Every Day Gods: Oh It's In You! Find It.

King Princess sings about love in her song “1950”. She asks “So tell me why my Gods look like you? And tell me why it’s wrong?”. We do worship Love don’t we? We do feel ‘wrong’ when it doesn’t hold it’s promise, no matter what the relationship: parent-child, lovers, friends, neighbors, citizen-leader, or student-teacher. There are endless forms of relationships that can disrupt and heal, in equal measure, and our worship practice falters, we lose ourselves repeatedly. ?

I see it in my work as a trauma therapist, the wounds when love fails to save us, or protect us. There is a?trauma when individuals no longer want to, or can’t kneel, at Love’s Alter, humble and vulnerable and pray for themselves to keep at it despite the ways it can flee or fail us. ?

In my field we are somewhat obsessed with attachment theory when it comes to the origin wounds that form a pattern of what hurts throughout our lives. It all becomes a story that usually involves hard lessons from love worship. We can become disconnected from ourselves inside decades of these patterns but also function. It is like we begin to function without our spirit. We can lose our inner spirituality. The Every Day?God that we have inside us is our ability to give and receive love. The personification of love in the statement “the One” is an example. We just are attached to the idea of searching for a love match, either through resistance and fierce independence or soul mate idealism, and a thousand other personifications in between. ?So, let’s talk about attachment.?

Attachment styles are patterns of how we think, feel and act in close relationships. They can form early in life based on the way we bond, or have barriers to bonding, with our primary caregivers. John Bowlby first developed the theory in the 1950s when he was looking to learn more about the distress that young children feel when separated from their primary caregivers. Before his research it was thought attachment was only due to the feeding relationship that an infant relies on, we need food, the caregiver keeps us fed, literally, we bond. However, now we know that babies search for their caregivers when they are absent, and feeding them does not calm them, attention and comfort do. When caregivers are available, compassionate, loving, and responsive, children develop a sense of security. ?

So, yes King Princess. My God looks like you, whatever person seems to be truly there is God like, because we need to feel secure to feel ourselves whole. The work I do as a trauma therapist is about restoring that wholeness with my presence, but not because I am God, but because individuals become disconnected from the Every Day God that is their whole self, intact, no longer fragmented from insecure attachment traumas we all have, but certainly those with abuse, neglect, violation, abandonment, rejection, violence and dismissal histories definitively do. ?

When the Every Day God Develops Insecure Attachment?

Adults are motivated and affected by similar behaviors in each other as infants are with their caregivers. Attachment styles formed during infancy are only part of the way we learn connection. Relationships at any age can be traumatic and damaging, as well as healing and reparative. An adult may develop a very trusting and supportive relationship with an intimate partner, causing a sense of healing and repair. In succession, if there is trauma experienced by an adult in a relationship, it could also lead to a loss of faith in intimate relationships and potentially cause an insecure attachment style. The sense of uncertainty that what we possess is not enough to make another stay with us, worship in love with us, it is a loss. It can feel like a break from spirituality. Spirituality in this sense means the thread that connects things. The sense that all things are interdependent and in balance such that nothing is above or beneath, that is what God, whether reject or embrace, or believe that to look like, is conceptually, a sense everything is connected securely?

There are four attachment styles in adults: One is known as the secure style and the other three as insecure styles:?

Securely Attached?

Securely is something we have all moved in and out of and for some may not be finitely attained. It can be found in a future relationship, and also lost, as well as searched for. Although there can be a lot of information out there that conveys it as a style that some possess as innate or by the advantage of growing up within certain conditions, I would like to frame it differently. The tools of therapy, self-reflection, therapeutic movement that puts you in touch with nature or your body, artistic expression, and meaningful connection can all serve to repair and grow secure attachment potential. ?

The field of psychology will posit that there are just some people with secure attachment. They are innately gifted at forming healthy, trusting relationships, are emotionally open and skilled communicators, and they easily cater to the needs of those close to them without losing their boundaries. They respect each other, share their feelings with each other and with friends, and they give each other both affection and space as needed. Securely attached people listen to your point of view and once you get close to someone with this attachment style, you don’t have to broker a deal for intimacy, it becomes established fact. This is a true style and yet we can all become secure in our attachments or move into security as a relational skill. ?

In my personal perspective, and in the work I do, I don’t find it helpful to suggest that these secure people walk around the world, and we have to be lucky enough to be one or find one. I believe in reconnecting to the Every Day God in us. The type of attachment styles we can hold in our patterns of relating before this concept if reconnecting occurs however, are explained below. Knowing and accepting where you have been will help you on the path to reconnection. ?

