0204: Insecurely Attached to God

WHEN THE GOD YOU KNEW ISN’T ENOUGH
with Christy Bauman, Ph.D.

Welcome to Inside Out. I’m Eden Hyder—a licensed therapist, psychology teacher, and proud mother of two. I’m here to help us all press pause so we can re-engage with what matters most: ourselves, our relationships, and our kids—from the inside out. For more on relationships, parenting, and mental health between episodes, you can find me on Instagram or at edenhyder.com.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Christy Bauman as we explore the complex intersection of faith, mental health, and attachment. Through our personal stories—of depression, the loss of a child, and the evolution of belief—we reflect on how our understanding of God is shaped by attachment experiences, and how it often shifts through grief and growth.

We talk about how faith communities can either heal or deepen our attachment wounds, and how discovering the maternal aspects of the Divine has opened up space for both of us to experience feeling truly held.

This is a tender, honest conversation about what it means to feel insecurely attached to God—and how that very rupture can sometimes be the doorway to something more expansive, more whole, and more true.

Eden:
Welcome, Christy. I'm so grateful to have this time with you and to have this conversation. I think we first met through your husband—back in grad school?

Christy:
Right.

Eden:
And now here we both are, relocated to North Carolina.

Christy:
I know—here we are!

Eden:
I'd love for you to introduce yourself—tell us what you're up to, a bit of your background, what you're passionate about.

Christy:
Sure. So, mental health therapy is really where you and I first connected. I did my doctorate at SPU—Seattle Pacific University—and Andrew, my husband, was there doing his master’s. Since then, I’ve been working as a private practice therapist.

Over the years, I noticed that my lens really narrowed in on women, sexuality, and spirituality. That became the bulk of my work—and still is. These days, though, Andrew and I mostly see couples for marriage intensives. We’ve shifted away from traditional therapy and now host three-day intensives each week, which has been a big transition.

Our first book together was Reintroduce. But the book that really ties into today’s conversation is Theology of the Womb. That’s the one that sparked my curiosity about our attachment styles with a spiritual being—especially a maternal spiritual being.

From there, I wrote A Sexually Healthy Woman, and now I’m in the middle of signing a book deal for my next one.

Eden:
Can you tell us what it’s about, or is it still under wraps?

Christy:
It’s a little bit of a surprise! But yes—it’s about the six rites of passage in every woman’s life: birthright, initiation, exile, creating, legacy, and intuition.

That’s really the heart of my work—women’s well-being. It’s what my PhD and my research focused on, and where I continue to feel most called: that intersection of well-being and spirituality.

Eden:
I love that. I really do. And I feel the similarity—those shared passions. In grad school, I did a lot of study in feminist theology alongside psychology, and that integration has always been huge for me.

When I started this podcast, my focus was really on attachment—but it’s definitely branched out from there. And honestly, as you’re talking, there are so many light bulbs going off. I’m like, Oh, I want to talk about that. Oh, we could go there too.

Eden:
Okay—I’m going to try. That’s my intention. I’m going to try to stay focused.
But truly, I’m so excited to have you in this conversation.

Part of what I’ve laid out in Season One is this really basic definition of attachment:
Attachment is a relationship we use to try to get our needs met.
When those needs are consistently met, we develop secure attachment. When they’re inconsistently met—or not met at all—that creates insecure attachment.

In my own process, I grew up in the Christian church. I was pretty involved—attending services, going to youth group, doing all the programming. And over time, I began to notice how the God figure I related to in those early years was kind of… covering up my deep insecurities. My lack of self-esteem. That idea of “With God I am everything; without God I am nothing”—that really defined how I operated.

But when I experienced that presence as gone, when I felt that God figure was absent, I truly felt like nothing. And I fell into a deep depression.

So, I’ve been thinking about this intersection of faith and attachment for a long time. And I know you’ve experienced it too.

As a woman—and specifically a white woman—in the church, I’ve internalized so many messages about my body, my place, my worth. Especially in relationship to a God figure who is almost exclusively defined as male. And I think that’s part of what I want to open up here today.

