3 Spiritual Blocks That Stem From Attachment Trauma

EPISODE 120 | 3 SPIRITUAL BLOCKS THAT STEM FROM ATTACHMENT TRAUMA

[00:00:00] We need to be able to know our emotions and hear our emotions. God speaks to us through a discernment that requires us to first be able to know how we feel. But how can I really be attentive to how I feel when I'm so scared that God is going to trample on my emotions? 

[00:00:18] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me. 

[00:00:55] THE JOURNEY OF INTEGRATION: A PERSONAL STORY
Hey, good morning! Good morning, everyone. Okay, so, today, I want to share something that has taken me about 26 years to kind of integrate and put together. Okay, so, yes, you heard me right. I said, what I'm going to share today has taken me about 26 years to kind of put together to integrate because I think this is true for many of you as well. 

[00:01:23] EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF SPIRITUALITY AND PERSONAL GROWTH
When we begin to take our relationship with Christ seriously, when we wish to grow in spiritual maturity, we often think of that as something that is in silo, like on a separate track from everything else in our life, right? But those of us who have been really desiring to deepen this relationship with Christ, who desire to become more faithful and to take seriously the command to love God and love neighbour as we love ourselves, we will often find that there are blocks, right?

[00:02:00] There are blocks that we can't seem to be able to overcome. And a lot of times, we tend to think of those blocks in purely spiritual terms. In all my years of going to spiritual direction, for example, and I started spiritual direction back in 2009, so, that's like about 14 years, right? I tend to think about the issues that I bring in the spiritual direction, the struggles that I have about, for example, being compassionate with other people, being more patient with myself and with others or my inability to deepen my prayer life, for example.

[00:02:39] All of these things, I think of them usually only in purely spiritual terms, right? And it was only later on that I began to realize that there are connections between my spiritual struggles or my spiritual development and, well, me as a whole person, as an entire person with a mind, with a body, with a heart, with an emotional life.

[00:03:04] So, it's not only in my own spiritual journey, as in, in my own, attempt to accompany myself in my journey. I also come across this a lot when I accompany others. So, I've been in pastoral work. I have been in a position of mentoring and forming younger people. And by younger people, I don't necessarily mean younger in terms of age.

[00:03:26] I've also done adult faith formation. So, it could be people just imparting and sharing and mentoring on the discipleship journey, right? People who wish to be on the discipleship journey. And a lot of times, one thing I observe definitely something I did in the past and I now also recognize that a lot of people think like this.

[00:03:46] When we see behaviours or actions that kind of like miss the mark, maybe not loving enough, maybe not generous enough etc., etc, there is this tendency to link this directly with a lack of discipleship. Okay, we think, oh, you know, so-and-so, or these people, they are not willing to. One common example, for example, would be they seem to be not willing to step up to serve, or they are not able to be still.

[00:04:17] THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL HEALING IN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION
Okay, so, now I'm switching gears. So, often in parish context, in community context, when we want people to serve, a frustration could be that people are not really stepping up to serve, especially because maybe we are serving and then it's easy to label like the reason for which people are not willing to be more generous with their time or not more generous with the money. To just think of it in terms of, oh, it's a lack of discipleship, alright?

[00:04:42] I know that happens because I've been there before and I know it happens and I know it still happens. But from a different context, in the context of, let's say, someone who does spiritual direction, let's say a spiritual director. So, this, what I'm going to share, is going to be helpful for spiritual directors as well, or formators, or people who journey with others in the spiritual life.

[00:05:06] When we begin to realize that there are certain things that need to be in place for a relationship with God to deepen, for example, people actually need to be able to be still and to be silent to be able to deepen their prayer life. And then we find that some people just can't. They can't be still. They struggle so much with be still and being silent. Or we know that one of the traits of spiritual maturity and people who are seeking spiritual maturity need to be able to surrender and let go, for example - however you understand that. And then, we recognize that there are many people who really struggle to let go and to trust God, right?

[00:05:47] Again, there is that tendency to see these things purely as a spiritual lack, that this is a lack of spiritual maturity, not necessarily in a bad sense, but we just think of it in terms of it's because they don't have that relationship with God yet or something, you know? Or like they're not spiritually developed yet. And that's why they struggle.

[00:06:06] But when we are trying to help whether ourselves or someone else grow in spiritual maturity, if we don't know what kind of help they need, that's going to be very counterproductive, right? Frustrating on both ends to just kind of keep trying to give them the same kind of invitations the same kind of maybe prayer exercises to practice and waiting for them to finally catch on. Now, yes, there is some dimension, always, that, you know, there's grace that's needed.

