I had the joy of completing my Relational Spirituality Coaching Certification last year with Dr. Todd Hall. In my business, Tenderly Transformed Coaching, I love being able to assist people in these areas as they continue to heal and grow.
Transformed by His Love is a caring community. Join us by subscribing.
I thought it might be helpful to explain some of the concepts and tools that I’ve found really helpful for my clients and in my own spiritual and emotional journey.
WHY IS JOY CAPACITY OR JOY STRENGTH IMPORTANT IN THE HEALING PROCESS?
I have previously shared a video about the FIVE BAR exercise and an article about Immanuel Journaling. I often help my clients build their joy capacity/increase their joy strength. This makes healing more possible. Here’s a link that will take you to these resources I wrote about earlier:
Have you ever wanted to find a creative way to strengthen your relationship with God? Do you like journaling? I wanted to share how Immanuel Journaling has encouraged me in my walk with God, and it has given me a structure that helps me recognize how very real and present God is as He relates to us as His children.
In relational spirituality, the idea that “we need to have a stronger joy capacity than the pain in order to heal” aligns with the principle that secure attachment provides a foundation for resilience and growth. Joy, in this context, is not merely happiness but the deep, relational experience of being delighted in by another—whether God or a trusted person. This joy creates a secure emotional base, enabling us to face and process pain without being overwhelmed. Dr. Todd Hall’s work emphasizes that secure attachment fosters this capacity for joy, as it teaches us that we are loved and valued, even in our brokenness. This joy is recorded in implicit memory and becomes a filter through which we interpret life’s challenges, allowing us to endure suffering with hope 27.
Hesed and Secure Attachment with God
Hesed, often translated as God’s steadfast love or covenantal faithfulness, is the biblical embodiment of secure attachment. It reflects God’s unwavering commitment to His people, providing a haven of safety and a secure base for exploration and growth. For example:
Lamentations 3:22-23: “Because of the Lord’s great love (hesed) we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning, great is Your faithfulness.” This verse highlights God’s reliability and care, even in the midst of suffering.
Psalm 136: The refrain “His love (hesed) endures forever” underscores the permanence of God’s attachment to His people.
Hesed mirrors the qualities of secure attachment: availability, responsiveness, and emotional attunement. It assures us that God’s love is not contingent on our performance but is steadfast, providing the relational security needed to process pain and grow through trials.
The principle that “the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10) illustrates how joy equips us to face challenges. In relational terms, joy acts as a buffer against pain, enabling us to engage with both comfort and challenge. Comfort provides the emotional safety to rest and recover, while challenge pushes us toward growth. Secure attachment balances these dynamics, as seen in God’s interactions with His people: He comforts them in their distress (Isaiah 41:10) but also challenges them to grow in faith and obedience (James 1:2-4).
Joy, rooted in the assurance of God’s hesed, empowers us to embrace both aspects of this relational dynamic.
Anger, Conflict, and Secure Attachment
Dealing with anger and conflict is integral to secure attachment because it requires emotional regulation and relational repair. Secure attachment teaches us that expressing anger or addressing conflict does not threaten the relationship but can deepen trust when handled constructively. Biblically, this is evident in God’s relationship with His people:
Psalm 13: David expresses anger and frustration with God, yet his lament leads to renewed trust: “But I trust in Your unfailing love (hesed); my heart rejoices in Your salvation” (v. 5).
Matthew 18:15-17: Jesus outlines a process for resolving conflict within the community, emphasizing restoration and relational repair.
Insecure attachment, by contrast, often leads to avoidance or escalation in conflict, as individuals fear rejection or abandonment. Secure attachment, whether with God or others, provides the safety to engage in conflict with the goal of reconciliation and growth.
In summary, joy, hesed, and secure attachment are deeply interconnected. Joy strengthens us to face pain, hesed assures us of God’s steadfast love, and secure attachment equips us to navigate anger and conflict with grace and hope. Together, they form a relational framework for healing and transformation.
Spiritual Growth Through Secure Attachment
Secure attachment is foundational for spiritual growth because it provides the emotional safety needed to explore and deepen our relationship with God. When we experience God as a secure base—someone who is consistently available, responsive, and loving—we are freed to engage in the transformative work of spiritual formation. This includes:
Processing Pain and Doubt: Secure attachment allows us to bring our full selves to God, including our doubts and struggles. For example, David’s laments in the Psalms (e.g., Psalm 13) show how secure attachment fosters honest emotional expression while maintaining trust in God’s hesed (steadfast love) 48.
Developing Resilience: Secure attachment equips us to face trials with hope, as seen in Romans 5:3-5, where suffering produces perseverance, character, and hope. This resilience is rooted in the joy and strength that come from a secure relationship with God (Nehemiah 8:10).
