much like an epidemic.
There are several characteristics of tipping points. First, small causes or inputs in a
system can have very big and unpredictable effects. Second, emotional communication is
“contagious.” We not only catch others’ emotions, as we discussed in chapter one, but we
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also catch others’ ways of being. Others who have more mature, open, and flexible “low
road” brain circuits draw us in to their ways of being. They spread like a virus to the way
we feel about ourselves, and the way we relate to others. Their way of being emotionally “in
synch” with us, and their brain circuits, are contagious. This contagion literally operates in
our brain circuits, and is one way of describing tipping points. Finally, the most important
aspect of a tipping point is that everything changes radically in a dramatic, unpredictable
moment.
Neuroscience has taught us that our attachment filters don’t change in a gradual,
linear way. Spiritual transformation, then, being based on our gut level knowledge, happens
in a nonlinear way. This is another way of saying that it is not proportional. You do not put
two units of spiritual input in, and get two units of spiritual growth out, and you may not
see any spiritual growth at that time of the input.
An example of the negative side of nonlinearity is obsessive-compulsive disorder.107
An excessive signal from the part of the brain that surveys the environment for danger may
find evidence for fear when there really is no evidence. This can bring online a cascade of
responses from other systems in the brain such as a sense of panic, racing heart, obsessive
thoughts about death, and compulsive behaviors that are irrational but nonetheless designed
to avoid a disaster. This is the downside of the way our brains simultaneously process a
massive amount of information from many different systems.
On the upside side of nonlinear change, minor shifts in our perspective, gut level
beliefs, or experiences in relationships can suddenly lead to exponential changes in our
attachment filters; that is, to a tipping point. Let me return to Jim’s story. In the midst of
Jim despairing over whether he would ever change, somewhere deep down I had faith thatour relational connection was growing deeper roots, and that this was preparing the way
for change. I just didn’t know how, and I couldn’t predict when we would see tangible
change. And then at one point, out of the blue, a tipping point occurred in Jim. In a way,
nothing had changed in the way we working together. There was no dramatic event that
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happened, and we talked about the same issues. But all of a sudden, over a period of several
months, I noticed that he was different. Not that the issues had disappeared, but Jim had
changed. And I don’t mean different in a superficial way; his filters had been transformed.
He felt differently about himself—more secure and confident—in a very deep way. His
gut level expectations of others had changed. He responded differently to women and they
responded differently to him. The walls came down, and he began to experience deep and
meaningful connections with people and with God. The immediate causes that led to the
tipping point were probably relatively minor moments of “in synch” communication, but
the changes were far more pervasive than what would be expected from these interactions.
That is because they were building on years of preparation that loosened things up so his
filters could change.
WHY TIPPING POINTS?
Why then, do our gut level knowledge and expectations change in this way that
is so unpredictable? Part of the answer as to why it works this way has to do with the
stubborness of attachment filters as we mentioned earlier. This stubborness stems from
engrained brain circuits, which require many instances of being destabilized before they
give way to new ways of being in relationship. Another factor is the way our “low road”
brain circuits, particularly on the right side, process this gut level kind of information.
Cognitive scientists tell us there are different “channels” or “codes” through which
our brains process information. The first and most basic way that we process information
is in a code that processes input from many different systems in the brain at the same
time. It is the gut level code, or what cognitive scientists call the “subsymbolic” code. It is
information processed below, or without symbols. There are three primary characteristics
of this kind of processing that are largely defined by what they are not , because the system
is so powerful and complex. To explain this, let’s use the analogy of an orchestra.
Last Fourth of July, my family and I went to a local amphitheater to hear an orchestra
and watch fireworks. There was a conductor, and a large group of musicians all dressed
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very fancily. All the musicians had their instruments and music in front of them. Now,
the system in our brains we are talking about is so powerful that it can process infinitely
fine-grained variations of information, so there are no explicitly identifiable rules that
govern how this information is processed —at least that we can figure out. I’m sure God
knows the rules, but they are beyond our ability to pin down. In other words, this system
is like an orchestra with no identifiable music theory to guide how the musicians interpret
the meaning of the music on their sheets. So it would be like an orchestra of non-musicians
who have never even taken a class in music theory.
Second, the kind of information we are talking about here is not neatly packaged
information like musical notes. In fact, it is very difficult to pin down specific characteristics
of this kind of information because it is so broad. That is, there are no standard boundaries
that create defined pieces of information, so it is like an orchestra of non-musicians with no
music in front of them.
And third, this type of processing operates without us telling it what to do and
without our awareness, so it is like an orchestra of non-musicians who have blank sheets in
front of them, with no conductor! Now here is the kicker: somehow this orchestra can play
Bach and Beethoven, without the non-musicians knowing that they are playing a symphony,
or how they are doing it. This system of processing information takes into account so much
information, that we cannot possibly predict or understand how our experiences combine to
create a tipping point. The “low-road” brain circuits on the right side of our brains do their
jobs behind the scenes, and any experience could be the one that shifts the brain circuit.
MOMENTS OF MEETING IN SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
So if our inability to love stems from deeply engrained attachment filters that we
perpetuate and that keep us in a spiritual rut, and change happens in this, unpredictable,
uncontrollable, exponential way, then what kinds of experiences and processes might trigger
tipping points in our attachment filters?
As we mentioned earlier, relational connections with God and others lead directly
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to changes in our attachment filters. And they do this by changing the neural connections
in our brains, which is the way our brains record new, gut level relational experiences with
God and others. We might refer to these relational connections that are instrumental in
shifting our attachment filters as “moments of meeting.” A moment of meeting is a moment
of deep connection, or attunement, with another person, or with God. This may occur in
the context of a close attachment relationship, or it may happen in the context of the Holy
Spirit working through someone to meet a need, or to bring comfort and compassion in a
crucial moment.
There are several types of experiences that can lead to moments of meeting.108
As we establish connections in ongoing relationships with God and others in a spiritual
community, we experience compassion for our subjective experiences; in other words, for
the unique meanings we experience in events our lives. And so you can see here how this
ties back into the importance of emotion. Emotions are by their very nature meanings, and
they reveal to others the deepest meanings and values we automatically ascribe to events
in our lives. Compassion can come in the context of close attachment relationships with
or others, as well as in the context of acts of compassion and service by others who are not
attachment figures for us. As we think about compassion, it is instructive to consider the
many examples of compassion in Jesus’ ministry.
A word that is used frequently to describe Jesus’ encounters with others is the word
splachnizomai (to have pity, show mercy, feel sympathy). The splachna are the entrails,
the inner organs, and the verb describes a profound emotional response to another’s need.
Jesus experienced compassion for a leper (Mk. 1:41), for the crowds that attended His
itinerant ministry (Mt. 9:36), for two blind men (Mt. 20:34), for a hungry multitude that
had not eaten for three days (Mt. 15:34; Mk 8:2) and for the widow at Nain mourning the
death of her only son (Luke 7:13). Although Jesus’ compassion was often in response
to a concrete and readily visible need, it was also elicited by the “harassed and helpless”
multitudes whom Jesus saw “as sheep without a shepherd” (Mt. 9:36; cf Mk. 6:34). He
perceived their emotional and spiritual bankruptcy and responded to it. Notice that Jesus’
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compassion for those in need habitually moved Him to act on their behalf.
In the parable of the good Samaritan (Lk. 10:30-37) splanchnizomai expresses the
desire to use all of one’s resources to help another at a crucial moment . In the parable of
the prodigal son (Lk. 15:11-32), splanchnizomai expresses the strongest type of merciful
or loving reaction109. The meaning of splanchnizomai in the parable of the prodigal son
is particularly instructive given the self-perpetuating nature of our attachment filters. As
we noted earlier, our filters tend to pull others to respond to us in ways that reinforce our
filters. These responses can have a powerful impact in solidifying negative aspects of our
filters. However, when we experience splanchnizomai from another—a profound response
to our needs—we experience being known by another, or what we referred to earlier as
“attunement” in a broad sense. And because it is not what we expect based on our filters, it
shakes up, or destabilizes our attachment filters. At the level of the brain, these experiences
create new neural connections that make possible new experiences of ourselves and others.
Just as the father’s merciful reaction represents God’s grace in the story of the prodigal son,
a merciful and compassionate response can lead to a powerful moment of meeting that is a
concrete manifestation of God’s grace.
Compassion parallels, in some senses, our contemporary notion of empathy, which
has been demonstrated to be one of the key factors in people growing in counseling and
psychotherapy. Just as Jesus’ compassion for people moved him to help them in some way,
compassion for others is what motivates us to try to understand others’ experiences which
better allows us to act in their best interest. Empathy is one of the most important elements
in communicating acceptance or what we have referred to as contingent communication.
Contingent communication, as I mentioned earlier, is when one person is able to perceive,
understand, and respond to another person’s gut level signals in a timely manner. It is more
than just understanding the words of another person in head knowledge; it is understandingthe emotional meaning of what they are communicating. This creates a sense of communion
and joining with another, or with a group in a spiritual community.
Whether this is the context of a close attachment relationship, or an act of service
by a group or someone who is not an emotionally significant person in your life, it is first
of all an expression of God’s grace. So we receive such gifts as ultimately being from
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God and they foster our relational connection with Him. Second, we are often aware of
the relational intent of the other to respond to our need, and so this, in the context of being
received as a gift from God, can lead to moments of meeting with God and others that shift
our attachment filters.
Close relationships are critical to changing our filters, however, because over time
these contingent connections in which we feel known and accepted create a sense of
continuity and co-ownership over a shared life story. We build our life stories, our sense
of who we are, together with others to whom we are attached. As our stories become
intertwined with another, they become inhabited in our relationships. This deepens our
sense of communion, and develops a sense of resonance, in which each person is present in
the other’s mind even when they are apart. Over time, this relational resonance increases
our ability to be aware of ourselves and others in the here-and-now. Sometimes when we
experience these moments, time seems to slow down, and there is a sense of well-being that
comes from being connected to another person in the present moment, in the now.
Moments of meeting come in all shapes and sizes. They aren’t necessarily dramatic
or intense, but sometimes they are. They can occur with family, friends, mentors, pastors,
or therapists. They can be relatively small moments—moments that put a chink in the
insecure attachment armor, or bigger moments, that put us on a different pathway. A friend
of mine, Dave, tells the story of such an moment. Dave had not received much affirmation
from his father growing up. During college, he was working at a camp in the summer with
an older man who became a mentor. One day, they were simply driving somewhere in the
course of their work day, and the older man turned to Dave and said, “Dave, don’t ever
change. You’re a good person.” That was it. Only eight words, but they were packed with
very deep meaning. Dave says this encounter changed the direction of his life. It was a
moment of meeting.A client and I experienced a moment of meeting several years into therapy. During a
particularly difficult time with relationships and work, she had pushed people away, and she
had done some things that she feared would push me away. Her history of abandonment
primed her to expect me to give up on her. At a gut level, she thought I would leave her in
some way—emotionally, if not physically. I didn’t, and this surprised her. As we talked
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about this, she asked me why I didn’t leave or reject her. This was a moment that called
for deeply personal response with my signature on it—a response of giving her a window
into how she affects me, how I have become attached to her as a caregiver. I told her that
I knew that if one of her children did something she didn’t like, even if it was severe, it
wouldn’t break her bond with her son. She would still care about him, and want the best
for him. I told her I felt the same way towards her. It didn’t matter what she did or said or
thought; it wouldn’t change my caring for her—wanting the best for her; always being for
her. She then looked at me for what seemed like a long time, as if she were trying to take
in what I had said. I remember those moments vividly—it seemed like every thing was
in slow motion. I had a deep sense that this was the Kingdom of God advancing in my
client’s heart, right before my very eyes. In the next session, she told me that time seemed
to have slowed down during those moments. She felt different—not so alone. A moment
of meeting had occurred that tipped her gut level sense of herself.
All of these interrelated processes lead to new neural connections in our brains,
which in turn transform our attachment filters—our ability to love God and others. This
happens through our increasing capacity to achieve more stable, flexible, and adaptive states
of mind, which amounts to an increased ability to give up our lives for God and others in
order to find true life. We can only imagine the resonance and communion that the Trinity
experiences. I am sure it is far beyond what we experience in this life. But when you look
at the these experiences that change our ability to love others at the core of our being, it
seems to be a reflection of the perfect connection, compassion, communion, contingent
communication, continuity, and resonance of our triune God.
In summary, the fourth big idea is that changing our attachment filters is a long,
arduous process because they are self-perpetuating. Transformation of our filters occurs
over long periods of time, with long stretches during which nothing seems to be happening.
But during these periods our relational connections are preparing the way for tipping
points—changes in our attachment filters that are relatively sudden and far beyond what
we would expect from the immediate input in our lives.
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CHAPTER FIVEBIG IDEA #5
FURNISHING THE SOUL
FOR SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
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The fourth big idea described the general nature of how our attachment
filters change, with a focus on how our brain processes and
interpersonal experiences interact to change our attachment filters,
and ultimately our ability to love God and others. As we discussed, we do not have control
over these processes, which means that we do not have direct control over our own spiritual
transformation process. This is part of the human condition, and the more we accept this
truth, the more we grow. The deep magic seems to be full of paradoxes. Give up control,
and you will find the very thing for which you are striving by maintaining control. On the
flip side, if you emotionally bank on yourself to make spiritual transformation happen, the
very thing you are striving for will slip through you fingers. Likewise, as Jesus taught, if
you strive to hold onto your life, you will lose it. However, if you give up your life for Jesus,
you will find true life (Matt. 16:25-26).
Having said this, we do have a very important role in our own spiritual transformation
process. While we do not have direct control over our own spiritual growth process, we
do have direct control in some ways that prepare us for spiritual growth as we cooperate
with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We will explore here two metaphors to help
us understand this. First, we will discuss improv as an example of structured spontaneity,
and then we will come full circle to the theme of the book: furnishing the soul.
LIFE AS A SPIRITUAL IMPROV
If you have ever been to a performance of an improvisation comedy group, you
know that they get up on stage, and without any idea whatsoever of what character they
will be playing, or what plot they will be acting out, they take a random suggestion from
the audience, and then, without a moment’s deliberation, they make up a play from scratch.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to get on stage even with a script, much less
without one. Can you imagine standing on stage to perform a play with no plot and no
script? Oh, and by the way the whole thing has to make sense somehow, and you have to
be funny! To the untrained eye, improv appears to be completely chaotic and random. The
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fact of the matter is, however, that improv is not random at all. These actors spend long
periods of time rehearsing, and after each show, they get together to critique each other’s
performance.
Why do they rehearse if they are just spontaneously making it up as they go? After
all, there is no script to rehearse. The reason they practice is that improv is an art form
governed by a series of principles, and when everyone is on stage, they have to abide by
those rules to make the improv work. Yes, it is spontaneous; that is what it means to
improvise. But the spontaneity is not random; it is structured spontaneity. 110 Improv is a
lot like some team sports, such as soccer or basketball. Basketball is filled with incredibly
complex split-second, spontaneous decisions. But the spontaneity only works with a certain
structure that comes from hours of practice so that everyone understands their defined role
on the court. During the Lakers “showtime” era in the 1980s, when Magic Johnson came
down the court on a fast break, he knew where his teammates would be, and he often
spontaneously passed the ball to a teammate behind his back without looking. He became
famous for the “no look” pass. How was he able to do this? Through hours of practice that
structured, or prepared, the spontaneous, split-second decisions he made on the court. In
basketball parlance, this is what is referred to as “court sense.”
I tell my students that psychotherapy is an improv—it is structured spontaneity.
When they across from a client, if they are not working for an HMO, there is no script. We
don’t teach our students exactly what to say and how to respond to their clients. At first, it
seems like random chaos, and it can be quite unnerving. When they start a session, a client
can talk about anything and they never know what the client will talk about. It can seem
like random chaos. But therapy is an art form that is governed by a highly intricate set of
principles that provide a structure within which spontaneity can be directed toward the goalof helping people grow. Knowing these principles is what we refer to as clinical expertise.
Clinical expertise is the gut level knowledge that comes from the structure of countless
hours of training. The experience and training of the clinician shapes their immediate gut-
level, spontaneous judgments.
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If you think about it, all of life is a spiritual improv—spontaneity guided by the
structure of God’s purposes for our lives, by the deep magic of the way God created us to
grow and flourish. We cannot control the spontaneity of the plot or characters in an improv
or in our lives—they are given to us. And we cannot directly control our attachment
filters. The way we automatically evaluate the meaning of who we are with and to others
is not under our conscious control. But we can influence the structure that guides that
spontaneity. Put differently, we can furnish our souls.
