Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality
When God Becomes Safe to Love (Breaking Open: Part 2)
This series emerges from conversations with friends and Claude AI, drawing deeply from the wisdom of David J Temple's CosmoErotic Humanism, Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma, Steve March's Aletheia Unfolding, Daniel P Brown's attachment theory work, John Churchill's Planetary Dharma, and many insights from Jill Nephew. While their teachings light the path, any limitations in expressing their ideas are my own.
A normal human psyche is wired for connection, constantly moving towards intimacy with others. When we describe someone as a "loner," we're often witnessing avoidant attachment in action. This isn't a judgment - it's a recognition of how profoundly our attachment system shapes our way of being in the world.
Understanding spirituality through the lens of attachment theory offers us a powerful framework for making sense of both spiritual development and its challenges. It helps us understand why the path often feels paradoxical, why transformation sometimes requires breakdown, and why safety must precede growth.
The Nature of Attachment
Spirituality, at its core, is our relationship with reality itself. Just as a child develops patterns of relating to their caregivers, we develop patterns of relating to existence. This parallel isn't merely metaphorical - it reveals a fundamental truth about human development and spiritual growth.
In psychology, attachment theory describes how our early experiences shape our basic sense of safety and trust. A securely attached child feels safe to explore the world, knowing they can return to their caregiver for comfort and support. An insecurely attached child, however, must develop strategies to cope with feeling unsafe or unloved - either becoming anxiously clingy or defensively self-reliant. Both strategies reflect attachment disorders that profoundly hinder one's capacity for secure, healthy relationships.
Spirituality as Relationship
These same patterns play out in our spiritual lives. What does secure attachment to reality look like? It means feeling safe to experience whatever arises. It means trusting that reality is fundamentally reliable. It means being able to return to basic okayness even in difficulty. Most profoundly, it means knowing we are loved even in our most profound insecurities.
We might say that the mind of the Buddha is the mind of cosmic secure attachment - a perfect trust in the nature of reality itself.1
This doesn't mean all experiences are pleasant. The worldly winds still blow harsh and cold. But secure attachment to reality means we can safely experience all of it. This is why challenging events often become crises of faith - they probe the very edges of our trust in existence itself.
To be securely attached to reality means becoming clear that no experience is wrong to have. We are wholly welcomed in our feelings, our thoughts, our way of being - exactly as we are. There is no prerequisite state we must achieve to earn the love of Reality/God. That love is already here, constantly available, needing only our remembrance.
This lens helps illuminate many spiritual phenomena. Consider the common experience of feeling "abandoned by God" during difficult times. Just as an insecurely attached child may feel abandoned when their caregiver steps away, our spiritual life can mirror these early patterns of relating. The difference between becoming bitter and deepening in faith during times of challenge lies in our capacity to include the breakdown into our relationship with reality - and through this inclusion, discover a more complete wholeness.
The Path of Healing
God, as I heard recently in a Catholic mass, is always facing us - though we so often turn away. Like a securely attached mother, Reality/God remains present, ready to repair, connect, love, and attune. Our task isn't to earn this love but to develop the capacity to receive it, to stay present even when it challenges and shatters our familiar views of self and world.
When this capacity is disrupted, we often find ourselves caught in familiar traps: turning spiritual practice into yet another way to prove our worth, seeking enlightenment as an escape from feeling fundamentally inadequate, using spiritual beliefs to armor against vulnerability, or mistaking spiritual bypassing for truth.
The path to healing this disruption leads, paradoxically, through the very vulnerability we've been avoiding. Just as a child needs to bring their whole experience to a loving caregiver, our spiritual development requires bringing everything - especially our shame, fear, and pain - into direct relationship with reality itself.
To understand how healing occurs, we must recognize a fundamental truth: safety precedes growth. Just as a child won't explore their world without the security of attachment, we cannot truly open and unfold until we feel fundamentally safe in our relationship with reality itself.
Transformation Through Trust
Safety means safety to experience whatever arises. When we feel secure enough, our natural capacity for love and connection begins to unfold naturally. Our defenses - whether spiritual materialism, perfectionism, or withdrawal - gradually soften. We begin to trust the raw process of life itself.
This understanding transforms our approach to spiritual practice. Rather than chasing particular states or insights, we focus on building a secure relationship with reality - learning to trust its fundamental nature.
Having a secure attachment to reality doesn't mean all our experiences are pleasant or desirable. But it means reality itself is, at its core, trustworthy. Even our deepest insecurities and fears aren't evidence that we are fundamentally unloved or unlovable. We are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God.
This is what spiritual traditions have been pointing to all along. When mystics speak of "being held by God" or "resting in awareness," they're describing this fundamental security. When they talk about surrender, they're pointing to a trust in reality so deep that we can finally let go of our protective strategies and simply be.
Perhaps most crucially, this understanding helps us grasp why genuine transformation often appears as breakdown. When our system finally feels safe enough to release its protective strategies, everything we've built can crumble. What we once saw as our strength - our self-reliance, our spiritual attainments, our carefully constructed identity - reveals itself as an intricate defense against our true vulnerability.
This is why spiritual development cannot be forced or hurried. Just as you cannot command a child to feel secure, you cannot will yourself into secure attachment with reality. It unfolds gradually, through repeated experiences of safety and attunement. Sometimes this happens through meditation or prayer, sometimes through therapy or deep relationships, sometimes through forms of grace we may never fully understand.
The process holds an inherent paradox: we need to feel safe enough to face how profoundly unsafe we feel. We need secure attachment to heal our insecure attachment. This is where spiritual communities, teachers, and practices become our "transitional objects" - temporary secure bases from which we can gradually develop a more fundamental security with reality itself.
The Implications
The implications of this understanding ripple outward: our spiritual struggles mirror our attachment patterns, healing emerges through relationship rather than force, safety precedes genuine transformation, apparent regression often signals progress, and true spirituality cannot be separated from our deepest emotional needs.
This brings us back to our beginning - the recognition that spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience.
When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity - just as a child learning to walk must first release their familiar supports.
This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.
Consider how spiritual traditions so often speak of "the dark night of the soul" - periods of profound doubt and disconnection. Through the lens of attachment theory, these experiences reveal themselves in a new light. They aren't failures of faith but opportunities to develop a more secure attachment with reality - one spacious enough to hold both light and dark, connection and disconnection, certainty and doubt.
In the next piece, we'll explore how this understanding of attachment and spirituality illuminates the nature of human desire. We'll see how our longings, even those that appear mundane or materialistic, often mask attempts to recreate that sense of secure attachment we either once knew or have always yearned for. But first, we must recognize that what we're truly seeking isn't any particular experience or achievement - it's a fundamental shift in our relationship with reality itself.
This shift is what every authentic spiritual path points toward - not some perfect state of perpetual bliss, but a secure enough attachment to reality that we can meet whatever arises with fundamental trust, even when that trust is tested. This is the essence of spiritual maturity: not that we never feel lost or afraid, but that we can hold those experiences within a larger field of basic safety and trust.
Next in the Series
Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together
I first encountered the idea that the mind of the Buddha is the mind of ‘cosmic secure attachment’ from John Churchill. You can hear him explore this perspective in this podcast episode.
How do you know if you have that safe attachment with reality? What's the main characteristics? What do you have now that you didn't have before that rupture experience?
The title of this piece immediately struck a chord for me. I used to deeply distrust reality. I was angry at god (I still am, in some ways). I turned away, became the loner, built a fortress of will and control.
And then, eventually, slowly, learned to soften. Learned to trust a bit more. "Surrender" is no longer an insult in my world. It's a slow process. Attachment theory is really a fitting way to look at it.