Practical Steps for Growth
Reflect on Attachment Patterns: Begin by identifying your dominant attachment filter and how it manifests in your relationship with God and others. Journaling or discussing this with a mentor can help uncover implicit patterns.
Seek New Relational Experiences: Growth often requires new experiences of trust and connection, both with God and within a spiritual community. For example, participating in small groups or mentoring relationships can provide the relational safety needed to rewire insecure patterns.
Practice Vulnerability with God: Engage in practices like lament, confession, and prayer, which invite you to bring your authentic self to God. Over time, these practices reinforce the belief that God is a secure attachment figure who welcomes your emotions and needs.
Embrace the Role of Hesed: Meditate on biblical passages that highlight God’s steadfast love (Lamentations 3:22-23, Psalm 136). Let these truths reshape your implicit relational knowledge, helping you internalize God’s unwavering commitment to you.
The Role of Community
Spiritual growth is rarely a solo endeavor. Secure attachment to God often develops in the context of secure relationships with others. As the Harvard Study of Adult Development underscores, good relationships are key to flourishing in every area of life, including spirituality 2. A supportive community can model God’s hesed, providing the relational experiences needed to heal attachment wounds and deepen your connection with God.
Ultimately, spiritual growth through secure attachment is a journey of transformation, where we learn to trust God as our secure base, process pain with resilience, and extend love to others in ways that reflect His steadfast love.
Relational Spirituality Coaching (RSC) and the Deep Growth Interview (DGI) are designed to help individuals identify and transform their attachment filters, fostering secure attachment with God and others. These tools integrate the principles of relational spirituality with practical coaching methods, offering a structured approach to spiritual and emotional growth.
So how can Relational Spirituality Coaching help you?
Relational Spirituality Coaching (RSC) and Attachment Filters
Relational Spirituality Coaching emphasizes the role of attachment filters—implicit relational schemas formed through early experiences—in shaping how we relate to God, others, and ourselves. These filters influence our capacity for joy, resilience, and relational engagement. For example:
Secure Filters enable individuals to experience God as a secure base, fostering trust and openness in their spiritual journey.
Insecure Filters (e.g., avoidant, anxious, or fearful) create barriers to relational and spiritual growth, often leading to emotional protection or relational disengagement.
RSC helps clients identify these filters and guides them toward new relational experiences that reshape their implicit relational knowledge. This process mirrors how secure attachment is formed in human relationships: through consistent, attuned, and responsive interactions 8.
The Deep Growth Interview
The DGI is a key tool in Relational Spirituality Coaching, designed to uncover clients’ attachment patterns and relational narratives. It integrates attachment theory with narrative coherence, encouraging self-reflection and meaning-making. Key aspects include:
Exploring Stress Responses: Clients reflect on how they cope with distress, revealing tendencies toward avoidance or anxiety. For example, a client might describe withdrawing from God during trials, indicating an avoidant filter.
Relational Narratives: Clients share adjectives and memories that characterize their relationships with caregivers and God. This process highlights implicit relational patterns and their impact on spiritual growth.
Disruptive Incidents: Clients discuss recent events that disrupted their sense of self, providing insight into how attachment filters shape their responses to life’s challenges.
Transforming Filters Through Relational Spirituality Coaching
The goal of Relational Spirituality Coaching and the Deep Growth Interview is to help clients move toward secure attachment by:
Identifying Relational Pain: Recognizing how attachment wounds influence behaviors and spiritual struggles.
Creating New Relational Experiences: Encouraging practices like lament, confession, and community engagement to rewire insecure filters and foster secure attachment with God and others.
Integrating Joy and Hesed: Helping clients internalize God’s steadfast love (hesed) and experience joy as a source of strength (Nehemiah 8:10), which builds resilience and capacity for growth.
By combining the insights of relational spirituality with the practical tools of coaching, Relational Spirituality Coaching and the Deep Growth Interview empower clients to break free from habitual patterns of emotional protection and experience deeper connection with God and others. Let me know if you'd like to explore specific coaching strategies or examples!
Healing and Growth Through Relational Spirituality Coaching: Tools for Developing Secure Attachment with God and Others
In a world where relational struggles often hinder spiritual and emotional growth, Relational Spirituality Coaching (RSC) offers a transformative framework for healing and flourishing. By integrating insights from attachment theory with biblical principles, RSC equips individuals to identify and reshape relational patterns that block their capacity to experience joy, love, and connection. As a coach, I use three key tools to guide this process: the Attachment Filter Matrix, the Spiritual Transformation Inventory (STI), and the Deep Growth Interview (DGI). These tools provide a roadmap for understanding relational dynamics and fostering secure attachment with God and others.
