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What happens when the faith that once held you no longer feels like it can carry the questions you’re asking now?
You may still love God. You don’t want to leave your faith behind. But the beliefs, practices, or ways of relating to God that once sustained you begin to feel too small for the life you’re living.
In this week’s conversation, Dr. Alison is joined by bestselling author, psychotherapist, and spiritual director Ian Morgan Cron to explore the tender space between silencing your questions and burning everything down.
Through Ian’s brand-new novel Chasing Francis, they discuss how a crisis of faith can become an invitation to spiritual growth, deeper intimacy with God, and a faith that is more fully your own.
You’ll explore:
- Why a crisis of faith can become an opportunity for deeper spiritual growth
- The difference between healthy questioning and becoming trapped in cynicism
- What spiritual individuation looks like and why it matters
- Why the faith that sustained an earlier version of you may need room to grow
- How to return to the foundation that God is love and you are loved
- Why resisting a difficult spiritual season can create even more suffering
- How beauty, imagination, story, and nature can restore perspective
- What St. Francis can teach us about simplicity, compassion, and an embodied faith
Your questions do not necessarily mean that you are losing your faith.
They may be an invitation to examine what you inherited, hold on to what is true, and allow God to build something deeper.
As Ian reminds us, sometimes the work is not forcing yourself back into a previous expression of faith. It is asking:
What is the invitation here?
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
I have seen healthy expressions of deconstruction, and I have seen unhealthy.
We may not want either, but we're going to get them. Some of the best things that ever happened to
me were crises of faith. I mean, I've had 20 relationships with Jesus in my life. If I still had a
young life theology, I'd be in trouble. When these moments come to our lives, we...
these seasons. The resistance is what causes more suffering than just going through it.
If I try to overcome this and shame myself back into a previous expression of faith,
I'm actually maybe frustrating your purpose for this.
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I'm so thrilled
you're here with me today for this conversation. This is a great conversation. I loved where we
went with it. I loved having my friend Ian on the podcast. He's been on the podcast before and he
always brings such great wisdom. He's such a unique blend as a therapist, as a spiritual director,
as someone who's lived a lot of life to speak into a tender topic.
The topic we're talking about today is what happens when the faith that has been familiar to you,
the faith that has held you suddenly doesn't feel like it's sustaining you in the same way.
Maybe it begins to feel too small or God starts to feel far away or you're starting to ask
questions about things you once took for granted and you don't want to lose your faith.
You love God, but you're trying to figure out how to adjust spiritually and find a different way to
relate to God, a way to honor the questions without letting go. This is a tender place for many of
us. And culturally, I don't think we've done a very good job of creating spaces to honor these
seasons of faith. Sometimes it can feel like questioning your faith means you have to leave it.
There could be pressure to kind of pull you out of your faith. So from that vantage point, you
don't want to ask the questions because you don't want someone to pull you out of your faith, but
you also don't want to. bury the questions because they're there, they're real, and you know
somehow God can handle the questions, but you're not sure where to go with them. And so I think
today's conversation is just such a... place for us to land with some of the hard questions,
with some of the feelings, because there's just a lot of wisdom our guest brings today.
My guest today is Ian Morgan Crone. Ian is a bestselling author. He's a psychotherapist.
He's an Enneagram teacher, and he's the host of the Popular Typology podcast. He's also the author
of several bestselling books, including The Road, Back to You, The Story of You, The Fix.
He came on the podcast, I think it was a couple of years ago. to talk about the fix. It's a great
episode. And today we're going to discuss a brand new novel he has coming out.
He actually wrote it a while back. It's being released this month. It's called Chasing Francis.
We'll get into some of the themes today, but Chasing Francis tells the story of a man named Chase.
He's a successful pastor whose faith begins to unravel after a tragedy in his church.
And it sends him on a forced sabbatical where he takes a pilgrimage over to Italy, where an
encounter with the life and spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi begins to open him into a more
embodied faith, one that's shaped by beauty, by mystery, by simplicity, by compassion,
and by love for the created world. And so what could have been a crisis of faith actually becomes a
deepening, a beautiful process as he leans into it and allows God to work on him through this.
season. What I appreciated about this story and what I so appreciate about everything Ian does is
that it offers us a third way, right? Somewhere between never asking questions,
never changing the way we relate to God and leaving faith altogether, which again is sometimes the
only two options I see offered to many of us, especially if you're in the online world. And so much
of life is lived in that middle place of wrestling with God. And this story of Chase,
I think, honors the reality of our journey that we don't have to silence the questions,
but we also don't have to burn everything. down. Instead, it asks how the faith we inherited can be
examined, can be deepened, and can be made more fully our own.
In our conversation, Ann and I talk candidly about what it means to have a crisis of faith.
We talk about healthy and unhealthy ways of approaching that, about the process of healthy
spiritual individuation and why old ways of understanding God sometimes don't last or need updating
and how returning to the foundation of God's love can help us rebuild something truer,
deeper, more embodied, and even more authentic. talk about St. Francis himself,
the spiritual power of his story and of looking to past figures and who maybe lived out their faith
in different contexts and in completely different settings and how that can ignite our own
imaginations and spark something inside of us that maybe we couldn't find ourselves in other ways.
And we talk about why spending time in nature outside of our own minds, outside of some of our
doubts and questions can also help to restore. perspective in some surprising ways.
It's just such a great conversation. I love Ian. He's so real. We have such a great back and forth,
kind of talking candidly about some of these themes in our own lives. You can pick up Chasing
Francis anywhere books are sold. It's a great read. And I'm so thrilled to bring you my
conversation with Ian Morgan Cron.
I'm really... excited about this conversation and what this book,
Chasing Francis, stirs up. So thank you for being here. Thanks for writing it. You bet.
I mean, I'm delighted. For two reasons. One is I love St. Francis and have for a very long time.
And so I really am excited to get into kind of what... you reveal to us through this character in
the book about the way of Francis. But what I really loved is that you're painting a picture of a
way that we can have a crisis of faith or even questions about faith.
And that doesn't, sometimes I feel like in our modern era, in our kind of TikTok era,
there are two options. We can sort of question faith and leave it and get angry and burn it down,
or we can never question anything and we just stay in this very narrow circle.
And I don't think a lot of us want either of those options, but we don't often see conversations
happening where there's a third way. And I think that's what you're doing with this book.
