Jesus as Our Secure Base and Safe Haven

If you have ever wondered why you can look “fine” on the outside but feel restless, alone, or on edge inside, attachment might be the missing link. We talk about what secure attachment really is and why it has two essential parts: a secure base that helps you step into the world with confidence and a safe haven you can run to when life hurts. When those are present, we tend to carry a steady sense of worth and a realistic trust in others. When they are missing, we often compensate in ways that look strong but feel exhausting.

We walk through how anxious attachment can turn into people pleasing, over giving, and trying to earn love, and how avoidant attachment can turn into extreme self reliance and emotional shutdown because depending on people has not felt safe. We also connect these patterns to mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression, not as labels to shame you, but as signals that your nervous system is still looking for safety and support.

Faith adds a hopeful dimension. We explore God attachment and the compensation model, where a relationship with Jesus can begin to repair what you did not receive earlier in life. We talk about experiencing God as a secure base and safe haven through prayer, scripture, and strong Christian community, plus how serving others can reduce rumination and help with emotional regulation. If you want a clearer picture of your patterns and a pathway toward security, press play, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find this help.

Transcript

Welcome And Listener Questions

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Alright everyone, welcome back to the God Attachment Healing Podcast, the podcast that helps you understand your attachment style and how that affects your relationships with other people, with yourself, and most importantly with God. In today's episode, we're going to explore what it means to experience God as a secure base and a safe haven. We'll talk about some attachment to God research and discuss some clinical outcomes like anxiety and depression. So I hope that you're excited about this topic. I'm very, I'm very excited myself. And I want you to know that if you if these episodes are impacting you in a positive way, uh let me know. You know, shoot me a message through Instagram. You can always leave a comment or ask a question through the Apple Podcast app. There's a little link at the top there before each episode, and you should be able to submit a question there, and I'd be happy to answer it. I actually want to include that in these episodes, like at the beginning, maybe I list them at the end. Either way, uh more engagement is better. So I would really appreciate that. Um, so yeah, so today we're gonna talk about attachment and how that affects your mental health. You know, when God feels secure, when you feel secure in your relationship with God, here's what happens, and that's what we're going to be discussing today. So, as you guys know, I mean this is this is the whole podcast, right? It's about how we attach to God, uh, how we attach to other people, and how those two different relationships kind of how they uh weave together in our relationship to ourselves and our relationship to other people.

What Secure Attachment Means

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So we're going to define secure attachment. Now, the two concepts that we're talking about today is secure base and safe haven. Okay. Secure base, as described in the research, is really this element of how you feel when you're launching off into the world, right? You have a secure base of attachments. This could be parents, it can be a best friend, it can be a spouse, it can be anyone, but there's this launching pad into the world that you feel safe enough to go and explore your surroundings, right? So typically when we talk about attachment, it's the parent-to-child relationship, right? What was the primary caregiver's approach to meeting the needs of the child? And if needs were met consistently, effectively, in a timely manner, then what you find is that as you get older, you feel secure. You feel free to explore the world around you. And that is what establishes a secure uh base is that the person, typically a primary caregiver, typically the parents, are the ones who provide this safe, secure base from which you can now go out and to explore the world, right? You have confidence, you have belief in self, belief in a support system, and belief in God that you are able to go out into the world and do well, right? Um, secure people often have a positive view of self and a positive view of others, right? Which in a lot of ways makes sense because if you had parents who were able to meet your needs consistently, effectively, and in a timely manner, you start to see that people outside of that bubble, outside of your family, it's you've developed the belief that, hey, you know what? If my parents who care about me were able to meet my needs, why would I think any differently about other people? And you have the benefit of seeing your parents and looking for characteristics that kind of represent a lot of how they were, right? So the thing about securely attached people is that they know what security looks like because they've experienced it in their own lives, in their home lives with their parents. And if those parents are secure and they're meeting the needs of all of their children, then you have a really good idea of what security looks like and what safety looks like. So because you have that model for you, when you do explore from your secure base and you go out into the world now as an adult, is you start to notice things about people, right? Uh, you start to see certain characteristics and certain behaviors and certain ways of being that allow you to feel, hey, this person, they're they're pretty secure. And if I were to need something from them, and I feel like they would be able to meet that need, right? Now, again, the thing about securely attached people is that they're also able to meet the needs of other people, right? So they go out into the world and they're also trying to meet the needs of the people in their circle. So when you create that type of environment for yourself, you have secure people serving other secure people and being able to meet each other's needs, right? So that is essentially a secure base,