[00:06:39] And sometimes it happens, eventually, right? That this person can now overcome the obstacle that they had. In fact, I will say, for myself, in my own journey, that's often the case because it was very rare in my own progression, in my own story, my interior journey, where there were people who could connect for me the spiritual dimension of the journey as well as the emotional dimension of the journey.

[00:07:08] That was very rare. By and large, I was the one that did the connection and the integration myself. Because I began to be led to different kind of resources and then I put two and two together and then I realized, you know, it made sense, right, why I struggled, actually had other reasons other than spiritual reasons.

[00:07:27] UNVEILING THREE SPIRITUAL BLOCKS LINKED TO ATTACHMENT TRAUMA
So, I just want to share today three spiritual blocks which you may be struggling with or people that you're journeying with may be struggling with, and how these three spiritual blocks may stem from attachment trauma. Okay, so, this is where the integration takes place. It may not just be a spiritual problem, it could actually come from a human emotional lack. 

[00:07:51] And if we are aware of that, we may realize that the resources that we need, or the person that we are journeying with needs, may not be outrightly spiritual, but could be emotional healing that they need. 

[00:08:04] THE IMPACT OF RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY ON MENTAL HEALTH
Alright, so, in the forums that I tend to belong to, especially, in the past, I often see, you know, things cited, like studies cited or reports cited - cited that talk about how it's been shown that people who practice religion have better mental health, for example, especially during times of pandemic and all that, right?

[00:08:26] So, I often see, and I think people that move in my circles often get exposed to literature that talk about the benefits of having faith, the benefits of having a spirituality, how that can positively impact mental health. But I want to share, I want to highlight that the reverse side is also true, that religion and spirituality that does not have an appreciation of, and take into consideration the emotional, mental, physical, even physical side of things can risk being very unbalanced, unhealthy and counterproductive.

[00:09:04] So, just think of it. We all know people who are very religious, who are very devout and very spiritual and we can't fault them for their devotion, for their fidelity to their religion, to God, etc. And yet they hurt and harm others, right? What they do in the name of God, what they do in the name of the kingdom of God, even, is something that somehow does not translate into loving neighbour. Maybe not even necessarily into loving God, right?

[00:09:38] So, why? Why is there this disconnection? Why is there this disjoint? Because we're meant to be wholly human, integrated, right? And so, today, we're going to take a look at three common spiritual blocks that happen with people who have taken their spiritual life seriously for some time, really desire to grow in depth in their faith, grow in depth in their relationship with God, what they encounter.

[00:10:05] NAVIGATING SPIRITUAL BLOCKS: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS AND INSIGHTS
Okay, the first point I want to talk about on the three spiritual blocks that we may encounter - it's an inability to develop a close and intimate relationship with God. Now, granted, this is the case only for people who have begun to realize that to have faith is not just an abstract cognitive belief, but to have a relationship with God.

[00:10:30] Right, spiritual directors especially, find that the task that they have at hand with their directees is to help the directees develop a more intimate relationship with God, something that most of us are clueless about, how to go about, right? So, we can think of this as a spiritual problem. I'm unable to come closer to God. 

[00:10:52] Or for those of us who feel like, okay, I've begun to draw closer to God, I feel like I'm closer to God than I was before, but yet, for example, I may find that God the Father is a distant figure, and I feel like I can't really be myself before God the Father. So, that was me when I started on my interior journey.

[00:11:12] I was a lot more comfortable with the person in the Trinity, Jesus Christ, because I felt he was more relatable. He was like an older brother, a friend that I needed. God the Father was always kind of like, I respect you, I revere you, but there is distance because it mirrored my own experience of fatherhood figures and father figures in my life, right?

[00:11:36] If you have that inability to develop a close and intimate relationship with God, I would ask you to think first, what's your image of God? Right, because that image of God is shaped by your relationship with your caregivers and your significant others. It's shaped by your relationship and your experience of relationships with your caregivers and your significant others.

[00:12:00] Now, right there, is that connection, that our spirituality, our relationship with God is connected and embedded within our lived capacity and experience of relationships in general. That's human, that's emotional, right? So, ask yourselves, are you able to develop healthy, intimate relationships with anyone else in your life? With family members? With friends?

[00:12:33] Let's just stay there first, right, within your family, do you have healthy, intimate relationships? Or is it often a matter of survival and coping, enmeshment? Like, we try and have felt sense of shared identity, but we actually don't know how to be attuned to one another. We don't know how to be present to one another, but we try and find other substitute ways to feel close by doing everything together.