FURNISHING THE SOUL FOR SPIRITUAL
TRANSFORMATION
Another place we see a similar concept is in creative scientific work that we
highlighted earlier. Now we will see how the scientific discovery process integrates the
concepts of spiritual tipping points and furnishing the soul. By studying the introspections
of mathematicians and scientists, scholars have been able to gain insight into how these
scientists make progress in solving very complex problems. Scientists and mathematicians
often describe that when they get stuck on a scientific problem, they turn their attention
to other things for a period of time, but they continue to process the problem in the “back
of their minds.” The solution often comes when their focus is on something besides the
problem at hand.
Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician, solved Fermat’s last theorem—something
that had eluded mathematicians since the 19th century. In an interview about his seven-
year process of working on the theorem, he recounts what he did when he got stuck:
When I got stuck and I didn’t know what to do next, I would go out for a
walk. I’d often walk down by the lake. Walking has a very good effect in
that you’re in this state of relaxation, but at the same time you’re allowing
the sub-conscious to work on you. And often if you have one particular thing
buzzing in your mind then you don’t need anything to write with or any desk.
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I’d always have a pencil and paper ready and, if I really had an idea, I’d sit
down at a bench and I’d start scribbling away.111
When he would get stuck, he would go for long walks and think about something else,
letting his mind work. Often, while on the walk, or sometime later when he was not
focusing on the problem, a breakthrough would appear to him.
Even when these scientists were not stuck per se, often times the breakthroughs
would come in a flash. Listen to another such incident recounted by Poincare:
The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having
reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At
the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without
anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that
the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical
were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.112
These breakthroughs seem to come from the outside—“without anything in my former
thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it” as Poincare put it. In other words, this was
gut level knowledge at work. There were no linear steps that Poincare could articulate to
demonstrate how he arrived at this insight. However, the important point for our purposes
here is that these breakthroughs only come to those who have spent years acquiring
knowledge that makes them an expert in their fields. Listen to Andrew Wiles’ description
of his work and the nature of the breakthroughs:
Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms
of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of
the mansion and it’s completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the
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furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally,
after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly
it’s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into
the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these
breakthroughs, while sometimes they’re momentary, sometimes over a period
of a day or two, they are the culmination of -- and couldn’t exist without -- the
many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them.113
In other words, these breakthroughs, or tipping points, only come to those who have
furnished the mind with the components of information that the “low road” right brain
needs to combine in completely new ways in order to produce breakthroughs. If you have
not studied the components of a particular math problem, you can go on long walks until
you are blue in the face, but no breakthroughs will come. There is nothing for your gut
level processing system to process.
Interestingly, spiritual transformation very much parallels the scientific discovery
process. Just as scientists need to furnish their minds with the elements and theories of
the problem at hand, we need to furnish our souls
with the elements that prepare us for
spiritual transformation: relational connections with God and others, which also require
connections within ourselves between the two ways of knowing. We cannot force “spiritual
breakthroughs” any more than scientists can force scientific breakthroughs, but we can
provide the “raw materials” needed by our souls and the Holy Spirit to transform the core
of our being. We do have control over, and responsibility for, furnishing our souls. This is
where intentionality and commitment come into play. Our intentionality and commitmentlead us to do the things we need to do to furnish our souls. We leave it to God to arrange
the furniture. We furnish our souls through relational connections with God and others, but
in order to understand how the furnishing the soul process works in these relational contexts,
we must explore how we connect the two ways of knowing and how this fosters growth.
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An important part of furnishing your soul for spiritual transformation is bringing
together the two ways of knowing—head knowledge and gut level knowledge—so they
work together in harmony. This is a very intricate process but there are things you can do
to foster this. We have emphasized the importance of gut level knowledge because in a
certain sense it is foundational. It is the primary language or code, if you will, that stores
our knowledge of how to relate to God and others. This way of knowing is ultimately what
drives our ability to love. However, head knowledge and propositions that can be put into
words are also very important, but we must understand the role they play. In isolation, head
knowledge does not affect our ability to love—how we actually relate to others. But when
it works together with our gut level knowledge, it plays a critical role in transforming our
gut level attachment filters.
There are two ways in which head knowledge works together with gut level knowledge.
The first involves storying our unthought knowns that are embedded in our attachment
filters, which we may think of as “bottom up integration.” This type of integration links
gut level knowledge with words. The second way is storying head knowledge, which we
may think of as “top down integration,” in which head knowledge is linked with our gut
level knowledge. We will consider both of these processes below, and then explore how
they help us understand the function of spiritual disciplines and spiritual community in
our spiritual transformation process. Before we get to this, however, we will consider what
research suggests about how our brains are hard wired for stories to provide some context
for the critical roll stories play in our spiritual transformation process.
HARD WIRED FOR STORIES
Neuroscientists tell us that our brains are designed for narratives. Narratives are
emotionally meaningfully sequences of actions that are causally linked. Stories help us
organize, maintain, and evaluate our own and others’ behaviors.114 Narratives help us
regulate how we experience and express emotion. They are one aspect of our gut level
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memories that serve as attachment filters. In other words, our attachment filters are stored
in the form of stories, and it is through stories that we access them, or bring them online.
By the age of two-and-a-half, parents and children create stories together at a rate of 2.2
per hour in everyday conversation.115
These stories connect parents with their children,
but they also contain within them a grid for evaluating what is discussed, deciding what
information to include, how to process and understand that information, and whether the
story will have only one subjective center or vantage point, or several subjective centers.
Having several subjective centers carries with it the capacity for empathy, which is critical
to love and compassion. The way stories are structured contain a gut level, implicit model
of how to be, or relate, with others, and how many ways there are to do this.
Narratives in this light are analogous to a music score for an orchestra.116 Stories
organize and synchronize the participation of many “instruments.” The range and
complexity of a score determines which instruments are used, how they are coordinated,
and the quality of the final performance. Parents and children write this narrative score
together in the context of their family and culture. In short, neuroscience and developmental
research suggest that stories play a crucial role in a child’s developing connection with
parents, and in the development of their attachment filters.
A fascinating thing about narratives is that telling coherent stories about our
relationships (with God and others) requires a harmonious working relationship between
the right, “low road” and left, “high road” parts of the brain. The “interpretive” left side of
the brain (and high road) is predominantly responsible for recounting the logical sequence of
events, whereas the right side (and low road) is predominantly responsible for the emotional
meaning of the events. So when both of these ways of knowing are working together, youget a logical and emotionally meaningful—or coherent—communication of a person’s gut
level sense of who they are with emotionally significant others.
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If you don’t have both of these facets woven together, you don’t have a coherent
story. People with secure attachments in general are able to tell a coherent story about
their relationships. In contrast, people with insecure attachments tend to be incoherent
in their stories, but in different ways. Preoccupied people are incoherent because they
become overwhelmed by painful feelings. Unresolved painful memories have been shown
to be associated with a brain activation pattern that is dominated by the right brain. 117 It
turns out that cooperation between the two hemispheres appears to be necessary in order
to consolidate memory.118 So the core problem with unresolved painful memories may be
the failure to consolidate memories of traumatic events. When the right brain is dominant
in preoccupied narratives, there is really an absence of a storied version of painful events.
There is not a beginning, middle, and end; there is no plot that can be detected. It’s just a
big knot of emotional pain. So the interpretive left side of the brain is not able to do its part
to place emotionally significant events into a larger network of permanent, consolidated
memory. Instead, these unresolved painful memories remain in an unstable state of
potential gut level activation, that often intrude as if from an outside person.
Dismissing people, in contrast, tend to be incoherent because they do not integrate
the emotional meaning of the events into their stories. We can assume their narratives tend
to be dominated by “high road,” left brain activity. If you listen to their stories, you will
get a precise account of the sequence of events, but you won’t get a good sense from their
nonverbal communication of the emotional meaning of the events they are recounting.
In this case, the “low road,” right brain does not do its part of integrating the emotional
meaning of events into the narrative sequence. So you get a sequence of events that has no
life to it. However, the incoherence in both types of filters causes the emotional meaningsto be clouded. They are very difficult to pick up on. This clouding of emotional meaning
hinders new relational information from getting into their souls. Let’s turn now to the role
stories play in the two ways of integrating head knowledge and gut level knowledge.
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STORYING UNTHOUGHT K NOWNS: BOTTOM UP INTEGRATION
In chapter two, I proposed the concept of unthought knowns as a picture of our gut
level way of knowing.119
These are things we know, yet they remain unthought, unformed.
They are emotional meanings that don’t exist in words that can be thought and communicated
to others. This is part of why changing our attachment filters is so profoundly difficult.
The very nature of our attachment filters is that they are unspeakable, and when they are
painful, they become even more difficult for us to be aware of and communicate to others.
When they remain unspeakable, they are very difficult to transform because they do not
come into relational contact with God or others to bring new emotional information to
bear on them. Yet our unthought knowns can become “speakable” through a translation
process that links our raw, gut level knowledge with words and then back to our gut level
knowledge again. Cognitive scientists call this “referential activity,” meaning that each
way of knowing references the other. This proces works through the medium of images
and stories.
Our gut level knowledge starts off very raw when it is first processed in our “low
road,” right brains. As I mentioned earlier, this information cannot be easily defined or
categorized. In order for this kind of information to be verbalized and communicated to
others, and to process it using the rules of verbal logic, we first have to translate it. There
are several steps in this translation process. Let’s consider Fred again to illustrate how
this process works. When an experience gets processed through our attachment filters, it
produces a gut-level emotional meaning. So when Bonnie withdraws or disagrees with
Fred, an emotional response is activated along with associated components such as sensoryand visceral experiences, physiological arousal, tendencies to act in certain ways, and gut
level memories with a similar feeling tone. These sensations are very difficult to express in
words.
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The first step in the process of connecting these experiences to words is that our “low
road,” right brains chunk information into categories that have similar emotional meanings.
Fred’s filters chunk his physiological arousal and input from facial expressions into the
emotional meaning of rejection, and of himself as being bad and not worthy of love. This
emotional meaning is then represented in the right brain as an image that has the structure
of a typical episode of needs, desires, and actions that amounts to a complex sequence of
interactions that are expected to occur; that is, the image amounts to a story. So Fred’s gut
level sense of badness and rejection gets processed into an image that has the structure of
a story in which he tries to connect with someone close, and he/she rejects him by either
withdrawing or showing hostility. The image of this episode is very similar to the dynamic
that has often played out as we described it earlier.
If Fred wants to communicate this emotional meaning to me in therapy (or to anyone
else) the best way to do it is to describe an episode in which the emotional meaning was
activated. Stories about our relationships can be viewed as metaphors of the emotional
meanings associated with our attachment filters. Telling our stories about our experiences
in relationships is the closest we can come to verbally communicating the emotional
meanings of our attachment filters. In other words, when we tell our stories with words,
it activates our attachment filters which are then communicated “between-the-lines” in
our nonverbal communication. Stories carry and activate our attachment filters. Stories
bring our gut-level filters online, which gives ourselves and others “live” access to them,
allowing them to change.
What this suggests is that part of furnishing our souls is telling our stories about our
important relationships with God and others to important people in our lives. When we dothis, two things happen that facilitate the spiritual transformation process. First, telling our
stories is like working a muscle. Although our stories may not be totally coherent, the act
of narrating our relational experiences causes the two hemispheres, and two “roads” of the
brain, to work together. Second, telling our stories communicates our attachment filters
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“between-the-lines.” Our attachment filters are “enacted” in our stories, and this brings
them into contact with God and others, allowing them to provide a loving connection that
will bring growth and healing. This happened with Fred over a period of time. As he
brought his attachment filters “online” with me by telling his story, he was increasingly
able to translate his feelings into words and communicate them to me. This allowed me
to respond to his gut level meanings in such a way as to create new experiences of grace.
At the same time, Fred began to incorporate his gut level feelings into His prayer and
relationship with God. This led to new experiences of God as well. Experiences in both
areas led to shifts, or tipping points, in his attachment filters; to a new script about who he
is with and to God and others.
STORYING HEAD K NOWLEDGE: TOP DOWN INTEGRATION
The second way in which head knowledge works together with gut level knowledge
is what we can think of as storying head knowledge. To illustrate this concept, take a
moment and imagine in your mind a picture of the concept of “fruit.” Take a moment
and jot it down. What did you imagine? You may have imagined a cluster of grapes, or
bananas, or maybe a peach. But none of these is the concept of fruit; they are specific
instances of the abstract concept of fruit. Cognitive scientists tell us that you can’t create
an image in your mind of high level abstract categories like fruit. However, you can develop
an image in your mind of a specific fruit like a banana because it has sensory qualities that
your bottom-right brain circuits can process to produce an image. The abstract concept of
fruit does not have sensory qualities, so it can only be processed in the left-high road brain
circuits involved in head knowledge.The same is true of knowledge of character traits we are striving for in the spiritual
transformation process. You can develop only head knowledge of abstract character
concepts like “integrity” or “love.” This is not bad in and of itself. The problem is that
abstract head knowledge of integrity does not, by itself, translate into gut level knowledge
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of how to love others. Developmental psychologists describe the difference between these
two ways of knowing as the difference between “knowing how” (gut level knowledge) and
“knowing that” (head knowledge). In order for the concept of integrity to be integrated
into our gut level knowledge, it has to have sensory qualities in the real world that can be
processed by our right-low road brain circuits. In other words, we have to see it lived out
in the lives of people to whom we are close. Only then does this knowledge have sensory
qualities that our right-low road brain circuits can translate into “knowing how” to love
others. We have to see concrete examples of integrity and love in other people’s stories,
and in our own relationships, in order for this to affect our gut level knowledge. This also
occurs as we encounter Jesus and other stories in Scripture. Stories of God’s truths lived
out people’s lives have built within them gut level knowledge about how relationships and
life work. So it is critical that we encounter the stories in Scripture and stories of those in
our communities who are living out God’s truths.
Another way to think about this is the analogy of scanning. If you have a hard copy
of a document, it may be of limited use when it is not in electronic form. However, you
can scan the document into your computer and then the information is in a different form
that provides a wider range of uses. The same is true of head knowledge. By itself, head
knowledge is like a hard copy of a document that has limited uses. However, if you “scan”
or image your head knowledge into your gut level knowledge, it takes on transformative
power.
This prinicple was illustrated in my work with Mike. Mike grew up in a very
neglectful environment. His mother was preoccupied with her own interests and was
emotionally involved intermittently with Mike. His father was very emotionally distantand a workaholic. As a result, Mike developed a dismissing attachment style in relating
to significant people in his life, including God. He naturally excelled in school, and so he
threw his energy into academics. When he became a Christian in college, he developed a
strong interest in studying the Bible and theology. His relationships, however, remained
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very superficial, and most of the time, he described himself as feeling “numb.” In other
words, he wasn’t aware of his feelings, and he came to see me when he started to experience
symptoms of depression. When Mike would hear sermons and study the Bible, he developed
significant head knowledge about God and the Bible, but this didn’t usually translate into
growth in his gut level knowledge and his relationships with God and others. He tended to
hone in on analytic knowledge about God and theology rather than the meaning embedded
in the story of God’s redemptive work in his own life. In addition, he had no meaningful
connections with peers or mentors who could model loving relationships and service so that
he could connect to a story of what this looks like.
Through our work and a few others coming along side him, Mike began to slow down
in his Scripture reading so that he could begin to experience the truths he was encountering
in Scripture. He got more involved in his spiritual community and gradually began to open
up and connect to a few people. He began to see the truths he knew in his head lived out,
(although certainly not perfectly), in the lives of a few peers and mentors. He experienced
their stories with them. All of this helped to link his head knowledge about God (knowing
that) to a deeper, more integrated relational knowing of himself and God (knowing how)
that was embedded in the stories he was encountering in Scripture, and in the lives of
several friends. This began to change his capacity to love. As I write this, Mike is still very
much in process, but with the help of God and others, he is beginning to bring his head
knowledge into the story of how God is working in his life.
THE K NOWLEDGE SPIRAL: PHASES IN STORYING OUR SPIRITUALITY
The transformation of our gut level attachment filters of God and others is not afunction of either gut level knowledge or head knowledge only, but requires working back
and forth flexibly between both ways of knowing. This process involves building new
relational experiences along different dimensions than those in our current gut level memory.
Our head knowledge system then identifies these and analyzes the meaning of them, and
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the very act of doing this helps us to process and transform our gut level experiences at new,
and deeper levels. Our ability to articulate new experiences opens up new connections in
our gut level experiences. Ideally, this is a constant back-and-forth process leading to a
continuously deepening progression in both ways of knowing that can be aptly described
as a spiral-like process.