This term, deconstruction, which has overlap with that idea of crisis.
You know, I have seen healthy expressions of deconstruction and I have seen unhealthy,
you know, expressions of it. And first of all,
we may not want either, but we're going to get them. I mean, you know, crisis of faith.
Some of the best things that ever happened to me were crises of faith. So I'm not. I mean,
if we go back to the old trope about the word crisis, the etymology of it, meaning opportunity in
its original derivation, right? So it's really an opportunity. A crisis of faith is an opportunity.
of faith. And so it doesn't have to be painted as a negative.
You know, it can be really quite beautiful and a necessary wound to move into a deeper place of
intimacy with God. So I love that framing. In my experience,
of having some questions about faith in a time. I was in my doctoral program,
this is 25 years ago, before we were online, before there were sort of these ideas about this,
again, this kind of buzzword that I have such fraught feelings about deconstruction for good
reason. Just to your point, I have friends who have seen their,
some of my listeners have seen friends and family members in the name of deconstruction
just burn down anything, right? And that's just heartbreaking.
And to your point, I know other people who have really looked at it from more of what,
again, 25 years ago, before it was a thing, it was a philosophical idea that just simply meant
questioning assumptions. That's all it really was about. It was like, you know, looking at what are
some of the assumptions that I have? And I remember for me going through a season where I never
lost sight of God. I never lost faith in Jesus. I never stopped loving the scriptures.
I related to God and how I understood Jesus' role in my life and how I understood how the
scriptures speak to me changed. And it was disorienting. And at times it felt like a wilderness
area. At times it felt like scary. And I'm kind of glad that that happened offline and before we
were having all these conversations about it because I knew I wasn't losing anything. But I did
recognize, to your point, an invitation to a different kind of intimacy that felt disorienting.
And so I guess with that frame in mind, What is your story behind the story of Chasing Francis that
led you to think about these ideas that you write about so beautifully in the book?
Yeah. Well, I mean, at the time that I wrote it, I was moving through a season of positive
interrogation around My faith.
Right. And what I mean by that is I was beginning to question many of the scripts and assumptions I
was handed as a younger person and beginning to say, does that belong to me or someone else?
And I think I was recovering or reclaiming a faith of my own. And I think that's very healthy.
I mean, that's just sort of spiritual individuation. is what that is. Oh, that's good. And I just
sort of feel like that's the journey of the main character of the book, Chase. He's going through,
he doesn't lose complete faith in God. I mean, he wouldn't have gone on this darn pilgrimage to
Assisi, Italy if he had given up all hope. But it's as if the model of faith that he had early in
the book just ran out of gas. And I just think that's normal. I mean,
listen, I've been married 20 times to the same woman. I mean, we have renegotiated our marriage.
We have been married, I always say, 20 times. We've had to renew the contract at several important
moments. I feel that way with God. I mean, you know, God is this infinite pool.
And so, you know, it only makes sense that we I mean,
I've had 20 relationships with Jesus in my life. You know what I mean? Like, if I still had a young
life theology, I'd be in trouble. Like, you know, it was good at one point.
But, you know, as I grew older and more life circumstances came in, I had to make room,
a bigger room for who God is. I see.
So, yeah, I get what you're saying. Deconstruction in the in contemporary parlance has a negative
kind of aspect and it can go sideways. Yes. And I don't I I've had many conversations with people
in the midst of what they called deconstruction and I've challenged them. You know,
I said, listen, if you if you had if you have if you're disillusioned, it's because you had
illusions and you need to own that first. You started with illusions. Then secondly,
I'll say, and at what point will you reconstruct it? Yes. And what efforts are you putting into
that? Because otherwise they fall into this pool of cynicism and kind of like kind of a season of,
you know, yeah, cynicism and kind of not a great emotional,
psychological space. And I want to name, I just wanted to name that up front before we dive in,
because again, for the listener, I think Chasing Francis is giving us that third way that it's okay
to question. It's okay to look at things. It's okay to even doubt. It's okay to, I love what you're
saying, individuate from. Whether it's your parents, your family of origin, a youth group where
there's been painful messages or messages that don't just hold anymore. And we need this third
category that isn't, you know, I feel that tug sometimes. And again,
I feel it mostly online. I don't feel it in my real life. I feel like in my real life, people are
having honest conversations that don't fit neatly into these kind of extremes of don't question
anything or question everything and get cynical, right? It's what you're saying. And I think
marriage is a great example. Again, we don't see that with marriage either. You know, it's like,
it's great or leave. It's like, oh my gosh, marriage is a lot of the middle. You know, it's a lot
of the, right, to your point, the renegotiating, relearning each other, coming back.
And so I just kind of want to... frame our conversation, leaning into that,
I don't even want to call it the messy middle, but the work of kind of examining,
looking at closely, seeing what's hard, but also rebuilding, recreating, renegotiating. I really
love that, how that's what I see that you're doing here. You're hitting the hard questions head on,
but letting that be the start of a journey versus just a leaving of something.
You know, I think there's a model not original to me, but I like it because it's been true to my
experience. You know, you in the spiritual life, you're given or you develop on your own a thesis.
Right. And that you organize your spiritual life around that thesis,
if you will. So it's your beginning journey. Then you may go through a period of a lot of
questioning and a lot of. You know, soul searching. And then and that's called antithesis.
So you're you're you're kind of throwing out a little bit, not all of it, but maybe a portion of
what you had before. Yeah. And then the next stage that people don't hit is synthesis.
So thesis to antithesis to synthesis.
And I think that's the journey Chase is on in Chasing Francis. Right. He had a model. He.
loses that model, right? There's some skepticism. and hurt and pain involved.
And then by the end of the book, he finds this beautiful synthesis where I think he holds onto the
distinctives, the important distinctives of that earlier faith. But now his influence,
his spirituality has been opened up to this whole new domain around St.
Francis and other things. And now he's... So his faith has grown as a result of this,
what might feel like a painful pruning of the faith he once had.
And so I just, I've been through that any number of times in my life spiritually, and I think it's
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You talk about with Chase in the book, and this really mirrors a lot of my own experience.
When I was talking about 25 years ago, I would say my thesis was, and again,
I wouldn't say this was theologically my thesis, but the way that I was applying my faith was to
mostly focus on the outer behaviors and the thought life.
