A fresh look at Attachment Theory

Some of you will be familiar with our friends

Geoff Holsclaw (PhD)

and Cyd Holsclaw at

Embodied Faith

. They led a session on attachment theory at our 2024 Annual Summit, were featured on episode 9 of the Podcast and were speakers at our 2024 Conference. Each time, they shared on their working theory of Attachment Theory through the lens of four different landscapes.

As a fan and amateur student of Attachment Theory, I’ve loved watching this develop and grow, and was honored to write an endorsement for their new book, Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection (releases Aug 5, 2025). Here’s what I wrote:

Geoff and Cyd offer accessible language to those of us who often feel lost in clinical terminology. Not only do they clearly illustrate the landscapes of attachment as a tool for observation and awareness, but they also offer practical pathways forward and through our past relational experiences toward healing and wholeness. This is a gospel of hope and of being home where we belong.

BRIAN LEE, founder of Broken to Beloved

I want to say something up front: I am not a therapist or counselor, and have no fancy letters after my name. Attachment Theory is something I find great value in and am trying to learn more about and understand more deeply. I do not consider myself an expert, nor should you take me as such.

What I do know is this: it’s made a real difference in the way I see and understand myself, God, and others. And, it can be difficult to get a grasp on terminology and understanding the differences between anxious, avoidant, ambivalent, let alone the combined anxious avoidant and others. Different authors often use different preferred terms, which can add to the confusion.

What I love and appreciate about Geoff and Cyd is the way they’ve made attachment feel accessible and understandable. For me.

There are two main reasons I appreciate their work: first, it makes an abstract concept more concrete. Second, it positions attachment not just as evidence of something lacking or deficient, but as a positive survival strategy, with an invitation to move toward joy and connection.

Together, they paint a picture of four landscapes: the Jungle of Anxiety (anxious), the Desert of Avoidance (avoidant), the War Zone of Chaos (disorganized), and the Pasture of Joy and ­Peace (secure).

Those just make sense to me. They may not to you, and that’s totally fine. All I can say is that for my mind, it helps me to visualize what can be a very abstract concept.

I’m grateful to be able to share some excerpts with you from chapter 1 of their book with permission from their publisher. If you’d like to read more, order your copy on Amazon or by supporting your local bookstore on Bookshop, or wherever else you get your books.

As an Amazon and Bookshop associate, I do make a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Everything below the divider is an excerpt from Chapter 1, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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Chapter 1: Surviving Trauma & Hoping For Change

Imagine being dropped on a small jungle island. Your skills, habits, and instincts for surviving would quickly be tailored to that specific environment. Whatever tools or habits didn’t help you survive would be discarded.

Or think of being dropped in the middle of a desert. To survive, you would develop skills, habits, and instincts totally different from what you would need in the jungle.

All of ­ us—through the twists and turns of our particular lives and because of sin in the ­ world— find ourselves in different landscapes. While one person believes life is a jungle, another person lives as if it’s a desert. Someone else lives like it’s a war zone, while another lives as if it’s a lush, green meadow. These landscapes feel like home because they are all we’ve ever known. And we have developed survival skills adapted to the landscape we live in and from.

Throughout this book, we will use the scientific research on attachment theory to look at how you actually were dropped into a jungle, desert, war zone, or pasture at birth and how you learned to survive in that environment by gaining skills suited for that attachment landscape. And we will look at how these landscapes have shaped your ­ faith— how you pray, worship, and read the Bible. It has shaped your expectations of churches you have attended and how you relate to other Christians. Your attachment landscape has even shaped your view of God.

But you aren’t meant to live as if life were a jungle, a desert, or a war zone. You aren’t meant to live in anxiety, avoidance, or chaos. God designed you to live in joy and peace, as if you were in a pasture, under the protective care of the Good Shepherd.

The good news is that no matter which landscape you find yourself living in, Jesus meets you where you are, and he can also help you move toward the life of joy and peace you are made to ­ live— a life deeply attached to God…

Survival Skills

…You have survival ­ skills—relational and emotional survival skills you learned as a child. Skills that helped you when you needed protection. Abilities that helped you when you needed connection. Maybe your survival skills are focused on how to read people, understanding how they are doing and what they need. Or your survival skills are focused on ­ problem- solving, understanding patterns and following rules. All of us have relational and emotional survival skills that developed within a particular relational and emotional environment.

Over time, these survival skills grow into attachment strategies. These attachment strategies are the regular use of specific survival skills to navigate the relational and emotional environment you live in (you’ll learn specifically about these attachment strategies in part 2).

Most of the time you’re not thinking about your survival skills or attachment strategies. You’re just using them. When you’re distressed, threatened, or overwhelmed, they activate. And you don’t usually know or think about it. Your survival skills and attachment strategies automatically shape your view and experience of other people, God, the world, and yourself.

And a big part of your relational reality is how you shift between connection and protection.

Connection or Protection

…It is God’s good design that you shift between connection and protection. Your nervous system was made to scan your environment, focus on what is happening inside and outside you, and decide whether it’s safe to connect or whether you need to protect yourself…

Now here’s the twist.

All of us flow between connection and protection in different ways and for different reasons. Why? Because we have lived through different experiences (some traumatic) and in different relational and emotional environments. How we were raised, the specific survival skills we’ve learned, and the attachment strategies we’ve developed all impact how we respond to the common storms of life.

Yes. Maybe. No.

Let’s shift from how our nervous system works to how it became wired to react the way it does. Much of your ­ life—your life with God, with others, and with ­ yourself— boils down to one of these three words: yes, maybe, no.

Your specific survival skills, your attachment strategies, and your relational hopes and dreams emerge from this yes, maybe, or no. Of course, you don’t consciously know ­ this—you were a baby when these words began shaping your life. You don’t realize how these words control your movement between connection and protection. But they do.

Yes, maybe, or no are the three possible answers to one simple question: If I’m in distress, will someone help me?

• Yes. Someone will help me.

• Maybe. Someone might help me.

• No. Someone will not help me.

One of these three words has been

• defining your relationships,

• influencing your emotions,

• shaping your experience of your body, and

• directing the flow of your thoughts.

One of these three ­ words—yes, maybe, no—has been forming the very development and function of your brain, the structuring of your nervous system, and how you experience connection or perceive the need for protection. One of these three words has become your default expectation when it comes to relationships. (We will learn more about these attachment defaults in chapter 4.)

Sometimes you are completely accurate in understanding that certain people are not trustworthy. They really aren’t dependable and are not for you. But other times you’re making assumptions about someone’s availability without knowing it and never giving them the chance to prove otherwise. It’s because of your default of yes, maybe, or no.

Thankfully, as you will see, you can change your answer. Or rather, by becoming securely attached to God, your answer will change. And this will change everything in your life. The yes, maybe, or no that you live from is not your personality type. It is the strategy you used to protect yourself and survive…

God’s Good Design

Rather than beginning with all the struggles you have right ­now—­ your fears or frustrations, your doubts or disappointments, your anxieties or ­ avoidances— we are going to explore how God designed you to be securely attached to God and to others.

What would it be like to be so deeply rooted in God that you are full of faith, hope, and love? Full of faith in God being available to you. Full of hope for a better world. And full of love overflowing to others. How would everything be different if you could connect with people in healthy relationships without regularly slipping into protection mode? How would it be to freely offer yourself and your gifts to the communities where you belong and the people you love?

This is the way God designed it to be. God designed your brain and your body to be deeply attached to God and to others. Once you have a vision of how these deep roots are designed to help you thrive (part 1), you can understand how your attachment goes wrong (part 2) and see how God is repairing it all (part 3).