When There Is No Secure Base

SPEAKER_00 5:03

right? Is it's the place from which you feel secure enough to go and explore the world, as opposed to an unsecure base, right? Where if you didn't have your needs met, or if they were met inconsistently, or if the actual need wasn't met, you know, for a child, it could be something as simple as um maybe it wasn't food that they needed. So mom or dad is trying to give their child food when really all they wanted was a hug, right? That they're fussing, they're they're making a big um throwing a tantrum. And the parent says, Well, you know, maybe you need to eat, right? And the child maybe doesn't need to eat. Maybe what they needed was just a hug from the parent, just this affirmation that they are okay being around them, right? Um, sometimes a child needs someone to turn to when they are feeling distressed. And if the parent pushed them away, they feel, well, you're not someone that I can come to and express a need. And we'll get into a little bit about that, because that actually refers to a safe haven. Um, so I'll talk about that in a little bit. But this idea of can I have a secure base from which I feel secure enough to go out and venture into the world? And for those who grow up with an insecure attachment, be it anxious, avoidant, um, disorganized, they don't feel like they have the tools necessary or safe enough to go out and actually explore the world, right? They don't feel capable enough. They often have, again, either a low view of self and a high view of others. And I talk about this a lot in a number of other episodes, but this low view of self tends to be that I'm not worthy enough to have my needs be met. I'm not worthy enough because my parents weren't able to do that. So why would I believe that other people are? But even though I'm not worthy enough to have my needs met, maybe if I try to meet the needs of other people, maybe then I'll be worthy enough for my needs to be met, right? So for the anxiously attached, when they don't have that secure base to go to, they then start to operate through people pleasing, through serving others limitlessly, meaning that they go to the extremes to be there for other people because in that way they're essentially trying to earn the um love from other people, that the care from other people that they didn't receive when they were younger, right? So the anxiously attached person becomes that in order to win not approval, right? It's not necessarily approval. We call it people pleasing, but really what they're wanting is I want to be worthy in your eyes. And if I do enough good things, right, if I do good towards you, if I do good in the world, then maybe you'll see me in a more positive light and you'll accept me and want me and love me the way that I didn't receive when I was younger, right? So that's the anxiously attached. Again, we're talking about not having a secure base. So the anxious, anxiously attached person does that. Now,