You know, there were numerous reasons for that. And Chase is, he's successful on the outside. He's
a pastor, but his inner world is unraveling. And I related to that,
right? My outer world looked fantastic, like gold star, Christian, you know,
high achieving, you know, but I had no idea how to reach the inner life.
And I saw that in Chase. That was the beginning for him. And I'm curious if that...
That dichotomy you think is – do you see that often in the people you talk with and the people
where there's sort of a distinguishing between the outer, what we're kind of thinking makes work?
If I can just get this together on my outer life, get this relationship right, get this job
perfect, do this better versus the inner. Do you see that a lot, Ian? Yes. I particularly see it
when we talk in those terms of – know, the first half of life and second half of life.
Yeah. Um, that's one place I see it a lot, you know, like between one and 40, man, you're like,
you're creating an ego, right? And then between 40 and 80, you're deacon,
you're taking that ego apart.
Which is the healthy, I think you started to say deconstruct, which is that healthy, non,
trying to do that, where you're just re-examining it going, I don't know that all that was
healthy. Right. You're dismantling is maybe even a better word for the ego. And so you're just
like, if the first half of life is about addition. Uh, you know, you're adding, you know,
I'm getting married. I'm going to have my first child. I'm going to get my license. I'm going to,
you know, get my, you know, have my, get my first promotion and I'm going to make my, you know,
some people might say I got my first million dollars. Some people might, you know, have kids, my
kids, my pickup fence. Yeah. All the things. And then in the second half of life is subtraction,
right? It's about, it's about saying, oh, it was a necessary.
part of my journey in that first half to be about the work of adding. But in the second half,
as I grow closer to Jesus, it's really about subtracting. It's realizing that none of those things
are going to give me the ultimate sense of satisfaction. I'm going to have to literally,
and you know, I won't go down the trail of Pinocchio, but he's my spiritual hero because that's
precisely what he does, right? Like in the first half of little Pinocchio's life, he wants to be a
real boy. Yeah. Right. We all come into the world wanting to be real boys and girls. Yeah. And then
we go on little misadventures. Yeah. Acquiring, doing all the stuff.
Right. And then at a point, as in the story of Pinocchio, somebody is going to have to die here if
they want to become a real boy. And that part of us that has to die is the ego. It's the irony.
It's the irony. And then, as in the story of Pinocchio. you will be resurrected as a real boy or
girl. Yes, that's the path. Yeah. That's the, right. It feels like a death, but it's actually the
path to greater life and the life you've wanted. You know, so we go through life and we have,
you know, that's why when someone's in a journey of a dark night of the soul or whatever we call
it, a deconstruction or whatever it may be, for the earnest seeker, it's okay,
I tell them. It's going to be okay.
If you can't see God, it may not be because the light is not with you.
It may be that the light is so bright it's blinding. God may be so close to you right now that you
can't see. And so just ride with it, you know, and it'll be okay.
And I think, you know, in Chasing Francis, you know, it was both a message to Chase's journey and
it was also a message to the church at large, right? How do we create communities in which those
kinds of journeys can be held? Yes. And as a natural part of the growth span of growth stages of
spiritual life. Exactly. Just like I think about, if you think about... development we wouldn't
want to remove i mean as a parent you might want to remove the teenage years but they're necessary
we need that kind of some of the kicking and screaming you know to become the person and it's no
different spiritually um and let's i want to talk about i love the pinocchio metaphor that's
brilliant i want to talk a little bit about saint francis because in the book For the listener who
hasn't read it, it's just a beautiful novel. And we're touching on through story.
I love how you use story, which I think is such a powerful way to bring to life some of these
themes. But he goes on a pilgrimage.
And it has to do with Chasing Francis, the title, Learning About St. Francis.
What was your first meaningful encounter with St. Francis? And what did you see in Francis that
sparked something in you that made you want to? make him such a pivotal figure in this book?
I first came to faith as a little boy in the Catholic Church. I went to Catholic schools.
We were deeply steeped in Irish Catholicism as a boy. I always tell,
whenever I meet another Irish Catholic, I'm like, did you have a Mother Mary nightlight? I did. And
invariably they did, or it was Joseph or whatever. And I owe a great debt of gratitude to that.
expression of our faith, right? In high school, got involved in Young Life. I was introduced to
Jesus another time and began a journey in a more evangelical expression of the faith.
Now, of course, evangelicalism in the 1980s was a lot different than it is now. It was a whole
different. I mean, we were to us. It was standing around singing. Hello, darkness, my old friend
and like holding hands and crying. But, you know, it was very sweet. And those people saved my
life. They saved my life at a very critical time.
And, you know, I think my introduction to Francis then was,
you know, obviously in the Catholic Church as a little boy. Right. And that was one of the things I
loved about Catholicism. You know, we always had statues and we always had windows and they just
reminded you of all these people's stories. Yes. Now.
Around the time that I wrote it, I was on
my way to a trip in, of all places, Bermuda.
And as I was going out the door, I saw a copy of G.K. Chesterton's St.
Francis of Assisi on my side table because a friend had lent it to me. A little tiny book,
right? And I brought it with me and I thought, I got there, I read it four times in one week.
Because I was floored at this remarkable historical figure who looms so large over the Christian
tradition. And I was so impressed. He represented to me the Christian I wished I could become in so
many ways. His joy, his simplicity, his love for the poor,
his... his love of the natural world. I mean, he's the patron saint of ecology.
You know, his, I mean, it was as if he was more important now than he was 800 years ago.
And I was like, you know, my Protestant friends who have no exposure to some of these things and
who often describe the kind of Christian they want to become and don't know that they're describing
St. Francis. I want to tell them about this guy because They just think he's a birdbath.
You know what I mean? Like they just think he's like a garden gnome. And I'm like, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no. He's a map for our future. Yeah, didn't he? I mean,
historically, that is one thing I love about our Catholic brothers and sisters. My mom is a devout
Catholic, so I have a huge respect for that. well, I guess it's kind of the trunk of our faith and
we're the branch of the faith, but is that historical context,
right? You get into touch with some of these real life figures, but didn't he leave wealth?
