THE RELATIONSHIP THAT SURVIVES THE BREAK
There is a quiet drama unfolding inside every healthy relationship. It is not the drama of perfect attunement. In fact, perfect attunement does not really exist. Parents misunderstand children; spouses misread each other; friends disappoint; therapists say the wrong thing; miss the meaning underneath a sentence, fail to recognize a cue, or offer warmth at precisely the right moment. Human beings are magnificently complicated animals, attempting to read one another through several inches of skull, years of history, fluctuating neurochemistry, how we slept last night, and whatever happened before breakfast. Misattunements are not aberrations. They are built into the system.
What distinguishes a sturdy relationship from a fragile one is not the absence of rupture, but what happens afterward. In psychotherapy research, an alliance rupture refers to deterioration in collaboration or in the emotional bond between therapist and client. Sometimes the rupture is obvious: anger, confrontation, withdrawal, disagreement. Sometimes it is almost invisible: the client becomes agreeable but emotionally absent, changes the subject, stops bringing important material, or quietly concludes, “You do not really understand me.” Safran, Muran, Eubanks, and colleagues spent decades studying these moments. A meta-analysis involving 1,314 patients found a moderate association between successful rupture resolution and better psychotherapy outcomes. Rupture, when recognized and repaired, can become a beneficial vehicle for therapeutic change. The relationship may become stronger not despite the fracture, but partly because something fractured and the relationship did not disappear or end.
The Alter Rebbe offers a striking metaphor in Iggeres HaTeshuvah, chapter 9. He describes a rope that has been severed and then retied; at the place of the knot, it becomes “doubled and redoubled,” thicker than before, while the ends are drawn closer together. He uses the image to describe teshuvah and the renewed bond between the soul and its Source. It also evokes the Chassidic idea of “yeridah l’tzorech aliyah - descent for the sake of a greater ascent.” Something similar can happen in therapy and other relationships: rupture is acknowledged, understood, and repaired, and the relationship moves forward carrying knowledge it did not previously possess. Clients will sometimes ask me, “Will I ever be back to the way I was before?” I answer, “I sure hope not. I hope you’ll be back to the future.” The “how I was before” state may likely be precisely what led them to therapy in the first place. Psychotherapy knows this. Marriage knows this. Grief knows this. Torah apparently knows it too.
WHEN GOOD ENOUGH IS BETTER THAN PERFECT
D. W. Winnicott famously described the “good enough mother.” The phrase sounds vaguely insulting until one realizes how radical it is. The healthy caregiver is not perpetually synchronized with the infant. Reality intrudes. The phone rings, mom looks away. She doesn’t immediately attend. The infant waits, maybe whimpers or starts to cry. Then, she’s back. Phew! Development includes learning that frustration can occur without the world ending. This is called, “frustration tolerance.” Later research on infant-caregiver interaction described repeated cycles of matching, mismatching, and repair. Mother and baby are not performing an exquisite neurological pas de deux in uninterrupted synchrony. They lose one another and find one another again. The developing nervous system learns something larger than “Mommy’s back.” Disconnection can be temporary. Someone can misunderstand me, not pay attention to me at a particular time, and still love me.
Tehillim (Psalms) offers another image of brokenness that does not equal rejection: “A broken and crushed heart, God, You will not despise” (Tehillim 51:19). Judaism does not romanticize brokenness, but neither does it equate fracture with spiritual disqualification. Sometimes the broken place becomes the likely place through which a deeper relationship is formed. Attachment figures also become biological regulators of stress. Research on “social buffering” shows that trusted relationships can reduce psychological and physiological responses to threat. Early experience matters because safety is not merely an idea. The brain learns whom it can use as a safety signal. And therein lies both the beauty and the trouble. Eventually, we meet God with the nervous system we already have.
ENJOY MY SUNO SONG “THE ROAD BACK”
THE GOD WHO ENTERS THROUGH OUR ATTACHMENT SYSTEM
For a religious person, Hashem is not merely a philosophical proposition. We speak to Him, plead with Him, sometimes shout at Him, thank Him, fear Him, depend upon Him, seek comfort from Him, and interpret events through our relationship with Him. Psychologically, that makes the Divine relationship remarkably compatible with attachment processes. Attachment-to-God research suggests that many believers experience God as a secure base and safe haven. Experimental work among Israeli Jews has shown correspondence between interpersonal attachment patterns, representations of God, and attachment to God. Internal working models developed in human relationships can influence religious experience, although the relationship is far more complex than “my parent equals my God image.”