Avoidant Attachment And Self Reliance

SPEAKER_00 8:09

there's another form of insecure attachment, which is the avoidant, right? Um, you know, interestingly enough, the avoidant receives a lot of um, how can I say, not hate, but they have a bad reputation in a sense when we talk about attachment because they're described as, you know, uncaring and not being able to feel their emotions and all these different things. But no, they I mean they're they're insecurely attached, they feel emotions, but what they've learned to do is to shut down those emotions because it never worked, right? For the avoidingly attached, it's that their needs were not met, right? Again, similar to the anxiously attached, but they have a different way of coping. And for the avoiding the attached, what they learn is that, well, you know what, people aren't dependable, right? Um, and because people are not dependable, I can't put all my eggs in those baskets, right? In that basket, to think that other people are gonna be able to meet my needs, right? So actually, what I think as an avoidant, so this the perspective of an avoidant, actually, I can't depend on other people, so I have to depend on myself. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do everything that I can in my power to do these things that I'm going to do to do good and to make a name for myself or to become very independent so that I know that I can meet my own needs, right? So they become very competent, right? Very early on, they learn that they need to do things on their own to be able to meet the needs that they have, right? And this could be something as simple as, you know, um growing up as can be the oldest or just the person who's most responsible, where they're trying to meet the needs of other people, but um, they're also trying to find ways to meet the needs of themselves, right? So they see other people as a burden because, man, I'm meeting all your needs, but what about my needs? And they start to kind of have that battle with themselves. So, what the avoidantly attached person essentially does is that okay, I need to look out for myself, and everything else will take care of itself in its own time, but for now I need to focus on myself. So they are very well equipped and they are very successful in the eyes of the world or the eyes of people, in their careers, in relationships, in their ability to communicate, in everything that they do, right? They just become very competent, but that's not to win the approval of others or to have other people come and meet their needs, right? They're not trying to impress other people for that. What they learn is that you know what people aren't dependable. So I have to know and I have to learn how to depend on myself and then find ways to be able to meet my own needs, right? So, again, that's through being successful where they make enough money or where they have a lot of relationships and friendships where that just they just become very popular and very social, right? All of those are meeting needs, but they're doing it for themselves in a sense, because they have to depend on themselves. So, you know, when you think about them not having their needs met when they were younger, I mean it makes a lot of sense why they would do that, right? So, uh again, a lot of times the avoidant gets this bad rap for um for being so independent, right? Again, the anxious and the avoidant, they both have flaws in the way that they're relating to other people, right? The anxious is trying to impress others to be worthy of love. The avoidant considers himself worthy of love, but they own they don't depend on that from other people. They just see themselves in a very positive way. So the way that I like to explain it is again, I think I said with the anxious, it's low view of self, high view of others. I need to impress others to be worthy enough to gain or obtain their love. For the avoidant, it's the opposite, right? It's I'm capable. There's a high positive view of self because they've seen themselves be capable in various areas of their lives, and other people in a very negative light. I can't depend on others because at some point they'll eventually fail me. So instead of going through that pain, it's better that I just not depend on people, I just depend on myself, I do my own thing, and I'll essentially be okay. Right. So those are the two attachment styles. I only want to focus one on those two for right now because the disorganized is kind of we we have more of a trauma focus um uh in that attachment style. And you know, that that I can make an episode just on its own. And I have done that, but um, just for these two, because we're talking about a safe haven, I'm sorry, a secure base, where people feel secure enough to go out and explore the world. So for the avoidant, they didn't feel secure to go out and explore the world, but they went out and figured it out, right? So they were scared, they learned all the skills, they learned what they needed to learn, and they saw success in what they were doing, and therefore have developed this sense of strong identity. Like I believe in myself to carry out these things, and they do, right? So that's what we have when there is no secure base. You have the anxiously attached moving out into the world, trying to gain the approval of others because they didn't get that in early childhood. And with the avoidant, is I'm going to go out and prove to myself that I can meet my own needs, and therefore I don't need to depend on anyone. And it's not like an I don't need to depend on anyone, like people um, you know, I don't want to depend on anyone. It's just that they've learned from their own experience that people are just not dependable. So they lean more on the what would we call it, more pessimistic side or view of people, right? And we would say the anxiously attached kind of has this over-evaluation, overly positive view of other people, right? So they consistently end up being hurt because they're expecting the best, but they receive less than that. So you can see how that could kind of be a struggle there, right?