Couldn't he have inherited a bunch of his father's wealth and he turned away from it? Am I thinking
of the right saint? And he went to live with the poor. Yes, absolutely. So Francis was the son of a
very wealthy cloth merchant at a time when... paper currency was just first being introduced and
where there was rapacious greed and unhealthy capitalism like breaking out,
you know. And Francis turned away in a very dramatic fashion from his,
you know, materialist life and embraced a life of poverty,
which is not to say all of us have to do that. Yeah. But there's a powerful message in it about us
as contemporary Christians and our relationship to materialism,
to money, to complexifying our lives with too much stuff.
And so, you know, the book poses challenges, some that I hope will cause dis-ease for people,
right? In the same way that... did for me when I first began to really research Frances.
Well, to that thing we were talking about, where the outer, kind of the ego, even the subtle ways,
you know, a lot of myself and the women I work with, where there's some of the outer is kind of
social, you know, trying to be liked, you know, that sort of pleasing part of me, I'll speak for
myself, right? Like, even that isn't, well, it's maybe not, you know, accruing wealth, but it is
sort of still fixated on something outside of me, making me finally feel whole, as opposed to...
Yeah. Yeah. It's the nature. I think it's just human nature that we look for external solutions to
internal problems. Yes. Eventually, the external solution becomes a bigger problem than the one it
was trying to solve. So, you know, if you pursue a life of I want to be accepted,
I want to be loved, I want to, you know, I want to be one of the cool kids. I want to have money. I
want, you know, these are eventually those will become bigger problems than the problem it's trying
to solve. Yeah. Right. And so. You know, and that's just therapy.
I mean, therapy is basically looking at how people are trying to solve a problem. And in the
solving of the problem, they're creating more problems. So, you know, at least in part.
Right. And I just find so what's so interesting to me when I,
you know, writing Chasing Francis. My goal was to introduce people to St. Francis and Chase was
simply going to be the vehicle through which that happened. And here's, but that's not what has
happened. I have so many emails. People, they're not interested as interested in Francis as they
are in Chase. Interesting. Sure. Like everybody wants to know. People say to me all the time,
oh my gosh, Chase's story is my story. Yeah. Yeah. So Francis became almost like a sidebar add on.
And but they wanted to know about Chase. And I was so surprised when that happened. Yeah.
And yet that's the I mean, that's just the unintended consequences of publishing a book.
Right. Like it connects it in a level you didn't think it would. Well, and I think. the the
pilgrimage aspect of the book that it's sort of there's an allegory component to it we you know we
think about pilgrim's progress or or um i think sometimes it gets us and i want to ask you about
this it gets us into our own imaginations and so we're encountering something in a different way
right as opposed to being taught it didactically it's like you can almost you can feel it more in
in your body was that were you aware that you were trying to do that while writing this book while
kind of trying to yeah Well, it's funny.
The way this book came about was I ended up in a lunch with an acquisition editor from a publishing
house. And she had like 30 minutes to talk to me, right?
And so while I'm pitching a book about St. Francis, I just blurted out,
you know what? I could make it a novel. It ought to be a novel. And then I left the meeting because
she was all stoked. I left the meeting going, what did I say? Oh my gosh, I've never written a
novel. Were you mad? And then I thought, and this line is in the book,
oh no, no. First of all, St. Francis is the most written about saint in history.
More books have been written about him than any other saint in history. So I'm like, yeah, why
would you write a nonfiction, just didactic? book and just add it to the pile of books about him
when you could write a novel that would engage people at so many levels. And there's a line in the
book where I say, when the front door of the intellect is closed,
the back door of the imagination is open. love that. So when you're telling a story,
you're carrying so much freight in.
You're sneaking past everybody's filters, right? You're just sneaking past all their objections.
And they're kind of romanced or wooed into seeing what you're saying and the possibilities that it
might hold for their lives. Yeah. Yeah, it's powerful. I love that.
That's what I think. I think it was C.S. Lewis who talked about the baptized imagination.
Yes. And he came up with that term through reading George MacDonald. Right. And this idea that and
that that was a big part of this is you're putting us in that imagination. So we're kind of outside
of ourselves, but we also see ourselves in it. And I love that.
I love that you. different than your other books i mean is this i think this is your first your
only novel right yeah it's my only novel and uh though i have a really good idea for a new one but
um we'll see um but uh yeah and the the cool thing about it is you know i've written five books and
you know people know the enneagram stuff and they know the fix and stuff but they don't even know
this book's out there and so harper collins was like hey,
you know, this book seems more timely now than it was when it came out. Why don't we re-release it
as essentially a new book and get behind it like it's a new book? Because there's a ton of people
in your world now that don't even know you wrote this book. And I'm so thrilled.
I went back and read it for the first time. six months ago i'm like hey this is pretty good i love
it yeah i love
that they saw that because even even on the podcast and and my listeners it's good for you to hear
this when i ever whenever i do episodes on dark night of the soul um spiritual drowning
trying to make sense of God. They're always some of my most topped, listened to episodes. And I
appreciate, that's why I wanted to name up top. Like I appreciate that trust because I want this to
be a place. And I see that in your book where those are great things to name. These are
invitations. These are not things to shy away from. And you can name them here. And I'm going to
take you with God's help as part of this process. And you're doing this in the book.
We're going to go deeper into faith when we hold those questions. And I think that's...
what we see happening with Chase in the book. Those questions don't break him. They take him deeper
in through this encounter with Francis. But he's going to have to accept it first, that this is how
it is. So talk a little bit about that journey for him. Don't give away the story,
but tell us a little bit about what he has to encounter. Well, let me just—I mean, I don't have to
give—no spoilers here, right? But this is the story of an evangelical megachurch pastor who—
due to his time of life and a tragic incident in his church,
has a crisis of faith that leads him to say some stuff in a sermon that ends up getting him on a
forced sabbatical. And off he goes with his uncle, who happens to be a Franciscan friar,
to Assisi to kind of put his faith and his life back together again. And of course,
there's all kinds of... intrigue and all these other stuff that goes with it. But, you know,
I think when these moments come to our lives, as it as it did in the life of Chase,
that we resist these seasons. Yes.
And the resistance is what causes more suffering than the than just going through it. If you just
say, hey, God, this is where I'm at right now.
And. Frankly, if I try to overcome this and shame myself back into a previous expression of faith,
I'm actually maybe frustrating your purpose for this.