Judaism does not teach that Hashem is a projection of our parents. Psychology suggests something subtler: our experience of Hashem is filtered through psychological systems that developed long before we possessed sophisticated theology. A child raised by warm, reliable caregivers may find Divine love more easily imaginable. Someone raised with inconsistency may believe intellectually that Hashem loves them while experiencing that love as precarious. Someone raised under harsh authority may hear “Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King)” and experience Malkeinu far more vividly than Avinu. Someone whose needs were repeatedly dismissed may interpret Divine silence not as mystery, but as rejection.
This is not necessarily defective emunah. Sometimes it is attachment history wearing religious clothing. But attachment history is influential, it is not destiny. Research on “earned-secure attachment” describes adults who experienced insecure or adverse early caregiving yet later developed more secure relational patterns. Later attachment figures, reflective functioning, therapy, and corrective emotional experiences can help rewrite what once felt inevitable. The nervous system can learn new grammar. A 2024 study of Jewish and Muslim adults in Israel likewise found that anxious and avoidant attachment to God were associated with greater “divine struggles,” which were related to depressive symptoms. Theologically, Hashem is not merely our human parent projected heavenward. Psychologically, however, our human parents may sometimes get in the way of how safely and clearly, we experience Avinu (our Father).
AVINU MALKEINU: A GOD LARGE ENOUGH FOR THE WHOLE ATTACHMENT SYSTEM
Jewish liturgy is psychologically sophisticated enough not to give us a one-dimensional God. We call Him “Avinu Malkeinu, (Our Father, Our King).” Attachment and authority. Nearness and transcendence. Belonging and accountability. Tanach goes further still. Hashem speaks through Isaiah (Yeshayahu) using one of the most intimate images available in human experience: “Can a woman forget her baby, or disown the child of her womb? Though she might forget, I never could forget you” (Yeshayahu 49:15). The prophet reaches directly into attachment language. A nursing infant is biologically dependent upon being remembered. For a person whose earliest experience was, in some fashion, “I can be forgotten,” this verse can become more than poetry. It can become a spiritually corrective experience.
BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOD FEELS FAR AWAY?
Judaism refuses cheap reassurance. Tanach does not present religious maturity as smiling pleasantly while inexplicable things happen. “Why, Hashem, do You stand far away? Why do You hide Yourself in times of trouble?” cries David in Psalm, 10:1. The Torah itself gives us the language of hester panim, the hiding of the Divine face: “I will surely hide My face” (Deuteronomy, 31:18). Judaism therefore has vocabulary for the felt experience of Divine concealment. It does not require us to deny or rename darkness as light before we have actually seen the light. This would be what they call, these days, “spiritual bypass.” Chassidus deepens this distinction. Tzimtzum - contraction, and hester - concealment, do not mean that God ceases to be present. They describe a masking of Divine revelation.
Psychologically, the distinction is exquisite. Absence and the experience of absence are not always the same thing. A frightened child can feel abandoned while the parent is in the same room, but obscured from view. A client can feel rejected while the therapist believes she has merely established a boundary. A friend can become quieter and activate years of abandonment circuitry when she intellectually knows the friendship is strong. Our nervous systems are dreadful theologians, excellent alarm systems, but horrible philosophers.
WHEN AN OLD RUPTURE BECOMES A NEW GOD
One quiet task of adult spiritual development may be learning to distinguish Hashem from the God-image assembled by our attachment history. If love in childhood was conditional, perhaps we imagine Divine love must also be earned continuously. If authority was humiliating, yiras Shamayim (literally, “fear of Heaven”) may become entangled with terror, and not with awe. If caregivers withdrew affection after conflict, an aveirah (transgression) may feel not merely like “I did something inconsistent with who I want to be,” but “I am now unlovable.” If someone important suddenly became emotionally cold, Divine silence may awaken the old sentence, “Here it comes again. I thought I mattered, and now I guess I do not.”
This is why spiritual struggle deserves compassion rather than shame. The struggling person may be wrestling not simply with a proposition about God, but with an implicit nervous-system history of what closeness costs, what distance predicts, and whether ruptured bonds ever return. Research on religious and spiritual struggle confirms that these conflicts are psychologically significant. Negative religious coping and alienation from God can correlate with greater distress. Yet the story is more nuanced than “anger at God is bad.” Research has distinguished between distress associated with anger and the potentially meaning-making role of protest behaviors such as questioning, arguing, and complaining. Apparently, King David was conducting spiritually integrated psychotherapy several millennia before institutional review boards existed.
