Episode 386 - Michael John Cusick, "Exploring Sacred Attachment: The Trinity, Neuroscience, and Experiencing Divine Love"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Today’s conversation dives deep into the heart of spiritual growth, as AJ Denson returns to interview Michael about his award-winning book, Sacred Attachment, Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love.

The episode explores Chapter 3, focusing on attachment theory and its profound connection to both psychology and the divine. Michael lays a foundation by tracing attachment back beyond neuroscience and child development, all the way to the ultimate example: the Trinity. Together, Michael and AJ unpack how the Trinity models perfect attunement and connection, and what this means for our relationship with God, others, and ourselves.

Transcript

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Hello friends, welcome back to the Restoring the Soul podcast. I'm Michael John Cusick, and today AJ Denson is on the podcast, uh, interviewing and hosting and emceeing. Hi AJ, welcome back. Hello, good to be back. Love being on the podcast. I think it was 5, maybe 6 months ago when we started walking through the chapters of Sacred Attachment Somehow, some way we got distracted, other things came up, and I thought we must have been 3/4 of the way through the book, but we're only on chapter 3. Hey, better late than never. We're hacking away at this book one bite at a time, and boy, is it a book to go through. And speaking of which, congrats on— as we just recorded this, your book just won an award. So congratulations for that. Yes, yeah, thank you for bringing up the fact that I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That was very, very gratifying. Yes, that one, yeah. No, it was really a treat because 2 weeks back to back, first InterVarsity, my publisher, notified me that the book, that they were taking nominations. And so we reached out through email and social media to friends of the ministry and to different channels that had shown interest in the book. And lo and behold, it got nominated for one of the books. And so there were 5 books in the category of spiritual growth and formation. And then a week later, found out that I won. I woke up a week ago today, Monday morning, and opened up an email. And this may sound like false humility, but it was like, aw, shucks. Excitement, but also I was not expecting it. There were some other really good books in the category. And very grateful to InterVarsity. It's been fun because just with that award called the Reader's Choice Award out of all of the 100 books that InterVarsity published in 2025, it's been interesting to watch social media metrics and things like that, or at least how people have reported that to me. And I know that that's all pretty superficial, but it's like that kind of attention brings it up to another level. And it's been reported that the book is a bestseller. So I'm really, really just grateful for that because the message, as we're going to talk about today, is really important to our relationship with God, our relationship with others, and ultimately our relationship and connection to ourselves. So thanks for bringing that up. And I just celebrate it. And thanks be to God. And thanks to all the readers who buy the book and Spread the word. Absolutely, man. It's a well-deserved award for a book, and it's a fantastic book. So a little plug if you haven't read it. Um, well, man, let's dive right in. Uh, chapter 3, you go into attachment, and kind of at the very beginning you talk about your staple. I call it staple because it's something that I've heard from you for many years, and it's— you've said it many times on the podcast, but the 4 S's. Um, and it'll kind of segue us into the of the book. Can you touch on the 4 S's again, just for those who haven't heard, and kind of remind us what those mean? Yeah, you bet. And before I talk about the 4 S's, I want to simply talk about, um, and you're right, the, the, uh, chapter is called Attached. All the chapters in Sacred Attachment are one-word titles. I, I just want to back up the truck before I get into the 4 S's and, uh, say that I believe that the story of Scripture, therefore the story of God, and therefore the gospel, because the gospel is not simply Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the holy gospels. The gospel is not simply a presentation that we give to somebody about how to, how they can be saved or how they can go to heaven. The gospel is this revelation from God that we see in the book of Genesis all the way through the book of Revelation, which is God basically saying this is who I am. This is what I'm like. I've had a number of conversations with people that are far more intellectual and philosophically and theologically astute than myself over the last several years around the material in this book. And in those conversations, I found some agreement around an idea that I've had, and that is the central question today for people that are thinking about God and his existence and whether they're Christians or whether they're some other religion. The central question is not, does God exist? To remind listeners, this idea of atheism or atheism, not believing in God, that's a very modern idea, and it's probably fresh from the Enlightenment, so maybe 400 years old, the 1600s. Post-Renaissance, post-Reformation. But I think the central question is not does God exist, but what is God like? And I've never heard an atheist who said, well, I believe that if God existed, that he'd be this wonderful, kind, merciful God that would humiliate himself, be born to an unwed teenage peasant girl, in a stable and then grow up to sacrifice himself in death. No, I've never heard an atheist say that, but what I have atheists say is, I could never believe in a God who blank allows innocent children to suffer, or who allows there to be so much suffering in the world, or any number of things like that. So the unbelief is actually a resistance against a certain kind of picture of God. And I find that very, very interesting. So why am I talking about this? That attachment is a concept that we will unpack and that I have unpacked on the podcast and in Sacred Attachment. It's a concept that is based in attachment theory and therefore in psychology and child development. It's a, a theory and a reality that's based in neuroscience that takes it from theory in psychology and development where you can't measure something or look at it under an X-ray, an MRI, or an fMRI or CAT scan or something like that. And it becomes far more empirical that we can actually look at the brain, we can actually see it light up. So that's part of attachment. But attachment is also something that is part of who God is, and it's part of how we were created as the imago Dei. So attachment doesn't start in the 20th century with psychology. It doesn't start with neuroscience. It actually starts in the very heart of the Trinity. Three separate eternal persons, and yet one substance. The idea of the Trinity is unexplainable on so many levels. It's a mystery. And yet we know that it's three separate persons and one substance, which is to say that there's something about the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, where they're actually one, where with each of them, they're connected, but there's no diminishment or loss to themselves. They actually, if you will, become more fruitful, more fully themselves, more fully the Father, more fully the Holy Spirit, more fully the Son, Jesus, not because they were somehow insufficient and became more, but because they spilled over. So within attachment and within the Trinity, which I believe is the, the ultimate and initial model of attachment, there's generativity. When there's a secure connection, when there's a secure attachment, there can be love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control. And therefore, on a human level, the conditions for it are to be seen, soothed, safe and secure. To come back to your point about the 4 S's, and I'm not going to do this now, but the book project that I'm writing on now, which I believe in some ways is kind