This knowledge spiral in spiritual transformation has fascinating parallels in
creative scientific work and in the arts.120 Let’s consider the process of scientific discovery,
which I referred to earlier in discussing tipping points and furnishing the mind, in order to
illustrate the process of how we link the different ways of knowing in furnishing our souls
for spiritual transformation. Four phases have been identified in the process of discovery:
preparation, incubation, illumination, and reflection/interpretation. These phases overlap
and the boundaries between them are fuzzy, but they capture different aspects of this
process. We don’t necessarily move through these phases in a linear sequence; sometimes
we jump back and forth between different phases. The first phase actually starts with
storying head knowledge, or top-down integration. The last three phases map onto storying
our unthought knowns, or bottom-up integration.
In general, preparation in the process of scientific discovery is the ongoing, lifelong
acquisition of knowledge through which a person develops expertise in his or her field. The
specific preparation to solve a particular problem requires the scientist to “back-translate”
the problem from the head knowledge system to a gut level way of knowing. The scientist
hears the problem in its verbal form, which is processed by the top-left circuits of the brain.
She then begins to meditate on the problem in a scientific mode in the “back of her mind”
so to speak, which is the bottom-right brain circuits. As with Andrew Wiles, she may workactively on the problem for awhile, and then feel like she is getting nowhere, “stumbling
around in the dark.” This is what it feels like to work in the gut level system of knowing.
You search without any clear direction and without categories that have been defined.
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This applies as well to our gut level processing of our relationships with God and
others, and of our attachment filters. In the spiritual transformation process, preparation
is one way to begin the furnishing the soul process. In general, it is the ongoing, lifelong
pursuit of relational connections with God and others in the context of spiritual community.
In other words, it is the ongoing, lifelong engagement in spiritual disciplines for the purpose
of becoming more like Christ. Much of the preparation process involves sharing our
ever-evolving stories with God and others in our communities. A more specific aspect of
preparation begins with top down integration, and takes two forms.
In one form, preparation begins by identifying a spiritual “growing edge”—a
particular area in which you feel stuck spiritually—in a way you can verbalize using head
knowledge. Then you translate this into your gut level system by beginning to reflect on,
meditate on, and narrate the issue. This can be done through prayer, conversation with
others, and journaling. As we have mentioned, the emotional meanings of our relationships
and events in our lives exist in the form of stories. Because of this, narrating different story
lines about our growing edges is one of the primary ways we “back-translate” the issues
with which we are struggling and bring our gut level processing systems (bottom-right
brain circuits) online.
The second form of preparation does not start with a spiritual growing edge, but
rather starts with propositional truths about God and Scripture. As you hear or read about
various truths that start out in a verbal form in head knowledge, you translate these into your
gut level processing system as well by beginning to meditate on them, and by connecting
to them to your own experiences and to the experiences of others whom you have seen
live out these truths. Again, this translation process takes on the form of stories. We takea particular truth, and connect it to an emotionally meaningful sequence of events in our
own lives, and in the lives of others. Both these aspects of preparation involve storying
head knowledge (top-down integration) in some form—spiritual struggles in one case and
conceptual truths in another. This is one point of entry into the furnishing the soul process,
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but you can also start with unarticulated, gut level experiences, or unthought knowns, in
the next phase: incubation.
The preparation phase flows fluidly into the incubation phase. The scientist’s
gut level processing occurs predominantly outside of awareness and without intentional
control in the incubation phase. The person often times turns their attention away from the
problem, but once the gut level processing system of the top-right brain circuits has been
prepared and activated, it continues to work on the problem. It follows its own leads and
connections, which the scientist is not aware of, and cannot consciously follow. We saw in
the examples above of Poincare and Wiles that breakthroughs often happened after turning
away from the problem. In addition, these types of insights involve relationships between
questions and concepts that at first seemed entirely unrelated. In other words, these are not
logical, linear connections that can be made in the head knowledge system. The gut level
processing system makes its own connections and builds new dimensions and categories
while the problem incubates.
Likewise, incubation is a crucial phase in the spiritual transformation process with
respect to our gut level knowledge of ourselves, God, and others. This is the beginning
of bottom-up integration, in which gut level experiences are in a nonverbal form outside
of awareness, and eventually become articulated in a conscious, verbal form in a later
phase. In the incubation phase, your gut level processing system processes your relational
experiences and filters—your sense of connection to God, your gut level expectations of
God and others, and your most deeply held beliefs and values that motivate what you strive
for on a daily basis. The rules that govern this processing are not known, and all this
happens behind the scenes, outside of our awareness. It is the place where we form newconnections about the meaning of our experiences, about who we are with and to God
and others. It is the place where new story lines are developed. Incubation at some point
morphs into the next phase: illumination.
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In illumination, the connections that are being forged in the incubation phase make
themselves known, as if coming from the outside. Recall one of the breakthroughs of
Poincare: “At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without
anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it…”121
Illumination is
experienced by the scientist as coming from an external source, but it comes from the gut
level processing system. However, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter, illumination only
comes to those scientists who have furnished the mind with the necessary ingredients to
solve the problem at hand. A lot of ground work in the preparation and incubation phases
have prepared the way for illumination, or tipping points, that involve new ways of seeing
a problem. When these new connections hit the scientist’s awareness, this is the point at
which the gut level processing is connected to the head knowledge system (bottom up
integration).
In the context of transforming our attachment filters and capacity to love,
illumination is the tipping point where new gut level meanings about ourselves, God, and
others (attachment filters), are crystallized. New story lines begin to take shape in our
awareness. This is what changes the very structure of our souls, and transforms how we
relate to God and others—our capacity to love. These new meanings, or gut level filters,
may have been around awhile in a more fuzzy way, but now they come into a more clear
focus in our conscious awareness. A new awareness might start off as an image, a picture,
but the images have stories embedded within them. This then leads into the next phase of
reflection and interpretation.
In the reflection and interpretation phase, the scientist capitalizes on her new awareness
by interacting with it using her conscious, analytic (head) knowledge. This happens primarily within awareness. When she does this, it brings more precision to the new gut
level breakthrough. She can now hold this new awareness in her mind’s eye (analytic head
knowledge) as it were, and manipulate it, communicate it to others, look at it from different
angles, examine its relationships with other concepts, and sharpen its boundaries.
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In our spiritual transformation process, likewise, we capitalize on the gut level
processing that has incubated, and led to an illumination, or tipping point, regarding our
gut level meanings. We do this by attempting to translate our new gut level experiences
into words, concepts, and ultimately into a new story line in our relationships with God.
We give shape and form to the illuminations, which allows us to tell new stories to God and
others, and gives us more access to these gut level meanings within ourselves. The very
process of translation transforms our gut level meanings by connecting them to a larger
network of meanings within oursevles that constitute an ongoing story, and by connecting
them to God and others through prayer and spiritual community. So we see here the spiral
back-and-forth linking of the two ways of knowing, and that stories are a critical part of
linking these two ways of knowing.
Let’s return to my client Mark, who I mentioned in chapter two, to help illustrate
the knowledge spiral in the spiritual transformation process. If you recall, several years
into therapy, Mark began to withdraw from his relationship with God, and gradually pulled
away from his spiritual community. The general preparation phase involved the relational
connection we had developed over several years of exploring his experiences —him telling
me his story and the two of us beginning to share his story. The story of our work together
became intricately intertwined with all the sub-plots of his life. These specific experiences
incubated as we discussed them over several months. Part of the incubation process was
new experiences with me in which I did not become overwhelmed by his pain and leave
him. No breakthroughs happened right away, but new connections were being made behind
the scenes as we discussed this, and as we turned away to other topics on occasion. Over
time, these incubating connections led to a vague sense of abandonment by God. He was
not yet able to tell this story with words.Illumination came through a series of images of himself wandering aimlessly
and drowning with no one around to save him. His gut level processing had led to new
connections about how he felt about himself at a deep level. He felt abandoned by God and
others in his life, alone, and not worthy of others really caring and sticking around. Prior
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to this tipping point, he had not consciously realized this feeling about himself and God.
It was just a vague, floating sense of discomfort—background noise in his life that caused
him to keep a certain distance from God and some of his friends. Because it was vague and
the story was outside his conscious awareness, it was difficult to change the story line. It
just floated around in background in an unstable state of potential activation. His gut level
sense of abandonment would become activated at times without his knowing what story
was causing the increased discomfort.
As we processed the issues further, he reflected on, and interpreted these experiences
with my help. He was gradually able to put words to his gut level experiences, further
articulating the meaning of his sense of abandonment by God. The experience of
abandonment and subsequent withdrawal from God were in response to a series of perceived
rejections of his needs for reassurance and comfort in close relationships after he expressed
these needs. But this filter also reflected his gut level sense of how relationships work—that
eventually people leave, emotionally if not physically. He became more aware of this story
that ran through every thread of his life. He started to be able to tell this story in words.
The very nature of this knowledge spiral of linking his gut level experiences to words
and a story, transformed the experience by simultaneously providing more access to the
experience within himself, and by bringing it into relationship with me, and eventually God
and others. This represented one tipping point of growth in Mark’s journey. It came as the
result of furnishing his soul through our relational connection, which led to connecting his
gut level knowledge of himself in relation to others with head knowledge by co-authoring
a new story about how relationships work for him.
Just as scientists furnish their minds with knowledge in their fields, as Christians,we need to furnish our souls with the resources that prepare us for spiritual transformation:
relational connections with God and others. These kinds of kinds of connections require
a deep, gut level knowledge of ourselves as well. We have talked in general about how the
furnishing the soul process involves linking the two kinds of knowledge in the “knowledge
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spiral,” and how telling our stories provides a bridge between head knowledge and gut level
knowledge. Now, let’s turn specifically to the relational connections that furnish our souls,
and some of the relational processes involved in this.
RELATIONAL CONNECTIONS WITH GOD:
SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES
Our most important relational connection is with God, through Jesus Christ. In John 15,
Jesus explains that we must be connected to him, just as branches are connected to a vine:
Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it
must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you
will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15: 4-5).
Jesus is saying here that we must be relationally connected to him in order to be spiritually
transformed—in order to bear fruit. We cannot do it apart from him, and we cannot do it
on our own because we are hard wired to connect.
How do we connect with, or remain in, Jesus? We often assume that we need to be
connected to Jesus by knowing about him—through head knowledge. A friend recently
told me about an interesting observation about Paul. Paul, who encountered Jesus on the
road to Damascus, only quotes Jesus three times in all of his New Testament writings.
This seems a bit odd. You would think Paul would reference Jesus more than that—that
he would give him a more extensive “respectful nod” in his own writings. It is not that
Paul didn’t have head knowledge of Christ’s teachings. But this is not what transformed
Paul’s life. Rather it seems clear that Paul was radically transformed, not by knowing about
Christ’s ethical teachings, but by knowing Christ in a much deeper way, as he passionately
describes in Philippians 3:8: “Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the
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infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything
else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ” (NLT).
Likewise, Jesus, in John 15, is talking about a much deeper form of connection.
He is talking about a relational connection that is rooted in gut level knowing—knowing
him in our experience, not just knowing about him. The spiritual disciplines are in fact
designed to help us relationally connect with God—to remain in Him in a way that is
more holistic than just head knowledge. My purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive
treatment of spiritual disciplines. There are many good references on this topic. Rather,
my purpose is to highlight a few key spiritual disciplines and illustrate how they activate
the knowledge spiral to lead to deeper ways of knowing God. We will focus on two basic
spiritual disciplines: a contemplative approach to reading Scripture and prayer.
LECTIO DIVINA
We tend to read Scripture for information, focusing on the meaning of the text,
and trying to understand it in context. This is appropriate and necessary. However, it is
important to also spend time reading Scripture in a more reflective way for transformation.
In other words, we also need to read Scripture in a way that opens our hearts to relational
connection with God, and to His presence and communication, that may take place at a
gut level. This type of reading involves waiting and listening in order to gain discernment
about the significance of the truth of God’s Word in relationship to our gut level knowledge
and attachment filters. This is often difficult to do. We naturally want to see results in
our spiritual lives. We want the process to be orderly and linear. If we put X number of
units of spiritual input in, we want to get X number of units of growth out of the deal. Theeasiest way to do this is to focus on increasing our head knowledge about a passage, rather
than focusing on the messy unpredictable process of God’s truth in our deepest levels of
knowing. This is part of the human condition.
We see an extreme form of this in the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. They developed
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a lot of extra laws and rules to make things orderly and linear. But look where this led. It
became not just about predicting and controlling how they could grow, but about avoiding the
sinfulness of their own hearts. Listen to Jesus’ words to the Pharisees in Mark 7:6-13:
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as
it is written: “’These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are
far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human
rules.’”…..”you nullify the word of god by your tradition that you have handed
down.”
There is a fine line here. A desire to connect with God and understand more about him
is good. But when this shifts into a focus on what we can get out of practicing a spiritual
discipline, this pathway can lead to a motive to control and predict in order to avoid the
messiness and sinfulness of our hearts. We need to bring this perspective to bear when we
read Scripture.
There is a reason that spiritual disciplines are referred to as disciplines. They are not
easy and they don’t come naturally, much like training in athletics. It is natural for us to try
to control and predict God’s Word by focusing on what we can learn in a head knowledge
sense, to the exclusion of encountering God in our gut level knowledge. Facing the sin and
messiness in our hearts is much more difficult. My hope is that providing a framework
here in Furnishing the Soul for how spiritual transformation works will help you see the
absolute necessity of spending time encountering God in is Word.
Lectio divina is designed to facilitate this process. It is a Latin term that means
“divine reading” or “sacred reading.” The practice of lectio divina began with the early
church fathers and mothers of the Christian faith. Some have referred to lectio divina as
a slow, contemplative praying of the Scriptures that becomes a means of listening to God.
It brings to mind Paul’s words in Colossians: “Let the Word of Christ richly dwell within
you…” (Col 3:16).
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The basic process of lectio involves four movements or modes of engagement. I
will provide a brief overview to provide a context for discussing the knowledge spiralin
lectio.122 First, you begin with a time of silence to prepare your heart to be open to God. It
may take some time to focus and quiet your heart from the internal noise of the day or of
whatever concerns are on your mind. Then you read the selected passage (typically about
ten versus) four times, each in a different mode of engagement, and each followed by a
brief time of silence. The first mode is to read the passage once or twice, listening for any
words of phrases that resonate, or seem to grab your attention. Then you spend a time of
silence meditating on the words or phrases. At this point, you don’t try to analyze them in
your head or make anything happen. Rather, you try to rest with the words or phrases and
allow them to furnish your soul. The second mode is to reflect on the passage. You read
the passage a second time, this time reflecting on how the passage speaks into your life
right now. Following this, you spend a brief time in silence allowing the passage to speak
into your soul. The third mode is to respond. In this mode, you create space to attend to
your gut level responses to what you have heard or sensed from God. You spend some time
in silence reflecting on your responses to God. Finally, you read the passage one last time
with a focus on resting in God. The goal is to allow yourself to enjoy God’s presence and
the entire experience of communing with Him.
Each of the soul projects in section 3 ends with a lectio divina to help you process
that particular area of feedback in prayer before God. So you will be encouraged to practice
this discipline in conjunction with your STI feedback. However, I want to explore here
some of the ways in which lectio facilitates the knowledge spiral and parallels the phases
of the discovery process. If we look at the four modes of engaging Scripture, we can seethe back-and-forth process of head knowledge and gut level knowledge. First, as you read
the passage, your top-left brain circuits are active as you process the logical meaning of
the text. Then you are encouraged to listen for words or phrases that resonate in your
soul. Here you are attending to your subjective experiences in such a way as to bring the
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bottom-right brain circuits of your gut level knowledge system online. This is analogous to
the preparation phase in the discovery process. You read a passage and then begin to pay
attention to it in a way that “back translates” the text into your gut level processing system.
Next, as you spend time in silence meditating on the words or phrases, you transition into
the incubation phase. As you rest with the words or phrases, you are allowing them to
incubate in your soul and allowing the Holy Spirit to work in the deep structures of your gut
level knowledge. You cannot follow the connections here, and they occur outside of your
conscious awareness.
In the second mode you reflect on how the passage speaks into your life right now.
As you spend time in silence allowing the passage to speak into your soul, your gut level
processing system is at work, and this transitions into the illumination phase. As you sit
with the passage and allow the Holy Spirit and your bottom-right brain circuits to work, you
will at times experience a new gut level sense of how God is speaking to you, and how the
passage applies to you. This may not always happen right away because we cannot predict
how long the incubation period will take, or how or when the Holy Spirit will choose to
speak. So this mode may stretch over some period of time. When some illumination does
come, it is helpful to transition into to the reflection/interpretation phase. You now consider
the new gut level awareness or sense about the passage and God speaking in a verbal form.