And so what would happen, God, if I just said this is disorienting,
dislocating, uncomfortable and yet necessary? And,
you know, it's interesting. You know the term we have, puerile, which means childish,
right? The word puer means childish, right?
It's like, it's the archetype. It's where we get Peter Pan from. I don't want to grow up,
right? He's a puer. And, you know, we always have to be asking ourselves,
you know, when our husband or wife asks for it, a divorce out of the blue,
or one of our kids becomes an addict, or something happens that disorients and dislocates us,
we always, I think, should stop and ask ourselves, okay, I need to accept all that's coming up in
the middle of this and simultaneously be always asking, what's the invitation here?
What's the invitation? Because in God's economy, nothing's wasted.
Yeah. This is, you know, it's like it just nothing's wasted. Yes. And so God is going to bring
something out of this that could not be brought out in you in any other way.
Yeah. And I think that's so hopeful. Yeah. I love that. I love that.
I have a refrain. that i say over and over in the secure soul and i i've started saying it i am
loved even here i am loved even here yes even at this where i am loved even here it's not i'll be
loved on the other side of this i'm loved even here and i agree with you it's so hopeful it's not
trying to minimize the pain or spiritualize it it's honoring the hard but and also i love that i
love that yeah You know, we went, as you know, years ago, we went through a season with one of our
children who was an addict, right? And man, oh man, talk about Dark Night of the Soul.
I mean, years, years of a couple of rehabs, a couple of, you know,
just wondering if he was going to live or make it through.
And now, thank goodness. Four years sober and doing fabulously. That's great.
He's more beautiful now than he ever was before. It's just so exciting.
But I remember when this began, right at the very beginning, a phrase came to me,
and I use it all the time now, when I really realized this is what was happening. The phrase was,
and now this. And now this. And it wasn't,
and now this, like. Dang it. It was, ah, open-handed. Okay. And now this,
what, what will this, what will this, what will, you know, as another friend of mine loves to say,
he says, I can't wait to see what God does with this mess. You know, it's like that kind of
hopefulness in the middle is really beautiful. That childlike, you're right. There's that, there is
that. I love how you, how you bring that around. What would you say,
Ian, to someone listening? other than to read the novel, because they'll find so much in it,
to someone who feels that disillusioned or that maybe even afraid to admit,
you know, that... faith feels thin or what would you want that person to hear?
I think you just said it, but I'd love to just kind of have you speak directly to the listener.
Yeah. Well, so many things. One would be sometimes going back to the beginning and to the
fundamental basics of things. Because oftentimes it's not the fundamentals that are bothering us.
It's peripheral issues, right?
So I was on a hike recently, and a person shared with me,
a guy shared with me about his journey. He was at a very, very conservative Reformed church and
just had a terrible experience there of betrayal, which made him question the whole Reformed
theology of it. You know, everything. Everything was now up for grabs.
Well, you know, listen, we were walking many miles together. And I said, well,
can we go back to just the basic that you are loved?
Let's just go back to that. You know what I mean? Let's just start with God is love and you are
loved. And now we can start to rebuild, right? Like, just take it back.
Get it down. Get the house back down to the studs. Right. And then we can rebuild. But but let's
get it back down to the studs. Like hang on to that.
And don't make sure that you don't inadvertently or unconsciously throw that out.
Right. As part of this journey of, you know, a new.
Yes. A new place for you. And it also it's normal.
Like, don't shame yourself because you're going through a difficult season. It's just normal.
I mean, look at the lives of great saints and mystics and contemplatives of our traditions. They
all went through this. They just all did. You know,
I mean, even Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had a couple of questions.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I mean, you know, it's like, why would any of us, like,
go, this is bad. I'm not supposed to have these seasons. And it's like, no, that's actually a bad
script someone else handed you. Like, actually, this is just part of the journey. Yeah,
I love that. I love that. Get down to the studs, get down to the basics. And from that base,
yeah, you know, I love what you're saying. You still have to tackle the questions, but you have to
start from that secure base. Yeah, exactly. That gets right back to that secure base of love,
that secure attachment. I love that. To close on today,
what is one small Franciscan experiment or action or practice you might invite me and or my
listeners to try this week? Oh, my gosh. So many I could pick from.
Well. Let's just pick an easy one because I'm in Colorado right now. And this morning I went on a
four mile hike up the mountains.
We need to spend more time in nature. Now, Francis is the patron saint of ecology.
I recognize that in the evangelical world, this is a kind of fraught topic,
but it shouldn't be. I mean, this is our father's house. Yes.
You know, when you spend time in the natural world,
what begins to happen, well, okay, you ready to go here? Yeah. All right, all right.
So most of us spend so much time with spotlight attention. And,
you know, attention in the spiritual life is a very big topic. Simone Weil and others write
beautifully about it. So our attention is very narrow. So imagine a stage.
You got a spotlight and it just picks out a character. Right. And and then it isolates.
Right. And it but there's there's no context. All you're doing is seeing one thing. But if you flip
on the lights, suddenly you see the whole stage and you see that person or problem in context.
So good. Yeah. Right. And and so I'm always. In spiritual direction with people,
I'm always like, okay, you have very spotlighty attention.
Your attention is riveted on this kid, riveted on this job,
riveted on this, right? I said, turn the lights on. See things in context.
And that is the contemplative mind. Yeah. Right. And so when you're walking in nature,
this is just actually proven. This is science, right? Yes. You begin to have a sense of the
interconnectedness of all things. Yes. Yeah. And you move from spotlight attention to what's called
lantern attention. I love that. So the attention becomes diffuse instead of overly focused.
And you go, oh, it's much bigger than I thought. It's more beautiful than I ever imagined.
I've been so riveted on my little life.
So today I was standing on a ledge overlooking the continental divide, and I'm like,
oh, right. I'm part of a really big story here. And all of a sudden?
Perspective. Perspective. And so I could say so much more about why it's important to spend time.
in uh in in nature in the created order and for so many people increasingly technology it's it's
become a lost spiritual discipline so ian i i this cover this book i grew up at the base of a
mountain up in wyoming and i and now we live at the base of the mountain again and i had i had it
as a kid and so it's kind of a key character in this in this book there's a little bit of an
allegory component to this book but I never heard that described just like that, but I will notice
as an adult, I used to drive toward the mountain as a kid when I was just angsty energy, and it
would just calm me. I never really understood that, but that's what I did. Now as an adult, it's
exactly what you're saying. It's like whatever's going on in my mind, whatever I'm fixated on, that
mountain literally, it's just my shoal. And I've noticed it so palpably.