of the next logical step from Sacred Attachment: 8:36

Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting Divine Love, is the working title of Love Has You, continuing this idea that I stated over and over and over again. And of course, for the believer, Love, capital L, is God, specifically the God revealed in Jesus, and that love has us is to say that we are held. So in future conversations, I'll unpack book by book of the Bible, not all 66, ways in which we see the story of God and stories within books of scripture that might initially give us pause and say, whoa, I can't trust that. That doesn't feel like being seen. That feels like being shamed in certain stories, or that doesn't feel like being soothed. That feels like now I'm on edge because God's angry with the person in this story who, you know, is one of his chosen ones. So I'll pause there, then we can come back to the 4 S's. I'd love to hear what you're hearing. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hit the Trinity aspect one more time because I think It's something that I haven't heard you talk about before and how the Trinity relates to attachment. Could you go into further detail on that? Sure. So from a scientific perspective, attachment is a process before it's a style. And it's a process that the newborn infant has whereby, and I borrow this from Kurt Thompson and others, whereby that infant learns how to organize themselves in the world Where am I and where are people around me? Are they dependable? Are they reliable? When I cry, when I'm hungry— and of course, the infant has no cognitive construct or idea of what hunger is. They just know on a sensory level that their stomach hurts them or that it's gurgling. And so they cry out or they get restless, and then the caregiver comes. That's the process and the degree to which that caregiver, the parent, comes and attunes to them. To that degree, that infant who will become a toddler, who will become a preschooler, who will become a grade schooler, who will eventually graduate high school, maybe go to college, get married, have a family, et cetera, that infant will learn to regulate, that is, to be able to be present to themselves, to exhale, Ah, because there's another there that's attending to them. And therefore, in that attending, the adult's nervous system, whether they're anxious, whether they're calm, whether they're making eye contact, whether they're talking in a loud voice or whether they're talking in some prosodic voice using prosody of sing-songy language and talking quieter and maybe in a higher voice, all of that affects the nervous system of the infant, and they learn to regulate. So as we think about that within the Trinity, there's already perfect order. So I'm not saying that attachment is something that has to happen ongoingly within the Godhead because they are simply connected and they are simply one. And the Trinity is perfectly at peace. Perfectly regulated. So therefore, even when Jesus got angry and made a cord that we see that story in John and in other gospels, and he went to the temple and he got angry and he turned over tables, that somehow, some way in Jesus' body, yes, there was cortisol and adrenaline running through his veins and his nervous system, but that somehow he stayed in a place, I believe, where he wasn't out of control, but that even in what he was doing, there was an intentionality that would've been consistent with the purposes and the heart of that relationship which existed before time, which is the Trinity. And that story, as Pete Scazzero taught many years ago, I'll never forget this. He said Jesus' anger of turning over the tables was a sense of how dare you, how audacious and unacceptable of you, you who have— you're selling pigeons and coins and basically set up a market outside of the temple. How dare you block access to my Father's house? And he wasn't referring to just physical space. I remember watching the TV show The Chosen and watching Jesus get angry and go and make this cord and great intentionality and time and effort put into it. And it was because of not just the physical proximity to those vendors, if you will, that were holding a kind of flea market, but it was the way in which that whole system had become oppressive and said that there's only certain people that can go to my father's house that you have to pay certain taxes to go to my Father's house, that you have to do certain sacrifices to get there as well. And that Jesus who turned the tables is the same God who said in Isaiah chapter 1 through the prophet of Isaiah that your rituals, your sacrifices, and your new moon festivals stink in my nostrils. They literally are something that repulses me. That's what was going on there. So it might sound like we're a little bit off attachment, but I believe that what's fundamental to your question about more about the Trinity is that there is a relational connection that is just as it should be, and that the Trinity in this moment, as you and I are speaking, and for all of human history,— and forever, however long in eternity the Trinity existed before that, the Trinity has never been worried or pacing back and forth or scratching their head, the Father to the Son saying, "What are we going to do with them?" There's been a sense of ultimate presence, and here's what's