Safe Haven And Emotional Support

SPEAKER_00 14:17

So what we begin to see is okay, so we have a safe haven, which is where you need to feel secure enough to go out and explore the world. So secure people have that and they go out and explore the world. But the other thing that secure people have is that they have a safe haven. And the safe haven itself is a place to go to when you are under distress, when you are in pain, when you are suffering. Who do you turn to when you have pain and suffering and the stress, right? And for the securely attached person, they have a go-to person, right? They have someone who or a number of people who are dependable, who are trustworthy, who have been um consistent and being able to meet their needs when they've had them. So that is the secure or the safe haven, is that if I know as I'm exploring the world that something goes wrong, I'm not gonna just try to challenge it myself because we need a support system. So I'm gonna come back to my safe haven and try to get some emotional regulation there, right? That you have someone that you can process these things with, right? Again, both men and women do this, right? Uh, men may have a smaller circle, but that circle is very strong. Women tend to have a bigger circle, and that's okay too, right? They as long as the people are trustworthy, dependable, and consistent, that's considered a safe haven, right? Um, obviously, if you were to take inventory right now of who those people are in your life, you know, you could probably come up with two or three names, right? Because they mean a lot to you and they've they've shown themselves to be consistent in your life, right? So that is a safe haven. The place to go to when I'm under the stress, uh, when I'm suffering, uh, when I'm in pain, whatever it is, I know who to go to, right? And what young children learn is that when they fell and they hurt their knee and they came back to mom and dad, that they were received very with open arms. They were welcomed in. I'm sorry that you're in pain. Hey, let's get through this. You're okay. I'm here for you if you need anything, right? Uh, you know, same thing for a father. How does a father become present when his child gets hurt? Hey, you okay, buddy? I'm right here. Hey, you got this, I'm right here with you, right? They they give him this affirmation, this strength. Uh, mom is typically very caring and is tending to the knees, and maybe if there's a cut or scratch, she puts a band-aid on it, shows him that that he cares, or shows her that he she cares. So that that is a good warm reception to a pain that is experienced by a child.

Parenting That Builds Safety

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Now, what what you're doing with that, so for those parents who are out there, what you're doing with those multiple examples, those multiple experiences when your child experiences pain and you're turning towards it or towards them in a receptive, warm, and caring manner, is you're preparing them for the future, right? Is that this is not gonna be the first time that they're gonna experience pain. They're gonna have many times of pain and suffering in the future. And you want to establish yourself as someone that they can come to when they do experience those things, right? You don't want to protect your children from suffering, right? That's not what we're looking for. What I want, or what we want as parents or as people who are securely attached, is you want to be the go-to person when they experience suffering. Okay. So I'm writing this article right now on parents and uh young adults or teens who have graduated from their from their schools and they're about to go into college, right? And I'm I'm talking about there should be some levels of distress when that happens, right? That there shouldn't be so easy letting go of your child to college because you know that they're gonna face suffering, that they're gonna face a hard world out there, right? So you experiencing some levels of distress, knowing that your child is gonna go out into that world, that that's normal, right? That is a part of security. Like you shouldn't just feel completely comfortable with that. It's a hard transition, right? Now, some people may shut their feelings off and I want to experience that. That's okay. You know, it's a way of coping. And you have others who are just overly involved and overly emotional about the process. So that may not show a lot of security either. Um, but there should be some levels of the stress, both for the parent and for the child, right? So the child feels this like, oh man, I'm leaving my secure base. I'm going out into exploring the world, and they're going to look at their experience with that parent or with their parents as to whether or not they're a safe haven, right? That if I go out into the world, I know that if I face any type of struggle, that I can always come back to mom and dad and I'll be okay. Right. So so they have that, and that's what you want. You want to be a safe haven for your children, right? So for those who have an anxiously attached um attachment style, they don't feel like they have somewhere to go to, or they don't fully trust the person that they're gonna go to because it's been inconsistent, right? Sometimes they've responded well, other times not so well, right? So they don't feel like they have an actual safe haven. But we know as anyone would, that at some point in life you're gonna experience some level of the stress, some challenge, some difficulty, some suffering that is going to require you to depend on someone