[00:13:02] For example, by taking great pride in a common identity, being Catholic, for example, we're a Catholic family and we take great pride in showing up as a family for church events, for, you know, for Easter vigil, et cetera, et cetera, or Christmas mass and all that kind of thing.

[00:13:17] That's not really closeness, right? That can appear like closeness. Having a united front can look like closeness. Doing everything together can look like closeness. But that's not actually having a close, intimate relationship with one another. So, that's family. How about friends? Do you have, over years, over your life, stable friendships where you can be vulnerable? Accepted for who you are, where you feel safe to divulge your weakness and you feel accepted.

[00:13:55] And where there is mutuality, there's reciprocity in vulnerability and sharing and in being present. And has this been consistent, you know, over years, at least some years, for example. Or do you see in your life a pattern where friendships often get fractured, where you either get too close to someone and then something happens to that friendship because maybe it gets too close and it cannot be sustained, or where you enjoy the presence of people. On the outside, you seem very amiable, very friendly, people love being around you, but you actually struggle to really be intimate, to divulge your inner world with friends, to be able to share your struggles with friends.

[00:14:48] Now, if, as you listen to me say all these things, if you find that, yeah, actually my family may appear close, but it's not really a healthy kind of closeness. We don't know how to be attuned, to respect one another, respect each other's individuality while supporting one another as a family. If you think, oh, yes, I have had many friends, but they're kind of, my friendships are kind of dysfunctional too. They're either very codependent or there is always this sense of distance, like I can't really be myself with them. I'm always worrying about what I need to do in order to belong, to fit in so that these people will be my friends.

[00:15:30] Right there, all these things would tell you that you don't actually know how to be in a healthy intimate relationship with people, with other people. That was me. That was me for, oh my gosh, like 30 odd years of my life. I mean, I'm not saying that I didn't have any good relationships or friendships, but there were many blocks to that.

[00:15:52] And that, you know, it can only reach a certain point and it couldn't go further. And what may seem healthy on the outside, actually within, inside me, especially, there was always a lot of anxiety. There was always a lot of judgment and criticism of myself or of the other. So, I wouldn't say that they were actually healthy, vulnerable, intimate relationships.

[00:16:14] So, if you don't have healthy, vulnerable, intimate human relationships, then it makes sense that you would also struggle to develop a close, intimate relationship with God. Because in some sense, one of the ways I like to talk about it is, it's like your mechanism is - it's faulty. Your equipment to be able to relate, attune, is wounded, right? You are wounded.

[00:16:42] So, that capacity requires healing. That capacity requires not just healing but a slow building up. Again, to be able to know how to relate to one another, to other people or to God, in closeness. So, this is something that I think some spiritual directors do realize that, that issue that some of the directees face is beyond spiritual but could be human as well. But then, they may not realize what is that connection, you know? Where can that directee go to rebuild that connection, the capacity for them to have intimate relationships?

[00:17:23] So, that's really in the area, I would say of counselling, of psychology, of counselling and maybe therapy for you to look into, okay. So, that was the first, the first spiritual block, right? Inability to develop a close, intimate relationship with God.

[00:17:40] A second spiritual struggle or spiritual block that a lot of us experience, especially when we begin to take our prayer life more seriously, when we want to draw closer to God, we learn and we know that it's important for us to be still. It is important for us to be able to be silent because, you know, when our world is full of noise and our hearts and minds are full of noise, we can't hear God.

[00:18:05] Right, we generally we can't attune to anyone whether it's another human being whether it's ourselves or with God. So, stillness and silence is important. And that very, very much, we also need to learn to rest because with rest, is our ability to receive, right. So, for many, many people, myself included, while we really yearn and desire to draw closer to God and to deepen our prayer lives, there is always this compulsion to do. And we really struggle to just be, right?

[00:18:39] Like the doing always somehow overpowers the being - so much so, that in a very ironic way, we make the spiritual journey itself. A very violent kind of doing like we try and push ourselves coerce ourselves to be still. I'm laughing as I talk about this because I’ve been there, right. It's like, oh, okay. So, being still is important, being silent is important so, I'm going to be very disciplined about it and I'm going to make myself be still. Kind of like how you can even think of like a little kid that can't see it still.