beautiful: 15:56

attunement. That the Trinity is the ultimate parental unit. It's the original family unit before the family unit that we see come together in Genesis Genesis 1, and that family unit of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is attuned to us and attuned to every human being, to our needs, to our pain, to our suffering, and therefore we are seen, soothed, safe, and secure, which raises a lot of questions about, well, what about the people in Minneapolis on either side? What about the children in Sudan that are being trafficked? What about What's happening in the Ukraine and the 1 million soldiers that have been lost since the time of the war who have widowed their wives and left their families behind, or who won't live a productive life and never have a family? What about them? How are they seen? So safe and secure. And so I get into that to some degree in the book, but ultimately the book is not and apologetic for suffering. Yeah, that's fascinating. Just to summarize, I'd love to go back and kind of highlight a point you were making, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're stating the Trinity is an ultra-incredible example of perfect attachment and perfect attunement between the three. Would you agree with that? Yes, and I would step out of the Old Testament where we see the "let us make man in our image" in Genesis chapter 1, and I would take you fast forward to the book of John, the Gospel of John, chapters 15, 16, and 17. And, you know, chapters 13 and 14 are the story of the Last Supper, the Lord's Supper. Jesus washes Peter's feet. And then they— Jesus gives his last sermon and he says that I'm the vine and you're the branches. And he talks about remaining and he talks about if you have seen me, you've seen the Father. And so he starts to unpack this idea of Trinitarian relationship. And over those 3 chapters, and especially in chapter 17, as Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit and through that whole narrative, It's, you know, I will leave so that I can send someone, and he's talking about the Holy Spirit. It's this beautiful relational connection that's there that in the context of Jesus talking about John 15, I am the vine and you are the branches, Jesus is saying that's what the Trinity is like. Because

