Before You Teach Them, Attach to Them
Secure Attachment is The Operating System of a Fully Alive Life
Imagine trying to run your life, your relationships, your emotions, your sense of purpose, on half an operating system. No warning message pops up. No flashing red light says, “Hey, something vital is missing.” Everything looks like it’s working. You can get through the day. You might even be successful by most external standards. But something in your soul is running in survival mode.
You just know there’s an ache, subtle but persistent, like a hunger you can’t quite name. An emptiness that doesn’t scream, but hums beneath the surface of everything. A low-grade sense that you’re missing something vital, like trying to tune into a song you were made to sing, but only catching faint echoes. Life works, sort of, but it doesn't feel whole. Relationships are fine, but somehow not safe. You show up, but something inside you wonders if you really belong. It’s that haunting feeling of always reaching but never quite arriving, like your heart is living just a few steps behind where it was meant to be. Something’s off and you feel it and sense it. But identifying what ‘it’ is seems fleeting.
That “something” is often insecure attachment, the invisible thread woven through our story that shapes how we connect, how we trust, how we see ourselves and others. It’s not always obvious at first. It shows up in our overthinking, our fear of being too much or not enough, our struggle to rest, or our deep longing to be known while feeling terrified to let anyone truly in. Insecure attachment isn’t just a psychological label, it’s a relational injury. And like any unhealed wound, it quietly distorts how we experience love, safety, and belonging until we name it, tend to it, and begin the healing journey back to secure connection.
Attachment, In a Nutshell
Attachment is the way our brains and bodies learn to connect with others, especially in our earliest relationships. It forms through consistent, loving, attuned care and shapes how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we experience the world. When that care is present, we develop secure attachment, a deep inner sense that we are safe, loved, and worthy of connection. But when that care is inconsistent, neglectful, or harmful, we develop insecure attachment, which leaves us anxious, avoidant, or disorganized in relationships. Instead of connection feeling safe, it starts to feel uncertain or even threatening.
What Is Secure Attachment?
Secure attachment is the foundation of emotional safety. It’s what forms in us when, as children, we are consistently attuned to, seen, soothed, and safe with at least one emotionally available caregiver. It’s not about perfection, thankfully, but about relational repair, consistency, and presence. When we’re securely attached, we know a few core truths deep in our bones:
I am loved, even when I’m not performing.
I am seen, even when I’m struggling.
I am safe, even when the world is not.
I matter, even when I feel messy.
I’m accepted, even when my behavior isn’t so great
Secure attachment forms the blueprint for how we relate to God, ourselves, others, and the world around us. It's not just emotional fluff, it’s the internal GPS that guides how we handle conflict, navigate intimacy, tolerate distress, and discern whether the world is safe or threatening. It is the operating system for a life that’s fully alive.
Attachment Isn’t Just Emotional, It’s Neurological
Here's the wild and wonderful part: Secure attachment isn’t just something that happens in our hearts, it’s built into our brains.
We’re born with the left hemisphere of our brain more dominant. This is the part responsible for logic, language, and cause-effect thinking. It’s the analytical side, the checklist-maker, the explainer. But our attachment style develops in the right hemisphere, the relational side of the brain. This is where we process emotions, nonverbal cues, facial expressions, tone of voice, and connection.
And here’s the kicker: The right brain develops only in real-time, face-to-face, emotionally attuned relationships. You can’t read your way into secure attachment. You can’t logic your way there. You have to experience it.
And it’s the right hemisphere that is supposed to inform the left, not the other way around. Why? Because the right brain is where we first learn to feel before we can think. It’s responsible for processing emotion, relationships, tone, rhythm, body language, and all the nonverbal cues that make human connection possible.
It gives us our sense of identity, belonging, and safety in the world. Only after those experiences are rooted and interpreted through relationship does the left brain come online to make sense of them with logic, language, and structure. What’s more, the right brain is much, much faster at processing information than the left, up to six times faster, meaning it makes rapid, intuitive assessments about safety, connection, and emotional context long before we can explain or analyze what’s happening. When the left brain tries to lead without the grounding of right-brain connection, we may look competent on the outside, but we live disconnected on the inside, disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from the emotional truth of our own story.
When we grow up without healthy, secure attachment, it’s like our relational brain (the right side) never fully boots up. The left side is still running, managing tasks, making arguments, checking boxes, essentially, performing, but it’s doing so disconnected from relational wisdom, identity, and emotional regulation.
We’re running on half the system. And yet, we don’t feel broken. Just busy. Just stressed. Just a little numb. Or always anxious. Or perpetually driven. Or inexplicably exhausted.
The Brain on Insecure Attachment
When secure attachment doesn’t develop, the lower levels of the right brain take over. This is where the amygdala lives, our fear and survival center. It’s always scanning for if something is good, bad or if it’s dangerous, always alert to threat, always asking: “Am I safe? Am I loved? Am I too much? Am I not enough?”