[00:19:15] And unfortunately, where I grew up, in schools, from a very young age, they're kind of expected to be still and to be quiet, which is really not natural for them for that age, right? And so, sometimes they they're conditioned to through fear of punishment, through being scolded, for example. So, that's what I was kind of familiar with. And I tried to teach myself or help myself be still and be silent with that kind of attitude, which I believe to be love.

[00:19:43] So, my very first experience of a silent retreat was over seven days, but really five full days, you know, in the middle of silence. And I told myself I will be very, very good. I will not bring any reading material. I won't do anything that my spiritual director does not tell me to do. Oh, okay. I wouldn't read anything that my spiritual director or the retreat director doesn't ask me to read.

[00:20:06] And, you know, I really want to be very disciplined about the silence. All right, so, I shared this before in some other episode or sharing before. But that first silent retreat was torture for me because there was so much anxiety and so much repressed and suppressed emotions that suddenly now, in the face of nothing to distract me, it all just surged up.

[00:20:35] Right, it just all surged up and when they surged up, they were met by me, not with any understanding or compassion because I didn't know how to be compassionate. I didn't know how to understand myself. I was just very - I just tried to, you know, try to be silent, try to be still. I tried to meditate. I tried to, you know, go out and walk in the reservoir. There's a big park nearby the retreat centre, which eventually did help.

[00:21:05] It took me three and a half days to reach a point of kind of being a bit more still, okay. Three and a half days of being in that space before, I guess, my nervous system felt safe enough to settle and be still. But what I didn't understand was that this wasn't a spiritual thing. This wasn't just a spiritual thing. It wasn't because I was spiritually immature that I needed so much time to become silent. So, much time, like interiorly silent.

[00:21:35] It wasn't that difficult to not speak. But it was very hard to have silence within myself, in my mind, my racing, very, very racing noisy mind and in my heart. Okay, the experience would have been so different if I understood that it was because I just haven't felt safe all my life and I've needed always to distract myself and be busy and to be thinking about how to solve problems or how to help people, for me to feel any semblance that there's stability, security within me.

[00:22:08] If I'd known that, then my inability to be still, my struggle to be silent and quiet, to rest, I wouldn't have seen it as just like kind of like a spiritual defect or, you know, because I was spiritually immature, I would have been able to be so much more compassionate with myself, to realize that there's something else in me that needs tending to, and that's why it is hard for me to enter into silence.

[00:22:36] And that's why maybe I need more help in, you know, to enter into silence and stillness, and that perhaps there was no shame in that, you know. It's just different. I come with a different set of needs that maybe somebody else who had more security already, whether it was from their upbringing or already they've already developed and earned security, earned a sense of safety within themselves. They'll be able to enter silence a lot more easily and that was the case for me later on, right?

[00:23:06] Like, like a few years on, after that, I realized that it was very easy for me, compared to before, to just slip into silence when I enter into a silent space. Even if it was just like a three-day, two-night kind of retreat, eventually that was just what I needed when I needed a little bit more of a block of time away to enter more deeply into silence and solitude.

[00:23:28] I could just slip in a lot more easily and then at the end I could come out of that silence a lot more smoothly as well. It wasn't so jarring, the difference between the silence of a retreat and my daily life. That's because over time I had built or cultivated more interior silence, right?

[00:23:48] But that's not just a spiritual quality. That's what I'm trying to say. I think it's also because over time, I was building a more secure relationship with God And then, eventually, a more secure relationship with myself. So, there was just generally more safety inside me. And so, going into silence, you know, being still, learning to rest, was all a lot easier.

[00:24:12] Not just because I was now spiritually more mature, but because there was more security inside me. So, if you find that you're often always very antsy, restless that you're trying to distract yourself or trying to make up for it by doing good things, doing holy things, if prayer, the only kind of prayer you can do is reciting said prayers, you know, all that, it's okay.

[00:24:38] Bear in mind that it may not just be a spiritual thing, okay? If you're yearning to be able to go into more silence, it's a good thing to desire. But maybe also look into literature or get support and help and resources that help you repair your relationship with yourself and to develop more security and safety in your body. That's going to help you enter silence.

[00:25:04] Okay, that's going to help you enter stillness and learn to rest, okay? So, so far, I've talked about first, was an inability to develop a close and intimate relationship with God, that was the first block. The second block I talked about was and when you struggle with an inability to just be still to be silent, especially when you're in retreat or in times of prayer and you find that it's very hard for you to just be, right. It's a compulsion to do. Those were the first two blocks and I talked about how It may be lack of security within yourself or with God that's actually causing that and it may not just be a spiritual thing.

