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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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.



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.



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



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



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



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



SECTION ONE:

FIVE BIG IDEAS

ABOUT RELATIONAL

SPIRITUALITY

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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.



CHAPTER ONE BIG IDEA #1

HARD WIRED TO CONNECT



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.



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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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.



CHAPTER TWOBIG IDEA #2

UNTHOUGHT KNOWNS:

WE KNOW MORE THAN WE CAN SAY



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.



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



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.



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



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



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,



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.



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.



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



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:



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.



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,



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



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



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



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,



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



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



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.



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



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.



CHAPTER THREEBIG IDEA #3

GUT-LEVEL MEMORIES

AS ATTACHMENT FILTERS



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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,



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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?”



CHAPTER FOUR BIG IDEA #4

TIPPING POINTS

IN SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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’



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



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



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.



CHAPTER FIVEBIG IDEA #5

FURNISHING THE SOUL

FOR SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION



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



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.



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.



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



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.



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



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.



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.



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.



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



“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



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



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



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.



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,



11

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.



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.



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



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



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



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



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).



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



EPILOGUE:MYSTERY, BROKENNESS AND THE

GOODNESS OF GOD



13

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



14

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).


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).



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).



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.





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,



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


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


50 Bowlby, J. Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment, (New York: Basic Book, second edition, 1982, p. 200).



14


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.



14

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.



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.


4(2), 133-161.







77 Mikulincer, M. (1998). Adult attachment style and affect regulation: Strategic variations in self-appraisals. Journal



14

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


80 Kirkpatr ick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and


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.



4(2), 133-161.



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.



90 Simpson, J. A. (1990). Influence of Attachment Style on Romantic Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 59(5), 971-980.



14

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.



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.



98Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1998). God as a substitute attachment figure: A longitudinal study of adult attachment style and


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



14

of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 430-445.



CHAPTER FOUR: TIPPING POINTS IN SPIRITUAL

TRANSFORMATION


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).


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


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



14

recall of traumatic memories. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 7, 187-250.


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).


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).



SECTION TWO:

INDIVIDUAL REPORT

AND ACTION STEPS



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

N CartmellPREPARED FOR

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOGS. this is here

so that the Univers 75 font will be embeded into the pdf.

November 25, 2006

1



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%




November 25, 2006

2






November 25, 2006

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





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






November 25, 2006



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.


: 4. I HAVE A STRONG 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.


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

4






November 25, 2006

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


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.


Action Steps

HOW DO I RESPOND TO TRIALS, PAINFUL

SITUATIONS AND SUFFERING?

27%F.

5






November 25, 2006



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.


TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF

MEANING AND PURPOSE IN LIFE THROUGH MY

RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?

73%H.

6






November 25, 2006



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.


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.


TO WHAT EXTENT AM I AWARE OF GOD’S PRESENCE

AND COMMUNICATION IN MY LIFE?36%J.

7






November 25, 2006

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.


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.


TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY LIFE CENTERED AROUND MY

RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?55%B.

8






November 25, 2006

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.


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.


TO WHAT EXTENT DO I DEMONSTRATE CHRIST-LIKE

LOVE AND COMPASSION FOR OTHERS?41%D.

9






November 25, 2006

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.


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.


TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE GOD’S

FORGIVENESS AND DOES THIS EXPERIENCE HELP ME

FORGIVE OTHERS?

18%B.

10






November 25, 2006

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.


AM I ABLE TO WORK THROUGH PAINFUL

EXPERIENCES IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?55% C.

11






November 25, 2006

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.


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.


HOW MUCH DISAPPOINTMENT DO I EXPERIENCE IN

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?32%B.

12






November 25, 2006

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.


HOW UNSTABLE IS MY EXPERIENCE OF GOD?36% C.

13



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.


HOW MUCH DO I LACK A SENSE OF CONNECTION TO

GOD?27% A.




November 25, 2006

14



SECTION THREE:

SOUL PROJECTS



{1}. An exercise in deepening your

awareness of your internal life before God.



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?”



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?”



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.



NOTES:



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?”



e. “Are there any obstacles I feel toward practicing certain spiritual practices?”



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?”


Psalm 119: 10-14





NOTES:



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.


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?”





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?”


Romans 8:26-28





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“HOW DO I RESPOND TO TRIALS, PAINFUL

SITUATIONS, AND SUFFERING?”



God to reveal where your heart is with respect to suffering.


regard to transformational suffering?” “Was there anything from the


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?”





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?”