I'm like, it's the most calming. effect just driving towards something bigger than me and it really
it's like that looming and i think about the psalms my eyes turn to the hills you know and it is
it's that kind of almost that you know it's just it's god it you know it kind of stands in as oh
this this i'm not alone in this there's something it's i'm i'm there's something bigger than me you
know it's kind of that attachment presence and i haven't heard it explained how you just explained
that but it's very real and very kind of nervous system literally like my yes i can just release
and it's looking at something bigger than me and it's just everything into context and it's so
interesting to hear you describe that physiologically and and um that it's very real so i love that
practice and if you don't live near a mountain or you don't you know you can't get to that
perspective I think there's studies that show even just going to a park, being in grass,
literally getting to a park bench, getting to where there's trees, just getting somewhere where
there's some sense of your context, to use that word. My wife, who's a sweet Enneagram 9,
and they love the outdoors, man.
has this little practice that makes me tear up every time she does it. There's one trail we use a
lot, or go on a lot, and there are two trees on that trail. And one represented my son's sobriety
to my wife, because when he was really struggling, there was just something about the solidity and
the rootedness of this tree that spoke to her.
Sorry, I'm getting a little choked up. That's beautiful. She would just go over and with both
hands, lean, hold the tree and touch it and say a prayer for my son.
In our last home, we nearly had a big window made into stained glass of that tree.
But where else can you encounter God like that?
You know, where everything is a metaphor. The mountains are a metaphor.
The trees are a metaphor. The birds are, everything is brimming. Not that everything is God,
pantheism, but panentheism is okay with me, right? Which is God is not everything,
but God is in and through everything and shines forth through everything.
And so this is so Franciscan, it's crazy, right? Like this is how Francis, you know,
saw the world. It's the Psalms that declares the glory of God.
It's just beautiful. And you're just a treasure.
There's just a wisdom that you speak that always hits.
And I'm just so grateful for your time today. But I'm also really grateful that you took the risk
on telling this story.
just, you know, kind of taking us again. It's like sometimes, the other thing I was thinking of
when I was reading Jason Francis is sometimes looking back to the, you know,
looking to something, the ancient is the way to the future. I love that kind of paradox.
Yes. Well, on a good closing note, there's a line in the book. It says,
the road to the future often runs through the past.
And that's, in many ways, a summary of all of Chasing Francis, that oftentimes we think that the
future is new and innovative when, in fact, oftentimes it's ancient and well-trodden.
So I hope people enjoy it. It's beautiful. Thank you so much for we'll link to the book in the show
notes. And it's a great time this summer as before we kind of head into the craziness of fall to
just anchor yourself, right? Anchor yourself in this story. And it's an easy read in that sense
that it's a story, you know, and I think I think we're hungry for that, too. I know I was when I
started. I was like, oh, I'm so ready to read because usually I get more like self-help, you know,
good stuff. But it's like, oh, it's just nice to sink into a story. So glad. We're grateful.
Thanks, Ian. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so
much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you
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help you start your mornings with a steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who
you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
Rejection has a way of feeling bigger than the moment itself.
A missed invitation. An unanswered text. A friendship that seems to be slipping away. An opportunity that goes to someone else. Even when we can understand why it happened, something inside us can begin telling a much older story: I'm not enough. I don't belong. This always happens to me.
In this deeply personal solo episode, Dr. Alison shares a recent experience with rejection and explores why present-day disappointments often awaken wounds from the past. Drawing from Psalm 27, attachment psychology, and the healing practice she calls Recognize and Return, she offers a compassionate framework for tending the sting of rejection without letting it define your worth.
You'll learn:
- Why rejection often activates emotional memories far older than the present moment
- How to recognize when today's hurt has become an old inner narrative
- Why logic alone can't heal wounded places inside us
- How self-compassion helps right-size present disappointments
- The difference between extending grace to others and abandoning yourself
- A practical practice for moving through rejection with God's loving presence
Rejection may still hurt. But it doesn't have to become the story you tell about yourself.
Healing begins when today's pain is allowed to be today's pain—instead of carrying every hurt you've ever known.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 201: “This Must Be My Fault”—Why We Take Rejection So Personally
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Allison and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You.
Today I want to talk to you directly about rejection. Rejection to me is such a strange phenomenon,
especially as an adult, because sometimes the actual event that triggers that feeling of rejection
is relatively small. Maybe someone doesn't respond in the way you hoped that they would.
Maybe you're not included at an event. Maybe you reach out to someone and the door closes or nobody
even bothers to reply. Maybe a friendship shifts. An invitation doesn't come.
An opportunity goes to someone else. And here's the thing that I notice happening in my life.
You may even understand why this is happening. Maybe you can create a perfectly reasonable
explanation for the other person's behavior. Maybe you can even give them a charitable spin on why
this might have happened. And still, something inside of you begins to hurt, almost as if this one
moment is carrying the weight of every time you have ever felt overlooked. unwanted,
or like you don't belong.
This is what I want to talk about today because I have a real-time, real-life example I want to
share with you of how this work that we've been talking about so much on the podcast collides with
these moments of rejection and what happens when a present-day rejection lands on an old wound
deep inside and how do you acknowledge that something hurt without creating a story that there is
something wrong with you? How do you have... for someone else without abandoning the part of you
that feels disappointed? And how do you keep one closed door, one moment of rejection from becoming
a verdict on your own worth, your own sense of belonging, or your own outlook about your future?
I used to think that because I struggle with rejection, it was a sign of insecurity.
But one of the things I'm coming to believe with all of my heart, especially as I put this book
into the world, it's that a secure soul doesn't become immune to rejection. Security doesn't mean
you never feel hurt when someone doesn't choose you. It doesn't mean you stop longing for
connection, inclusion, belonging, friendship. or love. Those are marks of a beautiful soul.
And even if your soul like mine is sensitive to rejection, this is not something we need to change
about ourselves. A secure soul learns how to tend to the sting. It learns how to recognize when
today's hurt has touched on older places inside of you. And it learns how to return that place to
loving presence. I want to anchor our discussion today in Psalm 27.