Christy:
That was such a powerful tee-up. I mean, wow. Like you, I want to follow all the threads—I want to talk about feminism and womanism, and how white women talk about the spiritual experiences of Black women and women of color. There’s so much there.

And then listening to earlier episodes of your podcast—I loved the way you talked about your kids, your relationships. You mother all day long, and when you're not mothering, you're still mothering, right? And so when you use those examples, I feel myself understanding attachment in this new way.

I also really loved how you named the five core attachment needs—safety, security, comfort, relief, and validation.

Eden:
Yes.

Christy:
When I heard you say that, I thought—this is exactly what I’ve been exploring in terms of our attachment style with a maternal spiritual being. There’s something in the way you talk about mothering that really resonates with what I’ve been trying to understand theologically and spiritually—the idea of God as mother.

For most of my life, I related to God as male. That made sense to me. And my relationship with my own father? It was disorganized. There was inconsistency and confusion, and that showed up in how I saw God.

So I tried really hard to believe in God as a secure father. The church told me, God is a good father, so I worshiped God as that secure father figure. I tried to learn how to be the daughter of that kind of God. I repeated it to myself, pounded it in my head—because I knew I had a father wound and I wanted to heal it through this secure version of God.

That was my first 30 years of spiritual life.

But then I became a mother. And in that journey—especially in the loss of my first child—everything shifted. The trauma of that loss made me look at God and ask: What do I do with You now?

It felt unnatural to relate to God as Father during that season. I needed a God who could meet me in my motherhood. A God who could be Mother.

Because I was learning what it meant to birth. What it meant to bury. What it meant to birth again—and to raise a child. And in that process, I needed God to take a different form.

As I began exploring the maternal parts of God, I also had to face my attachment to my own mother.

And that’s where I really relate to what you’ve shared. In writing Theology of the Womb, I heard from so many women who told me: This book brought up my relationship with my mom. Some realized they had insecure attachments, or had experienced harm, jealousy, neglect. For me, I had a secure maternal attachment—so connecting with God as Mother was soothing. It felt safe. It felt immediate.

But it exposed something else: that if someone didn’t have a secure maternal relationship, it might be much harder to connect to the Divine in that form.

That’s how I come into this conversation. And I’m just so excited to keep going.

Christy:
So what do I do in the dark? In those hard, wintry seasons of life?
I busy myself.
Instead of slowing down, I fill the space.
And I’ve realized—I’m great in the life cycles. When things are growing, thriving—I'm the best mom, the most entertaining. I'm loving God. Spiritually, I’m having a great day.

But what that exposed for me is that my maternal attachment—the one I developed early on—is very similar to what my mom taught me: keep going. Push through. Be productive.

And I think, as mothers, we’re constantly being invited to engage this embodied wisdom of the cycle—to teach our kids:
"Yes, this is your winter. Yes, you didn’t make the team. Yes, you’re disappointed. Yes, you have this diagnosis. Yes, something in your body is different. Okay… now what do we do with that?"

That’s always the question I’m holding: What will I do with the death cycle? With what’s coming?
Because suffering is part of the future. But do I believe I have more sustenance for it now? Do I trust I’ve gained resilience from what I’ve already survived?

And can I mother in a way that gives my kids more capacity for pain and loss the next time the cycle comes back around?

I think how we engage the cycle—life, death, life again—says so much about how we were mothered. And how we engage a God we see as maternal, because that cycle is costly.

Eden:
Earlier you mentioned that there was a time when it became uncomfortable—maybe even impossible—to relate to God as male. Can you say more about that moment?

Christy:
Yeah. It felt... heretical.
I’d grown up in the church. I wanted to be a good seminary student. I was committed to staying in my “right place.” If I wasn’t supposed to preach or be ordained—okay, no conflict. I’ll find another way. I’ll become a therapist. That’s where I’ll bring my voice.