You attempt to put this into words. Often journaling can be very helpful in crystallizing
the illumination. In this phase, you are now bringing the top-left brain circuits of the head
knowledge system online to analyze your gut level intuitions about how God is speaking
to you through the passage. This processing will occur in a narrative, verbal form, using
episodes in your life that contain causal sequences of events. This will occur predominantlyin your conscious awareness.
In the third mode, as you create space to attend to your responses to what you have
heard or sensed from God, you are spiraling back to preparation and incubation by engaging
your gut level processing system again. This will help you deepen the verbal knowledge
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about how the passage applies to you. Finally, as you read the passage one last time with a
focus on resting in God, you continue the incubation phase of deepening your connection
with God through the passage. As you can see there is a constant back-and-forth process
between the two ways of knowing that are built in to lectio divina. The fascinating thing
about this is that this discipline was developed in the early Church long before we developed
a science of these two ways of knowing. Our early church fathers and mothers clearly had
a deep knowledge of human nature and how our hearts are transformed.
PRAYER
Just as with reading Scripture, there are different approaches to prayer and different
types of prayer. For example, we can focus on making requests of God on behalf of others
and ourselves, praising God, talking with God about situations in our lives, struggles we
are experiencing, or listening to God. These, and other forms of prayer, all have a place in
our spiritual lives. Regardless of the type of prayer, it is easy for us to approach God with
the mindset that spiritual growth is predictable and orderly—that we can make it happen
somehow if we are devoted enough. The same issues we discussed with regard to reading
Scripture come into play with prayer. We often try to control the process and the outcomes
of prayer, rather than opening our souls to the depth of God’s love. In Spiritual Theology,
Simon Chan gives a poignant description of prayer: “In prayer we begin to see ourselves as
God sees us and we see God as he is. In prayer we acknowledge that we are not in control.
This is simply acknowledging a basic fact of our existence. Not to pray is to take destiny
into our own hands, to falsify our true self as dependent creatures and to deny God as the
Sovereign One.”
123
Chan brings to light a truth we explored in chapter one: that as relational beings,
we are profoundly dependent on God and others to grow, and we express this in a basic
way in prayer. Certain types of prayer can help us to access our gut level knowledge and
subsequently become more attentive to how God is working in our lives. An example of
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this is the prayer of examen. Richard Foster states that “Examen comes from the Latin and
refers to the tongue, or weight indicator, on a balance scale, hence conveying the idea of an
accurate assessment of the true situation.”124
There are two types of the prayer of examen. The examen of consciousness is an
exercise in “which we discover how God has been present to us throughout the day and how
we have responded to his loving presence.”125 There are three basic steps in this process.
First you stop and make time at the end of your day to engage in this process. This, like
all spiritual disciplines, involves intentionality. You then observe, or replay your day in
your mind’s eye, tuning in to the ways God was present with you throughout the day and
attending to the Holy Spirit. Notice that this practice involves your gut level knowledge
system. You file through the events of your day, but you are attending to sensations about
God’s presence and communication that involve the bottom-right brain circuits. This
involves both the preparation and incubation phases. As you process your day in this way,
certain senses or feelings about God’s presence may impress themselves on your conscious
awareness. This is the illumination phase. This may not always happen. In fact, often
times, when you begin this practice, it will be frustrating because you may feel like you
are not noticing much of God in your daily life. This is part of the point. The very act of
attending to God’s presence in this way helps you begin to be more alert to His presence
during the day. It trains you to activate your gut level system to be alert to God’s presence.
As you become aware of different sensations, you then reflect on these sensations, shifting
into the reflection/interpretation phase. Now, you translate your gut level senses of God’s
presence and communication into words and into a story about how God was present with
you. This helps you to process the meaning of God’s presence in a deeper way.The examen of conscience is a time in which we invite God to search our hearts for
the purpose of uncovering our gut level knowledge and expectations that need healing and
transformation. We are instructed to do this in Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and
know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful
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way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.” This is a time to come before God without
defense and without hiding. Notice again that this process is designed to activate our gut
level system. When David says “know my heart,” he is talking about the deepest part of his
soul, not his conscious head knowledge. What the Bible calls the heart is parallel to what
I am referring to as our gut level knowledge. It is the center of our character, the place in
our soul from which the quality of our relationships spring.
This involves introspection, but it is much more than that because it is done in
partnership and cooperation with the Holy Spirit. We tend to either minimize the unhealthy
aspects of our gut level filters, or we condemn ourselves. In the examen of conscience, we
are inviting a Holy Other to bring to light the gut level knowledge and values that may be
painful and difficult for us to access. God desires to reveal to us exactly what we need to
know in order to grow and mature us. He does so perfectly with grace and truth. In this
we can rest.
As you meditate on your heart, inviting God to reveal areas in which you need to
grow, you enter the preparation and incubation phases. As incubation comes to fruition at
some point, in conjunction with the working of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will impress
certain feelings, images, and senses on your awareness. The Holy Spirit is working, and
your bottom-right brain circuits are working. These initial impressions have meaning
embedded within them. From here, you being to submit these gut level senses to your head
knowledge system and translate them into a verbal form with words and stories. Sharing
these stories further helps you to gain a deeper sense of how God is working in your heart.
This helps you get a handle on what God is communicating more precisely.
Again, we see here that these spiritual disciplines have built within them theknowledge spiral—a continuous back-and-forth process of gut level knowledge and head
knowledge. Using both forms of knowing in harmony in this way leads to a deeper, more
integrated knowing of the hidden aspects of our hearts that God wants to transform. Just
as we furnish our souls with relational connections with God, relational connections with
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others in spiritual community is also critical for our spiritual transformation. Let’s turn
now to the processes involved in spiritual community.
RELATIONAL CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS:
SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
I mentioned earlier that our most important relational connection is with God,
through Jesus Christ. This is true, and yet, in a very real way, our relationship with
God is constituted and expressed through our relationships with others. True spiritual
community, in turn, points us back to God. Relationships in the two domains are mutually
reinforcing.
One of the key ways we can furnish our souls is to be involved in a spiritual
community. While we cannot directly control our spiritual growth process, we can be
intentional about involvement in spiritual community. We can “put ourselves in the way
of God.” Involvement in a spiritual community is one of the primary ways that we are
transformed to become more like Christ. We will briefly highlight the biblical context
for the importance of spiritual community, and then turn our focus to the exploring how
the knowledge spiral and the role of stories help us understand the function of spiritual
community in our spiritual transformation process. Following this, we will highlight
three key characteristics of spiritual community that help us go about creating the kind
of communities in which our hearts are transformed by connecting our stories to God’s
grand story.
BIBLICAL CONTEXT FOR SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
To set the context for understanding spiritual community, it is helpful to take a look
at what the Bible has to say about the body of Christ. First, we see that John reminds us
that we cannot separate love of God from love of others: For anyone who does not love his
brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (I John 4:20). Our
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relational connection with God is intimately tied up with our relational connections with
others. True community flows from our relationship with God, and reflects the very nature
of our Trinitarian God. We see this intimate connection between loving God and others
earlier in this same passage:
“Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from
God. Anyone who loves is born of God and knows God. But anyone who
does not love does not know God—for God is love. God showed how much
he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have
eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but
that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear
friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No
one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love
has been brought to full expression through us (I John 4:7-11; NLT).
Throughout the New Testament we see the importance of spiritual community,
and particularly in Paul’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of the body of Christ in
I Corinthians 12. We depend on each other in the body of Christ to help us grow into
maturity. This goes back to chapter one and the first big idea—that we are hard wired to
connect. God designed us such that we need a deep sense of belonging and connection to a
community in order to grow. A spiritual community provides grace in the context of truth,
and truth in the context of grace. Sometimes one is in the foreground, and sometimes the
other, but the two are always held in tension.For example, Peter instructs us that “Each one should use whatever gift he has
received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms...”
(1 Peter 4:8-10). Paul instructs us to “comfort others with the comfort we have received
from God” (2 Cor 1:3-4). However, we are also instructed to hold each other accountable
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for our sin and to confront each other (Matt 18:15-17). We are to help each other see the
truth about ourselves and God. Yet, we are always to do this in the context of God’s grace,
with the other person’s best interest in mind. In Ephesians 4:15-16, Paul tells us: “We will
in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body,
joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love,
as each part does its work.” Paul elaborates on this body metaphor in 1 Corinthians chapter
12: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you has a part of it” (v. 27). Each
one of us plays an important role in the overall spiritual transformation of our spiritual
communities.
THE K NOWLEDGE SPIRAL IN SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
With this broad biblical context in place, it seems natural to ask the question: what
does true spiritual community look like, and how does it actually help us grow? It is
not uncommon for spiritual communities to function at a fairly superficial level. We go
to church, connect socially with a group within our church, hear the Word, maybe share
prayer requests, and yet we often don’t share our true stories, leaving without any sense of
meaningful connection to others. These superficial relational connections are not sufficient
to bring about lasting spiritual transformation. We need at least a few deeper attachment
relationships in the context of a spiritual community in order to help us grow spiritually.
Before elaborating on this, let me comment on the importance of serving others with whom
we may not have close emotional connections.
We are also to serve others in our spiritual communities as well as those outside
our spiritual communities as co-laborers with Christ in his Kingdom. It is importantserve people with whom we may not have close relational connections. When we are on
the receiving end of this, it does stimulate spiritual transformation at a broad level as we
experience God’s love and grace manifest through His body. Likewise, being used by God
to serve others also helps us grow. When we experience God using us to help others come
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one step closer to Him, whether directly or indirectly, we are literally building the Kingdom
of God. This, ultimately, is the most meaningfully thing we can do, and participating in
moving things closer to the way things are supposed to be has a profound impact on our
souls. This is the paradox Jesus taught us that we discussed earlier. As we lose our lives for
the sake of others on a daily basis, functioning as an active agent in building the Kingdom,
our souls are operating according to the deep structure of God’s design of human nature
and of the universe, and this is what causes our souls to flourish. However, as important as
service is to a broader community, attachment relationships play a critical role in helping
us transform the sometimes painful, gut level knowledge we carry around about God,
ourselves, and others.
Truth and grace are brought online through the grand story of God as it is unfolding
in the global Church, our local spiritual community, and our individual lives. A spiritual
community tells the larger story of God throughout history and by so doing helps us
connect our own unfolding stories to God’s story. Psalm 78:4 says: “We will not hide
these truths from our children but will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of
the LORD. We will tell of his power and the mighty miracles he did” (NLT). Likewise,
Psalm 145:3-4: instructs us to tell God’s story to the next generation in our communities:
“Great is the LORD! He is most worthy of praise! His greatness is beyond discovery! Let
each generation tell its children of your mighty acts” (NLT). This is an enactment of the
Kingdom of God in the here and now.
Second, our stories are not just our own individual stories. Our own stories become
embedded in the larger story of our local spiritual communities, which are in turn a reflection
and enactment of the global Church. As I have suggested earlier, our spirituality is by itsvery nature “storied.” Telling our stories is the way our deepest gut level knowledge of how
to love God and others is enacted, brought online, and transformed. It is the closest we can
get to our gut level knowing at the core of our being. And our stories are told fundamentally
in communities that allow us to become connected to God’s grand story that transcends
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ourselves. We were designed to transcend ourselves—to be part of something larger. This
is the only thing that provides meaning and fills out souls. If we lack connection to the larger
story of a spiritual community, and ultimately to God’s unfolding story, we become what
Robert Mulholland calls a “self-referencing” being.126
We turn inward, seeking meaning
outside of community where it cannot be found. If we continue on this path, we eventually
implode on ourselves. Spiritual transformation of our gut level knowledge comes only
through the telling and re-telling of our God-stories in spiritual community.
Spiritual community is also critical because it is our community story-telling that
bridges the back-and-forth processes involved in the knowledge spiral. As we discussed
earlier, transforming our gut level filters requires a harmonious working together of gut
level knowledge and head knowledge. Deep involvement in the lives of our communities—
living out the unfolding of our stories together—is critical to building new relational
experiences along different dimensions than those in our current gut level memory. This
kind of community requires longevity, and getting involved in the messiness of each other’s
lives. Just as spiritual transformation occurs through tipping points that we cannot predict,
involvement in spiritual community, likewise, is not a neat, linear process. It is precisely
in the messiness of encountering each other’s hearts that we create the context for new
grace-ful experiences that can lay down new gut level memories and create new attachment
filters.
New experiences in spiritual community occur in the preparation and incubation
phases we discussed earlier. In the incubation phase, your gut level processing system
processes your gut level expectations of God and others, and your most deeply held beliefs
and values. The deep structure of our attachment filters comes to the surface in the contextof spiritual community. All this processing occurs in the background. Although we cannot
identify how this processing is happening, this is the place in community where we form
new connections about the meaning of our experiences, about who we are with and to God
and others. It is here in community that we develop new story lines about our lives. It is
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through experiences of grace in community that we begin to experience ourselves at a gut
level as friends of Christ. We need a spiritual community to continually demonstrate to
us, albeit imperfectly, how God views us. As these experiences in spiritual community
incubate, they transition at some point into illumination.
In illumination, the connections that are being forged in the incubation phase
begin to come to our awareness. Illumination is the tipping point in our experience of
spiritual community in which new gut level meanings about ourselves, God, and others
(attachment filters) become more fully formed. New story lines begin to take shape in our
awareness. As our new story lines are taking shape, we transition into the reflection and
interpretation phases. Here we capitalize on the gut level processing that has incubated,
and led to an illumination, or tipping point, by translating our new gut level experiences
into words, concepts, and ultimately into a new story line in our relationship with God. Our
communities offer the place where we begin to tell our new stories as they are unfolding.
We explore and try on new senses of who we are to God, and how He is intervening in our
lives, and we do this in story. The very act of telling our unfolding stories in community
gives shape and form to our illuminations, and gives us more access to these gut level
meanings within ourselves. The process of translation transforms our gut level meanings
by connecting them to a larger network of meanings within our own experience, and within
the larger story of our communities. Once again, we can see here the spiral linking of the
two ways of knowing, and that spiritual community provides the context for telling our
stories. But how do we create the very communities so necessary for us to tell our stories,
and connect to God’s larger story?
FOUR CHARACTERISTICS AND THREE TIERS OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
A spiritual community has four key characteristics: it is spiritual, relational,
intentional, and is greatly impacted by its size. Some of these characteristics are implicit
in what I have stated so far, but it is important to make them explicit. First, a spiritual
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community is not just a community; it is spiritual by its very nature. The goal of a spiritual
community is not just to foster general social connections. The goal, rather, is to glorify God
by continually stimulating spiritual transformation among its members—transformation
into the image of Christ. Stated differently, the goal is to glorify God by developing human
beings who are fully alive. Spiritual communities do this through what is sometimes
referred to as the “means of grace.” To put this in the language we are using here, these are
different ways of furnishing our souls.
One way of furnishing our souls that is fostered by spiritual community is through
God’s Word—putting our stories in the context of God’s larger story. As we hear God’s
Word, we are given the opportunity to open our hearts to God’s grace. We see our lives in
a different perspective. This can lead to tipping points that change our experience of our
lives in the here and now. It brings us back to the fundamental purpose of our lives. Our
two knowledge systems can then reference each other back and forth in the knowledge
spiral as we process God’s Word and open our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit. As we
highlighted earlier, lectio divina is designed exactly for this purpose.
Spiritual communities also foster transformation into the image of Christ through
prayer. We discussed earlier that there are different forms and types of prayer, and
highlighted the prayer of examen that is particularly designed to develop a deeper relational
connection with God. Much more could be said on prayer, but my basic point here is that
prayer is one of the primary means of grace in which spiritual communities engage to
foster transformation among its members. There are many more means of grace in which
spiritual communities engage, and many ways of going about them. My point here is more
general: simply that a spiritual community is a particular kind of community that has aspecific end goal—transformation into the image of Christ, and building the Kingdom of
God. Because of this, spiritual communities must engage in particular kinds of activities
together in order to achieve the end goal of being transformed into the image of Christ.
Second, it almost goes without saying, but a spiritual community is relational by
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its very nature. We often take this for granted, but if we think about this, it means that a
spiritual community has to do things that explicitly foster relationships among its members.
