Sex, Spirituality & Attachment Theory

In this episode, learn about the importance of secure attachment, not to another human first, but to the divine. Jenny will share her story about connecting with Mary Magdalene. This episode wraps up by discussing how a secure attachment to the divine positively affects our romantic relationships. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Why Didn't I Know Podcast? This is episode 22. I'm your host, Dr. Jenny Martin, and this episode is entitled Sex, Spirituality, and Attachment Theory. So today we're going to be talking about attachment theory, but in a way that is very different than what you may have heard of before. We're going to talk about it in relationship to sexuality and spirituality. Normally, attachment theory is really focused on how your relationships as a young child, as an infant, how they were developed, how emotionally close you felt with your caregiver will determine, according to this theory, how you show up, how you respond in all your relationships as an adult, whether those are sexual or non-sexual relationships. So whether you feel secure in relationships as an adult can be traced back to how that happened for you as a child, whether your needs were met, whether you felt taken care of. And as an adult, if you have an anxiousness around relationships, if you have a sense of avoiding relationships, or you're always the one to leave, or you feel abandoned, all of those different types of ways we can respond in close romantic relationships and also in platonic relationships is tied back to your primary relationships when you were growing up, according to attachment theory. And the idea being, yes, you can go to psychotherapy to work through this, but there is a template that you have based on how you grew up. How those emotional relationships were formed is going to really dictate how you're going to show up as an adult. And depending on who you're working with as a therapist, they're going to approach it differently. But in general, it's common to believe that you just have to become aware of your attachment style, whether you're more anxious or avoidant or secure, have self-compassion, and the same for your partner. Understand what their attachment style is and have compassion for them as well, and kind of you know work around it. Well, let me speak from personal experience. I did not have my emotional needs met. I grew up in a family that there was a lot of strife, there was financial turmoil, there was domestic violence, there was a lot going on, right? So suffice it to say, my emotional needs just didn't even, you know, rank at all. So according to attachment theory, I would be set up for a life of not really having emotionally bonded, secure relationships, and most specifically not in a romantic, in a sexual uh situation with a you know partner. And what I can tell you is that has not been the case in my life. My relationship with my partner has been securely attached. This was not something that would be expected by my childhood. And how did that happen? It didn't happen because I went through years or or even months of psychotherapy or talk therapy. It also didn't happen because I went through a lot of somatic therapy, even though both of those different ways of coping and healing can both be very, very helpful to people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting that a lot of people receive a lot of benefit. And I've gone through my own graduate school in psychology. So I completely understand that the importance of looking at things from that framework and really working to help people in that way. However, the reason why I talk about spirituality so much on this podcast and in you know, in relation to intimate relations, is this is what has been transformational in my life. Looking at things through the lens of spirituality and making spirituality real in my life has been the catalyst for my healing of this whole attachment deficit that I had when I was younger. And what I've come to believe is that there is something that is faulty in our theory of attachment theory. Yes, of course, as an infant, your needs, you know, there's a prime, there's a primal need for you cry, you need your diaper change, you need food, you can't take care of yourself. Absolutely. We need our needs to be met as a child, a hundred percent. And you know, we know of the studies that even though survival needs were being met by children in one study, if they didn't get love and you know, connection, emotional connection from a caretaker, it actually affected their overall physical well-being. So as an infant, yes, those things are important. But what I'd like to address is whatever happened to you as a child, whether you had those needs met or not, we really can't control, do much about that when we're too tiny to even articulate anything for ourselves or to speak or say anything or to even know what's going on. But when we grow into adulthood, the idea that what happened with our primary caretakers when we were a child and an infant is going to dictate the rest of our lives. That is what attachment theory is kind of suggesting to us. That I suggest to you is not only not very helpful for most people, it actually, I do not believe, it's the way we were designed. So when you think about it like this, every human being, even if they're someone that had a secure upbringing, they had that secure emotional bond, as an adult, yeah, they may form securely emotionally close relationships, and they may be someone that you're in a relationship with that you really know that you can trust and you have that connection. But even then, we are human, we have bad days, we something might go wrong at work and we're not communicative with our partner when we come home. It may have nothing to do with your partner, it may have something to do with a complete other area of your life, but it's going to spill over to your intimate relationship. And even though that person is so-called in the category of securely attached, if they have an off day, which we all do, then you're not going to derive that emotional closeness with that person on those days. So I feel that we're not really helping people in the way that's really sustainable by sourcing that sense of security as an adult, I'm speaking about as an adult, not a child, from another person. So, what I'm suggesting here is that the idea that if we didn't get this as a child, we're kind of messed up for our for the future as an adult is an incorrect premise. My idea is that we weren't meant, we weren't designed as