BP 137
The Olson family attended church rarely missing a Sunday. They believed in Jesus and tried to spend time in the Word whenever possible. They looked healthy on the outside but beneath the surface, they were dysfunctional. Not highly or terribly dysfunctional, maybe. It was more about the good things they didn’t do, not about the bad things they did do. They had no idea how to be emotionally vulnerable. Since they did not know how to be close relationally, they filled the gaping gap with things like neatness, properness, and good etiquette.
Even the younger children had to sit nicely at the dinner table, placing their napkins on their laps, chewing with their mouths closed, sitting with backs straight, and speaking not just in “inside voices” but quiet and calm inside voices. Excessive excitement was discouraged since all emotions needed to be contained, managed, controlled.
People who ate with the Olson family were amazed at the civility and properness with which they conducted themselves at the table—especially the children.
The family was physically close but emotionally distant. They travelled together on many vacations because Mr. and Mrs. Olson knew that they came from emotionally distant families and wanted to try to reverse that trend with their own children. The travelling helped some as did other activities they shared such as family devotions, but these practices did not address the root of the problem, namely, an inability to open their hearts and be vulnerable.
Sean, the youngest of the four Olson children, did not know it at the time, of course, but when he was seven years old, the lack of emotional intimacy led him to attach to other things besides people. Since people were not available for attachment, he attached to places.
He attached to his bedroom, his house, and his back yard to such a degree that when his family sold the house and moved to a bigger one, he was so angry that he broke all the rules about civil expression of emotions and had temper tantrums for months. Not being emotionally mature, Mr. and Mrs. Olson did not know what their son was communicating with his intense emotions, namely, a hunger for attachment and love.
During Sean’s childhood, the family moved five times. Mr. Olson coped with the restlessness of his emotional hunger by always doing new things including building and moving to new houses. Obviously, Mr. Olson’s coping conflicted massively with his son’s coping. I suppose it could be said that Mr. Olson’s coping involved attaching to new things for a short time while Sean’s coping consisted of attaching to familiar things for a long time.
When the family went on vacation, Sean even attached emotionally to the campgrounds his family stayed at and was always sad when it was time to leave. It felt like he left part of himself at all the places they visited.
Sean’s heart was almost always aching about the loss of the places he had attached to each day or week. Maybe the most painful part of his aching losses was that no one else knew he was feeling things so deeply.
As he grew older, Sean attached to other things as well. He attached to music, especially favorite songs that were associated with places and times in his life when he was feeling things deeply inside and alone. Certain songs would elicit deep sadness (the ache) in his heart and even tears. They would also bring him deep comfort because the music took him back to familiar things and places he had bonded with over the years.
Sean also attached to his dog, Sammy. The golden retriever went everywhere with him and even slept on the floor beside his bed at night. He talked to Sammy and even used him as a pillow when he watched TV. Sammy seemed to enjoy the closeness as much as Sean did.
When Sammy had to be put down because of cancer, Sean was devastated. He could not bear to go to the vet with his father to euthanize Sammy, so he stayed home, hiding under his bed. He hated himself for not being with Sammy in his final moments. He felt guilt and grief for a year after his best friend left him. No one around Sean understood the depth of his sadness because he didn’t have the words to express it and his family didn’t have emotional ears to hear it.
Sean also attached to books and the lives of the characters on their pages. He even found attachment in a few TV series that immersed him in the lives of fictional characters.
When he moved into adolescence, he still had not learned deep emotional intimacy. He did not know how to let others see him beyond the social mask and neither did he want them to because he feared that he would be found wanting, behind. Often, he felt that he was on the outside of life, invisible, unloved, and incapable.
So it was that he easily fell into viewing pornography and fantasizing about women in the safety of his mind while masturbating. For Sean, it was less about sex and more about the excitement of being seen and “loved” by a woman—a brief escape from the invisibility and the shame of being so inept in relationships.
The shame he felt around the pornography and fantasizing only caused him to pull farther away from people in the real world. Increasingly, he became self sufficient in meeting all his needs instead of attaching to others. No one knew his true self, not even Sean. He had gone into hiding deep inside the cave system of his heart.