So I conformed. I shaped myself around male-lensed theology because that’s what the system rewarded. That’s how you fit in a patriarchal faith culture. And I was good at fitting.

But when I had to bury my son—that’s when it all started to unravel. I couldn’t trust anymore that God knew.
And yes, I made the argument—God the Father buried His Son, Jesus. God knows everything. But I remember visiting my son’s grave—he’d been buried for 22 days—and I looked up and said,
"You don’t know what this is like."

That was the beginning of me pulling away.
Pulling away from forcing myself to relate to God only as Father.
It gave me permission to rage, to question, to push back.

And I honestly believe God was like,
"I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for you to realize I’m as much maternal as I am paternal."
Not in a scolding way—more like a gentle, relieved welcome:
"Finally, you’ve shown up to this part of the conversation."

It wasn’t God who had limited that relationship. It was me—through doctrine I’d absorbed, through messages I’d internalized. I hadn’t trusted the Imago Dei in myself. I hadn’t trusted that the female body—my body—was part of the image of God.

And it was like God said,
"Yes. Yes, you are. I’m so glad you’re here."

That was the reckoning.
The moment when I knew—I’ve been trying to make God the Father be everything to me. But He wasn’t enough.

I remember saying, “You did this for three days. Show me you understand what it’s like for me.”
And even though there are stories—scriptures—where women bury their children, I needed to know the God they found.
The God within them.
The God who could endure that kind of separation.

And honestly, I’m not here to tell everyone else they have to get there. I’m not saying everyone needs to make God their Mother.
I just needed to stay in relationship with God.
And to do that—I needed space to be honest.
Because at its core, attachment is about safety.

And for a while, it wasn’t safe enough for me to say,
"A masculine God isn’t working for me right now."

Christy:
Like—I’m a grieving mother.
So I need you to be a grieving mother.
Are you a grieving mother?

Eden:
Yeah.
And I really resonate with that—even just the slight shift in pronouns. There have been times when I’ve needed to say she during worship songs.

I still participate in a faith community—there are things about it that feel important for our family—but sometimes I need different language.
Sometimes I need to say She, or Spirit, or Great Mystery.
Sometimes it’s Mother Earth.
Because what I’m learning is that a God figure—as an attachment figure—can be multifaceted.

Like a diamond, right?
So many angles. So many faces.
And I might need to relate to a different one in a different season.

So yes—I need a grieving mother.
Have you been a grieving mother? Can you be that for me now?

And the thing is, I don’t think God skipped a beat.
God was like, Yes. Yes, I have. Thank you for asking.

And then, story after story—there it was.
There’s one I’m thinking of right now, though I’m forgetting her name. A woman in the Bible whose son was killed without reason, and she would walk to his body every day. It’s just a few verses, but I want to tattoo that story on my arm so I never forget it.

That was the moment I felt God say:
"I’ve been waiting for so long—for you to trust me enough, to feel safe enough in my presence to ask these questions."

And the message wasn’t defensive.
It wasn’t, That’s not on Me.
It was:
"I’m so thankful you’re here."

Eden:
Yes. I feel really sensitive, too, to how you’re articulating the voice of God in this. Because for someone who’s in that in-between space—not yet ready to relate to God again, or even willing to consider another version of God—it can feel impossible.

And yet, all of that—the walking away, the silence, the doubt—it’s all part of the process. It’s all built into the cycle.

Christy:
Yes. Without judgment. Without expectation.

Eden:
That’s how I want to parent.
That’s the kind of safe space I want to be.

Christy:
Same. If I can work through all my own stuff, that’s exactly how I want to show up for my kids. That’s the attachment I want to offer them.

Because God could have been like, “Nope. I’m not a lady. I’m not going to meet you there.”

Eden:
Right! But that’s not the model at all.

Christy:
Exactly. And it makes me think of something so simple and so real—like, for whatever reason, I just struggle with playing dolls. It’s not my thing. But my kids? They love it.

So I’m in there, playing dolls, and cringing inside. And the inner dialogue is hilarious—it should probably be on a sitcom. But I’m doing it.