an adult to find security in in another person. Yes, it's very healthy and we need other people and to be socially connected and to have intimate bonds and emotional bonds is part of who we are as humans. We seek relationship. When people are on their deathbed, they're not talking about their accomplishments, they're talking about their loved ones, their relationships. We are social beings. However, sourcing our sense of security from another person is problematic at best. So sourcing our security from the divine is the way we were designed. Now, this psychological theory of attachment theory does not account for spirituality. Spirituality is just not even part of the mix, it's not seen as relevant. Because let's face it, spirituality, you're not touching the human being, you're not there in the presence of something that you can see, someone that you can see. Spirituality takes a certain level of faith. But can it be a real relationship where you can source security? That's the big question mark. And my answer to that is yes, because I've lived through that. And still to this day, sourcing my security, regardless of an intimate relationship, is with the divine. And what to know about that is no matter what your partner is doing, no matter if they're having a bad day, if they're having a good day, if you have that connection with the divine yourself, then you're always going to be able to source that. And I know that people always ask me, well, why can't you just have that secure connection with yourself? Well, you certainly can, and you certainly need to be your own best friend and have self-love and self-compassion. But let's face it, not all of us feel completely strong, completely on top of our game every day. And you know, there's a statement in the Bible that says something about the fact that when I am weak, I am strong. And it's evoking this sense that we don't have to just draw on our own strength. We can draw on the strength of the divine. Now, when I'm talking about that, I'm not talking about a man in the sky. I'm talking about having a relationship with an aspect of the divine that feels personal to you. And let me make that more concrete. In my own life, when I discovered the hidden story about Mary Magdalene, that she wasn't this pentitent prostitute, this lowly sinner, that she was actually an enlightened woman in her own right and was co-equal to Jesus. When I discovered that story through scholarship, through The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starboard and other really profoundly well-researched books on the subject, I felt the reality of that. I felt that even though my intellect was understanding words about her, something just rang true about that version of the story inside me, like at a cellular level. And I felt, even though I had only grown up as a Catholic in Ireland, knowing about Jesus, Mother Mary, I felt that this Mary Magdalene, this representation of the feminine aspect of God, was someone who I could feel connected to. I couldn't feel connected to a perfect celibate mother in terms of the Virgin Mary, but I could feel connected to a powerful sexual woman who was in relationship with Jesus, I could feel connected to her. And my process started way long ago, decades ago, and overcoming PTSD and overcoming a lot of different things, conditioning from religion and so forth. And in that journey, I didn't always feel like I could just source strength for myself. It was necessary and still is at times today to seek protection, to seek strength, to seek guidance from a connection, a personal relationship with the divine. And yes, you can say the divine is a presence that is everywhere present, omnipresent. And that I totally believe as well, but it's hard to have a relationship with an everywhere present, just amorphous thing, right? We in our finite minds, we are more suited to having a name to relate to, having a sense of a personality involved to relate to. But I could feel this with Mary Magdalene. So what started my journey so many years ago was looking to Mary Magdalene in my time of meditation, also in my time of connecting through sexual pleasure, to invite her in. You invite her to be with you, and it's always about invitation. This presence, what whoever you're calling on, cannot be with you without an invitation. There's always an invitation that is required. But when I have done that, I have noticed a peace, I have noticed a shifting in my energy. And there's been times when I didn't know the path forward. I was confused about my next steps, and I asked for assistance to be given some guidance, and it wasn't necessarily the way I would have expected it to show up. But time and time again, some piece of guidance, some clear direction opened up. When I reached the end of my stress and frustration and struggling, and I finally remembered, oh yeah, I could ask Magdalene to help me. And once I did, once I turned over, you know, trying to control everything, trying to make things happen, there it's just something showed up that was beyond my human mind to fabricate in that moment. And what I have done over the years is for the most part, I'm not religious on this, but for the most part, it's been really, really helpful for me to keep a journal. And I don't write a novel, I don't write, you know, pages and pages every day. But when one of these situations happened, happens when I have turned something over to Magdalene, to the divine, and asked for assistance, asked for guidance. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily happen right in that moment, but it might happen a couple days later or a couple of weeks later. And I it's unmistakable that I know that it wasn't me that made this happen, that it happened on its own accord, and I believe with her assistance. And when that happens, and I record it in my journal, it is that is where the relationship develops. Because just like with human beings, it's not what you say that really makes someone trust you, it's how you back it up with your behavior, with your actions, right? How you're actually showing up and keeping your word and actually fulfilling on your promises, not just making empty promises, but actually fulfilling on them. And even though I'm talking about right now about a relationship with a being that I don't see with my physical eyes, I do have a secure attachment there because I can see so many instances where my peace came to me in times where I just felt like completely just wiped out by grief or wiped out by some kind of devastation, or guidance showed up, or you name it, you