God Attachment And Mental Health

SPEAKER_00 19:43

else. Right now, this is where faith comes in too. Christians have a unique relationship, not just with people, but obviously obviously with God, with Jesus. We have that relationship, meaning that if our parents were not able to do that, there's something called the compensation theory model uh or the compensation model for uh God attachment, which is if parents were not able to meet your needs as a child and you come to know the Lord later on in life, right? Because I'm not just talking about just Christian uh uh parents, but anyone who just comes to know the Lord at any point in time, if you parents didn't know the Lord when you were younger and you grow up and you then learn about Jesus and you're given the gospel and you respond to it, right? You come to know the Lord and you start to see your past experiences, your parents' inability to meet your needs as a child. Now you start to find that in God, right? In a lot of ways, God starts to compensate for what you lacked when you were younger, right? So the compensation is that whatever I didn't receive with my parents, I'm starting to see my relationship with God. Like God is loving, he is caring, he is uh sees me in a positive way. I am his child, right? So you have all of these positive connotations with your relationship with God because you didn't have that before, right? So you start to see God now as a not just a secure base, but also as a safe haven, right? So due to the fact that you didn't have those things when you were younger, now that you have a relationship with Jesus, you start to go to Him when you experience difficulty in your life. And that is through scripture, that is through prayer, that is through Christian community, right? Going to church, all of these different things. And there's a lot of research on that. On people who are involved in church, people who are serving in church, people who are serving others, they deal much better with mental health issues. Why? Because they uh are not focused only on themselves, they're focusing on other people. They're not ignoring what they're experiencing, they're just alleviating a lot of that pain by focusing on other people. So This makes a lot of sense, right? Because what happens is that in mental health issues, when you become inward focused, what happens? You start to feel it more, right? It's like a cut that you're allowing to heal, right? If I keep scratching at a scab that I'm trying to wait to heal, right, you got to let it sit and harden and then eventually fall off by itself, right? But if you keep poking at it, you're making it longer because you're just focusing on it, right? But if you go about your day and you just know, hey, it has to heal up, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, right? Your time is focused elsewhere and you're still healing, right? And that's kind of the same concept here is that when you when you are focusing on serving other people and you're focusing on uh meeting community and praying to God and finding that community with Him through prayer, through scripture reading, you start to see that your mental health issues or your problems or things that you're experiencing, they seem smaller, right? Um, or you're managing them better. Your emotions are regulating because you're sharing them with God who understands everything that you're going through, right? And God says that he understands everything that we're that we're going through. He lived a life as a human and understands the human experience. So he empathizes with our pain, right? So when you see that, wow, well, I'm gonna turn to him whenever I experience anything distressing, right? And the Lord was that for me as well. When I went through a very difficult time in my life, I started turning to the Lord, specifically just to him. So I was just so focused on Lord, you have to help me during this time because I don't know what to do and I'm in so much pain. No one else is gonna understand but you. Now you can have that as well, right? That as you've experienced suffering, like who've been your go-to? Like, now you want to have people, right? But you obviously, as a Christian, right? I'm talking to two Christians here, Jesus is your first go-to. And because we have him as our first go-to, he then uses other people to also meet other needs that we have, right? We are relational beings, we're intellectual beings, we're emotional beings, right? And because God understands that about us, he's able to meet our needs through our relationship with him and also through our relationship with other people. So he places those people in our lives. So that's that's very important. So the safe, the secure base is the safety and explore, uh, the safety I have to go out and explore the world around me, to go out and do things. And I have enough of a positive view of self. This is not an exaggerated, not exaggerated, what's the word? This is not an uh elevated view of self where you think you're better than it. I'm not talking about that. When we talk about um a securely attached person, that they just see themselves in a positive light, right? It's not, oh, I'm such a I'm such a horrible person, I'm this, I'm that, like this, this very shaming type of language themselves. And they don't have an an over-inflated view of self or I'm the best, I'm better than that's not what it is. It's just, hey, you know what? I feel good about myself because the parents have instilled the sense of, hey, you're worth you, you're worthy, you're important to me, your needs matter. Like they they do these things when make which make us feel important and make us feel valued, right? So you want that. You want your children to feel valued. So when you have that, you have a positive view of self, and then you have a positive view of other people because people who are see that you have a need and they're able to meet those needs and want to meet those needs, that starts to play in your mind, like, okay, people are dependable, people are trustworthy, right? Um, so you would have a secure base and a safe haven to come back to. For the anxiously attached, they don't have a secure base, so they're venturing out into the world and they're trying to do things the best that they can, but they're operating on wanting to gain worth by doing the things that they do, by doing a lot of good things, typically for other people. And we talk about people pleasing, we talk about just wanting to uh be seen in a positive light by other people, right? We value their opinion more than we value our own. So all of these different things for the avoiding the attached is the opposite. They have seen themselves do things on their own, they feel very competent and very capable, and they have a positive view of self, right? I'm capable, I can meet my own needs, like I'm independent, I can go out and do what I want, right? And I'll be okay. And they have a negative view of people in the sense that they're not able to meet my needs. I'm not gonna depend on other people, right? So the reason why they struggle with opening up is not because they uh don't want to, they would like to, but they have the perspective that people are not dependable because of their past experiences, right?