And what kind of relationships? I mentioned earlier that attachment relationships are
particularly important to change the deep structure of our attachment filters. These are
people to whom you have an emotional connection, meaning that you can rely on them
for support, comfort, encouragement, and accountability, particularly during difficult
times. There are two types of attachments we can foster in a spiritual community: specific
attachment relationships between two people, and attachment to the community itself. The
first type is what we discussed earlier in chapter three. Spiritual communities need to be
structured such that people can develop meaningful connections with one another. This
needs to take the form of small groups as one dimension of the community. We will return
to the importance of group size shortly.
In addition, much like a family, a spiritual community is more than the sum of the
individual parts. Every community has a set of social norms and values, implicit, unspoken
rules, and a particular feeling tone. We might capture this to some extent with the concept of
“ethos.” Most of the ethos of a spiritual community is implicit and unspoken. All members
of the community contribute to its ethos, but the leadership contributes a disproportionately
large amount to it. As the leaders go, so go the people.
As I mentioned in chapter two, John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, made
an interesting point that attachment behavior is often directed toward groups and institutions
such as schools, colleges, work groups, and religious groups.127 Such groups can actually
become a secondary attachment “figure,” and in some cases a primary attachment figure. I
found this to be the case when I practiced psychology in the Army for several years. It wascommonly known among mental health officers that many soldiers would come to treat the
Army as an attachment figure. In cases in which they were discharged due to psychological
problems, these individuals exhibited all the signs of separation and loss of an attachment
figure. Bowlby noted that in most such cases, the development of attachment to the group
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occurs through an attachment to a person (or persons) holding a prominent position within
that group.
This has important implications for the spiritual communities of all types. Leaders
(whether they be explicitly defined as such or not) set the tone for the ethos of a spiritual
community to which most members will be become attached to some extent. In addition,
because they represent the group, individual members of the community develop an
attachment to the group via the leaders. Leaders, then, bear a large responsibility to
develop a healthy community ethos so that members can develop secure attachments to a
community that models grace.
Third, spiritual communities are intentional. Providing a context in which deep
relationships develop with each other and with God—in which we tell our “real” stories
to each other—does not happen accidentally. In fact, if we look at the landscape of our
churches today, there is evidence that it is very difficult to develop true communities. For
example, fewer than one out of six Christians has a relationship with another believer that
provides some level of spiritual accountability.128 Our individual relationships with God
and with others require intentionality. This is even more the case for a community of
people with different personalities, visions, concerns, relational and spiritual histories, and
levels of spiritual maturity and commitment. As we have discussed, we cannot control the
process of spiritual growth, but we can furnish our souls by deciding to do things that foster
community. There is no formula for this. It can look as many different ways as there are
communities. But we must be intentional.
Finally, one of the things we must be intentional about is the size of the functional
units of our communities. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Tipping Point, talks aboutthe “magic number 150.”129 Let me give you a bit of background to explain this concept.
As human beings, there are natural limits to the amount of information we can process
simultaneously. Cognitive psychologists refer to this as our “channel capacity.” For
example, we can typically only remember about seven numbers at a time, which is why
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phone numbers have seven digits. If you ask people to list the number of people to whom
they are close—whose death would badly shake them—the average is 12. This is referred
to by psychologists as your “sympathy group.” We simply cannot be close to too many
more people than that. Somewhere around 10-15 people, we begin to lose track of our
relationships. A particularly interesting channel capacity for understanding community is
what Gladwell calls our “social channel capacity.”
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has developed this concept.130 He argues that, for
a particular primate species, the size of the neocortex—the part of the brain responsible
for abstract thought and reasoning—correlates with the average size of the group with
which that primate species lives. The more people in your group or community, the more
relationships you have to monitor and remember. And this increases exponentially. For
example, increasing the group five times increases the number of relationships you have
to keep track of by a factor of twenty. Based on his research, Dunbar concluded that the
maximum number of people we can really know at some meaningful level is about 150. 131
Beyond this number, it is very difficult to maintain some level of relationship across
the entire group. Communication breaks down, and formal communication structures
become necessary. However, groups smaller than 150 tend to maintain communication
across the group that is based on the relationships. This type of communication is organic
rather than formally structured. There are numerous organizations that have figured this
out through trial and error. The military, for example, has arrived at a rough guideline
that functional fighting units cannot be larger than 200. The Hutterites, who came from
the same tradition as the Amish, have also discovered this principle and tend to maintain
communities of 150 or less. Gladwell cites a company, Gore Associates, that has alsodiscovered this principle. Gore, a multi-million dollar high-tech company, maintains plants
of 150 or less. They find that things get done much more efficiently because everyone knows
everyone else in the plant, across all the business lines. Because of these relationships, the
communication across the organization is very fluid, and the channels of influence are
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based more on relationships than on formal hierarchies such as supervisor-supervisee.
Spiritual communities are different than these examples in some very fundamental
ways. Nonetheless, this principle has important implications for our spiritual communities.
It suggests that our churches and spiritual communities should be structured in functional
units of 150 or less. If you move beyond this size, even just slightly, the dynamics of the
community change dramatically. This raises the broader issue of the different levels of
depth in a spiritual community in relation to its size. We can think of the depth dimension
of spiritual communities as a series of concentric circles, or “tiers.” The inner most circle
represents a few close attachment relationships and/or a small group of 10-15 people with
whom we share our spiritual stories on a regular basis. We can think of this as our “first
tier” community. This may be a small group of many types. It could be a small group in
a local church context, or a small group of friends that have been brought together through
some other context. For example, in interviewing Christian college students who attend
a Christian college, I have found it quite common that students will define their primary
spiritual community as a small group of college friends who live in close proximity to each
other. They often emphasize the fact that the group is not just a social group; that is has
developed to have an explicitly spiritual focus and function. The important thing is that
the focus of the group is on the spiritual transformation of the members. This is the level
of community at which spiritual values and morals are transmitted through relationships,
particularly across generations.
These relationships are referred to by some as “spiritual friendships.”132 David
Benner cites five ideals of spiritual friendship: love, honesty, intimacy, mutuality, and
accompaniment. Spiritual friends are those we share our spiritual journey with as it unfolds.A friendship characterized by the ideals Benner cites is clearly not a superficial relationship.
It requires a deep mutual commitment to the spiritual transformation of the other. And it
requires a strong sense of intentionality. There are several fundamental aspects of what
spiritual friends do with and for each other. First, they share their experience of God with
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each other, and attempt to be with the other in this experience. This requires vulnerability
and trust to share the sometimes dark and confusing places we experience with God. It
requires an openness to the confusion and messiness of the spiritual transformation process,
and a stance of “being with” the other rather than trying to fix or solve a problem. Second,
spiritual friends seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance in speaking into the other’s life in the context
of their current experience of God. Finally, spiritual friends are committed to interceding
on behalf of each other, with a specific focus on the other’s spiritual transformation.
The next circle in the depth of community typically involves a group ranging
from about a dozen people up to 150. This is our “second tier” community. This could
be a Sunday school class, or a group focused on some spiritual task or mission, among
other things. This is the next functional unit of community in terms of the depth of the
relationships. Such a group is too large to develop close attachment relationships, and yet it
is still possible to maintain some level of meaningful relationships across a group this size.
It still possible to be a relationally connected community up to about 150 people. Such
groups are very important especially when they cross generational lines and provide the
opportunity for the transmission of spiritual values and morals through modeling. While
we may not develop close attachment relationships with more than a handful of people, we
will grow by hearing the stories of others and how God is working in their lives. These
stories also model for us how to love God and others in various contexts. We also benefit
from the gifts of those in the body of Christ in this level of community.
The next circle of community represents groups larger than 150, which we can
think of as a “third tier” community. Beyond this size, there can still be some level of
community, but it is less constituted by the matrix of relationships than it is by a senseof connection to a handful of leaders and a common vision and ethos of the community.
There are still benefits to larger communities such as this. They can provide resources,
structures and programs that facilitate the smaller communities’ pursuit of the common
vision of the larger community. However, the law of 150, as well as the importance of
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EPILOGUE:MYSTERY, BROKENNESS AND THE
GOODNESS OF GOD
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In the end, we must remember that we cannot do anything to directly
transform our souls, to change our attachment filters, to make our sin
“OK” before God. At the end of the day, we are dependent on God and
others to transform our hearts. So when you are with others in your community, remember,
they cannot change without you, and you never know how God may use you to bring about
a tipping point of spiritual growth in someone in your community.
How do you know if your spiritual training is working? I think one sign is that we
are able to increasingly live out of our brokenness. Psalm 51 says: “Have mercy on me, O
God, because of your unfailing love. Because of your great compassion, blot out the stain
of my sins. Wash me clean from my guilt. Purify me from my sin…….For I was born a
sinner—yes, from the moment my mother conceived me. But you desire honesty from the
heart, so you can teach me to be wise in my inmost being……..The sacrifice you want is a
broken spirit. A broken and repentant heart, O God, you will not despise.” Brokenness is
the fodder for spiritual moments of meeting that lead us to a deeper dependence on God. It
is where we meet God in a way that changes our shared relational space.
Pursuing transformation into the image of Christ is a profound act of faith in God.
Even with the effort that we must put in to furnish our souls, we must ultimately fall on our
knees before God and cling to His Goodness. For me, it comes down to knowing that I will
never fully understand how God works, but trusting more and more that He is Good. In
Ephesians 3, Paul prays for spiritual empowerment for the Ephesians. I close by offering
this prayer for you: “When I think of the wisdom and scope of God’s plan, I fall to my
knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that
from his glorious, unlimited resources he will give you mighty inner strength through hisHoly Spirit. And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you
trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love. And may
you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how
high, and how deep his love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is
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so great that you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of
life and power that comes from God” (Ephesians 3: 14-19).
NOTES
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION ONE
1 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
CHAPTER ONE: HARD WIRED TO CONNECT
2 Commission on Children at Risk. Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities.
(New York: Institute for American Values, 2003).
3 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
4 See Robert Karen. Becoming attached. (New York; Warner Books, 1994).
5 Quoted in Rene Spitz. Hospitalism: An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53-74.
6 Robert Karen. Becoming attached. (New York; Warner Books, 1994)..
7 See Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999) and Commission on Children at Risk.
Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities. (New York: Institute for American
Values, 2003).
8 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999). See also Michael J. Meaney. Maternal
care, gene expression, and the transmission of individual differences in stress reactivity across generations. (Annual
Review of Neuroscience, 24, 1161-1192, 2001).
9 Commission on Children at Risk. Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities.
(New York: Institute for American Values, 2003).
10 Stephen J. Suomi. Developmental trajectories, early experiences, and community consequences. In D.P. Keating
and C. Hertzman (Eds.), Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations: Social Biological and Educational
Dynamics (New York: Guilford Press, 189-200, 1999).
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14
11 Stephen J. Suomi. How mother nurture helps mother nature: Scientific evidence for the protective effect of good
nurturing on genetic propensity toward anxiety and alcohol abuse. Commission on Children at Risk, Working Paper
14 (New York: Institute for American Values, 18-19, 2002).
12
For a synthesis of the last 30 years of infant research see Beatrice Beebe, & Frank Lachmann. Infant research and
adult treatment: Co-constructing interactions. (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2002).
13 A. Meltzoff. Foundations for developing a concept of self: The role of imitation in relating self to other and the
value of social mirroring, social modeling, and self practice in infancy. In D. Cicchetti & M. Beeghly (Eds.), The self
in transition: Infancy to childhood (pp. 139-164). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
14 R. Davidson & N. Fox. Asymmetrical brain activity discriminates between positive versus negative affective
stimuli in human infants. (Science, 218, 1235-1237, 1982).
15 G. Dawson. Infants of mothers with depressive symptoms: Neurophysiological and behavioral findings related to
attachment status. (Infant Behavior and Development, Abstracts Issue, 15, 117, 1992).
16 T. Field. Infant gaze aversion and heart rate during face-to-face interactions. (Infant Behavior and Development,
4, 307-315, 1981).
17 A. Fernald. Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. (Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181-195,
1987).
18 Beatrice Beebe & Frank Lachmann. Infant research and adult treatment: Co-constructing interactions.
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2002).
19 Ibid.
20 Daniel Stern. The first relationship. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 502.)
21 See chapter 5 of Beatrice Beebe & Frank Lachmann. Infant research and adult treatment: Co-constructing
interactions. (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2002).
22 Beatrice Beebe & Frank Lachmann. Infant research and adult treatment: Co-constructing interactions.
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2002).
23 J. Fagen, B. Morrongiello, C. Rovee-Coller, & M. Gekoski. Expectancies and memory retrieval in three-month-
old infants. Child Development, 55, 936-943.
24 Commission on Children at Risk. Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities.
(New York: Institute for American Values, 2003).
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14
25 Robert Karen. Becoming attached. (New York; Warner Book, 1994).
CHAPTER TWO: UNTHOUGHT KNOWNS: WE KNOW
MORE THAN WE CAN SAY
26 Daniel Goleman. Social intelligence: The new science of human relationships. (New York: Bantam Books,
2006).
27 Allan Schore. Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. (Hillsdale,
N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
28 A. DeCasper & M. Spence. Prenatal maternal speech influences newborn’s perception of speech sounds. (Infant
Behavior and Development, 9, 133-150, 1986).
29 Allan Schore. Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. (Hillsdale,
N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
30 Tozer, A. W. (1961). The knowledge of the holy. San Francisco: Harper and Row (p. 2).
31 David Benner. Care of souls: Revisioning christian nurture and counsel . (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1998).
32 Brokaw, B.F., Edwards, K.J. (1994). The relationship of God image to level of object relations development. Journal
of Psychology and Theology, 22(4), 352-371.
Hall, T.W., Brokaw, B. F., Edwards, K.J. & Pike, P.L. (1998). An empirical exploration of psychoanalysis and
religion: Spiritual maturity and object relations development. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 37(2),
303-313.
33 Hall, T.W. & Edwards, K.J. (2002). The Spiritual Assessment Inventory: A theistic model and measure for assessing
spiritual development. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 41(2), 341-357.
34 Merck, R.A., Johnson, R.W. (1995, August). Attachment theory and religious belief. Paper presented at the 103rd
Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, New York.
35 Beck, R. & McDonald, A. (2004). Attachment to God: The Attachment to God Inventory, tests of working model
correspondence, and an exploration of faith group differences. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 32, 92-103.
Rowatt, W.C., Kirkpatr ick, L.A. (2002). Two dimensions of attachment to God and their relation to affect, religiosity,
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14
and personality constructs. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 41(4), 637-651.
36 Granqvist, P. (1998). Religiousness and perceived childhood attachment: On the question of compensation or
correspondence. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(2), 350-367.
Granqvist, P. & Hagekull, B. (1999). Religiousness and perceived childhood attachment: Profiling socialized
correspondence and emotional compensation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 38(2), 254-273.
Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and
religious change in college students. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 24(9), 961-973.
Kirkpatr ick, L.A., Shaver, P.R. (1990). Attachment theory and religion: Childhood attachments, religious beliefs,
and conversion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 29(3), 315-334.
37 Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1997). A longitudinal study of changes in religious belief and behavior as a function of individual
differences in adult attachment style. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 36(2), 207-217.
38 Kirkpatr ick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and
religious change in college students. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 24(9), 961-973.
39 Granqvist, P. (2002). Attachment and religiosity in adolescence: Cross-sectional and longitudinal evaluations.
Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(2), 260-270.
40 Hall, T.W., Halcrow, S., & Hill, P.C., & Delaney, H. (2005). Internal Working Model Correspondence in Implicit
Spiritual Experiences. Manuscript submitted for publication.
41 We suspected and correctly predicted that on a self-report measure dismissing individuals would report relatively
high levels of forgiveness, but this is most likely a form of “pseudo-forgiveness.”
42 Ana Maria Rizzuto The birth of the living God. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).
43 Ibid.
44 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment, (New York: Basic Book, second edition, 1982).
CHAPTER THREE: GUT LEVEL MEMORIES AS
ATTACHMENT FILTERS
49 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
50 Bowlby, J. Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment, (New York: Basic Book, second edition, 1982, p. 200).
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51 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
52 Daniel Goleman in Social intelligence: The new science of human relationships. (New York: Bantam Books,
2006).
53
This is cited by Daniel Goleman in Social intelligence: The new science of human relationships. (New York:
Bantam Books, 2006).
54 Daniel Siegel uses this phrase to describe contingent communication. Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New
York: Guilford Press, 1999).
55 See for example, Robert Karen. Becoming attached: First relationships and how they shape our capacity to love.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
56 Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of
the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
57 E.g., H.R. Schaffer & P.E. Emerson. The development of social attachments in infancy. (Monograph of Social
Research and Child Development, 29 (3), 1-77, 1964)
58 Mary Main & Judith Solomon. Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth
Strange Situation. In M.T. Greenberg, D. Ciccheti, & E.M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years:
Theory, research, and intervention (pp. 121-160).