Because I know if I reject that bid—“Hey, come play dolls with me”—then I’m saying, in a small but real way: this part of you isn’t safe with me.

And sure, that one moment doesn’t define our whole relationship. But over time, those small moments build something important.

As an attachment figure, I want to shape myself to support what my child needs.
And if I can’t meet that need directly, then I want to be the one who finds the resource—therapy, a mentor, a grandparent—whatever it might be.

Actually, one day, Andrew said,
"I just want to rent a mom. Can we start a program where we vet really good older moms, and let people rent them for a while?"
And I was like, That’s such a great idea, honey.

Eden:
That would be amazing. Seriously.

Christy:
Okay, yes—it’s probably illegal. The whole “rent-a-mom” thing.
But I think the desire behind it is so real. What it comes down to is this moment I had with God where I said:
"It’s not enough that You’re Father. I need You to also be Mother."

And God—without skipping a beat—responded:
"I am. I’m both. And I’m even more than that."

That’s what the “rent-a-mom” longing really is, right?
It’s: I just want, for a moment, to not have to work so hard. I want to be taken care of by a safe being.
And I think that’s what a securely attached relationship with a Higher Power actually feels like—
“I got you. I’ll play dolls. I’ll be your rent-a-mom if that’s what you need. Because it doesn’t bother Me to let you feel safe, seen, and known.”

Eden:
Yes. And now my mind goes to all the people who grew up with attachment figures who didn’t sit with them in their pain, in their grief, in their disappointment. And so they expect the same from God—either that God is like that unsafe figure…
Or they go to the other extreme and try to make God into the complete cure—the rescuer, the fantasy of perfect healing.

Christy:
Exactly. It’s usually one of the two extremes.

And it reminds me of the book Stumbling Toward Faith—I’m blanking on the author’s name.
She wrote about being sexually abused within her faith community. I believe her father was her pastor. The place that should’ve been her sanctuary became the site of repeated harm.

So for her, returning to faith was a twisted, painful, almost unbearable journey. And as you’re talking, I realize—yeah, there’s a whole spectrum. On one end, we’re asking God to be everything for us. And on the other end, there are people for whom it’s nearly impossible to see God as anything other than the abuser, the betrayer, the one who failed to protect.

Eden:
Yes. There’s that painful space—where someone might feel drawn toward something spiritual, but the blueprint they were handed is all wrong.
They look at their past and think, Oh, okay… this is what God approves of? This is what’s holy? And it’s just… devastating.

Christy:
Yes.
And we’ve both sat with people—time and time again—who are carrying that.
And in those moments, when I don’t know what to do as a mother, I find myself switching into therapist mode. Or I go back and forth, like—What would a good therapist say? What would a good parent do right now?

And that’s where it gets complicated.
Because when the people who were supposed to parent you hurt you… it’s a complete mindfuck.
It scrambles everything—your blueprints, your sense of reality, your ability to trust what’s good.

So what do you do?

What I’ve learned is that in the death cycle, you burn those blueprints.
You bury them.
And you mark yourself with the ash—so there’s some outward sign of the internal rupture.
And then you wait. You wait, not knowing if anything will ever grow again from those ashes.
And not knowing if you’ll even want what does grow.

It’s the tension we’re invited into, especially in the aftermath of trauma—this painful, holy struggle to create life again.

Even the author of Stumbling Toward Faith—before she passed away—she had children. She got married. She built a family. She created life again.
And I’m not saying creation is limited to biological motherhood or marriage—not at all.

Eden:
Right. Right.

Christy:
But I want to honor that she didn’t give up.
She moved through the death cycle. She didn’t stay buried.

And I’m sure that death showed up again and again throughout her life, in her faith, in her relationships.
But she didn’t give up—except on those blueprints. Those, she buried.
And that’s what you said so beautifully: we mark ourselves with them.
We carry the imprint.
And we wait.

Eden:
That part—wait—that’s the hardest.
Because when you’re in it, you don’t know what’s coming. Or if anything’s coming at all.