This psalm begins with confidence. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
Whom shall I fear? But as the psalm unfolds, we also hear the vulnerability.
We hear David's fear of being abandoned, ignored or turned away. He says it like this,
hear my voice when I call, Lord, be merciful to me and answer me. My heart says of you,
seek his face, your face, Lord, I will seek. Do not hide your face from me.
Do not turn your servant away in anger. And then in verse 10,
David says, though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.
And I want you to hear me say that again, the Lord.
I love this passage because David does not pretend that rejection doesn't matter.
He doesn't say, God loves me, so I shouldn't care what anybody else thinks. He doesn't shame
himself for wanting to be heard, seen, received, responded to, or welcomed.
He names the deepest fear underneath the rejection. Please don't turn away from me.
Please don't hide your face. Please don't leave me here alone. And then he remembers,
even here I am received. Even when someone else cannot make room for me,
I still have a place. Even when a human relationship falters, I am not abandoned by love.
I was planning for this episode last week when I got my feelings hurt deeply.
Someone I really wanted to stay connected with. Someone I thought I was developing a friendship
with shut a door on me. And it wasn't dramatic. It wasn't even a huge betrayal.
It was just sort of a quiet sense that what I was really excited about developing wasn't as
meaningful to the other person. and it hurt it stung me somewhere deep within and what was
interesting is that big part of me was genuinely understanding about what had happened. I could see
that this person was likely overwhelmed. She was probably doing her best. Maybe she didn't have the
capacity. Maybe she was trying to manage too many demands, too many things on her own plate. And
this was simply one more thing she couldn't take on. And I really wanted to try to give her that
charitable interpretation and not take it personally. Maybe it was personal. I didn't know. I mean,
she handled it very deftly, but it still hurt in that sense of she was clearly... setting a
boundary on her limits. And I know enough to know that the therapist part of me knows that when we
can interpret someone else's behavior in the most generous way, it's actually better for us. It
actually helps us. We don't have to immediately assume the worst. I was trying to do that, right?
I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. And tell myself she's likely overwhelmed. She's
likely doing the best that she can. I don't think this is personal. And I think that explanation
was likely true. The truth is I understand what that feels like. I also know what it's like to
reach. the end of my own capacity. I know what it's like to miss an email or take too long to
respond or even have to decline an opportunity or close a door or narrow a window,
you know, not be as available as I've been. And I hate having to do that, but I understand what
it's like sometimes when life gets full and you can't always be who the person on the other end
wants you to be. And so because of that, I have empathy and yet it just still hurt.
You know, I couldn't. talk myself out of it. I couldn't. I couldn't figure out how to logic my way
out of feeling this kind of festering pain inside. Even with all the empathy in the world,
with all the perspective in the world, with all the logic in the world, none of it was really
taking away that sting. And throughout the day, I just kind of noticed that there was just that
lingering feeling of that didn't feel good. And then those inner narratives that, again,
I haven't necessarily felt in a while, but that are very familiar to me. You know, did I do
something wrong? Was I too much? Did I try too hard? Did I somehow do something to make this
happen? And then there's another narrative that can rise up from an even deeper place within.
Why does this always happen to me? Why do I never belong? Why do I always get that closed door in
the face? And I could feel the beginnings of this old narrative.
And this is in... to notice because this narrative inside that goes way back is often that clue
that something inside of us is telling a story that isn't only about this present event.
Because I was aware that that old narrative didn't really apply to this situation,
but I couldn't shake. The feeling, I couldn't get that sting to come out from deep within my soul
where it had gotten lodged. And this is the thing about narratives. They often transform a painful
moment into a deeper wound. You know, something hurts and then our minds begin to try to explain
why. Maybe the door closed because I'm not... enough maybe she didn't make room for me because i'm
not important maybe i wasn't invited because i just am not someone who really belongs or maybe this
happened because there's something wrong with me And here's the thing, the disappointment is real,
right? I don't want to minimize the reality of that current disappointment, but when that
disappointment starts gathering all this random data from your whole life and creating a story
about it, it reaches all the way back to every single time that we've been excluded,
every single time a friendship ended, every single time that someone else was chosen and we
weren't. And it creates this story. See? This is what always happens to you.
And it was such an interesting experience in that moment because I've done a lot of work on this.
And again, part of me, a big part of me understood that this, this faint whisper of a narrative
inside was old news, that I didn't have to go there, that I didn't have to let it fester.
And so I was doing okay. I wasn't spiraling. I wasn't lashing out, but I was aware of that inner.
narrative, that the traces of it, the whispers of it that were still there. And I also knew from
the past that it had potential to fester. I didn't want it to fester into resentment.
I didn't want it to fester into that old story that I can start to tell about myself,
that I'm not good enough, that I'm not as good as other people, that I don't deserve a seat at the
table, that what I do doesn't matter enough. You know, I didn't want to go there. I've come so far,
right? Throughout the day, I just kind of checked in. I was aware that the logic wasn't working.
And that evening, I was in my room before bed. I was by myself and I...
in this habit of, I get down on my knees and kneel at my bed because it helps me not fall asleep so
that I can say my prayers before bed. And I've learned this from my husband. He's super disciplined
about this. I talk about this in the Secure Soul in the opening chapter, if you've read this, sort
of my journey with prayer. But I've learned that this is a really helpful, just getting on my
knees. And I thought of all the Psalms that we go through every week on the dailies,
the daily podcast episode. And I just talked to God about it. I just cried out to Jesus,
you know, and I, and immediately what I teach, this process that I teach kind of came into my
conscious awareness from the Holy Spirit.
And I almost instantly got a picture in my mind and my imagination of myself at 13,
maybe 14, this young, tiny, I was such a late bloomer. giant teeth,
crooked teeth, you know, funny little permed hair. The kids called me toothpick because I was so
tiny. I was such a late bloomer. And I was on in this particular memory. I just, in my imagination
that the Holy Spirit just brought to mind, just on the school bus that I rode to the middle school
in our town. It was a long ride. We went all the way across town in this school book with just all
the kids. And just that feeling, all these different images kind of came into my mind.
In that moment, just a lot of my friends, my girlfriends who were already starting to kind of like
boys and be into boys a little bit. And the boys were passing notes to them and kind of flirting
with them on the bus. Or they were athletes and they had like their athletic wear with them.
