Your Brain is Protecting You From God
I’m afraid to let God in on my real emotions. I’m terrified of vulnerability. Being honestly known (especially by God) feels risky.
This article is a bit longer than our usual fare, listen to Brandon read it here:
“Where do you feel sadness in your body?”
“Can we take a minute to sit with that feeling? To pray about it?”
To be honest, I squirm a little when my spiritual director asks me these kinds of questions. I’m afraid to go where those questions ask me to go. I’m afraid to let God in on my real emotions. I’m terrified of vulnerability. Being honestly known (especially by God) feels risky.
So I usually avoid the questions. I rationalize my way out of them. I say something like:
“Why is it so hard for me to feel my feelings?” or “Oh, wow, it’s so hard to talk to God, how do I get over that?”
But I don’t realize that I’m avoiding the question. It just happens automatically. And that’s actually kinda true.
Your brain makes some decisions without consulting you
Just like with physical danger, relational danger triggers automatic protective responses. Research shows that by 12 months old, children have already developed a working emotional strategy for relationships.
They've already learned what to expect when they need someone. They know whether showing distress brings comfort or makes things worse, and they adapt their behavior accordingly, before they even have the capacity for conceptual thought.
Those experiences get stored not as ideas but as body-level expectations. We develop gut-level intuitions about relational safety, and those intuitions influence our behavior. It’s like wearing glasses that color how we perceive relationships.
These lenses influence my behavior without me being aware of them. They change my perception before I consciously make any choices. They literally define the options that I can see. Some behaviors become my go-to responses, and others are hidden from my awareness completely.
For example, I only recently realized I could give my wife space and take a break when we are arguing. The only option my brain gave me was to force her to accept me, to demand that she not walk away.
It’s not that I didn’t understand the concept of taking a break. I consciously know how to give her space. (Step 1: stop talking; step 2: don’t follow her from room to room demanding that she speak to me…). Hell, I’ve even explained how to do this to other people!
It’s just that when my connection with Liv feels threatened, my body perceives relational danger, and automatically engages its anxious defense mechanism. At that moment, I'm not really thinking at all.
The same thing happens in our relationship with God. My nervous system learned long ago that dropping my emotional guard with an authority figure is risky. So, when I’m invited to vulnerability, when I’m invited to trust that Jesus will have compassion on me (Psalm 103:13-14), my brain, sensing danger, engages the old neurological pathways it created long ago to protect me. The danger isn’t real in this case, but at a gut level my body doesn’t know the difference.
I can’t think my way out of this problem. That’s because it’s not a problem with the propositions I believe about God. It’s a problem with the experiences I have with him and other people. It’s a problem with my programming.
The sinful choices I make (like selfishly demanding that my wife listen to me) aren’t excusable. I actually do know better. I can and should respond differently. But my heart — my will — is constrained and broken. I just won’t choose better!
Until someone helps me.
Help comes from outside!
Attachment theory research shows that healing unhealthy relational patterns requires new, safe relational experiences.
It’s the relational equivalent of “exposure therapy.” Let’s say I have an extreme irrational fear of swimming, especially in lakes or ponds. (I mean it doesn’t feel irrational to me! Do you have any idea what’s lurking under the surface of that pond!? Do you want to be dragged under and eaten slowly!! I certainly don’t!) Ahem… sorry, where was I? Oh, right, the only way to heal an irrational fear of swimming is repeated, safe experiences with it.
You’ve got to start slow, of course. No throwing the scared man into the pond against his will! That only reinforces the instinctive fear. Instead, show me that it’s safe a little at a time. In a certain sense, the water has to earn my trust.
This slow process lets my brain rewire and create new neural pathways that respond differently to new ponds.
Something very much like this is the path toward healing a difficult prayer life. Specifically, I need repeated, embodied experiences with people and God that play out differently from what my gut expects.
