I wrote a blog called Getting God’s Attention when I was trying to get through October last year. It’s the only way I know that works. I grew up in church, and I was a Christian for at least thirty years before I learned about the Holy Spirit. I think one of the biggest wins to date for the enemy is that so many churches don’t teach about the Holy Spirit.

It caused me to look to others for comfort because I had no concept of the Holy Spirit being my Comforter. I spent my childhood thinking He was a dove. Then, when I outgrew that belief, I didn’t have anything to replace it with, so He just faded into the background as something that came down to earth when Jesus was baptized. The only other time I really thought about Him was when I read the book of Acts. For me, the Holy Spirit was a back in the day biblical timeline concept. I had no idea that He was for us to experience today.

I didn’t make any real progress with healing my disorganized attachment style until I gained a good understanding of the Holy Spirit and began learning how to move from knowing about Him to actually having a relationship with Him and partnering with Him. We can’t connect to something that remains elusive to us, and when we have attachment wounds, we seek out something or someone to meet that need, often without having any idea how to determine what is healthy for us.

I remember a time when my therapist, who had really bad boundaries, decided she was going to establish a new boundary after a year and a half of allowing the behavior she was now trying to correct. There was a part of me that knew all along that she was wrong to allow what she was allowing. I fully understood that it was unethical and even that it wasn’t sustainable, but that was head knowledge, and I was being led by a broken heart. My system did not care that it wasn’t a healthy relationship. It only cared that for one hour, once a week, we didn’t have to feel so much pain.

I had learned at a very young age that I had to find ways to get my needs met and nobody could see the manipulation behind the presentation. I had little parts who were constantly coming up with reasons to need to talk to her or go see her. Their favorite thing was to have a question about the Bible related to healing because what Christian therapist is going to say no to that? When that didn’t work, they would spin out memories and pain until I became so flooded and overwhelmed that I was convinced that I needed an emergency session.

I didn’t understand that they were flooding my system when it was happening, but I can see it clear as day now. There were times when I felt compelled to drive across town just to see her car in the parking lot. I didn’t even need to talk to her. Just seeing her car brought some relief. It sounds desperate because it was desperate.

My little parts were always trying to feel 5 more minutes of being loved. She was always reassuring them, but no amount of reassurance ever seemed to be enough. I wasn’t consciously setting out to manipulate her, but I often engaged in manipulative behavior that was driven with compulsion by unmet needs.

There is a developmental milestone called object constancy. It is the process of learning that people and objects continue to exist even when they are no longer within our sight. Think about a baby playing peekaboo. In the earliest stages of development, when something disappears from view, the baby may not yet understand that it continues to exist somewhere else. As object permanence develops, the baby begins to understand that something can be out of sight without ceasing to exist.

Emotional object constancy is another important developmental capacity that influences our attachment style and the level of our attachment wounds. Emotional object constancy is the ability to maintain a sense of emotional connection to someone even when they are not physically present. It includes being able to hold on to the understanding that someone can still love us, care about us, and value our relationship even when they are unavailable, distracted, upset with us, or temporarily separated from us.

While survivors learn object permanence, many of us are dangerously deficient in the area of emotional object constancy. It serves the cult agenda to keep us desperate and dependent on believing that our obedient behavior will earn a moment of comfort. It starts in childhood, but it stays with us throughout life until we make the choice to face the pain and let God heal it.

Head knowledge of having someone tell you that they care is not the same as being able to feel secure in that truth. For children who grow up with consistent, responsive caregiving, there are countless everyday opportunities to develop that security. They experience distress, receive comfort, and gradually learn that their caregiver remains a source of safety even when they are not right beside them. Of course, no parent does this perfectly, and children don’t require perfection to develop healthy attachment. What matters is a pattern of safety, consistency, responsiveness, and repair when things go wrong.

Disorganized, avoidant and anxious attachment styles develop when those experiences are disrupted by abuse, neglect, abandonment, frightening caregiving, or relationships in which the very people who are supposed to provide safety are also sources of fear.

The child learns that comfort is unpredictable, that relationships can change without warning, and that love and safety can disappear at any moment. For some children, the response is to cling desperately to that connection at any cost. Others learn to shut down their attachment needs because depending on someone has become too painful or dangerous. Some alternate between desperately seeking closeness and pushing it away.

There was a constant push and pull going on inside my system that made no sense to me. Some of us had too much shame, and at the same time too much pride, to admit that we wanted a mother. Other parts desperately wanted one. They were always imagining what it would be like to have a mother who loved them and took care of them, while I was constantly telling them there was no way that was happening. I prided myself on not needing anybody.

