The God Our Nervous System Knows

This reflection unfolded in two parts because that’s how the healing unfolded for me.

Our earliest relationships shape not only how we relate to other people, but how our nervous system learns to relate to God.

As I’ve done my own trauma healing, I’ve realized that my spiritual struggles were not a crisis of faith—they were an invitation to see God through a wider, safer lens.

This first piece explores how our parents shape our internal experience of God and why certain images of God can feel regulating—or threatening—to the nervous system.

The second piece shares how recovering the feminine face of God became an essential part of my own healing and spiritual integration.

These reflections aren’t meant to persuade or provoke, but to name an experience many carry quietly: the longing to feel safe with God, not just faithful. I offer these reflections not as answers, but as an honest unfolding.

As a child, relating felt unpredictable and chaotic.

My mother could be warm and loving one minute.

Harsh, critical, and shaming the next.

There was no warning. No consistency.

Even when she was kind, my body stayed braced—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That kind of environment shapes a nervous system.

It also shapes how we relate to God.

I’ve come to believe that we initially experience God through the lens of our safest parent—not our ideal parent, but the one our nervous system could survive.

For me, that wasn’t my mother.

As distant and uninvolved as my dad was, he was at least consistent.

I learned not to expect warmth, but I also didn’t have to fear sudden emotional explosions.

So that’s how I learned to relate to God.

Distant.

Reliable.

Tolerant.

It never felt safe to approach God as warm, tender, or emotionally attuned.

That kind of closeness felt dangerous.

I trusted God deeply, but from a distance. I didn’t linger. I didn’t rest. I stayed alert.

Even now, when I read Scripture—especially passages where God punishes, exiles, then blesses—my nervous system reacts first.

Not because these passages reflect healthy relationship.

Because they echo emotional instability I experienced as a child.

I want to be careful here: what I experienced with my mother was not healthy rupture and repair.

In healthy relationships, rupture is followed by accountability, repair, and a return to safety.

What I lived with was inconsistency without repair.

Warmth that could suddenly turn to criticism or shame.

Without acknowledgment or responsibility.

There was no reliable return to safety.

My nervous system learned to stay vigilant rather than trust closeness.

Naming this distinction matters.

When chronic emotional instability is softened into “rupture and repair,” the harm can disappear in language. Healing has required telling the truth about what was unsafe, rather than reframing it in ways that made it easier to stomach.

This shaped how I experienced God.

As my healing deepened, it became clear that my difficulty wasn’t believing in God, but resting with him.

I had learned to relate from vigilance rather than safety.

Strength and authority felt familiar.

Tenderness and emotional closeness did not.

This realization became a turning point—not away from faith, but toward a fuller experience of God than I had ever known.

I’ll share the next part of this reflection in the following newsletter, where I write about how unexpectedly encountering parts of God I had never been able to trust before became a turning point in my healing.

If any part of this stirred something in you—comfort, resistance, curiosity, or grief—I want to honor that.

Our images of God are deeply personal and often shaped long before we have language for them.

Healing doesn’t require abandoning faith, nor does faith require staying small or unexamined.

Sometimes healing simply asks us to let our understanding widen.

To allow room for a God who meets us with both strength and tenderness, truth and safety.

Wherever you find yourself in that process, may you feel permission to move slowly, to listen inwardly, and to trust that honest wrestling is not a failure, but often a sign of deeper relationship.

Eva