[00:25:40] UNDERSTANDING ATTACHMENT STYLES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON SPIRITUALITY
So, the third point that I want to talk about, the third spiritual block that I see happen a lot with people actually and definitely happened a lot with me was this; is this tendency to freeze and be paralyzed when you're making a discernment, right? So, those who, you know, are moved in church circles, who have been cultivating, you're trying to deepen your relationship with God, we all know this term, discernment and we all believe that it's an important thing to discern, right?

[00:26:13] So, what do we understand discernment to be? Often, it's we feel like we need to know what is it that God is asking of us. We need to be able to hear what God is saying because we want to be able to do God's will, right? So, on the surface, that's what everyone shares who wish to discern. We wish to be able to hear what God is saying and we wish to be able to do what we hear God is asking us to do.

[00:26:38] And yet, yet, right? Why is it that we freeze? Why is it that we're paralyzed? I think a lot of us experience this tension, that there's a part of us who want to know but then there's another maybe even bigger part of us that don't really want to know, or really, really scared of what we might hear in our discernment, right?

[00:27:00] So, I'm just going to give an example from my own experience and maybe you might have something in your life that you can relate to this. So, in 2009, I had taken a one year leave of absence from my PhD studies to go full time into parish ministry, okay, as a volunteer. But I was basically available full time, doing pastoral work, helping with catechesis and all that. It was what I felt called to, at the time, to try something different. So, I was on a one year leave of absence because I hadn't completely closed the door to my doctoral studies, which I mean, I'd sunken, at that point, I think five years, at least five years into it. I've finished all my courses. I was in academic terms, ABD, all but dissertation. Okay, all I needed to do was to write my dissertation, defend it, and I would have completed my PhD. 

[00:27:54] And because I was actually a scholarship student, I had won fellowships, all the more, it was very hard for me to imagine dropping my studies, like not completing it. So, when that one year of leave of absence was coming to an end, I had to make a decision. I had to decide whether or not to go back and complete my studies or to let it lapse, to let my PhD candidacy lapse.

[00:28:22] Now, for me, that felt very, very high stakes, right? It's really like, okay, I've taken one year off to experience being in full time ministry. Now, I'm going to ask God, right? What is it that you want me to do? Do you want me to go back and finish my studies first? You know, there's always this voice, I finished your studies first, get that PhD, and then later you can do what you want to do, et cetera.

[00:28:44] Or could God be asking me to remain and continue with full time ministry at this time, which would mean I have to let my PhD candidacy lapse. That would mean that if, in the future, I wanted to come back, administratively, it would be a lot more difficult. I could still do it, but, you know, it's going to be harder to come back and complete the PhD.

[00:29:08] So, I tried to discern this, right? I tried, I tried to discern this choice, this decision and I remember every time I tried to discern this, I just got paralyzed. I just couldn't move forward. And the reason was I realized I was so scared that God may ask me to go back and finish my PhD.

[00:29:31] Okay, so, I actually knew a part of me realized that that was what I was afraid of doing. I really didn't want to do that but at the same time, I felt like I wanted to be so-called detached enough, right, indifferent enough, that if God was asking me to do something that I really hated, that I really didn't want to do, I would be able to go and do it. And maybe, subconsciously, there was a part of me that I really resisted that. Because now, looking back, my whole life, that was how I operated.

[00:30:02] That was the assumption on which I operated, that often the good thing that I'm supposed to do, that I'm meant to do, that I'm called to do, the loving thing would always be what I don't want to do. That it may even be something that I really don't like doing, but my feelings and how, you know, how I feel about it or my desires are not that important, not as important as doing the right thing. 

[00:30:24] Okay, so, this is the script that I've carried with me my whole life, and it also says something about my image of God, which I mentioned in my first point earlier, reflects often our relationship with our own caregivers, that God doesn't really care about my heart. That God doesn't really care about what is really important to me or my feelings my emotions because my script is that my emotions are less important or maybe not even Important there is something more important, which is God's will. And there's a kind of like a presupposition that that God's will would be to ask me to serve however He thinks it's best for me to serve, for the good of the kingdom, right?

[00:31:07] But in all this, I'm just an instrument, a tool. I'm not a cherished, beloved daughter. I'm not the beloved bride. I'm not the person for whom my happiness matters so much to God. Right, this is what I've been learning in my healing journey; that actually I am all that. I am the beloved, cherished child whose happiness matters a lot to God.