If my gut expects rejection when I show emotion, I need experiences with someone who consistently receives and validates my feelings. If my instinct is to retreat into a shell and trust no one, then I need experiences with someone who stays emotionally available, but doesn’t demand that I come out of my shell until I’m good and ready.
In the case of God, I need those experiences with him.
How?!
First, slowly. Relational healing takes time. Trust isn’t built in a day. Rather it grows like an oak tree, slowly over years. And when allowed to grow, it develops roots so deep it can withstand any storm.
Second, through embodied experiences. That is, through normal, human experiences. I am my body. I experience everything through my body.
I can’t heal my relational patterns with my wife by sitting alone and thinking about them. While that might reveal some behavioral patterns I need to address, healing happens when I actually get in the same room with her and enact new patterns.
But how do we have new embodied experiences with God? God is a spirit!
Jesus said, “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt 18:20), and the church is the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27).
This is why it’s so important that people in the church learn to be healthy, safe, relational companions for each other! It’s through us that others experience Jesus (John 13:34).
And there are other ways to have embodied experiences with God. We encounter the “living and active” God in scripture (Hebrews 4:12). And we can be confident that on account of Christ’s righteousness given to us on the cross, the kind “eyes” of the Lord are on us, and his “ears” hear our prayers (1 Peter 3:12).
Of course, these practices aren’t magic! Most of us have bad experiences with reading scripture on our own and with private prayers. My point is absolutely not: “just pray and read your Bible more.” Even here we need the help of emotionally healthy mentors and community.
My point is encouragement: God has made himself available for healthy embodied connection in more ways than you might at first have guessed. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age!” (Matt 28:20).
A healthy, connected relationship with God was the entire point of the incarnation.
Jesus is “God with us.” With us physically, communally, sacramentally. He gives us new experiences with himself – compassionate, forgiving, comforting experiences, so our brains can stop protecting us from God.
Bypassing Your Brain's Defenses - Reading The Gospels with Your Imagination
In this workshop you'll learn a simple practice for using your imagination to encounter Jesus in Scripture.
C.S. Lewis argued that "reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning." We don't truly grasp something until it lives in our imagination. Abstract ideas bounce off us. Stories sink in.
Stories bypass our defenses. Images catch us off guard. They connect with our souls before we can intellectualize our way around them.
God can teach us with facts. But he meets us in our imagination.
In this workshop you'll:
- Learn how imagination is a God-given tool for encountering God in Scripture.
- Walk through a simple 5-step method of reading with your imagination.
- Practice the method and ask your questions
- Leave with a complete worksheet and list of passages to start with.
Provisions for the Road
Jesus Felt THIS Emotion The Most?! - The Signpost Inn Podcast
What does Jesus actually feel when he looks at you — worn out, knocked flat, barely holding on? The Gospels have a word for it. And it's nothing like the soft, managed thing we usually call "compassion."
Today Brandon and Matt dig into Matthew 9:36, the Greek behind two of the most overlooked words in the Gospels, and a gut-level emotion that drove everything Jesus did.
Then we close with an imaginative exercise to help you actually receive it — not just understand it.
Food for Thought
Things the team found interesting this week, no endorsement implied.
How The Weekend Was Invented
By Gene Veith at Cranach: The Blog of Veith
Did you know that the weekend–that is, two days off after five days of work–didn’t exist until the 1920s and wasn’t standard until 1938? Before that, everyone worked six days a week. Read the fascinating history of a two-day weekend!
Why You Never Stop Longing for Home
By Carl Nassar at Psychology Today
Not written from a Christian perspective, but still incredibly helpful advice for those grieving loss of loved ones and home. Remembering that our true home with God is awaiting us in the resurrection would make this article even more powerful!
Prisoners of Our Own Devices - First Things
A book review by Matthew Gasda at First Things
“If we do not return to our animality and our corporeality, if we do not reintegrate into organic communities, and if we stick to the Enlightenment’s anemic image of the human (autonomous, rational), then we will find ourselves permanently divorced from nature, from Eros, from God.”