he starts out at 15: 18:41

1-3, 1-10, talking all about vine and branches, and then he has this conversation with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And it's really this beautiful interweaving of that is both the Trinitarian reality of unity, oneness, attachment to one another, is the original template, the imago Dei, which is given to us. And the story of God is over and over through each and every book, we see this, what I'll call, uh, resting. And this is not in the book, this is some of the writing I'm doing now. A place of rest, a place of rupture, a place of repair. And rest isn't necessarily Adam and Eve or any of the other patriarchs or biblical characters, or you and I sitting with our feet up enjoying our favorite beverage. It certainly can't include that. But what I mean is resting in a sacred attachment, resting in this security, this indivisible union that's there that Jesus says, here's what that union is like. I'm the vine, you're the branch, and that's a union that's there and indivisible. That's the rest. Then there is an inevitable rupture. We see that happen in Genesis chapter 3. We see God show up and he asks the question, not what were you thinking, or how could you do this, or I thought that you loved me, or didn't I make the instructions clear? He says, Adam, where are you? God's attuned at that moment. Again, another picture of attachment, just like what neuroscience, good counselors, and attachment theory says, that a good parent is attuned to their child and will help them regulate when there's a rupture. And we talk about this a lot on here around rupture and repair. But the research is very clear that a child can have a very imperfect parent where there's rupture. And as long as that parent will literally and perhaps figuratively and perhaps literally get down on their knees and become small and talk in a quiet, humble, kind voice and look that child in the eye and maybe put their arm around them and require nothing of that child and say, I'm so sorry. Daddy was angry. That was wrong. Versus, I can't believe you didn't listen and that when you were stirring that bowl of pudding, it spilled all over the floor because I told you not to do it on the kitchen counter where you can't reach. You never listen to me in a harsh tone. Instead, getting down to their level, having that connection, Having that contact, that's attunement. And then engaging based on that, because anything that happens when the nervous system is dysregulated, that's not going to be a teachable moment for that child. Just like good marriage counselors say that when you're working with a couple, anytime the pulse rate gets over 100, communication is going to be broken down. That makes. Sense. We've really gotten off into the weeds here, haven't we? Boy, are we, man. We're up But I think this is really good. I think it sets up the idea of attachment and being able to go into these different styles because we can get into the nitty-gritty of it all. But the concept, the main mission here, especially of sacred attachment, is the sacred attachment to our Lord. And so I love the idea of bridging all of this together and kind of setting the scene. I think something I would love to hear you speak about is, you know, you've, you've related a lot of this to parents attuning with their children. And I'm sure— well, I'm not just sure, I know that there are people listening who, they're adults, they may have not had attuning parents, they may have not had good attachment styles established when they were younger. What is the first step for them when it comes to putting this idea of the Lord wants to attune with me, not just he's this big God in the sky and the white robe and the white beard kind of looks like a ripped Santa Claus and has this idea that, you know, there's actually a relationship here. What would you say would be the first step into diving into a actual attuning relationship with the. Lord? That's a great question, AJ, and I would start with the fact that it's recognizing that we want more. Um, I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but yesterday I read something where a spiritual formation spiritual director evaluated, um, a public prominent writer who was basically saying that quiet times should exist for study and biblical literacy and becoming really literate and informed about what God's word is. And the spiritual director was saying that that's not wrong, but that that's not the goal. And where they went to was the idea that what we're created for is experience with God, and that studying the Bible is not an end in and of itself to know the Word of God, but that it's to lead to, and its ultimate end is experience of God, which then leads to— this is now where I'm taking that illustration of the spiritual director and I'm leaving it behind. I would say that the goal of experience with God is to be loved in the ways where we've not been loved, where we've been wounded, where we've been traumatized, where we've been abandoned, where we've been lied to. The very things that start in Genesis chapter 3, because Adam and Eve in part did what they did because they were deceived and lied to which is how we live in the world. We have an enemy who's the father of lies and who's deceiving us and deceives us even to the point, as James chapter 1 tells us, that every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father above who doesn't change like shifting shadows. And he's contrasting the good and perfect Father to the father of lies because in James chapter 1, verses 12 through roughly 15, he's actually talking about temptation. And evil. So there's this contrast there. And so just this recognition of, I want more. And, you know, I think because I know you that this is some degree your story, and it was my story for many, many years where I read the Bible and I memorized scripture, and I still memorize scripture. I love to memorize scripture and I love God's word. But the whole thing was to have consistent quiet times and to somehow pray enough, and that never healed the brokenness inside of me so that the love of God that was there, because God already is, forever will be perfectly attuned to us, and there's not a moment of our existence where God is not perfectly attuned to us, but we can't love God, which is the goal, unless and until we've been loved by God. And there's been a little bit of criticism about my book, and I welcome any and all criticism, you know, that it's so focused on us and it's so focused on us being loved and us becoming whole. And therefore, some of the critique has been, you know, that it's overly therapeutic. And clearly I have a therapeutic bias because I'm a therapist, but I've never welcomed or appreciated this phrase, well, that's the therapeutic gospel. And I understand what people mean when they say, well, that's a therapeutic gospel or the therapeutic gospel, that it just leads to self-indulgence. Because self-indulgence is the opposite of having an other-centered life, or as they used to say in Latin in the early church, an ex curvatus se is a life that is overflowing and lived outward. In curvatus se is a life turned inward. So to the degree that therapy or theology or biblical teaching of any kind leads us to have a life turned inward, then that's not biblical, that's not Jesus-like, and it's certainly not Trinitarian. Having said that, I believe that I love God more than I did 20 years ago or 5 years ago, not because I've read the Bible more, but because I've been loved by God more. You know, we know in, I think it's Luke chapter 8, the story of the woman caught in adultery, and Jesus says the one who has been forgiven much loves much. And we know in 1 John that we love because he first loved us. And that means Michael, having known Christ about 40 years, that today I love because I've experienced his love. And so for people that are listening that feel spiritually lukewarm, to use that old phrase, people who feel spiritually cold, people that have deconstructed, people that have lost their faith, or even maybe unbelievers that are listening who think that this whole Jesus thing is represented by a political party or by a whole list of rules about what we cannot do. I want to say that loving God is singularly the gift of having been loved overflowing back to God. That's all it is. And so to come back to your question about where do we begin, we begin with the possibility that we are loved beyond our wildest dreams, that God actually wants us to experience that in our body. Thus a chapter in the book on embodiment, that he wants us to experience and receive that through our right brain, not just our left brain, where we are somehow apprehending facts and ideas, but through our right brain, we can actually comprehend and see the much bigger picture and the much bigger reality that we are in fact held in the heart of God. Awesome. That is a fantastic answer. And I think that is a great place to pause and pick up even more in-depth on attachment in the next episode.