PROTEST IS NOT NECESSARILY DEPARTURE
There is something deeply Jewish about refusing to confuse relationship with passivity. Throughout our biblical history, relationships were hard to get. Abraham argues with God over Sodom. Moses advocates for the Jewish people. Job demands explanation. Jeremiah protests. David asks why Hashem has hidden Himself. Jacob does something even stranger, and certainly chutzpadik! He wrestles with an angel. By dawn he is injured, his gait permanently altered (biblical sciatica of sorts). Yet it is there, precisely there, that he receives the name Yisroel: “Your name shall no longer be Ya’akov, but Yisroel, for you have striven with beings - divine and human, and have prevailed” (Bereishis 32:29). We are not called the people who never struggled with God. We are called Yisroel. The people who wrestle and stick it out! Ya’akov leaves limping but blessed. Sometimes repair does not return us to what existed before. Something has been seen. Something hurts differently now, there is growth.
TESHUVAH AS RELATIONAL RETURN
This brings us to one of the most beautiful words in the psychological vocabulary of Torah. The root of teshuvah is “shuv,” to return, not “repent.” Teshuvah includes responsibility, confession, remorse, and behavioral change, as Rambam (Maimonides) carefully describes. But the word itself refuses to reduce the process to repentance and punishment. The destination is return. Something became distant. Someone wandered off, and now is returning toward an original closeness to Hashem.
The Gemara makes the startling claim in the name of Rabbi Abbahu: “In the place where ba’alei teshuvah (penitents) stand, completely righteous people cannot stand” (Berachos 34b). Read psychologically, with appropriate humility, this sounds remarkably like rupture and repair. One does not smash a vase in order to enjoy kintsugi, but once fracture exists, repair can create capacities that untested perfection never needed to develop. The ba’al teshuvah knows distance and return. The repaired couple knows anger and reconciliation. The friends hug with a warmer embrace. The repaired therapeutic alliance knows misunderstanding and being understood again. Secure attachment does not necessarily mean never having been disappointed. It may mean having learned, deeply enough, that disappointment does not automatically mean disappearance.
THE GOD WE THINK WE KNOW
Here may be the harder avodah - not simply asking, “Do I believe in Hashem?” but “Who is the Hashem my nervous system thinks it knows?” Does He withdraw when I fail? Must I perform to remain loved? Am I afraid to protest because anger once endangered human relationships? These are not questions of theology, but of internal representation and projection. Sometimes the avodah may be less about acquiring belief than separating belief from biography. The frightening authority within me is not necessarily Malkeinu; the unreliable parent is not Avinu; the person who withdrew when I disappointed them is not the Master of the Universe. Therapy, Torah, prayer, and relationships that demonstrate that disagreement does not equal rejection can slowly help disentangle the two. Perhaps such relationships do more than heal attachment; perhaps they clean the window through which we perceive Hashem. Perhaps the avodah is not acquiring more belief, but separating belief from biography.
REPAIR DOES NOT ERASE RESPONSIBILITY
Rupture and repair must never become a sentimental excuse for mistreatment. Not every rupture is benign, and not every relationship is repairable. Chronic humiliation, coercion, abuse, manipulation, or repeated violation without accountability cannot be sanctified as “growth opportunities.” Repair requires recognition. In psychotherapy, it means acknowledging what happened, making room for the other person’s experience, and changing what needs to change. So does teshuvah. Judaism never says, “Return” while pretending nothing happened. Vidui (confession) names what happened. Charatah (regret and remorse) confronts it. Kabbalah al ha’asid (taking on behavioral change) requires changes for going forward. Repair without truth is merely reunion. Real repair needs to metabolize the rupture.
ELUL AND THE COURAGE TO COME BACK
That is why this idea feels particularly alive in Elul, the month preceding the High Holidays. We tend to imagine the Yomim Norayim as a great Supernal performance review. The King opens the books. We nervously present our spiritual spreadsheets. Somehow, we have all missed several deadlines. But Elul carries another image: “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li - I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.” Before the courtroom comes relationship; before judgment comes belonging; before repair comes the confidence that there is something to return to. Teshuvah becomes possible precisely because the relationship has not been annihilated by the rupture, it preceded it. Torah does not promise that life will never frighten us, confuse us, hurt us, or make God feel impossibly far away.