During our therapy sessions, my therapist would hold my littles, rock them, sing to them, and give them snacks. She took on a nurturing role with them that was healing for us. These were experiences that my younger parts desperately needed, and for the first time, they were receiving some of the love and nurturing they had missed during childhood.

The problem wasn’t that they were receiving nurturing. The problem was that we didn’t know how to take that healing and apply it to our everyday lives as an adult. My little parts loved being held. They waited all week for those sessions. It didn’t matter what I was doing or what responsibilities I had as an adult, they were thinking about the next time they would get to see her. They counted down the days and hours until their next appointment because they were so starved for safe human touch.

She allowed them to text her goodnight, and she would always respond. That was healing in one aspect because they had someone who cared enough to tell them goodnight. But it was also painful because she wasn’t there to tuck them into bed. They couldn’t separate what happened in the therapy office from what they longed for at home. They didn’t just want someone to tell them goodnight. They wanted a mother who would tuck them in, hold them when they were hurting, and be there when they woke up. No matter how much nurturing they received during their appointments, they still had to go home without her.

They knew she loved them, but they couldn’t maintain that feeling of being loved when they weren’t physically in her presence. One of the things I needed early in my healing was for her to help me develop the ability to feel secure in a relationship when the other person isn’t physically present.

Think about how a child develops. An infant depends on their parents for everything. They need someone to feed them, hold them, comfort them, and respond when they cry. But as the child grows and those developmental needs are met, their relationship with their parents changes. They gradually learn how to do things for themselves, tolerate separation, and become more independent. Healthy nurturing gives them the space and opportunities to explore. It provides the foundation that allows the child to continue growing because they have a safe base to return to at any time.

They needed those early experiences of nurturing, but they also needed help moving forward. They needed to learn that they could be loved without having to be physically held all the time, and they needed help developing the ability to receive comfort and security in other ways.

Unfortunately, after a season of receiving the nurturing they needed, they became stuck because they didn’t want to give up this mother figure that they had developed in their head. That’s when some of the behaviors began to change.

Sometimes they made things up, basically created crisis situations, because they wanted another opportunity to be held. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew they were doing it. I could see what they were doing, but I was watching from a distance. The desperation was so overwhelming that I couldn’t get close to it. It felt dangerous to even acknowledge those needs. I would dissociate and be outside of my body rather than facing what was happening.

I couldn’t face the pain of admitting that I needed a mother. I couldn’t face the fact that some of those needs were finally being met, and I certainly couldn’t face the fact that it felt good. As the presenter, I had only ever known pain. Healthy touch made me so uncomfortable. Feeling good about myself made me uncomfortable. Feeling good about much of anything was foreign to me. So, while my little parts were soaking up every bit of affection they could get, I was dissociating from the experience because I didn’t know how to receive it.

I was too afraid of the emotions to stop them, so I made it their problem as if I had no responsibility for what they were doing. The longer they fought to hold on to what they had, the more difficult it became to move forward.

I wish my therapist had encouraged my younger parts to come to me for comfort. I wish she had taught me how to hold them, rock them, talk to them, and meet their needs myself because I could have been there for them all the time. Instead of becoming the person they turned to when they needed comfort, I was still standing at a distance while they were becoming increasingly dependent on someone who could only be available to them for limited periods of time.

I don’t believe my therapist was trying to hurt us. I believe she understood the developmental purpose of nurturing those younger parts, and I also believe she genuinely wanted to show them the love of Christ. The nurturing itself wasn’t what I needed to get away from. I needed help taking what we were receiving and learning how to carry it into the rest of our lives.

When my therapist eventually began establishing boundaries around the access we had to her, I knew she was right to do so. I knew the boundaries were necessary. I knew they would help me grow. I was even angry because I knew she was right, but my younger parts were experiencing something entirely different. They felt completely rejected and fearful that another person was going to abandon them. They were willing to do whatever they thought was necessary to keep from losing her, even if that meant living in pain and becoming afraid to try new things.

Some of them started carefully weighing every word they said and every move they made. They wanted to be the perfect client, the perfect Christian, or whatever they believed she needed them to be. Other parts acted out. One of my teenage parts started drinking wine coolers and smoking because she didn’t want to deal with the pain. Needless to say, it wasn’t a fun season. Our system was spiraling, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know back then that I had spinner parts programmed to affect what I was experiencing as the presenter. I was being flooded with all of their emotions because they thought they were losing her.

The relationship that had helped them begin to experience nurturing had become something they were terrified of losing. This is a result of having to backtrack after having bad boundaries. This is why I believe boundaries are so important from the beginning of a relationship with someone who has significant attachment wounds. Once a pattern of access and dependency has been established, changing it can bring up enormous amounts of fear, rejection, and abandonment.