Intellectualism was yet another way Sean filled the abyss left by the absence of emotional connection with others. Just as his parents had turned to good etiquette and good behavior when they did not know how to access their hearts, Sean turned to the world of the intellect, becoming an expert in his vocation as a lawyer. He memorized laws, statutes and case precedent until his peers began turning to him routinely when they needed help.
Sean also had an intellectual relationship with God. He knew theology inside out and could quote Scripture from both the Old and New Testaments. He could define love, grace, and mercy but did not experience them at any deep level in his inner being. His brain attached to facts, but his heart did not attach to other people or God. No, he was not on the autism spectrum. He was simply not trained in emotional intimacy.
Since his parents modeled a subtle but very real emotional detachment and since they discouraged emotional expression, Sean never developed the ability to attach to others, at least not very deeply.
Of course, another problem for Sean was that he, along with the rest of us, was born into this world incapable of love and intimacy. He was born separated from the God who is love, far off from the presence of his Creator. Separated. Alienated.
His parent’s deficiency relative to attachment and emotional closeness was not unique to them, but endemic to the whole human race. Even believers in Jesus can struggle with the experience of Presence even thought they have an incredible advantage over people limited to their own ability to love.
As we have discussed before here at Designer Therapy for Life, Sean was attaching to something instead of someone. Something was all he had learned to attach to. Due to the fallenness of humanity, his family’s ignorance and fear of emotional intimacy, and his personal poorly developed relational skills, Sean was far from others, God, and his own self. He was very alone in the universe.
How about you? Are you more attached to something or someone? Being attached to places, food, books, animals, and intellectual pursuits including a knowledge of theology is often not a bad thing. These things may all be good gifts given to you by God. However, if any of these things interfere with the two great commandments Jesus spoke of, they could very well be idols. We could be choosing something over someone, namely, Jesus and other eternal beings.
What are the two commandments that represent the entire Christian faith? You know them. “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” ~ Mark 12:30-31.
You were created to love, to experience intimacy with others, to attach to people, to be close to God, to know your own self. If that attachment with God and others and even your own self is minimal or non-existent, you need to work on relational attachment or you will never realize your deepest purpose on this planet.
Food, animals, money, alcohol, marijuana, cars, vacations, sex, books, TV series, houses, nature, even conscientious morality and theology—all these may be attachment idols if they take you away from the love of God or others, if they are counterfeits that you pursue in place of deep relationship with God, others, and self.
So, sit down and think about it: Do you know if you are attached to God and others? Do you know and love your own self? If not, what should you do? There are three things to consider here concerning attachment:
- Remember that the battle in the universe is all about true and false attachments. You are not alone. You don’t need to be ashamed or hide if you are struggling. Remember that God made us to attach to Him, but the enemy and our fallen selves call us to attach to anything and everything but God. We can easily attach to sinful desires or even to our own shame or anxiety. Incredibly, feeling alone can become an attachment idol. Ephesians 2:1ff says, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” We are capable of pursuing many different passions that take us far from the love for God’s presence.
- Tell someone that you are alone inside, that you are afraid to be seen, that you fear you are behind others on the journey of life, that if people see you, they will not understand you or be appalled at your true self. Move toward others. Take risks. Know that you probably are good at moving away from others and need to develop the ability to move toward and attach to others, to love them and receive their love.
- Ask Jesus to help you take the journey from your head to your heart, the longest twelve inches in the universe. Don’t try to be a good person so He will approve of you. No. It is not about performance. Instead, cry out that you need to know His love for you and that you want Him to teach you how to love Him.
We are born not knowing how to attach. We hope that our parents and others around us know something about the path to attachment. If they don’t, we have a lot of work to do. It is not an eight-lane freeway. It is The Road Less Traveled, a hidden path through the forest of life. Above all, we pray that God will enter out hearts and draw us toward a deep attachment to Him.
Attachment is something you are called to develop over a lifetime. When in doubt, move toward God, others, and your own self. Don’t ever stand pat or let bitterness, fear, or shame block you as you build the bridge from unattachment to attachment. To be unattached is to be alone and isolated and separated—just where Satan wants you. To be attached is to be seen, loved, and in relationship—right where God wants you. Forever.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” ~ Romans 1:20ff
“It is the LORD who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” ~ Deuteronomy 31:8