Eden:
I’ve been wondering about something.
As I think about myself as a parent, and also about my own childhood—and then zooming out to how I see God—I keep asking:
What does it mean to sit with someone as their safe place?
To witness the waiting with them?
And to somehow be safe enough that they’d even be willing to wait?

Because when I think back on my own experience… my mom didn’t really teach me how to wait.
She knew how to be with me in the “life” seasons—when things were moving, when something was happening. But in the “ashes,” when everything felt dark or dormant… she’d get up and do something productive. She’d be around, but busy.
And I think I learned to bury my grief by myself.

I just didn’t want to be alone in that place.
So when I ask that question—what would it be like to have someone who is securely attached to you in the waiting?—I feel that ache.

Christy:
Yes. In the burying, and in the waiting.
There’s a rhythm to it, right? Like the way babies will look away and then come back. I’m overwhelmed, don’t look. Okay, now come close. Closer.

That push-pull can be so exhausting for the one trying to stay present. But in it, I’m trying to find my own way of mothering.

Eden:
With my daughters—each of them processes emotion really differently.
My youngest is the one who gets hit fast and hard by her emotions. Big outbursts. Then she’ll run off.

Eventually, I got to a place with her—
And I may have talked about this on a previous episode—where I could gently say:
"Hey, it’s Mommy. I’m coming to check in. What do you need? Do you want me to stay, or do you want me to leave?"

She’d yell, “Go away!”
But I’d slowly make my way in. Maybe she’d open the door just a crack.

And eventually she’d say,
"I want you to stay… but stay outside the door. Lock it. You stay on the other side."

And what she meant was, “I still need space, but I need to know you’re there. I need to know you’re available when I’m ready.”

Christy:
Yes. Exactly.

Eden:
When I’ve softened. When I’ve come down from the emotional curve.

And what you were asking earlier—it circles back here.
What do we do with a God who hasn’t been safe?
Who hasn’t seemed willing to knock on the door?
Who doesn’t feel like they’ll wait on the other side?

Christy:
That’s where I start to look around me. I look for people who are able to be that.
People who hold that kind of spacious, grounded presence.
People who display some aspect of a Divine that’s bigger than what I’ve known.

Because if I’ve never experienced it, how could I even imagine it?

Christy:
I think when I see someone who’s able to wait—able to hold space like that—I just think, Wow.
They must know what it feels like not to have had that kind of presence.
Or maybe they’ve made a commitment like, I wasn’t treated that way, so I will become the person who can do that for someone else.

Sometimes I have to look around and ask, Who are the first responders here? Because I don’t always know how to access that within myself.

And when you were describing standing outside the door for your daughter, I thought—I don’t even know if I know how to do that.
I think I barge in. I try to fix it. Or I get frustrated and say, Fine, take your space then.
That all sounds familiar. I had to learn how to wait. I still am.

Eden:
Yeah. And every kid is different, right?

Christy:
Totally.
And I’ve been thinking—if I didn’t grow up with a God I felt securely attached to, then maybe I need to stay curious around the people who did.
I need to learn from them. Watch them.
Where did you learn this? How do you know this kind of love?

I think that’s why both of us care so much about people’s stories.
Because in the stories, we find glimpses of both the harm and the healing. We find an imagination for something new—new ways to love, to relate, to be human.

Eden:
Do you think people with insecure attachment in childhood might actually be more drawn to faith or a relationship with a higher power than those with secure attachment?

Christy:
That’s a fascinating question.
At first, I wanted to say, I’m not sure—I don’t know, because I didn’t grow up with insecure attachment. But then I caught myself.
Yes, I did.

And I think my deep need to conform to a patriarchal Christianity—where I followed all the rules and stayed in my lane—that was actually coming from my insecure attachment. Whether that wound came from men or women, I had a longing to be held. To belong.

And faith—structured faith—felt like a place that would hold me.
As long as I conformed, I was invited in. I could belong.