It happens and most of the time it happens with the best of intentions. If you’re in a situation where you need to backtrack. Go slow, give your parts lots of reassurance that boundaries are not bad. Boundaries are actually evidence that the person helping you has your best interest at heart. It’s painful, but it’s also one of the biggest opportunities to grow. It’s one of those things that the only way out is through. Be willing to not give up the next time someone sets a healthy boundary. Be willing not to run away even when your programming is screaming to escape.

A really important part of setting a boundary is how it is done, especially for someone with severe attachment wounds. I’m a thinker so I needed to know the reason behind the change, and I needed someone to help me process the emotions that came up. I think that can be just as important as maintaining the boundary itself. My fear took over and all I could see was the 5% of the relationship that was causing me pain. I needed help remembering that the other 95% wasn’t changing and we weren’t being abandoned. I needed help seeing the new boundary as an opportunity to grow. Even though it would have made me mad in the moment, I still needed to hear it.

Survivors need help understanding what is happening, recognizing the needs driving their behavior, and developing the ability to meet those needs in healthier ways. Otherwise, we stop the behavior without addressing the wounds underneath it. We can’t take something away without replacing it with something better. Holy Spirit is the better. He is the absolutely safest option for all involved and He can give understanding of how boundaries make relationships safe.

For years, I had been looking to other people to give me the love and comfort I had missed as a child. I didn’t understand that the Holy Spirit was my Comforter, and I certainly didn’t understand how to develop a relationship with Him that could help me heal those attachment wounds.

How do you learn to trust a Heavenly Father when you have never experienced the love of a healthy earthly father that you can see and touch? It’s not that God isn’t trustworthy. It’s that when you have no healthy frame of reference for what a father is supposed to be, it can be incredibly difficult to understand what it means to trust Him as one. I had to apply what I learned from my relationship with her to working through my father wounds, too.

As I began developing my relationship with the Holy Spirit, I started allowing my little parts to sit on Jesus’ lap and receive comfort from Him. And as I worked through my own feelings about not having a father, I took the risk of approaching God as my Abba Father. It looked like sitting on my couch and imagining myself climbing up on Abba Father’s lap while He held me and I talked to Him. It was much like spending time in prayer, except I was sitting on His lap while we talked. At first, it was super uncomfortable, but not in a bad way. It felt more like that nervous energy you get when you’re excited about something you’re really looking forward to.

Over time, I started looking more and more forward to being at home because I wanted to spend time with Him. Think about how different that was from spending every day counting down the hours until my next therapy session. It helped me heal in so many ways. The more I developed that relationship, the greater my capacity became to rely on Him as my secure attachment. The more securely attached I became to Him, the more balanced my other relationships naturally became.

I taught my parts that Holy Spirit doesn’t go home to His own house at night. He stays with us around the clock. There is no risk of abandonment with Him. I didn’t have to come up with reasons why I needed an emergency session or find ways to convince Him to give me more of His time. I could spend time with Him whenever I wanted.

Instead of constantly trying to get someone else to meet needs that I didn’t even understand, I learned to receive comfort through my relationship with God and developed compassion for my own younger parts. I was learning that I was lovable as I was and it was such a relief when it no longer depended on another person’s availability.

A survivor once told me that survivors are a lot for one person. It helps to spread our sunshine around to multiple people and I find that to be true. When God is our secure base, we can develop other relationships and not be needy or overbearing towards any one person.

Survivors need to experience love, compassion, and nurturing from other people. We need hugs, we need affirmation, we need someone who delights in us. You can’t simply tell someone who has never experienced healthy love to go find it in God and expect that they will automatically know how to do that. Sometimes we need someone to show us what healthy love looks like before we can even begin to understand how to receive it. But the purpose of that nurturing should be to help us grow, not to keep us dependent on the person providing it. A really good way to do that is to ask often what God is showing us. Ask what we are learning in the word, how our communication is going with our parts, what we are doing as the presenter to show compassion to our parts, etc. Remind us that as the presenter, we have the opportunity to be the safe person we never had for our parts.

My parts needed to receive the love and nurturing they had missed, but they also needed help moving forward. They needed to learn how to trust, how to feel secure, how to receive comfort, and how to participate in life without constantly searching for someone else to make them feel safe.

I wanted them to heal, not remain stuck in the same desperate longing for the rest of our lives. I had to stop standing outside my body, ashamed of needs that belonged to all of us, and begin taking responsibility for loving and caring for the parts of me who had spent their lives waiting for someone to rescue them.

I wish I had understood all of this much earlier. It would have saved us so much pain, and it would have helped me understand that the goal was never to stop needing love. The goal was to receive the love we needed, learn how to live securely in that love, and continue growing into the healthy, whole person God created us to be.