59 Carol George, Nancy Kaplan, & Mary Main. An adult attachment interview: Interview protocol (3rd ed.).
Unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley.
60 Fonagy, P., Steele, M., & Steele, M. (1991). Maternal representations of attachment during pregnancy predict the
organization of infant-mother attachment at one year of age. Child Development, 62, 891-905.
61 Hesse, E. (1999). The Adult Attachment Interview: Historical and current perspectives. In J. Cassidy & P. R.
Shaver (Eds), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications. New York: Guilford.
62 Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2002). Attachment-related psychodynamics. Attachment & Human Development,
4(2), 133-161.
63 Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category
model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 226-244.
64 Hesse, E. (1999). The Adult Attachment Interview: Historical and current perspectives. In J. Cassidy & P. R.
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Shaver (Eds), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications. New York: Guilford.
65 Mikulincer, M., & Orbach, I. (1995). Attachment styles and repressive defensiveness: The accessibility and
architecture of affective memories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 917-925.
66
This is what happens with post traumatic stress.
67 Mikulincer, M., & Nachshon, O. (1991). Attachment styles and patterns of self-disclosure. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 61, 321-332.
68 Mikulincer, M. (1997). Adult attachment style and information processing: Individual differences in curiosity and
cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1217-1230.
69 Simpson, J. A., Rholes, W. S., & Nelligan, J. S. (1992). Support seeking and support giving within couples in an
anxiety-provoking situations: The role of attachment styles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 434-
446.
70 Hall, T.W., Halcrow, S., & Hill, P.C., & Delaney, H. (2005). Internal Working Model Correspondence in Implicit
Spiritual Experiences. Manuscript submitted for publication.
71 Peers, E.A. (Trans.). The dark night of the soul: A masterpiece in the literature by St. John of the Cross. (New
York: Image Books, Doubleday, 1990. Original work published 1584). St. John described two primary kinds of dark
night experiences, but I using the term here to refer in general to times when it feels God is nowhere to be found.
72 Green, J. D., & Campbell, W. k. (2000). Attachment and exploration in adults: Chronic and context accessibility.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 452-461.
73 Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2002). Attachment-related psychodynamics. Attachment & Human Development,
4(2), 133-161.
74 Mikulincer, M., & Orbach, I. (1995). Attachment styles and repressive defensiveness: The accessibility and
architecture of affective memories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 917-925.
75 Mikulincer, M., & Nachshon, O. (1991). Attachment styles and patterns of self-disclosure. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 61, 321-332.
76 Mikulincer, M. (1997). Adult attachment style and information processing: Individual differences in curiosity and
cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1217-1230.
77 Mikulincer, M. (1998). Adult attachment style and affect regulation: Strategic variations in self-appraisals. Journal
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of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 420-235.
78 Mikulincer, M., & Arad, D. (1999). Attachment, working models, and cognitive openness in close relationships: A
test of chronic and temporary accessibility effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 710-725.
79
Hall, T.W., Halcrow, S., & Hill, P.C., & Delaney, H. (2005). Internal Working Model Correspondence in Implicit
Spiritual Experiences. Manuscript submitted for publication.
80 Kirkpatr ick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and
religious change in college students. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 24(9), 961-973.
81 Byrd, K. R., & Boe, A. (2001). The correspondence between attachment dimensions and prayer in college students.
The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 11(1), 9-24.
82 Green, J. D., & Campbell, W. k. (2000). Attachment and exploration in adults: Chronic and context accessibility.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 452-461.
83 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
84 Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2002). Attachment-related psychodynamics. Attachment & Human Development,
4(2), 133-161.
85 Mikulincer, M., & Orbach, I. (1995). Attachment styles and repressive defensiveness: The accessibility and
architecture of affective memories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 917-925.
86 Fraley, R. C., Garner, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (2000). Adult at tachment and the defensive regulation of attention and
memory: Examining the role of preemptive and postemptive defensive processes. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 79, 816-826.
87 Mikulincer, M. (1998). Adult attachment style and individual differences in functional versus dysfunctional
experiences of anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 513-524.
88 Mikulincer, M., Florian, V., & Tolmacz, R. (1990). Attachment styles and fear of personal death: A case study of
affect regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 273-280.
89 Mikulincer, M., & Nachshon, O. (1991). Attachment styles and patterns of self-disclosure. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 61, 321-332.
90 Simpson, J. A. (1990). Influence of Attachment Style on Romantic Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 59(5), 971-980.
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91 Collins, N. L., & Read, S. J. (1990). Adult attachment, working models, and relationship quality in dating couples.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 644-663.
92 Pistole, M. C., & Arricale, F. (2003). Understanding attachment: Beliefs about conflict. Journal of Counseling &
Development, 81(3), 318-328.
Babcock, J. C., Jacobson, N. S., Gottman, J. M., & Yerington, T. P. (2000). Attachment, emotional regulation, and
the function of marital violence: Differences between security, preoccupied, and dismissing violent and nonviolent
husbands. Journal of Family Violence, 15, 391-409.
93 Mikulincer, M., & Sheffi, E. (2000). Adult attachment style and cognitive reactions to positive affect: A test of
mental categorization and creative problem solving. Motivation and Emotion, 24, 149-174.
94 Mikulincer, M. (1997). Adult attachment style and information processing: Individual differences in curiosity and
cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1217-1230.
95 Mikulincer, M., & Florian, V. (1998). The relationship between adult attachment styles and emotional and cognitive
reactions to stressful events. IN. J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds), Attachment theory and close relationships.
New York: Guilford.
96 Mikulincer, M., & Horesh, N. (1999). Adult attachment style and the perception of others: The role of projective
mechanisms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 1022-1034.
97 Hall, T.W., Halcrow, S., & Hill, P.C., & Delaney, H. (2005). Internal Working Model Correspondence in Implicit
Spiritual Experiences. Manuscript submitted for publication.
98Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and
religious change in college students. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 24(9), 961-973.
99 Byrd, K. R., & Boe, A. (2001). The correspondence between attachment dimensions and prayer in college students.
The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 11(1), 9-24.
100 Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships. 7, 147-178.
101 Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships. 7, 147-178.
102 Griffin, D., & Bartholomew, K. (1994). Models of the self and other: Fundamental dimensions underlying measures
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of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 430-445.
103 Hall, T.W., Halcrow, S., & Hill, P.C., & Delaney, H. (2005). Internal Working Model Correspondence in Implicit
Spiritual Experiences. Manuscript submitted for publication.
CHAPTER FOUR: TIPPING POINTS IN SPIRITUAL
TRANSFORMATION
104 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
105 Gladwell, M. The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. New York: Little, Brown &
Company.
106 Quoted in Wilma Bucci. Psychoanalysis and cognitive science. (New York: Guilford, 1997).
107 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
108 Stern, D.N., Sander, L.W., Nahum, J.P., Harrison, A.M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A.C., Bruschweiler-Stern,
N., & Tronick, E.Z. (1998). Non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy: The ‘something more’ than
interpretation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 903-921.
109 Esser, H.H. (1975). s.v. Mercy. In New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Brown, C. (Ed.).
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
CHAPTER FIVE: FURNISHING THE SOUL FOR
SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
110 Malcolm Gladwell develops the concept of structured spontaneity as an illustration of split-second decision
making. See Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005).
111 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/wiles.html
112 Quoted in Wilma Bucci. Psychoanalysis and cognitive science. (New York: Guilford, 1997).
113 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/wiles.html
114 Louis Cozolino. The neuroscience of psychotherapy. (New York: Norton Press, 2002).
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Schiffer, F., Teicher, M.H., & Papanicolaou, A.C. (1995). Evoked potential evidence for right brain activity during
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recall of traumatic memories. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 7, 187-250.
118 Daniel J. Siegel. The developing mind. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
119 This concept is developed by Christopher Bollas in the context of psychoanalysis. See Christopher Bollas. The
shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
120 Wilma Bucci. Psychoanalysis and cognitive science: A multiple code theory. (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).
121 Quoted in Wilma Bucci. Psychoanalysis and cognitive science. (New York: Guilford, 1997).
122 For a more thorough and very engaging treatment of Lectio Divina, see Ruth Haley Barton. Sacred rhythms:
Arranging our lives for spiritual transformation. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books.)
123 Simon Chan. Spiritual theology: A systematic study of the Christian life. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
1998).
124 Richard Foster. Prayer: Finding the heart’s true home. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
125 Ibid.
126 M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. The deeper journey. (Downers Grove: IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).
127 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment, (New York: Basic Book, second edition, 1982).
128 See George Barna. Revolution. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).
129 Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. (New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 2002).
130 Ibid
131 Ibid.
132 See David G. Benner. Sacred companions: The give of spiritual friendship & direction. (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 2002).
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SECTION TWO:
INDIVIDUAL REPORT
AND ACTION STEPS
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You described yourself as 21-year-old Male and indicated that you have completed 4 semesters of college, majoring in English
(language andliterature). Your religious affiliation is Anglican. You described your overall satisfaction with your spiritual development
as 1. Very unsatisfied. When invited to describe your relationship with God and spirituality in the past 3 months, and any changes that
have occurred during this time, you wrote: "I have not felt very close to God in the past months. I think that my motivation for
following Him may be in the wrong place--I know it is the right thing to do, but I do not want to do it to please Him. I know that it is the
best thing for my life, but I don't feel very motivated in following Him.". When invited to identify three patterns you struggle with the
most in your spirituality, you wrote: "Sexuality" and indicated it is having a 6. Very strong negative impact; "Time Management" and
indicated it is having a 4. Moderate negative impact; and "Selfishness" and indicated it is having a 5. Strong negative impact. You
indicated you have not experienced a major event or crisis in the past year. In reflecting on the impact of your college experiences
on your spiritual growth, your average score for these 19 items was 5.53, indicating that overall you feel your college experiences
have had a moderately positive impact on your spirituality. More specifically, you answered the following for these 19 items:
Academic courses Moderately positive impact
Mentoring relationships with faculty Neutral impact
Relationships with staff and administration Moderately positive impact
Relationships with other students in your college community Moderately positive impact
Ministry opportunities - no answer given -
Chapel programs. Moderately positive impact
Short term missions trips. Very positive impact
Student leadership opportunities. - no answer given -
Bible or theology courses Moderately positive impact
Integration courses Slightly positive impact
Working through a traumatic event, crisis, or ongoing struggle Moderately positive impactPraise and worship sessions sponsored by your school Moderately positive impact
Being involved in a bible study or discipleship group Moderately positive impact
Experiencing cultural diversity in your college community - no answer given -
Study abroad programs Neutral impact
Service learning projects, internships or practica - no answer given -
Psychotherapy received through your school counseling center Slightly positive impact
Formal spiritual direction/mentoring sponsored by your school Slightly positive impact
Experiences designed to expose students to cultural diversity issues Slightly positive impact
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FIVE DOMAINS YOUR RANKING
DOMAIN ONE:
HOW VIBRANT AND MEANINGFUL IS YOUR
SPIRITUAL LIFE?
27%
DOMAIN TWO:
HOW COMMITTED AM I TO GOD AND A
SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY?
32%
DOMAIN THREE:
HOW SECURE IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TOGOD?
41%
DOMAIN FOUR:
HOW MUCH IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TO
GOD HINDERED BY ANXIETY?
27%
DOMAIN FIVE:
HOW MUCH DO I LACK A SENSE OF CONNECTIO
TO GOD?
27%
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DOMAIN ONE: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU J. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN ONE.
DO I FOCUS ON THE PRESENSE OF GOD? :
DO I TALK WITH GOD ABOUT IMPORTANT ISSUES IN MY LIFE? :
DO I PRAISE GOD ON MY OWN? :
DO I LISTEN TO GOD? :
DO I PRAY SPECIFICALLY FOR THE NEEDS OF OTHERS? :
DO I PRAY SPECIFICALLY FOR AREAS IN WHICH I NEED TO GROW? :
HOW OFTEN DO I PRAY?27%
"YOUR QUESTIONS"
A.
: 3. I HAVE A MODERATE CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
HOW DOES PRAYER IMPACT MY SENSE OF
CONNECTION WITH GOD?0%
"YOUR ANSWERS"
B.
You scored in the low range on Prayer Type Frequency, suggesting
that you either engage in prayer relatively infrequently in general, or
that you occasionally engage in one or two types of prayer. It is
important to interpret the meaning of this scale score in light of yourexperiences of different types of prayer. A low frequency score
means different things depending on the meaning of your
experience of various types of prayer. However, in general, people
with scores in this range tend to be spiritually disengaged and lack
motivation to pray. I t will be important to understand the meaning of
these experiences, and any changes that have recently occurred in
your engagement in prayer.
If there are one or more types of prayer from which you are
experiencing some sense of connection, it will be important to
understand the meaning of this, as well as the meaning behind your
lack of sense of connection from the other types of prayer.
Individuals with scores in this range are often experiencing
hindrances to their prayer life. Consider factors that may be
hindering your desire to pray. Reflecting on the spiritual hindrances
feedback may be helpful in doing this. Individuals with scores in this
range generally report lower levels of spiritual meaning,
commitment, community, forgiveness, and tend to experience a
higher levels of insecurity their attachment to God. This can
manifest in either lacking a sense of emotional connection with God,
or in a high degree of anxiety in one’s experience of God.
Spiritual Transformation
Action Steps
Considering the God Attachment scales will help you evaluate this.
3
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DOMAIN ONE: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU J. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN ONE.
DO I SET ASIDE SPECIFIC TIMES TO
MEDITATE ON SPIRITUAL ISSUES? :
DO I READ AND STUDY THE BIBLE IN ADDITION
TO WHAT IS REQUIRED BY MY CLASSES? :
DO I PRAY WITH THE PURPOSE OF COMMUNING WITH GOD? :
DO I ABSTAIN FROM FOOD OR OTHER ACTIVITIES SPECIFICALLY
FOR THE PURPOSE OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH? :
DO I SET ASIDE SPECIFIC TIMES TO MEDITATE
ON THE BIBLE AND/OR GOD? :
DO I PRAY WITH THE PURPOSE OF COMMUNING WITH GOD? :
DO I WORSHIP GOD IN MY EVERY DAY ACTIVITIES? :
DO I CONFESS MY DEEPEST WEAKNESSES AND FAILURES
TO OTHERS IN MY SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY? :
DO I INTENTINALLY ABSTAIN FROM INTERACTION WITH OTHERSFOR A PERIOD OF TIME FOR THE PURPOSE OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH? :
DO I INTENTIONALLY ABSTAIN FROM TELLING OTHERS ABOUT MY
GOOD DEEDS AND QUALITIES IN ORDER TO GROW SPIRITUALLY? :
HOW OFTEN DO I ENGAGE IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE?23%
"YOUR QUESTIONS"
C.
: 3. I HAVE A MODERATE CONNECTION
: 4. I HAVE A STRONG CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 3. I HAVE A MODERATE CONNECTION
: 4. I HAVE A STRONG CONNECTION
: 4. I HAVE A STRONG CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 3. I HAVE A MODERATE CONNECTION
: 2. I HAVE A MILD CONNECTION
: 1. I HAVE NO CONNECTION
HOW DO SPIRITUAL PRACTICES IMPACT MY SENSE
OF CONNECTION WITH GOD?24%
"YOUR ANSWERS"
D.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that you either
engage in a variety of types of spiritual practices with average
frequency, or engage in one or two spiritual practices slightly more
frequently than average, but rarely engage in other types of spiritual
practices. It is important to interpret the meaning of this scale score
in light of your experience of different spiritual practices. An
average frequency score means different things depending on the
meaning of your experience of various spiritual practices. It is also
important to develop an awareness of your spiritual needs at this
point in your journey and to engage in spiritual practices that
address these needs during this season of life. Considering the
sense of connection you reported from various spiritual disciplines
will help you do this.
Spiritual Transformation
Action Steps
Some people in this score range engage in spiritual practices with
some consistency and yet still experience a sense of spiritual
dryness during a period of life. If you are experiencing little sense of
connection with God even though you are frequently engaging in a
variety of spiritual practices, this may be the case for you. This has
historically been referred to in the Christian church as a “dark
night” experience in which God seems distant despite engaging in
spiritual practices. People who experience such a dark night often
disengage from spiritual practices because they do not seem to
make a difference. People often feel a sense of despair andhelplessness during such periods. Despite the dryness, spiritual
practices provide a foundation for helping you to remain open and
receptive to God in the midst of a dark night experience. As you
continue to engage in spiritual practices, it is often tempting to shut
down or avoid feelings of dryness and despair. Instead, as much as
you are able, allow yourself to be open to your experiences and
bring them to God. God often exposes issues in our hearts during
such times. Often a spiritual mentor is helpful in such a situation to
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help one walk through a spiritually dry time like this.