Changing Your Attachment Style

SPEAKER_00 27:39

And again, one of the things that I talk about a lot on the podcast is that your attachment style can change, right? You need corrective attachment experiences with other people that start to show you that you that they are dependable, right? So for the avoidant, if you give him a securely attached individual who is able to meet their needs and does so consistently, their perspective starts to shift a little bit, right? Or even if they see it from um from a different relationship, like if they see it out in the world or in their close circle where other people are being secure in their ability to relate to each other, like they start to want that. Like, oh, okay, so that's what that looks like. Hmm. It just makes them intrigued, right? They do want those things, they just don't know what it looks like. But when they see it, they know it and they want it, right? So I do want to give that to those of you guys who may be experiencing or may struggle with avoidant attachment, right? Is that when you see it, you know it and you want to be part of it. Okay. Um, and for the anxiously attached person, it's learning that, you know what, I'm doing these things not because I want to gain their approval. I know that the Lord loves me. I know that He placed people around me that do care about me. I just need to learn how to appreciate those or accept that love that is given to me, right? Oftentimes anxiously attached are are um blind to what others are already doing for them or how others are loving them because they're focused on gaining the approval of other people, right? So sometimes they miss it. But if they were to focus more on those relationships where they are cared for and they are loved now as adults, then they would probably start to feel that a little bit more. So they start to get a more positive view of self as well as maintain that positive view of others. Okay.

Religion Versus Spiritual Felt Security

SPEAKER_00 29:31

So a lot obviously on attachment and and religion. So um when we talk about religion, it's the things that you do. When we talk about spirituality, it's how you feel about your faith, right? So when you obviously have a secure base, right, somewhere where you feel safe enough to launch into the world and try things out, and when you experience difficulty or suffering or pain, that you know that you have someone to come back to, the safe haven to be able to process what you're feeling, process the difficulty, to you know feel supported in those moments, then you know you you you you essentially have a good system for being able to relate to the world around you, right? God will provide you with what you need. So if you as a listener, as a uh are a Christian and you have not experienced the safe and secure attachment style, that's what I would encourage you to do is to start to just find people right first, connect with God again, prayer, scripture reading, community, strong Christian community. If you if you start to invest in those three things, I promise you, I promise you that you'll start to see God in a different light. And he'll start to bring people around you to comfort you, to provide that opening. Because God meets your needs in various ways, and sometimes we miss it because we're focused on the wrong thing. So if I can encourage you with anything, I would encourage you with that.

Practical Encouragement And Closing

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Um and yeah, I think that's that's a good place to end here as we talk about the safe haven and the secure base. Um, this does affect how you view yourself, how you view others, how you view even your mental health. So hopefully this was helpful to you guys. Thank you for tuning in, and I will see you next time for another episode. Take care, guys.