[00:31:33] He wants to know my desires, my dreams. In the first place, He gave them to me, right? He planted in my heart, my desires, my dreams, and He wants to hear me talk to Him about it. He would love for me to be open about telling Him this is what I want, this is what matters to me because He delights in me and He cherishes me. And the other image, I'm the beloved child. 

[00:31:55] But another image we often hear in scripture as well is the bride and the bridegroom, right? I am the beloved bride of Christ. As part of the body of Christ, I am also the bridegroom. The beloved of God and he desires my happiness even more than I desire my happiness.

[00:32:13] So, in that scenario, when I'm in such a relationship, I can absolutely trust my heart with this person, with this God, right? And I can look openly and trust that He's not going to make me do something that damages me. He's not going to impose His will on me as if my heart didn't matter. But that was what I was struggling with back then. Right, this was 2010 or so. And I wasn't aware of that, which is also the point of why I'm sharing this particular sharing today. 

[00:32:46] I think a lot of people who desire to grow in closeness with Christ, with God don't realize that they are labouring underneath this kind of disordered image of God and that this actually isn't just a spiritual issue. It is an affective issue. It's coming from our attachment wounds, right. Our images of God is impacted by our relationship with our caregivers our insecure attachment styles because of what we have not been able to receive in our life, it gives us a kind of like a ceiling beyond which we can't experience God's love.

[00:33:24] So, when we are trying to deepen our relationship with God, we stumble and we struggle with these things. In this case, like, I want to be able to discern, to be a good, effective disciple. So, that's also my script, okay? It's not all bad. I do want to be a loving, faithful disciple of Christ. I really do. But I think now it's less of a compulsion.

[00:33:44] Now, I have that desire with more freedom, right? But there was that script that in order to be a good disciple, I need to be able to be detached and indifferent and able to do whatever God asked me to do. But because what I didn't have was the effective equipment, the emotional maturity, security to know what this should feel and look like from someone who Is able to receive God's love and give it back freely, and choose freely to love others, to choose, at times, to, let's say, lay my life down freely and not because I feel like my life has no value or has lesser value than other people's lives, and therefore I should always lay my life down.

[00:34:32] Which by the way, was the subconscious script I had in my life. I wasn't aware of it, but I was living that way, right? Because other people met it more than I did. In order to survive, I had to pay more attention to other people's emotional needs than my own. And so, I brought that into my relationship with God.

[00:34:50] So, one thing that really characterized my attempts to discern in the past is one, I don't know how I feel, I'm scared of acknowledging how I feel because what if I acknowledge, what if I can hear how I feel? Okay, so, I'm talking about feeling also because when I learned about discernment, especially Ignatian spiritual discernment, and, you know, St. Ignatius actually taught that the raw data for discernment is our affect. 

[00:35:14] So, we need to be able to know our emotions and hear our emotions. God speaks to us through a discernment that requires us to first be able to know how we feel. But how can I really be attentive to how I feel when I'm so scared that God is going to trample on my emotions, that what I recognize is important to me, I may have to give up and ignore? So, I can't even be attentive. I don't even feel really safe enough to be really attentive to how I feel. 

[00:35:44] So, that's why I was paralyzed, and stuck, and frozen, right? So, when this, because there's this fear of making the wrong decision, or there's this fear that even if I hear rightly, I don't have the courage or the faith, I'm thinking, right, the courage or the faith to act according to what God wants me, and that would mean that I'm, a bad disciple.

[00:36:02] And that I couldn't deal with that because a big part of my identity was, I am someone who loves God. I am someone who wants to be a good disciple. And it's like my worth was predicated on my success at being a good disciple, right? I couldn't stand on that solid ground that I am infinitely, completely loved regardless of how successful I was at exercising my discipleship at any point in time.

[00:36:33] So, that's why I was often paralyzed and frozen, right. I needed to keep up that image of myself as that good disciple, maybe even that perfect disciple, even though by then I knew I was far from perfect. So, I've talked about the three points, three blocks. This won't be the only blocks, of course, the spiritual blocks that we have. But three examples of spiritual blocks that actually could stem from attachment trauma, right?

[00:37:01] So, because we bring with ourselves, bring within ourselves our relational experiences, our fears and our insecurities, so, our inability to draw closer to God, to trust Him, our inability to be, to feel safe in deep silence, to be still, to rest, to be, and not just keep doing, right. And our fear, our fears that keep us paralyzed and frozen when we try and make discernment. These are all very possibly due to our past wounds. Specifically, our attachment wounds. Okay, and our nervous system and body's inability to feel safe. 