In addition, it may be helpful to reflect on your level of consistency
in these spiritual practices, and to set some concrete, attainable
goals for spiritual practices with the help of a spiritual friend or
mentor. The spiritual hindrances you reported will help you
evaluate this, as well as your overall profile on the STI. In addition,
references in the last section provide resources to help you identify
spiritual practices that fit your current spiritual needs.
You scored in the low range, suggesting that you are experiencing
significant spiritual dryness or struggles during this period in your
life. Individuals with scores in this range tend to experience God as
distant and feel very little desire to pray, or be involved in spiritual
activities. This may reflect several different scenarios. If you are
engaging in spiritual practices to the same degree as you have been
in the recent past, and yet you have begun to experience this
dryness, you may be experiencing what was referred to in the early
church as a “dark night” experience. In such experiences God isoften working in individuals’ hearts to help them desire relationship
with him more than anything else, including the benefits that often
result from living the Christ ian life. Resources for better
understanding this experience can be found in the last section
“Fostering Spiritual Transformation.” In general, many individual
experiencing this find it helpful to discuss this with a spiritual
mentor, and to continue engaging in spiritual practices, engaging
with God around this experience.
Spiritual desolation for some individuals is a long-standing pattern,
and this may partially result from lack of commitment and
involvement in a spiritual community. It may be helpful to examine
your feedback on the Spiritual Commitment and Community Domain
in light of this, and to reflect on whether your involvement in aspiritual community and with spiritual mentors and friends is
sufficient to sustain a vital sense of connection with God
Spiritual Transformation
Action Steps
HOW CLOSE OR DISTANT FROM GOD DO I FEEL IN
RECENT TIMES?
9% E.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that at times your
relationship with God grows deeper as a result of suffering;
however this may not be a consistent pattern in your life. There may
be times when trials and suffering cause you to withdraw from God.
This may represent areas that would benefit from intentional
reflection on how you typically respond to suffering. You may
consider processing these experiences with God and several
spiritual mentors or friends to assist you in opening yourself to God
more deeply during painful times.
Spiritual Transformation
Action Steps
HOW DO I RESPOND TO TRIALS, PAINFUL
SITUATIONS AND SUFFERING?
27%F.
5
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DOMAIN ONE: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU J. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN ONE.
You scored in the average range, indicating that you at times see life
through a spiritual lens, however, this has not yet become a
consistent way of processing relationships and events. Individuals
with scores in this range desire to depend on God and follow his
agenda for their lives, but their natural response to events and
relationships at times does not factor in a broader spiritual
perspective. However, the beginnings of a spiritual perspective on
life are evident. Individuals’ perspectives are often clearly manifest
during trials. It may be helpful to reflect on how you have
responded to recent trials in your life in light of the degree to which
you intentionally processed how God was working. As events
unfold in your life, consider developing the habit of intentionally
reflecting on your initial responses, your deeply held values that are
revealed in your responses, how these compare to the spiritual
values you are striving to live out, and how God is working in and
through the events and relationships in your life.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT DO I SEE LIFE THROUGH THE EYES
OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD?64% G.
You scored in the high average range, indicating that at times you
experience a sense of meaning and purpose in your life, yet this may
be inconsistent or unclear. This may result from a number of
factors, such as inconsistent involvement in a spiritual community,
or lack of a clear sense of God’s specific direction for you at this
stage in your life. It may be helpful to reflect on God’s general
purposes for you, and how God is specifically working in and
through your life story to reveal Himself, and to transform you into
Christ’s image. While this area does not reflect a substantial
growing edge, individuals with scores in this range typically benefit
from an intentional focus on this area.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF
MEANING AND PURPOSE IN LIFE THROUGH MY
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?
73%H.
6
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DOMAIN ONE: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU J. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN ONE.
You scored in the average range, indicating that at times you are
open to different perspectives. However, at times you may find it
difficult to be open to other viewpoints. Individuals with scores in
this range may not actively deny doubts, but may not actively
process them either. These doubts may include logical beliefs
about God, but they may also include “gut-level” beliefs about
yourself in relation to God and others. Consider reflecting on any
doubts you may have and bringing these to God in prayer. In
addition, it may be helpful to observe how you naturally respond to
different viewpoints about God and spirituality.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
AM I OPEN TO DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON MY
GROWTH AND TO MY SPIRITUAL DOUBTS?50% I.
You scored in the average range, indicating that at times you
experience a sense of God’s presence, guidance, and personal
communication. However, you may struggle at times, not feeling a
sense of God personally attending to you. It may be helpful to
reflect on God’s general purposes for you, and how God is
specifically working in and through your life story to reveal Himself,
and to transform you into Christ’s image.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT AM I AWARE OF GOD’S PRESENCE
AND COMMUNICATION IN MY LIFE?36%J.
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DOMAIN TWO: BREAKDOWN32%
A. THRU D. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN TWO.
You scored in the average range, indicating that you are involved in
serving others in some way. This may involve volunteering in the
community, helping the poor, helping people with emotional and
physical needs. Individuals with scores in this range typically
engage in serving others, but this may not be internalized as a
lifestyle. It may be helpful to reflect on the types of service you are
involved in, how these fit your sense of calling, and the degree to
which you are devoted to serving others.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT AM I ENGAGED IN SERVICE TO
OTHERS?55% A.
You scored in the average range, indicating that you are involved in
some of the foundational aspects of the Christian life. Individuals
with scores in this range typically spend time with God at least
periodically, have some ongoing involvement in a spiritual
community and various ways of serving others. However, some of
these habits may be inconsistent. It may be helpful to reflect on
how ingrained these various practices are, and select one or two to
focus on developing them further.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY LIFE CENTERED AROUND MY
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?55%B.
8
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DOMAIN TWO: BREAKDOWN32%
A. THRU D. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN TWO.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that you feel a
moderate sense of belonging to your spiritual community, and are
involved in it. However, your involvement or sense of belonging may
fluctuate somewhat. In addition, you may have a relationship with a
spiritual mentor or friend that focuses on helping you grow
spiritually. Individuals who score in this range tend to feel a sense
of support from their spiritual community, and tend to have several
relationships that serve as an ongoing source of encouragement,
support, and challenge. However, individuals in this score range
may feel their spiritual mentoring or friendship relationships are not
sufficiently deep at times to sustain their need for support andspiritual growth. It may be helpful to consider the degree of spiritual
support you experience in your spiritual community, and to
intentionally foster spiritually supportive relationships.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
HOW INVOLVED AM I IN A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY?23% C.
You scored in the average range, indicating that at times you serve
others even when your natural response is that it is unpleasant or
painful. However, for individuals with scores in this range, this
typically has not become an ingrained part of their character.
Individuals with scores in this range struggle at times with getting
out of their comfort zone in serving others, although the seeds of
this lifestyle are evident. It may be helpful to consider any ministries
you are involved in with this in mind. In addition, consider reflecting
on how you typically respond to others' needs in situations that are
out of your comfort zone, or painful. This will bring to the surface
your heart's motives in serving and loving others, and enable you tobring these issues before God.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT DO I DEMONSTRATE CHRIST-LIKE
LOVE AND COMPASSION FOR OTHERS?41%D.
9
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DOMAIN THREE: BREAKDOWN41%
A. THRU C. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN THREE.
You scored in the average range, indicating that at times you may
feel comfortable exploring your thoughts and feelings about your
relationship with God; however, at times this may be difficult or you
may find yourself uninterested in doing this. Individuals who score
in this range are able to tell their current spiritual story to others,
and sometimes gain a new perspective on themselves in the
process. When their story comes to a painful part, they may be able
to communicate the emotional tone of their story while still helping
others understand how the story unfolded. However, these
individuals sometimes have difficulty articulating their current story
about what God is doing in their life. It may be helpful to journalabout and/or discuss with a spiritual mentor or friend the story of
your relationship with God as it is currently unfolding and how God
is working in your heart.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TO
GOD SECURE?59% A.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that you experience
a moderate sense of being forgiven by God, and that this helps you
to forgive others who have hurt you. Individuals with scores in this
range may struggle at times with feeling forgiven by God, and with
forgiving others. This may manifest in ruminating about perceived
offenses, avoiding others who have hurt you, or seeking to hurt
others who have hurt you. This may not be a consistent pattern, but
may be a periodic, albeit significant struggle.
When this occurs, consider being intentional about trying to
understand others’ perspectives, and actively processing the paincaused by others in order to not hold this against them. See the
reference to the book Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the
“Fostering Spiritual Transformation” section at the end of this
report. This book is an excellent practical guide to developing a
forgiving lifestyle.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE GOD’S
FORGIVENESS AND DOES THIS EXPERIENCE HELP ME
FORGIVE OTHERS?
18%B.
10
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DOMAIN THREE: BREAKDOWN41%
A. THRU C. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN THREE.
You scored in the average range, indicating that when you
experience disappointment with God, frustration, anger,
abandonment or confusion in your relationship with God, you
sometimes are able to maintain an underlying trust in God and
continue to process these painful realities with God and others.
However, you may struggle with this, and at times may find yourself
having difficulty resolving negative emotions toward God, and/or
feel a sense of distance from God.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
AM I ABLE TO WORK THROUGH PAINFUL
EXPERIENCES IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?55% C.
11
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DOMAIN FOUR: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU C. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN FOUR.
You scored in the average range, indicating that you experience
some degree of unresolved painful emotions related to your
relationship with God. This may not be a major struggle, but is likely
an ongoing issue. Individuals with scores in this range may at times
experience negative feelings when they discuss their relationship
with God. This may sometimes affect their ability to provide a
coherent story about their life in this respect, and to learn from
these interactions.
Consider discussing this pattern with others who know you well.
Processing unresolved negative feelings in your relationship withGod with a spiritual mentor, friend, or therapist may be very helpful.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
HOW MUCH IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TO GOD
HINDERED BY ANXIETY?59% A.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that you experience
a mild to moderate degree of unresolved disappointment, irritation,
and anger in your relationship with God at times. This may not be a
major struggle, but is likely an ongoing issue. This may be related
predominantly to a current situation. It may be helpful to reflect on
whether some sense of disappointment is related to a current
situation, and to what degree this is an ongoing feeling you have in
your relationship with God.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
HOW MUCH DISAPPOINTMENT DO I EXPERIENCE IN
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?32%B.
12
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DOMAIN FOUR: BREAKDOWN27%
A. THRU C. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN FOUR.
You scored in the average range, indicating that you experience a
mild to moderate degree of fear and anxiety that God may be angry
at you or be against you. Individuals with scores in this range may
at times, especially under stress, experience “gut-level”
expectations that God (and other important people) will reject them
in some way. These may come to the surface when you feel that
you have failed in some way, or are not living up to God’s
expectations for you.
Consider discussing this pattern with others who know you well.
Processing unresolved negative feelings in your relationship withGod with a spiritual mentor or friend may be helpful. It may be
particularly helpful to reflect on what issues or situations tend to
trigger these feelings about your relationship with God.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
HOW UNSTABLE IS MY EXPERIENCE OF GOD?36% C.
13
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DOMAIN FIVE: BREAKDOWN27%
A. IS A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE SCALES THAT MAKE UP YOUR AVERAGE FOR DOMAIN FIVE.
You scored in the low average range, indicating that at times you
may not experience or express a lot of emotion in your relationship
with God. This may not be a major struggle, but is likely an ongoing
issue. Individuals with scores in this range may at times deactivate
their need for God and others during stressful or painful times, but
usually maintain some sense of connection to God. This may
sometimes affect their ability to provide a coherent, meaningful
description about their life in this respect, and to learn from these
interactions.
Even if this is not a major issue, it may be helpful to considerdiscussing this pattern with others who know you well. Reflecting
on your emotional responses to God in prayer, reading Scripture,
and other spiritual disciplines may help strengthen your sense of
emotional connection to God. If unresolved negative feelings
toward God surface, processing them with a spiritual mentor, friend,
or therapist will be helpful. Journaling can also be a helpful way to
process these issues.
Spiritual TransformationAction Steps
HOW MUCH DO I LACK A SENSE OF CONNECTION TO
GOD?27% A.
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SECTION THREE:
SOUL PROJECTS
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{1}. An exercise in deepening your
awareness of your internal life before God.
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DOMAIN ONEHow Vibrant and Meaningful is My Spiritual Life?
SOUL PROJECT ON PRAYER
The first two areas have to do with prayer, and should be
considered together. They are captured by the questions:
“HOW OFTEN DO I PRAY?”
“HOW DOES PRAYER IMPACT MY SENSE OF CONNECTION WITH GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback on these areas of prayer in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking
God to reveal where your heart is with respect to prayer.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with my experience of prayer recently?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what degree have I felt connected to God in prayer in recent
months?” “Do I feel God is present and responsive?”
c. “Is there a discrepancy or a parallel between how frequently I am praying
and my sense of connection to God in prayer? If so, why might this be?”
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d. “Are there types of prayer that help me to feel particularly connected to
God right now? How can I foster these forms of prayer more in my life?”
e. “Are there any obstacles I feel toward practicing certain forms of prayer?”
f. “Do I spend time listening to God? Why or why not?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “To what degree am I able to pray without words?” “Are there
times when I want to pray, but do not know how to articulate what
is on my heart? If so, how do I respond in such times?”
b. “How do my attachment filters affect my experience of prayer?”
c. “Do I expect my prayer life to grow in an orderly, predictable way?”
“Have there been times when I have been frustrated when this has not
happened?” “Have there been joyous occasions recently in which I
experienced a tipping point in my experience of prayer?” “Have there
been any negative tipping points in my prayer life recently?”
d. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,to what extent do I spontaneously respond to life with prayer?” “What
can I do to provide structure for a spontaneous life of prayer?”
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4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Matt. 6:9-13
Lectio Divina
The basic process of lectio involves four movements or modes of engagement. We
will review them briefly here to provide you some guidance in engaging in the lectio
for each soul project.1 First, begin with a time of silence to prepare your heart to be
open to God. It may take some time to focus and quiet your heart from the internal
noise of the day or of whatever concerns are on your mind. Then read the selected
passage (typically no more than ten versus) four times, each in a different mode of
engagement, and each followed by a brief time of silence. The first mode is to read the
passage once or twice, listening for any words of phrases that resonate, or seem to grab
your attention. Then spend a time of silence meditating on the words or phrases. At
this point, don’t try to analyze them in your head or make anything happen. Rather,
rest with the words or phrases and allow them to furnish your soul. The second mode
is to reflect on the passage. Read the passage a second time, but this time reflect on
how the passage speaks into your life right now. Following this, spend a brief time in
silence allowing the passage to speak into your soul. The third mode is to respond.
In this mode, you create space to attend to your gut level responses to what you have
heard or sensed from God. Spend some time in silence reflecting on your responses
to God. Finally, read the passage one last time with a focus on resting in God. Allow
yourself to enjoy God’s presence and the entire experience of communing with Him.
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICES
The next two areas relate to spiritual practices, and should be
considered together. They are captured by the questions:
“HOW OFTEN DO I ENGAGE IN VARIOUS SPIRITUAL PRACTICES?”
“HOW DO SPIRITUAL PRACTICES IMPACT MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TO GOD ?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback on these areas of spiritual
practices from section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God
to reveal where your heart is with respect to spiritual practices.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
my experience of spiritual practices recently?” “Was there anything from
the feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what degree have I felt connected to God in spiritual practices
in recent months?” “Do I feel God is present and responsive?”
c. “Is there a discrepancy or parallel between how frequently I
am engaging in spiritual practices and my sense of connection
to God in these practices? If so, why might this be?”
d. “Are there types of spiritual practices that help me to feel particularly connected to
God right now? How can I foster these forms of spiritual practices more in my life?”