Without secure attachment, the amygdala becomes the narrator of our life story, the relational filter, so to speak, and it’s limited and at times not rational, although it feels rational to us at the time. Relationships start to feel unsafe. Vulnerability feels threatening. Even God can start to seem distant, critical, or disinterested, not because He is, but because our brain’s relational filter isn’t fully developed nor fully informed with truth.
In contrast, secure attachment allows us to operate from the upper right brain, where secure identity is developed and stored. This part of the brain is only built through secure relationships. When this region is developed and engaged, we live from:
A felt sense of belonging that doesn’t leave us
A solid internal identity that doesn’t change with circumstances
Capacity for mutual connection and ability to repair relational ruptures well
The ability to regulate our emotions through connection, not control
The ability to endure hardships well and not lose our sense of self (we remember who we are and are able to suffer well yet not forget our identity)
In Insecure Attachment:
You fear intimacy but also feel desperately lonely.
You over-function in relationships to earn love or withdraw to avoid hurt.
You live in your head, analyzing everything but feeling little.
You fear God’s disapproval and work to keep Him “pleased” but struggle to believe He actually delights in you.
Secure Attachment:
You can name your emotions and stay present in them.
You seek connection without grasping or controlling.
You can rest and believe in the love of God even when life is uncertain.
You can repair after conflict instead of retreating or retaliating.
Why Secure Attachment Matters to Faith and Discipleship
When we’re securely attached, we can finally live the kind of life Jesus modeled: relationally present, emotionally grounded, boundaried, Spirit-led. We can hear His voice, not through the static of fear or performance, but through the secure knowing that we are His beloved.
Discipleship isn’t about behavior modification, it’s about identity transformation. But identity only forms in secure, relational environments. That’s why emotionally healthy discipleship starts with emotionally safe connection, with God and with others, consistently, over time. Secure attachments move at the speed of healthy relationships that build trust and grow over time.
As followers of Jesus, we often try to disciple others with doctrine, strategies, curriculums, and systems, all left-brain things that require zero relational skill (all good things, mind you). But if our right brain is still running on fear and disconnection through the amygdala running the show, we won’t be able to live out what we know, or what we’ve learned through all the reading and information gathering. And we won’t be able to give away something we don’t have. And when our sense of identity is still fragile, it’s like a house without a strong foundation. And until that deep need for secure connection is healed, spiritual growth will feel more like performing or proving than actually becoming.
Becoming Secure, Here’s The Good News
Here’s the hopeful truth: Attachment wounds can heal. Our brains are designed to change and grow, which means that new relational experiences, especially ones that are safe, consistent, and emotionally attuned, can actually rewire how we think, feel, and connect.. That’s why emotionally healthy Christian community matters so much.
Every time you’re seen and not shamed, someone stays with you in your sadness, you’re forgiven instead of punished…your right brain gets a new message. And little by little, those moments begin to rewrite the old scripts. The fear-based system that once ran your life starts to give way to a new operating system, one that is now built on connection, safety, and trust.
This is how healing happens: not all at once, but moment by moment, relationship by relationship, until your heart begins to believe what it was always meant to know. I am not alone. I am worth loving. I don't have to perform to be accepted. I can be fully known and still fully wanted. I am safe, I belong, and I matter.
This is the quiet miracle of secure attachment: it teaches the heart to rest in the truth it was created for.
Here’s a Question Worth Asking Especially For Those of Us Making Disciples:
If we aren’t securely attaching to the people we’re discipling, can we really call it whole-brained, whole-hearted discipleship?
Jesus didn’t disciple at a distance. He didn’t run a program, drop truth bombs, or hand His followers a to-do list. He attached to them. He lived with them. Ate with them. Cried with them. Asked them questions. Sat in their fears. Restored them when they failed. His love was not just instructional, it was incarnational.
When we try to disciple others without secure attachment, without safety, attunement, and relational presence, we unknowingly reinforce the idea that God, too, is distant, demanding, and conditional. We disciple people into performance rather than presence. And while they may learn theology or spiritual disciplines, their identity remains unhealed, their right brain unformed, and their relational capacity underdeveloped. That’s not discipleship, that’s spiritual striving with Bible verses on top.
Loving people like Jesus means securely attaching to them. Not co-dependently. Not possessively. But with a steadfast, gracious, emotionally mature presence that says, “You’re safe with me. I’m not going anywhere. You matter, not because of what you do, but because of who you are.” When we create that kind of environment, the brain changes, the heart opens, and true spiritual formation begins.
Secure attachment isn’t a side note in discipleship. We believe it’s the soil in which transformation actually grows.
We were made to attach.
To God, to others who are emotionally safe, to ourselves. Securely. Tenderly. Joyfully. When we do, we don’t just function better. We truly become fully alive.