God As Secure Base is Not a Scam But A Journey to Wholeness

God as Secure Base: A Scam or a Journey?
I recently read a blog post talking about God being a secure base being a scam. Her exact wording "God cannot regulate your nervous system. You cannot co-regulate with an invisible being. There is no nervous system on the other side. The body needs people."

And honestly? I do not disagree with the biology. But I lived something the argument does not account for. Let me tell you about my husband.

When trauma fragments a person, as mine fragmented me, the nervous system does not simply have difficulty trusting God. It has difficulty trusting anyone. The littles inside me, those younger parts who carried the weight of what happened, did not understand safety at all. They understood terror. They understood only survival. They understood bracing. They understood watching for the door, scanning the room, and noticing every little sound or movement, anticipating the worst.

What they did not understand was that someone could stay. My husband stayed. He was not a therapist with a clinical framework. He was not a ministry leader with a program. He was a man who showed up, day after day, in the small ordinary moments that attach nervous systems to the concept of love, support, and safety. He was patient with the parts of me that tested him. He got frustrated mostly for the times he failed to prevent me from being triggered or when I would have unending flashbacks and memories coming flooding back or when I was so terrified that I needed him to stay up at night with me or stay in the bathroom while I took a shower or I wouldn't have been able to do it. He did not leave when things got complicated. He sat with the confusion and the fear and the chaos of a fractured inner world and he simply loved stayed. He held me sometimes for hours. He stroked my hair, was so in tune with me that the moment my body stiffened in fear he knew to stop holding and just be there.

That is how the littles learned what safe felt like. Not from a lesson. Not from a pastor who shared doctrine. Through thousands of small moments with a real human being who had a nervous system and a voice and a face they could read.

The article is right about the biology of attachment. Attachment is biological. It forms through bodies and presence and repetition. You cannot shortcut that process by directing someone toward an invisible being and calling it healed. But here is what I experienced that the argument does not leave room for. After my husband gave my system a template for safety, something shifted in how I could approach God. Not immediately. Not easily.

For a long time, the idea of being alone with God or with Jesus produced something close to terror. Not a theological crisis. A physiological one. My body would brace the same way it braced for danger. Prayer felt like dangerous exposure. Stillness felt like a trap and the word submission or surrender caused my amygdala to go into overddrive. And I could not think my way out of that.

What changed it was not willpower or more surrender or praying harder. What changed it was having a real experience of safety with a real person first. My husband gave my nervous system a reference point. The littles had felt, in their bodies, that closeness did not always mean harm. That someone could be trusted not to use our vulnerability against us. And slowly, tentatively, that template began to expand.

Terror became fear. Fear became anxiety. Anxiety became cautious stillness. Cautious stillness became something I can only describe as peace. And peace, over time, became something that feels like attachment. I am not talking about a theological position. I am talking about what happens in my body when I enter a quiet place with God now versus what happened ten years ago. Two summers ago I rexperienced a serene absolutely amazing rement laxation of my nervous system and attachment with God that wasn't physical but was the closest thing to attachment with God that I have every experienced. I was laying on my back on an air matress looking at the robin egg blue sky with the fluffy white clouds drifting carefree over me out in the warm sunshine in my swimming pool. As I looked above me at the beautiful green leaves on the branches above me and hearing the birds chirping happyily back and forth to each other I felt a closeness with God. I felt completely at peace, safe, loved and as I noticed the things around me that God created I knew that He was my Creator, my Father, my Daddy God and even though I couldn't physically feel Him I felt like He was there with me no different than when my husband would hold me. It was then that I realized I just needed the years with my husband first as a surrogate to then be able to trust that my nervous system could bear to let God close too.

I have come to realize that I may never feel comfortable in a church building with the hymns that sound like chanting or the pews that remind me of the catholic church, which included being sexually abused by a priest and a nun or sitting there having a sermon sound like advance directives, demands, commands, and the rigid rules of religion.

The journey from one to the other was not mystical. It was not spontaneous. It ran directly through the hands and the presence and the consistency of one human being who loved me when I did not know how to yet receive it. God used my husband to teach my nervous system what love looked like. And once my system understood what love looked like in a body, it became possible to begin recognizing it beyond one. That is not spiritual bypassing. That is the opposite. It is doing the hard biological relational work first and allowing it to open a door that would have stayed sealed otherwise.

I am not suggesting that pointing a trauma survivor toward God as their primary attachment figure is right for them or that they can feel safe anytime soon. For most of the people I have walked alongside, it is neither. The wounds are human wounds. They need human repair. Directing someone around that process does real damage. Jesus however does heal us even when there is not the close attachment that some part of us wants. But I am also not willing to say that the door needs to stay closed forever. What I lived tells me something different.

The nervous system is honest about what it needs. And what mine needed was a real person first. Someone with a body and a face and a nervous system that would not flinch at what it found in mine.My husband was that person for my littles., my teens, and the adult me. And because of him, I found my way, slowly and imperfectly and not without backsliding, to a place where God no longer feels like a threat to fear or push so hard against. That is attachment and what healing attachment wounds has actually looked like for me.