[00:37:43] So, I'm going to pause there for a moment. And for any of you who have been watching, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Okay, so, part of the wrap up, I'm just going to continue. And if you have any questions, feel free to just ask. 

[00:38:00] I began this sharing by saying how a lot of us think of spirituality in silo, kind of like a separate track from everything else. But when you think about it, when you take a step back and you think about it, spirituality rests on the bedrock of our humanity, right?

[00:38:16] So, if you are already somewhat familiar with the language, you know, of the church, of, especially Catholic, I guess, theology, there's this term, we hear that grace builds on nature and perfects nature. That grace builds on nature and perfects nature. That grace never destroys nature, right. So, then we need to pause a moment and consider what happens when that nature has been broken.

[00:38:45] Not just corrupted by sin. That's often the religious language that we think or corrupted by sin, you know? But practically speaking, it means that, like I said, the equipment that we have to give and receive love to feel safe enough to engage has been damaged. It needs healing. So, we need to look at natural means as well as grace and supernatural means.

[00:39:08] They've always been meant to work together, not like distinct. What happens a lot when we look at spirituality and faith as something that's so much more important than everything else, we have a very fragmented and often distorted view of faith, of spirituality, of religion, and then we end up with a very imbalanced, unbalanced, and potentially dangerous way of exercising what we think of as faithfulness and fidelity.

[00:39:41] Things that actually do violence, continue to do violence to the hearts of people, to the dignity of different people. And we can't see that because we have separated spirituality and faith from human nature, right? So, our nervous system, our body, our emotions, as well as our rational mind, they form an organic whole, right?

[00:40:03] We were created as an organic whole and all this was part of what God said was good when he created us. And so, our relationship with God also incorporates and requires all these parts of us working in harmony together, right? There's a caveat I wanted to mention that wholeness and holiness looks different at different stages of the journey at different seasons in our life.

[00:40:33] DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF PERFECTION AND WHOLENESS
So, again, I repeat this point a lot in my content; holiness, goodness, love looks very different depending on what stage we are in our healing, what stage we are in our development. Everything in nature declares the truth. Things are always in progress and changing and dynamic. We need to remember that for ourselves as well about interior journey and about our spiritual journey and not get fixated about an ideal and how it should look and keep comparing ourself with that ideal. That never works. That's always counterproductive. 

[00:41:10] There is no fixed idealized image of wholeness or perfection. Okay, to hold onto one is counterproductive and it does violence to ourselves. And if you are someone that journeys with others and you mentor others or you provide spiritual direction for others, you will also do violence to others without you realizing.

[00:41:31] That's a very hard truth to accept. It's harder especially if we haven't realized that the same thing was done to us. Okay, so when we begin to realize that we struggle with these things because of the wounds that we have received from others, then we tend to be more open to realize we do it to others too.

[00:41:52] Well, I think it's a cycle. It's a virtuous cycle, right? Or sometimes some of us recognize that we are hurting others even though we are meaning the best, we have the best intentions, we want to help them, and then we recognize that we are hurting them. And that introspecting on that, reflecting on why that is, makes us realize or helps us to realize that we are operating, operating out of a very distorted kind of framework and that it happened because of our own wounds.

[00:42:21] Okay, last caveat, I want to say appearances can be deceiving. So, recently, I was in a conversation with a friend who is also a seminarian, and he is someone who really loves discussing with me, like, you know, about the saints and contemplation and all that, and there was a really interesting book that he had started reading on the on Saint Francis de Sales and his friend and spiritual companion and friend Saint Jane de Chantal. So, they lived in France in I think about the 16th century, right?

[00:42:53] And there was this short excerpt that he shared with me. This book was written about 40 years ago, but and there was this talk about the spiritual virtue of detachment. Okay, holy indifference and detachment. And this writer, the writer was talking about how traditionally because there have been many people who have studied and written about St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane because of their very famous friendship and there are many letters that they wrote to each other. So, that letters have been analysed and read and interpreted and kind of analysed.

[00:43:25] And there was this common interpretation, traditional interpretation, that Saint Francis de Salle was the more spiritually mature of the two because from his letters, it seemed like he was more emotionally detached or indifferent. Indifferent in a good sense, more detached in his relationship. So, the example that was given was when he lost his mother, and he had written, he wrote about it to someone, maybe it was to St. Jane or somebody else.

[00:43:50] There was grief, but there seemed to be this healthy, you know, detachment. Whereas, St. Jane, who was widowed at a very young age, and then had two of her children die, and then later, just the many people that she lost in her life, like really through death and separation, and eventually even St. Francis de Sales, who was her spiritual confidant, died before she did. 

