Couples Therapy with God

Your relationship with the divine always takes the shape of your relational patterns in general.

This seems almost too obvious to write, but people keep finding it helpful, so: your relationship with the divine always takes the shape of your relational patterns in general.

Think of your emotional system as a series of canals, grooves dug inside of you by the force and drag of habit. Whatever you pour into those canals flows through the same basic shapes — whether it’s your relationship with your mother, your boss, a single all-seeing sky-father, a pantheon of deities, or a shamanic world of animistic presences.

If you’re regularly trapped in drama triangle dynamics, your relationship with divinity will be too. You’ll feel like a victim needing god to rescue you — or a victim of the gods, needing someone else to save you.

If you seek out parent figures to solve your problems, you’ll spend a lot of time in petitionary prayer and vague skyward hopes.

Anxious attachment? You’ll bring that to how you relate to the sacred. Avoidant? Same. Constantly ending up with people who cycle hot and cold? You’ll likely feel the divine cycling between intimacy and impossible absence.

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This dynamic opens up a lot (I mean a lot) of ground to examine, but there’s just two points I want to gesture at for now:

1. The divine seems to want better ways of relating from us. This could easily be its own series of articles, but the short version is that it seems like the divine has a habit of pressing against our relational patterns. It seems to want either to break them, or to draw our awareness to their shortcomings. Especially their shortcomings as a way to relate to the divine fabric of Being itself — if some of these patterns are unbecoming ways to relate to your siblings, they’re almost startlingly inappropriate as ways to relate to God.
   
   For example, someone who had trouble setting boundaries kept relating to the divine in a way that violated his boundaries over and over again. This kept happening, to the point where it got ridiculous and he had to recognize that if he was going to fix his relationship with God, he was going to have to figure out his boundaries with the people around him. He had to stop letting other people cross his borders and decide life for him. When he did that, the divine also felt less invasive and peremptory.
   

2. We can’t leave relational work out of sacred practice. Me and Rosa wrote some about this last week, but it bears repeating: so much of awakening happens in relationship. This is true for any of a dozen reasons, but one of them is what we’re talking about here — that if you want to relate cleanly, wholeheartedly, and naturally with the divine, then you need to have those relational channels open in your life. Which means having those patterns available with the people around you.

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A final note on all of this — people (and religious traditions) have a tendency to mistake their experience of the divine for features of reality.

In other words: if you aren’t careful, you’ll enshrine your own unconscious relational patterns as laws of the universe. This is a great way to get stuck, both in practice and in your relationships.

If a guru is only really capable of transactional relationships, they’ll gather students and tell them with total certainty that if you want the gifts of the gods, you have to pay for them in such-and-such ritual methods.

If a teacher has a hard time stepping out of the drama triangle, the entire religious worldview they espouse will center on a never ending litany of victims, villains, and saviors.

These beliefs may be based on very deep personal mystical experience. But that doesn’t mean that they’re features of reality. It simply shows the lens being used to look at reality.

All of which is to say — whatever your experience of the divine is, keep aware that it’s very often more about you than about the divine. The ways you show up in that relationship, and the way that relationship shows up to you, are largely mirrors of your own habits, patterns, and development.

This doesn’t need to be disappointing or diminishing. It’s a really deep mode of experience, and brings you closer to God to begin to recognize what’s the divine, and what’s your own stuff — and where you could clean up or develop your own stuff to experience the divine in a new way. Hopefully in a way with fewer and fewer distortions, over time.