Perhaps secure spiritual attachment sounds more like this. “I may not understand what is happening. I may be angry. I may experience distance. I may question. I may limp. But I will not confuse concealment with nonexistence. I will not automatically assume that rupture means abandonment. I will stay in the conversation. And when I cannot stay, I will know there remains a road back.”
THE BLESSING INSIDE THE LIMP
Ya’akov does not leave his wrestling match untouched. Neither do we. Some encounters change the way we walk forever. But Torah does not call the limp a failure. The wounded Ya’akov walks toward sunrise carrying a new name. Perhaps mature emunah is not rupture-free religion at all. Perhaps it is a relationship sturdy enough to contain bewilderment, one in which protest can coexist with love, anger with attachment, concealment with continued seeking, and injury with blessing.
Psychotherapy suggests that an alliance can deepen when rupture is genuinely repaired. Developmental psychology suggests that security grows partly through repeated experiences of connection following mismatch. Attachment science tells us that early relationships shape expectations about safety, while research on earned security reminds us that those expectations are not carved permanently into neural stone. Contemporary attachment-to-God research suggests that these same patterns can echo into religious, spiritual, and emotional life.
Torah takes us one step further. It tells us that the wrestling itself can become part of the covenant. We argue; we protest; we misunderstand; we sometimes feel forgotten; we return. Somewhere in that mysterious movement from rupture toward repair, Ya’akov becomes Yisroel. Not the one who never struggled with God. In fact, specifically the one who struggled, limped, remained in relationship, and went forward blessed.
REFERENCES
Cherniak, A. D., Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., & Granqvist, P. (2021). Attachment theory and religion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 126–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.08.020
Eubanks, C. F., Muran, J. C., & Safran, J. D. (2018). Alliance rupture repair: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 508–519. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000185
Filosa, M., Sharp, C., Gori, A., & Musetti, A. (2026). A comprehensive scoping review of empirical studies on earned secure attachment. Psychological Reports, 129(3), 1807–1832. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941241277495
Granqvist, P., Mikulincer, M., Gewirtz, V., & Shaver, P. R. (2012). Experimental findings on God as an attachment figure: Normative processes and moderating effects of internal working models. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 804–818. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029344
Gunnar, M. R., & Hostinar, C. E. (2015). The social buffering of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in humans: Developmental and experiential determinants. Social Neuroscience, 10(5), 479–488.
Hostinar, C. E., Sullivan, R. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2014). Psychobiological mechanisms underlying the social buffering of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis: A review of animal models and human studies across development. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1), 256–282.
Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G., Tarakeshwar, N., & Hahn, J. (2004). Religious coping methods as predictors of psychological, physical and spiritual outcomes among medically ill elderly patients: A two-year longitudinal study. Journal of Health Psychology, 9(6), 713–730. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105304045366
Safran, J. D., Muran, J. C., & Eubanks-Carter, C. (2011). Repairing alliance ruptures. Psychotherapy, 48(1), 80–87. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022140
Sasson Shoshan, T., Chaki-Binon, H., & Abu-Raiya, H. (2024). The links between insecure attachment to God, divine struggles, and happiness and depressive symptoms among Muslims and Jews in Israel. Journal of Religion and Health, 63(4), 2501–2522. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-024-02055-y
TORAH SOURCES
Bereishis 32:25–32. Ya’akov wrestles through the night, receives the name Yisroel, and emerges limping.
Devarim 31:17–18. Hester panim, the hiding of the Divine face.
Yeshayahu 49:14–16. “Can a woman forget her baby?... I never could forget you.”
Tehillim 10:1. “Why, Hashem, do You stand far away?”
Tehillim 51:19. “A broken and crushed heart, God, You will not despise.”
Berachos 34b. Rabbi Abbahu’s teaching that the place of ba’alei teshuvah is inaccessible even to the completely righteous.
Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Teshuvah, especially chapters 1–2.
Sotah 14a. The obligation to imitate Divine attributes through compassionate action.
Tanya, Likkutei Amarim, chapters 2, 44–46.
Tanya, Iggeres HaTeshuvah, chapter 9. The metaphor of the severed rope that, when retied, becomes doubled and redoubled at the place of the knot.
Brilliant
Return is the word that stood out. To stand in a place that the whole or the righteous could not.