[00:44:11] She often wrote about the great grief and pain that she experienced when these people were taken from her, right? And apparently, a very common and traditional interpretation was that well, look, St. Jane, you know, Jane is so much more attached to people and Francis de Sales, you know, seemed less attached and so he probably was more spiritually mature. 

[00:44:37] Now, what I was very glad to read was that this particular writer of this book actually begged to differ. Okay, and he referred to more recent - so, by recent, this was like four years ago apparently, but studies in psychology that also talks about the difference in relationality between men and women, for example, right, because of the roles that people play in society, there may be gender differences.

[00:45:01] And that this may have nothing to do about spiritual maturities. There's a different kind of expression, right, of why is it that we decide that the one who seemed less attached is therefore more spiritually mature. So, in this discussion, so, my friend, the seminarian was having this very interesting discussion with me. I threw in something else that we've been talking about, I mean, that I've been talking about in my content.

[00:45:25] I said, now, with even newer understanding, for example, about insecure attachment styles, okay. Now, even the saints weren't like perfectly secure. I mean, we all grow in insecurity, right? But we maybe come from different directions. What has been the case in my own learning is that those with avoidant insecure attachment style? So, avoidant is like that, you know? Avoidant really literally, literally means I don't draw as close. I tend to have maybe intimacy issues. I don't dare to be too intimate. I'm a little bit more distant, right? I'm a little bit more distant. That's one insecure attachment style.

[00:46:04] And then there's the other insecure attachment style another one, not the other one, there's more than two, but that is anxious ambivalent, which sometimes is, you know, we kind of say it's kind of like the more codependent style, that clings, feels, fears being abandoned and therefore clings.

[00:46:21] Now, the avoidant, those who are with the avoidant attachment styles, they also fear abandonment. They also fear being hurt. But their way of coping is to not come near. So, if I don't draw near then I won't be hurt. Whereas for the anxious, ambivalent is like I cling, I really, I try and grip and hold tightly to, and I'll do whatever is necessary for you to keep loving me. You know, that kind of thing. 

[00:46:41] It's a very clingy kind of insecurity, but guess what? Both insecure attachment styles are emotionally unavailable. And both insecure attachment styles need healing in order to have true intimacy with other people and with God. But, because of our traditional concept, our very abstract concept of what spiritual detachment looks like, I think there are a lot of people with avoidant attachment styles that actually seem more spiritually mature. Or we think they are more spiritually mature, or they think they themselves are more spiritually mature than those with like the anxious ambivalent insecure attachment styles. That's not true. That's not true.

[00:47:24] Okay, both are emotionally unavailable. And that I think is so important for us to realize appearances can deceive. And if we don't look deeper in, if we don't realize the interior integration journey is really about the core of us and the depth, entering to the depths of us we can be easily misled and then you know, kind of like just do a lot of harm to ourselves and others and maybe even be self-righteous and judgmental about ourselves or you know about others. 

[00:47:54] Okay, so, I hope that today's sharing it's actually quite rich in trying to bring together common spiritual interpretations of the spiritual journey as well as actually attachment wounds and the impact that actually has on us. And I know for most people, you probably are more well read in one of these areas or the other, or you have done more interior work in one area or the other, right?

[00:48:21] I guess what I'm trying to tell you or share with you is that they're actually connected. They are connected. When we work on our emotional healing, we are actually helping our spiritual journey. Yeah, when we work on our spiritual journey, our desire to come closer to God, the struggles that we have there can give us clues about where we need emotional healing.

[00:48:43] These two dimensions of the journey, they are actually the same thing, they are actually the same journey. And I really, really hope that more of us will be able to integrate these two dimensions of the journey and that really more spiritual directors in particular will become more aware of this more mentors and formators people who are providing pastoral, especially spiritual kind of pastoral education and care, become more aware of this. 

[00:49:07] And I'll say as a good start begin to look within themselves first for integration because if not what is often handed down as faith formation and spiritual formation is very unintegrated, fragmented, not really wholly human and potentially harmful and damaging.

[00:49:30] Okay, I see that there hasn't been any questions asked. So, I should just thank you guys for watching those of you who joined me Live. And if you are watching this on replay, I hope that it has blessed you. If you have any questions that stem from this particular sharing, this particular Live, feel free to send me a direct message on my Instagram and I'll be happy to maybe address that in another Live. You're very, very welcome. Thank you for joining me Live. Bye.

[00:50:00] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

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