Psalm chapter 42





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I SEE LIFE THROUGH THE

EYES OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD?”


2. Spend 30 minutes reflecting on the following questions, asking God to

reveal where your heart is with respect to your spiritual perspective.


with regard to spiritual perspective?” “Was there anything from the


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?”



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?”



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?”


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.”


Isaiah 55:8-9





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF

MEANING AND PURPOSE IN LIFE THROUGH MY

RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”


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.


with regard to spiritual meaning?” “Was there anything from the


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?”



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



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?”


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?”


Matt. 16:24-26





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“AM I OPEN TO DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON MY

GROWTH AND TO MY SPIRITUAL DOUBTS?”



to reveal where your heart is with respect to how you deal with spiritual

doubts and different perspectives on your spiritual growth.


with regard to spiritual openness?” “Was there anything from the


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?”





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?”


Psalm 27: 1-6.

5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,experienced, became aware of, etc.



NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT AM I AWARE OF GOD’S

PRESENCE AND COMMUNICATION IN MY LIFE?”



your heart is with respect to your awareness of God’s presence and communication.


with regard to awareness of God?” “Was there anything from the


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?”



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?”



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?”


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?”


Psalm 139: 7-10





NOTES:



DOMAIN TWOHow Committed am I to God and a Spiritual Community?

SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT AM I ENGAGED

IN SERVICE TO OTHERS?”



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?”



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?”



NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT IS MY LIFE CENTERED

AROUND MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”



your heart is with respect to your awareness of God’s presence and communication.


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?”



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?”



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?”


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?”


Proverbs 3: 1-7





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“HOW INVOLVED AM I IN A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY?”



to reveal where your heart is with respect to spiritual community.


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?”



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?”



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?”


in my experience of belonging to a spiritual community?”

If so, “How has this impacted the way I live my life?”



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 ?”


Ephesians 4: 1-6





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I DEMONSTRATE CHRIST-

LIKE LOVE AND COMPASSION FOR OTHERS?”



reveal where your heart is with respect to sacrificially loving others.


regard to how much life reflects Christ-like love for others?” “Was



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?”



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?”



c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level ability to focus on

others’ needs and give of myself sacrificially in loving others?”


recently in the way I live out sacrificially loving others?”


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?”


Luke 9:1-11





NOTES:



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?”



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




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?”



c. “How do my attachment filters affect my gut level sense of

my relationship with God being secure, and reliable?”


my experience of my relationship with God being secure and reliable?”


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?”


Psalm 23





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“TO WHAT EXTENT DO I EXPERIENCE GOD’S

FORGIVENESS AND DOES THIS EXPERIENCE

HELP ME FORGIVE OTHERS?”



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


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?”



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?”




expectations about God forgiving me?”


in experiencing God’s forgiveness, or of forgiving others?”


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?”


Matthew 6:5-15





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“AM I ABLE TO WORK THROUGH PAINFUL

EXPERIENCES IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”



your heart is with respect to processing struggles in your relationship with God.


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?”



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?”



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?”


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?”


Psalm 42: 1-11





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?”



God to reveal where your heart is with respect to any anxiety and/

or painful emotions in your sense of connection to God.


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?”






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?”


about how God being there for me when I turn to Him?”


recently in any sense of anxiety with God?”



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?”


Psalm 139: 1-18

5. Write a paragraph or two below on what you discovered,experienced, became aware of, etc.



NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“HOW MUCH DISAPPOINTMENT DO I EXPERIENCE

IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD?”



reveal where your heart is with respect to any disappointment with God.


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,


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?”



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?”




expectations whether God will disappoint me?”


recently in any sense of disappointment with God?”


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?”


Ezekiel 34: 11-16





NOTES:



SOUL PROJECT:

“HOW UNSTABLE IS MY EXPERIENCE OF GOD?”



your heart is with respect to any instability and insecurity in your relationship with God.


regard to any sense of instability with God I may experience?” “Was



b. “Are there any specific in my life causing instability

in my sense of closeness to God?”




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?”


whether God will be reliable and always love me?”




recently in the stability of my relationship with God?”


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?”


Isaiah 43: 1-7





NOTES:



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?”



your heart is with respect to any sense of lack of connection to, or distance from God.


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,


b. “How much do I tend to relate to God through my head knowledge

rather than experiencing an ongoing relationship with God?”



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?”



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?”


connecting to God on a more emotional level versus through head knowledge?”


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?”


Matt 11: 28-30

Ephesians 3:14-19





NOTES:



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



NOTES:



(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.)

Furnishing the Soul

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