Dr. Sarah Hensley: Your Attachment Style Impacts More Than Your Dating Life

You’ve spent a lot of your career researching attachment styles. Why is that a field you’re so passionate about?

Dr. Sarah Hensley: When I first became interested in relationship science, I was really drawn to the link between how happy we are in our relationships and our mental and physical health. When I started graduate school and began diving into that research, I came across attachment theory.

What impressed me about attachment theory was that it has been such a long-standing framework with a substantial amount of scientific evidence behind it. It’s been tested across cultures, genders, and a variety of relationship situations. The foundational aspects of the theory—the core tenets—have remained largely unchallenged through all this research.

As a research scientist, we really value falsifiability. Something is generally true until it’s proven not to be. That’s how science works. For more than 50 years, none of this research has been able to debunk the original tenets of attachment theory. These tenets suggest that our caregivers’ interactions with us, how they interact with each other, and what we observe in our parents’ relationships can imprint on us and shape the way we approach adult relationships.

I found it fascinating that attachment theory has so much empirical evidence behind it and that it does such a good job of predicting behavior in romantic relationships.

How does our attachment style affect our relationship with God and with faith?

When you think about it, our parents are supposed to be a representation of God’s love on earth. Specifically, our father relationship is incredibly important. Research shows that when people have a very attuned, intimate relationship with their father in childhood—where they feel safe coming to their father to express their needs, hurts, or problems, and the father is emotionally receptive—they are more likely to have a good relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Scripture points us to the idea that God is a father, right? He plays a fatherly role in our lives and wants to be that source of unending and unconditional love. Of course, we want parents who can lead us to God. But just as important is the way they interact with us: they need to lovingly represent God and parent us in the way God parents us.

God parents us with unconditional love. There’s never condemnation—only conviction. There’s never shame—only motivation and guidance toward the right way to live. Unfortunately, some of us have experienced shame, neglect, harsh punishments, or emotional reactivity in our parental relationships. That’s not how God parents us. He allows us to experience the natural consequences of our free will, but He loves us through it and helps us learn from those consequences.

I’m preparing to create a course on raising secure children, and my personal faith belief is that leading children to God and to Jesus is vital. But it’s not just about leading them spiritually; it’s about parenting them in the way God parents us—with unconditional love and support. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have boundaries with our children. God has boundaries with us. He’s clear that if we deviate from His ways—His godly, all-knowing advice—we might face consequences for going our own way or giving in to our fleshly desires.

However, even when we take a wrong turn, we learn from those experiences. Suffering the natural consequences of our actions helps us grow, and God loves us the same through it all. Similarly, as parents, it’s important to guide children to read God’s word, help them develop a relationship with Him, and parent them with attunement, support, and conviction rather than condemnation or shame.

It’s also important to let children experience the consequences of their actions instead of shielding them from discomfort. God doesn’t prevent us from feeling discomfort or pain, because those experiences often teach us valuable lessons. God’s ways are the highest ways, and they lead to the best outcomes, but they aren’t always easy to follow.

Creating secure attachments with our children is a demonstration of how God loves us. It’s one of the most profound ways we can reflect God’s love to them.

How do you incorporate your faith and therapy together?

So in my coaching practice, I always tell people that all faiths are welcome. You don’t have to have a specific religious faith or spiritual faith to work with me. I have all the psychology in the world for the people that are like, no, I just want the psychological perspective. It’s not a prerequisite that you have to believe what I believe in order to understand the psychology of attachment.

But honestly, those people who lean into the faith-based part of it, where they are really trying to cultivate their relationship with the Father and feel the true love of God the Father, they do better because outside sources, including our adult romantic relationships, can only fill us up so much. They can only give us so much happiness, so much fulfillment, so much joy, when really God’s love is the ultimate fulfiller in our lives. When we feel wholly connected and loved by God, we know that rejection by humans doesn’t really matter because they’re not the source of my worth. God is the source of my worth.

And so rejection sort of becomes a lie. No, I’m not rejected. I’m always with God. I’m never left nor forsaken, right? And I’m wholly loved and wholly created in this way that God wanted me to be. I mean, God chooses every hair on our head. He chooses every cell in our body. And so when we know that He doesn’t make any mistakes and that He made us exactly how He wanted us to be, then that gives us a level of fulfillment, that gives us a level of feeling loved and accepted that another human just can’t give us. It’s just that so many people haven’t been able to tap into that, right? And they don’t know how powerful it is to have that relationship. And so they unfortunately turn to other humans that have faults, right? And they aren’t always perfect for their source of validation and for their only source of love. And when then those humans fall short, it can really impact us very deeply, but God never falls short. He never falls short in His divine plan. It doesn’t mean we won’t experience suffering, but what God has promised us — and we can stand very firmly on those promises — is that if we are faithful to Him, then He redeems our suffering.

He guides us out of our suffering and into the redemption, into the lessons that we’re supposed to have so that we make better decisions in the future. Unfortunately, other people can really hurt us, and that is their free will to do so. God doesn’t interfere with our free will. He allows us to freely act within the world, and sometimes that means that we can align with the enemy and that we can do evil as human beings. Sometimes that ripples back to us even when we’re not the ones stepping outside of God’s plan, that we’re really attuned and listening to God. Other people may throw a wrench in those things and cause suffering within us, but when we stay close to God and we rely on God’s love, it’s a way of feeling healed and whole and accepted that can really buffer against the human rejections and the human suffering that we feel.

How has studying psychology deepened your relationship with God?

I started studying psychology first. I really only came to the Lord about five years ago. I mean, I would have called myself a believer, but I really didn’t have a relationship with God. I had this belief that Jesus died on the cross and all of those things, but I didn’t know what it meant to have a real, truly intimate relationship with God—a deep prayer life where I was really reading Scripture and getting my direction from it, from the word of God. That’s a whole different ballgame.

Psychology was my foundation. And although it’s a good foundation and science has taught us a lot about why people do what they do, it doesn’t have every answer, right? It just doesn’t have all the answers. God only made me more confident in psychological science because, funny enough, so many things demonstrated in psychological science appear in the Bible. My faith only confirmed that my discipline does a good job in the scientific field of uncovering truth, and my faith only got stronger. There’s nothing I’ve learned in psychology that contradicts my faith.

Now, does that mean these constructs are referred to in the same way in Scripture versus science? No, it doesn’t. For example, we may call them attachment wounds, but God calls them demons—demonic oppression, right?

Yes, we may feel rejection, bitterness, or fear. Psychology would explain that purely from a cognitive and emotional perspective. But God says, no, we need to go one layer deeper—that’s happening at the spiritual level. The enemy is oppressing you, putting these thoughts into your head. You’re aligning with them, believing them, and it’s affecting your nervous system.

It really doesn’t matter to me how somebody views it. If they want to view it strictly from a psychological perspective and call it wounds, or they want to say, no, the enemy was acting through people and through you to put these thoughts into your head and sway you into sin—either way, that’s fine.

That’s kind of my belief: there’s a deeper spiritual layer to it. I see the deepest layer as the spiritual layer, with the psychological layer being how we, in scientific terms, describe the spiritual layer. It’s just how we’ve learned to understand it from a scientific perspective. But to me, I think it’s demons. You can call them wounds if you want to, right? It doesn’t bother me either way. I’ll refer to it however you’re more comfortable.