So yes, I think people with insecure attachment absolutely may be drawn to faith systems. But the process comes with a lot of wrestling.

Because when someone with insecure or disorganized attachment finds that surrogate family within a faith community or system—and then there’s a rupture, or betrayal, or some kind of grief—it can feel like losing everything all over again.

Eden:
Yeah. I keep bringing this up, and I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how painful it must be to try to relate to a God—or to a faith community—when your early experiences of attachment were marked by insecurity.

And yet… most of us are drawn to some form of tribal belonging, right?
Something ancestral. A sense of citizenship.
Whether we’re talking Roman and Greek cultures or today’s modern religious communities—people are always asking:
Is there a village I can return to? A group I can belong to—even if I leave and come back?

Because at the core, I think attachment is about that longing:
Can I turn away, and then return, and still be loved?

Christy:
Yes. That turn-and-return is everything. It reminds me of the Prodigal Son story. That idea that you can leave, you can mess up, and there’s still a place at the table.

Eden:
Exactly. And it mirrors what happens in parenting too, right?
Those moments where we hurt our kids—or we miss something—and then there’s the turning toward one another again. That cycle: life, death, return.
It’s so powerful, both to offer and to receive.

And speaking of that, I’d really love to pick your brain about God as Mother. Because… there’s just not much out there.
And I want to soak up your wisdom.
How have you related to God as Mother? How have you brought that into your language, your parenting, your spirituality?

Christy:
Oooh… heresy is so close to this conversation. I mean, how much of this should we even be recording?
But honestly—what’s true is that we’ve just become really comfortable, in our family, with God being more than what we were taught.

The only way I could ever imagine creating and carrying another child after burying my first was to embrace the fullness of God.
To become comfortable with God as Mother.

And that cracked everything open.
It made me ask: What else have I limited God on?
What else have I put a boundary around that God never asked for?

Christy:
But, you know, I grew up the way I did. So when my husband comes home and says,
"Hey, I heard this worship song, and I think you should try singing it with 'mother' instead of 'father'—not just changing pronouns, but fully shifting the language..."
—it feels like a big thing.

In our house, that has become a practice. We sing songs like that.
But it still feels like I’m pushing edges.
My favorite worship band right now is collaborating with South African musicians who lived through apartheid. They’re revising language in their lyrics to reflect justice, honesty, and inclusivity—especially around racism and theology.

So I already feel like I’m at the margins—advocating for a more inclusive, justice-centered view of God.
And yet even still, there are moments when I feel… resistance.

Because now, I don’t need God to be Mother the way I used to.
I’m no longer desperate for it. And because of that, I don’t feel an urgency to make other people adopt that view.

So when my husband—being his bold Enneagram Eight self—says, “You should go confront all these places that still need to see God as Mother. This is your work!” I’m like,
"Hold up. Nope. No thank you."

If people want to talk, I’ll share.
But I’m not out here campaigning.

Still, I’ve found so much meaning in reimagining worship through this maternal lens. I now sing the doxology imagining God as female, as Mother.
What does it mean to rest on the breast of God?
To be nurtured, nursed, held?

And in our home, we use “he” and “she” interchangeably when talking about God—mostly through music and our prayers over the kids.
It feels natural here. But when I say it in public? That’s when I feel the discomfort from others.
Sometimes it even feels risky. There are spaces I’ve been quietly blacklisted from, as a theologian, because of that language.

But here’s what I know for sure:
I only feel safe offering my children to a God who is as much Mother as Father.
I want them to grow up with both. I don’t want them to grow up without the presence of a father or a mother. Both are sacred.

A parent should be someone who would give everything for their child.
Someone who is that safe.
And unfortunately, in so many faith contexts, that role has been more clearly associated with mothers than with fathers.

Eden:
Yes. That’s what I’ve always felt about Theology of the Womb.
It’s so comforting—there’s something that just settles in me when I let myself believe that God is also Mother.

It connects with the integrity I feel in my own mothering.
And that recognition—Oh, this too is in God—has brought depth and comfort I didn’t expect.