know, tangible things like a time when I needed a job and I could not find anything. And then lo and behold, something that even beyond what I could imagine showed up. Now, I need to mention something here as well, and that is I am not suggesting that this is about, oh, I'm gonna turn it over to Mary Magdalene, she's gonna solve my problems, and I can just kick back and watch Netflix. That's not what I'm saying at all. In the country that I grew up in, Ireland, in the Catholic community, there, there was this saying that pray and move your feet. So pray to God and then go take action. And that is absolutely the way that I approach it today is yes, I'm evoking the presence of Magdalene, but I'm also doing what I know to do to resolve the situation. So, for instance, that time where I absolutely needed employment, I asked for divine assistance, but I also was monitoring my thoughts when I was going into visualizing the worst, I had to reel that in and switch that thought. And as we know, what thoughts we're telling or what our self-talk is, what we're visualizing, is gonna translate into our feelings. So the more that I monitored what I was thinking and visualizing, shifted my feeling. It took a while to do that, it didn't happen in a day or even a week, but over time I was able to shift that feeling of security. When I shifted my body into a feeling of security by managing my thoughts and a vision, when I had that feeling of security that it was already there, even though I still had no sign from the external world that, yeah, here's your here's your job, here's your finances, there still wasn't any external sign. I was getting no responses, like zero. But what my job was, since I was involving the divine and acting out of faith, was to feel the result before I saw it. And what is the definition of faith? The definition of faith is living in the end, living in the conclusion. What do we want to feel like? Not necessarily the material item that you want, because maybe what you want isn't actually gonna make you feel happy. So go for the feeling of actually what you want. And when you hand it over to the divine, this is when something beyond what your finite mind can make happen. When you involve the divine, something beyond what you can make happen can happen. And that's exactly what happened for me. Something beyond what I could make happen showed up. Just it's almost like the minute I was aligned and I felt secure within my being, it was almost like the heavens opened up and this person got introduced to me, and it was just the most amazing opportunity that showed up. Now, why that didn't show up weeks earlier? Well, it's because I was totally stressed out, thinking about the worst case scenario, my mind was visualizing worst case scenario, and the divine could not reach me at that time to help me. I needed to line up my own being, my thoughts and feelings, so I could receive what the universe, what Magdalene was trying to help me with. So I needed to bring myself up in frequency to realize what was being offered to me from that mystical realm. So this is what I'm talking about. There can be this secure attachment where you document these things where when that finally did break open, when that finally did get that position, it was so beyond, like it happened in such a quote coincidence. It wasn't even one of these resumes that I was sending out. I was doing all this footwork, but in the end, the opportunity that showed up for me wasn't even something that I had sought after, but it came to me, and it came to me in a bigger, better way than all the things I had been looking at on my own. So when I look back at, oh, there's so many instances of when I asked for assistance and I was given the assistance, but it always taken my willingness to believe that I was getting assistance. I know for a fact that I can't ask for the assistance and then be fearful every moment. Then I block the help that is there for me. But when I do look back at my journals and I look at how, you know, I'll write something down that I'm struggling with an answer, struggling with a decision, and I'll write it down in my journal, and then I'll turn it over and ask for assistance, and then I'll forget about it, and I'll be writing about other things in my journal. And then, lo and behold, when I've kind of put it out of my mind and I'm just at peace, knowing that it's gonna be taken care of, then lo and behold, something shows up that is exactly the clear direction or the answer or what needs to happen next. And I'll write that in my journal and I'll look back a few days or a week and I'll realize how all of this came together. So in hindsight, looking back, that's when all of this makes sense. It doesn't make sense in the present time. In the present time, it can feel like everything's falling apart, it can feel like there's no answers, there's no assistance, and I know what that's like. I know what in the moment you can feel like there is no divine assisting me, there is nothing like that around me. But when you look back historically at your life and you look back at, okay, when are the times when you felt like you couldn't go on and you couldn't figure this out, or you know, you had no support from human beings, but you called on the divine and it showed up in a tangible way that was unmistakable, that you didn't make happen of your own ego with your own sense of control. Those times that happened to you, it's worth recording them because when you go back and review that in your moments of real heartache or struggle, you remember that you are being assisted. And that's what I mean by developing a secure attachment with the divine. You know that you're not doing life alone. You know that no matter what happens to your relationship, whether you're married or single or whatever, whether you're in a partnership or whatever, you know that no matter what happens in that human relationship, that you're never alone. And yes, we do need other people. We do need to be with people. We're designed for social relationship, but it gives you a sense of grounding, solidness, and security to know that you don't source that emotional bond first and foremost from another human, you source it from the divine because there is a constant flow of unconditional love that is available to us from that realm. And the reason why I talk about okay, having a relationship with Magdalene or some people that I work with in my classes, they say they want to have a relationship with Isis or Anana or you name it, just the whole spectrum. Or if someone is male, they're probably