Anxious Attachment?

This is an insecure style. Adults with this style tend to worry about their relationships. They find it difficult to express their needs, and they rely on those close to them for validation. They crave?intimacy?but fear abandonment and are sensitive to any sign that someone might be rejecting them. When feeling threatened, they can cling and become overly dependent. The?main factor?that causes anxious attachment is experiencing unreliability in caregivers early in life; sometimes they’re supportive and comforting toward the child, and other times unresponsive or absent.?

Dismissive Avoidant?

This style involves the preference of being on your own and having difficulty depending on people who are close to you. Dismissive avoidants have boundaries that make it difficult for them to form a secure bond. When they do, they tend to create distance when too much intimacy makes them uncomfortable. Dismissive avoidant attachment is?formed in childhood?when caregivers are unavailable for long periods of time and don’t meet the child’s needs. The child gets used to spending time alone and learns to suppress their need for intimacy.?

Fearful Avoidant?

Also called anxious avoidant or disorganized, this is the final insecure style. People with this style have traits of both anxious and avoidant attachment. This style fears both intimacy and abandonment, and they neglect emotions and lack self-confidence in relationships. They want close relationships and crave affection, but once things get too intimate or emotional, they withdraw. Fearful-avoidant attachment early on can result from?caregivers’ inability to care for the child, and neglectful, traumatic ways they responded to the child’s needs. Hot-and-cold behavior is common in fearful avoidants. ?

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Then there is How Styles Interact?

In adult relationships, any kind of trauma or breach of trust could lead to any one of the insecure attachment styles, depending on the person and the nature of the experience. Certain pairings of insecure styles can occur when the people involved subconsciously look for others who reinforce their beliefs about close relationships. For example, an anxiously attached person can affirm a dismissive avoidant’s beliefs that getting close to someone will make them feel smothered, unsafe, and like they need to escape. Contrarily, an anxiously attached person who is conditioned to fear abandonment might gravitate toward those who seem likely to reject them. ?

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Why We Need the Every Day God Personified in Parts of Self?

“Parts of Self” work is a concept of Internal Family Systems, a form of therapy that acknowledges that most of us have parts, and it does not mean that you have different selves, rather that you have elements of yourself that operate the day, hold onto trauma, impulsively act, harbor hidden desires, etc. Working with your inner parts allows you to uncover the elements of yourself that often have been buried. When unleashed, you access a newfound ability to shine, connect and relate to self, others and the world.?

Parts work is a kind of therapy that addresses differences and conflicts in motivations between your parts of self, these conflicts or disconnections between parts are usually responsible for gridlock in your emotional healing. ?

Take Sean, who comes in extremely motivated to resolve a childhood trauma and reprocess a specific memory that he feels more in his body than he can convey verbally. He describes “my stomach often feels like it’s got cement in it, and I know there’s an underlying reason for it.” We begin to do some work but there is always a distraction, a blockage or a self-sabotaging behavior, like overworking, that comes up and that interferes with what Sean came in to resolve. ?

When we changed the pace and moved towards asking parts, the overworking part specifically, to slow down and be with us, we dug deeper. Then we got curious about the parts at play, we identified a worry that if he were to get healthier, he may jeopardize the stable misery in his marriage and have to deal with “our total disconnection”. In this instance, there were some other valid concerns held by other “parts” of him that needed to be addressed so we could smoothly proceed with the work.?

The above is only a brief example of how to begin seeking out the Every Day God in you. Sean is disconnected from what his stomach is saying. His stomach is a part saying “I don’t like this, I feel stuck”. There are so many parts of Sean we start to explore, his part that acts unaffected by the way he can no longer focus in a work call. The part that wakes up everyday, hoping for affection and realizing “She doesn’t love me anymore, my touch is like sandpaper to her”. For Sean, he grew up with coldness and he has a strategy, that part of him is met with too. We eventually praise that part for protecting him with powering through, first becoming a sanitation worker and then creating his own company when her retired from the county job, but he has overworked his way out of love and his kids and wife don’t see him as loving. They see him as cold. ?

Successful treatment - giving a voice to all parts of self, is reconnecting to the Every Day God that is loving and draws people to be in it with you. We all have unique ways, it is not all free love strategy for every person, you will find your way to loving yourself if you notice your own absence. You have an “internal system” that has learned to protect you and beginning therapy or diving into something that is raw and fragile may kick up a worry that you’re jeopardizing your current safety and sense of self. You are not.?

Consider personifying the Every Day God in the recognition that will be your authentic self, then show it and show up in your life EVERY DAY. ?