Spiritual self-awareness as a moderator between attachment to god and evangelical christians’ appraisals of suffering.

Research suggests that deeply held beliefs about the world, self, and others often inform subjective appraisals of stressful or traumatic events. The present study examined how attachment to God and spiritual self-awareness related to Christians' appraisals of suffering. Specifically, we were interested in whether attachment to God was related to appraisals of stressful life experiences as having redemptive meaning. We also explored whether spiritual self-awareness moderated these relationships. A sample (N = 215) of participants who identified as Christian completed an online survey. As hypothesized, avoidant attachment to God was negatively correlated with redemptive appraisals of suffering. However, contrary to our hypothesis, attachment anxiety with God was related to an increased likelihood of appraising suffering as having redemptive meaning. Moderation analyses also showed that attachment anxiety with God was a significant positive predictor of redemptive appraisals of suffering only for individuals with low levels of spiritual self-awareness, while high levels of self-awareness were uniformly related to high redemptive appraisals of suffering regardless of levels of attachment anxiety. Spiritual self-awareness did not moderate the relationship between avoidant attachment and redemptive appraisals of suffering. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.