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e. “Are there any obstacles I feel toward practicing certain spiritual practices?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “How have spiritual practices affected my gut-level experience
of myself, God and other important people in my life?”
b. “How do my attachment filters affect my experience of spiritual practices?”
c. “Do I expect spiritual practices to lead to spiritual growth in an orderly,
predictable way?” “Have there been times when I have been frustrated when
this has not happened?” “Have there been joyous occasions recently in which
I experienced a tipping point in connection with spiritual practices?” “Have
there been any negative tipping points recently in my spiritual practices?”
d. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured
spontaneity, to what extent am I providing adequate structure through
spiritual disciplines?” “Are there certain structures/spiritual disciplinesthat would I would like to focus on in the next 6 months?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 119: 10-14
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW CLOSE OR DISTANT
FROM GOD DO I FEEL IN RECENT TIMES?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to your sense of closeness to, or distance from God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to desolation/consolation with God?” “Was there anything from
the feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. If you are feeling close to God now: “What factors have contributed
to this period of spiritual growth in my life?” “What are some of the
structures (ways I have furnished my soul) that have prepared me for
growth?” “How can I continue to furnish my soul in these ways?”
c. If you are feeling distant from God now: “Am I engaging in spiritual practices
to the same degree as before I felt distant, and yet have come to feel distant in
spite of this?” “Is there anything the Lord is impressing on my soul during this
time that might have been difficult to realize otherwise?” “Is my involvement
in spiritual community and disciplines not sufficient to provide the structure for
experiencing intimacy with God?” If so, “What are some intentional steps I can
take to foster my involvement in spiritual community and spiritual disciplines?”
d. “Are there any patterns in my life, or habits, that are hindering
my intimacy with God? If so, what are some intentional steps I can
take to furnish my soul with more life-giving patterns?”
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3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “What relationships have been particularly influential in my
experience of God recently (either positively or negatively)?”
b. “What situations or events have impacted my experience of God recently?”
c. “How have my attachment filters affected my interpretation of these events?”
d. “Have any recent situations seemed to have caused a tipping
point (positively or negatively) in my experience of closeness
to God? If so, has this taken me by surprise?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures of my life impacted my experience of God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Romans 8:26-28
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW DO I RESPOND TO TRIALS, PAINFUL
SITUATIONS, AND SUFFERING?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking
God to reveal where your heart is with respect to suffering.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to transformational suffering?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “Have I experienced any trials, difficulties or suffering recently?
If so, how did I respond to others in my life, and to God?” “Do
I typically respond this way to trials in general?”
c. “How do trials and suffering affect my trust in God?” “Are there some areas that I
don’t trust God with when I go through trials?” “Is there anything in particular I am
afraid will happen in my relationship with God when I encounter difficult times?”
d. “What factors help me draw closer to God during trials?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
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a. “What relationships have been particularly influential in the
way I respond to trials and suffering?” “How has growth through
trials been modeled for me by important people in my life?”
b. “Are there things I have learned at a “gut level” about God and myself
through suffering that are hard to put into words?” “Are there any images
that would help me express this?” “If I had to put this knowledge into words,
how would I try?” (you may use the space under #5 below to do this).
c. “How have my attachment filters affected how I respond to trials and suffering?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently in
the way I respond to suffering?” If so, has this taken me by surprise?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by
structured spontaneity, how have the structures (or lack thereof)
in my life impacted the way I respond to suffering?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm chapter 42
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I SEE LIFE THROUGH THE
EYES OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to
reveal where your heart is with respect to your spiritual perspective.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to spiritual perspective?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what extent do my gut level responses to life events align
with God’s ways and the purposes of His kingdom?”
c. “What factors help me draw closer to God during trials?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “What relationships have been particularly influential in
developing a spiritual outlook on life?” “How has this been
modeled for me by important people in my life?”
b. “To what extent is there a discrepancy between my professed values and my lived,
or gut level, values?” “Are there particular areas in which this is most pronounced?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect how I respond to trials and suffering?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively)
recently in my gut level values and spiritual perspective?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life impacted my values and
spiritual perspective?” Are there particular areas where I need to shore up the
structures in my life to furnish my soul for a more spiritual perspective on life.”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Isaiah 55:8-9
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF
MEANING AND PURPOSE IN LIFE THROUGH MY
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal
where your heart is with respect to your sense of meaning and purpose in life.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to spiritual meaning?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what extent do I feel God has a purpose for my life?”
c. “Are there times when my life lacks a sense of meaning?”
“How do I respond to God during those times?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “What relationships have been particularly influential in helping
my life feel meaningful?” “Are there any significant people in
my life who have modeled living out a meaningful life?”
b. “To what extent is there a discrepancy between my head knowledge
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about meaning in life, and my gut level sense of meaning in my life?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my sense of meaning in life?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently in my gut
level sense of meaning in my life?” If so, “what may have contributed to this?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life impacted my sense
of meaning in life?” Are there particular areas where I need to shore up
the structures in my life to furnish my soul for meaning in life?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Matt. 16:24-26
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“AM I OPEN TO DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON MY
GROWTH AND TO MY SPIRITUAL DOUBTS?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God
to reveal where your heart is with respect to how you deal with spiritual
doubts and different perspectives on your spiritual growth.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to spiritual openness?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what extent am I open to my own doubts about
God, or how He is working in my life?”
c. “How do doubts affect my relationship with God?”
d. “How do I respond to people who have a different outlook
on God and spiritual growth?” “Do I tend to dismiss them?” If
so, “what might be some factors contributing to this?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
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a. “What relationships have been particularly influential in helping me process my
spiritual doubts?” “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled
growing through being open to doubts and confusion in their relationships with God?”
b. “Do I have any deeply held (gut level) doubts that I try not
to think about, or that are hard to put into words?” If so, “Are
there people in my life that can help me process these?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect the way I deal with spiritual
doubts or differing perspectives on spiritual growth?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently in my
deeply held (gut level) doubts?” If so, “what factors may have contributed to this?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity, how
have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life impacted my spiritual doubts and
the way I deal with them?” “Are there particular areas where I need to shore up the
structures in my life to furnish my soul to be able to better process my doubts?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 27: 1-6.
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT AM I AWARE OF GOD’S
PRESENCE AND COMMUNICATION IN MY LIFE?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to your awareness of God’s presence and communication.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to awareness of God?” “Was there anything from the
feedback that seems to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?”
b. “To what extent have I been aware of God’s presence and
the how he is working in my life in recent months?”
c. “Are there times when God has spoken to me specifically
or vividly?” “How did I respond?”
d. “Have there been times recently when I feel like God is not
personally involved with me?” “How have I responded?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Have there been any relationships that have been particularly influential
in helping me to discern God’s presence?” “Are there any significant people
in my life who have modeled a conversational relationship with God?”
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b. “What are my gut level expectations/beliefs about God communicating
with me in a personal way? “Are there times I have been aware of God’s
presence in a way without words?” “How do I respond to this?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level expectations
about God being personally involved in my life?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently
in my deeply held (gut level) sense of God’s presence or communication
to me?” If so, “what factors may have contributed to this?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life impacted awareness of God in
my daily life?” “Are there particular areas where I need to shore up the structures
in my life to furnish my soul to foster more awareness of God in my life?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 139: 7-10
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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DOMAIN TWOHow Committed am I to God and a Spiritual Community?
SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT AM I ENGAGED
IN SERVICE TO OTHERS?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal
where your heart is with respect to the way you live out serving others in love.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with regard to my
engagement in service to others?” “Was there anything from the feedback that seems
to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “What ways of serving others cause me to “feel God’s pleasure”?”
c. “Are there any specific situations or life circumstances in my life now
that are hindering me from compassionate service to others?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled for me
compassionate service to others?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY LIFE CENTERED
AROUND MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to your awareness of God’s presence and communication.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to how central my faith is to the way I live my life?” “Was
there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience,
but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “What story does the way I spend my time tell about my
commitment to God, and to grow spiritually?”
c. “Are there any specific situations or issues in my life now that are hindering
me from pursuing relationship with God in all areas of my life?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled
for me passionately pursuing God as the most important purpose
in their lives?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
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b. “What are my gut level expectations/beliefs about the
purposes that should motivate and organize my life? “How does
the way I am living my life match my expectations?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level desire to pursue
relationship with God as the most important purpose of my life?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently
in my gut level desire to organize my life around my relationship with
God?” If so, “How has this impacted the way I live my life?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured
spontaneity, how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected
my commitments and the purposes that motivate my life?” “Are there
particular areas in which I need to furnish my soul by strengthening my
commitment, and re-ordering my life around my relationship with God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Proverbs 3: 1-7
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW INVOLVED AM I IN A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God
to reveal where your heart is with respect to spiritual community.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated
with regard to my experience of spiritual community?” “Was there
anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience, but
I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “To what extent do I feel I belong to a spiritual community?” “Are
there people I can turn to for spiritual mentoring and guidance”?
“Do I have any spiritual friendships in which we intentionally
focus on encouraging each other’s spiritual growth?”
c. “Are there any specific situations or issues in my life now that are
hindering me from being actively involved in a spiritual community?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled for me living life
deeply rooted in a spiritual community?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
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b. “What are my gut level expectations about how people in a
spiritual community will relate to me?” “How does this affect my
level of involvement and experience in spiritual community?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level
expectations about spiritual community?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently
in my experience of belonging to a spiritual community?”
If so, “How has this impacted the way I live my life?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured
spontaneity, how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected
my involvement in, and experience of spiritual community?” “Are there
particular ways in which I need to furnish my soul by getting more connecting
to a spiritual community, or by developing spiritual friendships ?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Ephesians 4: 1-6
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I DEMONSTRATE CHRIST-
LIKE LOVE AND COMPASSION FOR OTHERS?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to
reveal where your heart is with respect to sacrificially loving others.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to how much life reflects Christ-like love for others?” “Was
there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience,
but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “To what extent do I get out of my comfort zone in loving others?”
c. “Are there any specific situations or issues in my life now that
are hindering me from sacrificially loving others?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled for me
Christ-like sacrifical love?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “What are my gut level expectations about how I should be loving
others?” “How does this affect how I live my day-to-day life?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level ability to focus on
others’ needs and give of myself sacrificially in loving others?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively)
recently in the way I live out sacrificially loving others?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected my ability to
give sacrificially of myself to love others?” “Are there particular areas
in which I need to furnish my soul to prepare me to love others?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Luke 9:1-11
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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DOMAIN THREEHow Secure is my Sense of Connection to God?
SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION
TO GOD (OR ATTACHMENT) SECURE?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal
where your heart is with respect to the security of your sense of connection to God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with regard to my
sense of connection to God?” “Was there anything from the feedback that seems
to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled for me a
secure, stable connection to God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “To what extent do I feel at a gut level that God is
reliable and will always be there for me?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level sense of
my relationship with God being secure, and reliable?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently in
my experience of my relationship with God being secure and reliable?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected my sense of God
being loving and secure?” “Are there particular areas in which I need to furnish
my soul to prepare me to experience the consistency of God’s love for me?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 23
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE GOD’S
FORGIVENESS AND DOES THIS EXPERIENCE
HELP ME FORGIVE OTHERS?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to your experience of forgiveness with God and others.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with regard to
my experience of forgiveness?” “Was there anything from the feedback that seems
to fit my experience, but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “Are there specific people in my life I am struggling to
forgive right now?” “What might contribute to this?”
c. “Are there any specific situations or issues in my life now
that are hindering me from forgiving others?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled experiencing
forgiveness from God, and forgiving others?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “To what extent do I experience at a gut level God truly forgiving
me for my sin?” “Does this help me forgive others?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level
expectations about God forgiving me?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently
in experiencing God’s forgiveness, or of forgiving others?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected my experience
of forgiveness with God and others?” “Are there particular areas in
which I need to furnish my soul to prepare me to forgive others?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Matthew 6:5-15
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“AM I ABLE TO WORK THROUGH PAINFUL
EXPERIENCES IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to processing struggles in your relationship with God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to how I deal with painful experiences in your relationship with
God?” “Was there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my
experience, but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “Are there specific issues I am struggling with
right now in my relationship with God?”
c. “How have these difficulties (if any) affected my relationship with God?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled working through
difficult times in their relationship with God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “What are my gut level expectations about how God will respond
to me when I am experiencing some struggle with Him (e.g.,
confusion, anger toward God, lacking desire to pray, etc?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level expectations about how God
will respond to me when I am experiencing negative feelings toward Him?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or
negatively) recently in repairing ruptures with God?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity, how
have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected my ability to work through
negative, painful feelings toward God?” “Are there particular areas in which I
need to furnish my soul to prepare me to repair my connection with God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 42: 1-11
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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DOMAIN FOUR How Much is my Sense of Connection to God Hindered by Anxiety?
SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW MUCH IS MY SENSE OF CONNECTION TO
GOD HINDERED BY ANXIETY?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking
God to reveal where your heart is with respect to any anxiety and/
or painful emotions in your sense of connection to God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to my sense any sense of anxiety, or painful emotions, in my sense of
connection to God?” “Was there anything from the feedback that seems to fit
my experience, but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “Are there any specific situations or issues in my life that are triggering
anxiety, fear of rejection, etc, in my relationship with God?”
c. “How have these difficulties (if any) affected my relationship
with God, and my involvement in spiritual community?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
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a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled working through
anxiety in their relationship with God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “To what extent do I turn to God to comfort me when I experience
painful emotions?” “When I do turn to God, does this help
comfort me?” “Is the comfort I experience short lived?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level expectations
about how God being there for me when I turn to Him?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively)
recently in any sense of anxiety with God?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured
spontaneity, how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected
any sense of anxiety and insecurity I may have in my relationship with
God?” “Are there particular areas in which I need to furnish my soul to
prepare me to feel more secure in sense of connection to God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Psalm 139: 1-18
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW MUCH DISAPPOINTMENT DO I EXPERIENCE
IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to
reveal where your heart is with respect to any disappointment with God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to my sense any sense of disappointment with God I may have?”
“Was there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience,
but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “Are there any specific in my life causing disappointment
or frustration in my relationship with God?”
c. “How have these disappointments (if any) affected my relationship
with God, and my involvement in spiritual community?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled working
through disappointment with God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “What are my gut level expectations about God disappointing me?”
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c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level
expectations whether God will disappoint me?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively)
recently in any sense of disappointment with God?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected or contributed
to any disappointment with God?” “Are there particular areas in which I
need to furnish my soul to work through any disappointment with God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Ezekiel 34: 11-16
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW UNSTABLE IS MY EXPERIENCE OF GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to any instability and insecurity in your relationship with God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to any sense of instability with God I may experience?” “Was
there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience,
but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “Are there any specific in my life causing instability
in my sense of closeness to God?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled working through
instability in their relationship with God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
b. “What are my gut level expectations about God being there for me consistently?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level expectations
whether God will be reliable and always love me?”
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d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively)
recently in the stability of my relationship with God?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity, how
have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected or contributed to any lack of
stability in my experience of God?” “Are there particular areas in which I need to
furnish my soul to strengthen my sense of stability in my relationship with God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Isaiah 43: 1-7
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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DOMAIN FIVEHow Much Do I Lack a Sense of Connection to God?
SOUL PROJECT:
“HOW MUCH DO I LACK A SENSE OF CONNECTION
TO GOD?”
1. Read (or re-read) your feedback for this area in section 2 of your FS Pack.
2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to reveal where
your heart is with respect to any sense of lack of connection to, or distance from God.
a. “Was there anything in the feedback that particularly resonated with
regard to any sense of lack of connection to, or distance from God?”
“Was there anything from the feedback that seems to fit my experience,
but I was unaware of?” “If so, why might this be the case?”
b. “How much do I tend to relate to God through my head knowledge
rather than experiencing an ongoing relationship with God?”
3. Spend 30 minutes reflecting in prayer with the Lord on the following
aspects related to the five big ideas of spiritual transformation:
a. “Are there any significant people in my life who have modeled
working through distance with God, and becoming more emotionally
connected to God?” “If so, how has that impacted me?”
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b. “What are my gut level expectations about whether it is
OK to need God, and to express emotion to God?”
c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level expectations of
whether it is OK to need God, and to express emotion to God?”
d. “Have there been any tipping points (positively or negatively) recently in
connecting to God on a more emotional level versus through head knowledge?”
e. “If I think of my life as a spiritual improv guided by structured spontaneity,
how have the structures (or lack thereof) in my life affected or contributed
to any sense of lack of connection to God, and/or relating to God primarily
through head knowledge?” “Are there particular areas in which I need to
furnish my soul to develop my ability to emotionally connect to God?”
4. Engage in “ Lectio Divina” for 30 minutes over the following text:
Matt 11: 28-30
Ephesians 3:14-19
5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,
experienced, became aware of, etc.
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WHAT DO YOU WANT TO FOCUS ON IN
YOUR SPIRITUAL GROWTH PROCESS
OVER THE NEXT SIX MONTHS?
WRITE OUT YOUR FURNISHING THE SOUL GOALS
FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS.
SIX MONTHFurnishing the Soul Plan
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(Footnotes)
1 For a more thorough and very engaging treatment of Lectio Divina, see Ruth Haley Barton. Sacred
rhythms: Arranging our lives for spiritual transformation. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books.)