going to want to pick a male version of that. But the point here is that we relate to a divinity that we can put an identity to, that we can put that kind of humanness to it. Not that God is a man in the sky or a woman in the sky, not at all. That's not at all what I'm suggesting. But these embodied representations of the divine help our finite human mind to grasp these concepts. That's all I'm saying, and to have a sense that this is real. Now, the other aspect of this is I'm not saying at all that the way that we spiritually awaken and grow is to always have an external relationship with the divine. No, it is completely about realizing the divinity is within us. A hundred percent. Everything that I am teaching and writing about is all about that divinity within yourself. But as I mentioned, as a stepping stone to our own enlightenment, I myself and people that I work with find it very helpful. Sometimes in our moment of real struggle to access that relationship that is, so to speak, a higher power. What this is, is a celestial helper, so to speak, that is helping you see the divinity within you and raise your vibration, raise your ability to see yourself as a whole being. You know, so often we look at the worst in ourselves or the worst in other people, and we just see life through the lens of hopelessness or negativity. And when you invoke this relationship with the divine, you're being aided to take on a new view, a new perception that is a perception of you already being whole, not full of sin or full of karma or full of darkness that you have to get rid of. But the path that we're talking about here, that is the path that has really helped me, is the early Christianity, the gospel of Mary Magdalene, the gospel of Philip, that is talking about there isn't a sinful nature in you. You don't have all this dark shadow self that is your actual, you know, lot in life, that you came into this world or you got this from your ancestors or something, and you have to work through all the shadow work. It's quite the opposite. It's that you are divine, you have this light, you have this radiance, you have this sacredness within you. And the more that you can become aware of this potent spiritual vitality and radiance within you, the more that you can step into that as being your reality. Now, that doesn't mean that at some times you're not gonna feel like the opposite of that. Like you are just really feeling terrible and negative and all of that for real reasons. You know, you you lose someone in your life, you're gonna have grief, right? You lose a job, you're gonna maybe be scared or something, right? But those are human experiences that move through our body, but they're not our identity. They're emotions that we feel and we experience, and we need to. It's not about denying our emotions, but that is not our identity. We can source our identity from this divinity within us that is never harmed, that is never desperate, that is never worried, that is never stressed. It's a solid steadiness within us that knows that in the end we come through all of this and are united with our divinity, which is unconditional love, which is source of strength, vitality, resilience, and all of that. And when we do that for ourselves, when we live with that knowing, this is when we can improve and get to a deeper level in our intimate relationships. And when we're talking about human sexuality, we're talking about sacred sexuality, it is really important for us to realize that during sex, the surrender that is required to get to a deep state, to activate those psychedelics that are within our body, to get to that mystical state, is not a surrender to another human being. It's not a surrender to your partner, it's a surrender to this higher self, to this divinity within you. But I suggest to you that it's not enough to just live from your, I gotta do life on my own, I gotta make it happen, I gotta push, try to make things happen, I gotta struggle, struggle, you know, do all life on my own. It's not enough to do life like that and then get into an intimate situation and say, oh, I'm gonna have sacred sexuality today, I'm gonna surrender to my divine. It doesn't work like that. It's a lifestyle. This is a way of living as a spiritual being where you've made the decision that you're not doing life on your own, you're doing life in harmony, in union with the divine. And whether it means for you calling in a goddess representation or God itself or Mary Magdalene or Jesus or whatever that is for you, or maybe it's just Gaia or whatever you choose it is, but having that relationship with the divine yourself, which is also part of activating your own divinity within. Living like that, bringing that divine relationship into issues that you have at work, issues that you have in your finances, all the different myriads of life, all the different facets of life, that grounds your own secure attachment with the divine. And you need a secure attachment before you're going to surrender. So that needs to happen in your daily life for you to then be in the sexual situation with your partner, and really for your body and your nervous system to really enter that deep state of surrender, you're doing it from a place of I trust the divine, I'm securely attached to the divine, so now I can go into deep surrender, embodied surrender during sex. Or when we do that, when our surrender is from that during sex, this is when we have the ability to go to the most profound, magical, mystical, unconditional love alter state that is humanly available to us. So that's the invitation that we all have from the divine to live our lives without such a sense of struggle, without such a sense of I have to make this happen, I have to do it alone, it's all on me. Or I have to, you know, my partner's not doing pulling their weight, they're not doing enough, or the people in my life are not doing enough, it's all on me. Sure, we need other people, and having other people we can work with is important, but there's another level to that. When we really partner with the divine and are living life with a sense of dependence and expectancy and gratitude and trust in our relationship with the divine, we know that we're not doing it alone. And it gives us a certain concreteness, a certain groundedness in our own being that lets us connect with our partner, connect with our romantic partner, intimate partner, or even close friends in a more secure way. So that's what I'll leave you with today. Thank you so much for listening. I will look forward to connecting on our next episode.