The Attachment Filter Matrix: A Framework for Understanding Relational Patterns
The Attachment Filter Matrix is a foundational tool in RSC that helps identify how individuals relate to others and regulate emotions. It organizes attachment styles along two dimensions:
Relational Engagement vs. Avoidance: This measures the degree to which individuals seek or avoid emotional closeness in relationships.
Emotional Composure vs. Distress: This reflects how well individuals regulate their emotions under stress.
The matrix categorizes attachment styles into four types:
Secure: High relational engagement and emotional composure, marked by trust, vulnerability, and resilience.
Avoidant: Low relational engagement but high emotional composure, characterized by emotional disengagement and self-reliance.
Anxious: High relational engagement but low emotional composure, leading to clinginess and emotional dysregulation.
Fearful: Low relational engagement and low emotional composure, resulting in withdrawal and relational exhaustion.
Understanding these patterns is the first step toward growth, as it reveals the implicit relational filters that shape how we connect with God and others.
The Spiritual Transformation Inventory (STI): Assessing Relational and Spiritual Dynamics
The STI is a comprehensive assessment tool that evaluates attachment patterns across three domains: relationships with others, God, and community. By measuring levels of avoidance and anxiety in these areas, the STI provides a nuanced picture of how attachment filters influence spiritual well-being. For example, an individual with high avoidance in their relationship with God may struggle to trust Him as a secure base, while someone with high anxiety may feel overly dependent on God’s reassurance.
The STI invites clients to reflect on their attachment tendencies and how these impact their spiritual journey. This self-awareness is crucial for identifying areas of growth and creating a vision for secure attachment, both with God and in human relationships.
NOTE: If you’re interested in taking the STI, reach out to me. I can facilitate this for a reasonable fee, and you would receive a detailed report that can be very helpful in your journey of growth. It’s especially helpful in understanding where you are at in your attachment with God and others, but it looks at different aspects of your spiritual life. The exercises, called Soul Care Projects, can help you grow in the areas where the assessment shows relative weakness or need for growth.
When you work with me as a client, I enjoy using the Deep Growth Interview in conjunction the STI to help clients explore the areas they would like to continue to grow and heal.
The Deep Growth Interview (DGI): Uncovering Relational Narratives
The DGI is a narrative-based tool that helps clients explore their relational history and its impact on their current attachment patterns. Through guided questions, clients reflect on:
Key Relationships: Describing their relationships with caregivers and significant others, using adjectives and memories to uncover implicit relational knowledge.
Stress Responses: Examining how they cope with distress, revealing tendencies toward avoidance or anxiety.
Disruptive Incidents: Discussing recent events that disrupted their sense of self, highlighting how attachment filters shape their responses.
The DGI fosters coherence in relational narratives, helping clients make sense of their past and its influence on their present. This process is deeply healing, as it allows clients to integrate their stories into a larger framework of growth and transformation.
How These Tools Foster Healing and Growth
Together, the Attachment Filter Matrix, STI, and DGI provide a comprehensive approach to relational and spiritual growth. Here’s how they work in practice:
Identifying Relational Pain: By uncovering attachment filters, clients gain insight into the relational wounds that hinder their capacity for connection.
Creating New Relational Experiences: Through coaching, clients are guided to engage in practices that foster secure attachment, such as lament, confession, and community involvement.
Integrating Joy and Hesed: Clients learn to internalize God’s steadfast love (hesed) and experience joy as a source of strength (Nehemiah 8:10), building resilience and capacity for growth.
The Goal: Secure Attachment with God and Others
The ultimate aim of Relational Spirituality Coaching is to help clients develop secure attachment, which is foundational for spiritual and emotional flourishing. Secure attachment enables individuals to experience God as a secure base, process pain with resilience, and extend love to others in ways that reflect His steadfast love. As a coach, I am committed to walking alongside clients on this journey, offering tools and insights that empower them to break free from habitual patterns of emotional protection and embrace the fullness of relational and spiritual transformation.
As a certified Relational Spirituality Coach, I love offering clients access to these tools developed by Dr. Todd Hall, a psychologist and professor at Biola. He’s also involved in a project at Harvard, and he mentors coaches and leads a cohort once or twice a year in Relational Spirituality.
If you’re ready to explore how these tools can help you experience deeper connection and growth, I’d love to partner with you in this transformative process. Contact me at Tenderly Transformed Coaching if you’re interested in talking further.
Together, we can move toward healing, joy, and flourishing.
In my upcoming book called Tenderly Transformed: Growing and Healing Through Turbulent Times, we look at various forms of turbulence in life, or the things that can throw you off balance. I offer insights into ways people can get unstuck and find help so they can lead more fulfilling lives.
Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you have questions or would like more information about any of the tools described in this article.
I would like to thank Dr. Todd Hall for developing these tools and for his books and resources. This article draws from his work in the area of attachment and spiritual formation. This information is shared with his blessing.
Transformed by His Love is a caring community, and a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