Christy:
Absolutely.
Now, I also want to name: not everyone had that kind of relationship with their mother.
Some people were harmed, abandoned, or used by their mothers. And so for them, the process of relating to God as Mother might stir up something very different.

Eden:
Right. Their needs may be completely different in that relationship.

Christy:
Yes.
But for me, God as Mother feels like this beautiful, holy, selfless presence.
One who is willing to give herself over so that I can discover myself and know I’m okay.

With God the Father, I had to force myself into that attachment—You are a safe father, You are a secure father—even when it didn’t feel true.
But with God as Mother, I didn’t have to force it.
Because I know the mother in me.
I know what I see when I look at my kids.
So that connection… it came naturally. That depth came with it.

Eden:
When you say you feel drawn to God as Mother, do you also mean God as female? Or is it mostly the maternal side you’re connecting with?

Christy:
Both.
It’s interesting—Mother was easier for me to get to.
But femininity… that was harder.

That journey required me to face parts of myself I didn’t like—things I’d judged as “less than” simply because they were feminine.

Understanding God as female made me confront that.

And it was hard, and it was beautiful, and it took my breath away.
There’s a quote I love—Brené Brown was interviewing Sue Monk Kidd, and Sue said:
"I think every woman should take her own breath away once in her life."
She was reflecting on her novel The Book of Longings, and said she hadn’t really taken her own breath away until she wrote that book.

That line stuck with me.
Because as women, we’ll never know a world of just women.
We’ll never get to see who we could be without patriarchy.
And that’s both okay and not okay.

But in learning about the female nature of God, I felt myself drawn into awe.
The goddess imagery. The sacredness of my own body.
The parts of my sexuality that reflect divinity.

It was breathtaking.
And that’s where, for me, it wasn’t just God as Mother—it was God as Female that shifted everything.

Eden:
I really appreciate that distinction—Mother vs. Female.
I don’t think I would’ve made that separation automatically, but of course… there is a difference.

Christy:
The female image of God still takes my breath away.
And I truly believe that's why it's been so targeted, diminished, and stolen from—
to keep women from seeing themselves in their fullness.

That’s what this next book I’m writing is about.
It’s a mirror for every woman, so she can look into it and say, Do you see your own reflection?

Not just a reflection of me, or even of a good mother—
but her own self.
When a woman sees the woman in her… when she sees the mother in her…
when she sees the God in her—
she is well.
She is free.

Eden:
Yes. That’s the point of all this, right?
When it comes to safety and secure attachment, it’s not just about other people.
The hope is that we learn to live free.

Christy:
Exactly. Maybe what we’re really circling is our attachment to ourselves.

Eden:
Yes.
That’s what’s coming up for me, too.
Because a secure attachment figure offers an accurate reflection.
They hold up a mirror and say:
"Here you are. I see you. And you are good."

And so I think the question becomes:
What kind of reflection are we offering ourselves?
What is our relationship with the mother within us?
How does she reflect back to us? What do we see when we look inward?

Christy:
Yes.
That inner relationship… that’s where healing really roots itself.

Eden:
It reminds me of the parts work I do in therapy—internal family systems.
Sometimes there’s a mother part inside us.
And I’ll often ask: How do you relate to her?
Is she critical? Absent? Nurturing?
Or is she becoming the kind of presence you longed for?

Christy:
Exactly. It’s a different way of asking the same question:
How do you show up to yourself?
How do you mother yourself?

Eden:
Christy, I have loved this conversation.
There are so many lightbulbs still going off—so much to sit with and be curious about.
Hearing you speak so honestly about your journey—as a human being, a mother, a woman who longs for connection with Source… with God… with Spirit—
It’s just so moving.

Christy:
Thank you for having me.

Eden (closing):
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Inside Out.
You can find me on Instagram @edenhyder for all the extras and reflections from this season.

And before you go—make sure to subscribe, share with someone who needs this, and leave a review.
I’ll see you next time.