I grew up in a really athletic sports town and I wasn't very notably athletic. I was not made to be
an athlete in that context. And just that feeling of sitting there and kind of watching everybody
else seem to belong. with each other you know seem to be on the team be in the student council be
in a relationship be be at the parties be at the school dances and i was just felt in my own soul
like i didn't belong anywhere definitely not with my peers at that time And the thing is,
looking back, I don't know that any of my peers really felt like they belonged either. You know,
that's the funny thing about these childhood wounds. Now I can see that, but it doesn't matter.
My experience in that moment was just of everybody else has a seat at the table,
but me. I'm sitting here all by myself. There was just a part of me that always kind of felt like I
was watching everybody else live out their lives while I was on the sidelines. And I can just still
feel that energy inside of me of when will it be my turn? When will someone notice me? When will
somebody choose me? When will I get to be on the team? When will I get a seat at the table? When
will someone let me in?
That feeling stayed with me through much of my teen years, much of my adolescence. It wasn't only
attached to one dramatic incident, right? It was sort of like the emotional atmosphere around me.
I share some of the stories from that season that really kind of lodged that narrative deep inside
in the secure soul. But that theme that other people belong. I'm on the outside. Other people are
chosen. I'm not. Other people know how to enter into life while I'm just watching here from the
sidelines. It's just a really strong feeling at times inside of me. And in that moment of prayer,
in that moment of reaching out to God and of connecting to that younger version of me,
as the Holy Spirit kind of brought that memory to mind, I realized that that email,
that recent closed door, as minor as it was, had landed directly on that old wounded place inside.
The present situation had hurt, yes, but it had also really tapped on that old tail wound of that
13-year-old girl who's still asking, when will somebody finally let me in?
Right? And all of my logic didn't touch that. root place, that place where the wound is still to
some degree or another alive inside of me. And here's the thing that's so interesting to me when we
connect to the old narratives, to the old place of the wound. It's counterintuitive because we
often think that when we look back, toward that history, when we look back toward that younger
place where some of those core messages took root, that it will make us feel worse.
And if you've never done this work before, and if you have deep trauma, it can be overwhelming.
So I want to be clear. I've done a lot of this work, and these were not big T traumas. These are
more... you know, wounds. These are hurts, right? So if you've had big T trauma where you're going
all the way back to a really painful place you've never looked at, you want to do this work with a
therapist, with a guide. But when we learn how to be with that place inside where those wounds
first formed, especially in the presence of a loving God, of the Holy Spirit who wants to bring
that healing presence to every part of our souls, when we can be present with that part of us, it
brings self-compassion. Suddenly I had compassion. for myself, I thought, oh my gosh,
I feel for that young girl. That was hard. That was painful. And it went on for a lot of years.
And she really felt like she didn't belong, like she was an outsider looking in at other people.
And I get why I feel this way. I get why this particular kind of rejection. It's hurtful to me.
And suddenly I had compassion for myself. And suddenly my whole nervous system kind of softened. I
wasn't trying to beat myself up for feeling this way. I wasn't trying to talk myself out of it. I
wasn't trying to kind of sideline the feeling. I was just with this younger part of me and a really
compassionate. way and I could see for her what I couldn't yet see for myself,
which was, yes, this hurt. I could be with her in that hurt without trying to talk her out of it.
I could be with her in that feeling of rejection. And I could also be with her as an adult who had
more perspective than she had. I could see more clearly the truth for her and I could help remind
her and therefore myself of the larger truth that... not trapped on the outside of your life.
This one person's lack of capacity is not proof that you are unwanted.
One closed door does not mean every door will close. There will be people who do invite you in.
You do have a place. You have been chosen in countless ways. Good things have come to you and good
things will come. again. And I could see that in a way as I connected with her and the current
disappointment became right-sized again. It still hurt.
I still wished the situation had worked out differently. It still was like, ouch, I wish that door
had opened, but... became today's hurt instead of every hurt I had ever carried,
right? Somehow in that place of being able to imagine that younger version of me and holding space
for her and inviting God's presence to be with her all together helped my nervous system soften,
helped me find that compassion to return to myself in the present moment.
And here's the thing, healing doesn't always mean the pain or the hurt immediately disappears.
Sometimes healing means that today's pain no longer has to carry your entire history.
A rejection can be disappointing without becoming proof. that you are unworthy.
This is a big part of the healing journey, that those old wounds from the past no longer have to
narrate your present story. A closed door can be painful without becoming evidence that you will
never belong to anyone. Someone can lack capacity for you without that lack becoming a measure of
your value. And this is all rooted in the psychology of rejection.
Our present experiences, the experiences we have today with our friends, with our spouses,
with our families, with our loved ones, these do not occur in isolation. They interact with our
emotional memories. Sometimes we consciously remember those memories, but often we don't.
They're often operating outside of our conscious awareness. may not think, you know, this
unanswered text reminds me of middle school. Those dots might not be connected immediately in your
mind. Instead, you simply feel the familiar emotional conclusion,
that narrative. I don't matter. I'm unwanted. I'm too much.
I'm not good enough. It must be me. I'm the problem.
And it can feel as though the present moment is generating all of that intensity, but often the
present moment has touched a place in history. And that doesn't mean you're being overly sensitive
or overly dramatic. It doesn't mean you're being emotionally immature. In fact, the road to healing
is becoming aware of those places inside where the wounds still live,
right? And when that happens, arguing with yourself or criticizing yourself or trying to logic
yourself out of feeling that way doesn't... You can't shame a young place inside of you that's
never known loving presence into feeling something it's never felt. You can't lecture yourself into
security. You can't sort of badger yourself saying, this is ridiculous. Stop caring so much and
expect it to work. That younger place inside of you also needs care.
It also needs connection. It also needs your compassionate. presence.
That younger place inside of you needs the truth spoken in a way it can receive. It needs
parenting, maybe the kind of parenting you never got. And the good news is this,
you can bring that healing. You can bring that presence in partnership with God's spirit to those
places even now. This is part of what I call the process of recognizing and returning.
You recognize what is happening inside of you. You notice the thoughts, the narratives,
those festering feelings, maybe of resentment, the self-doubt, the old story beginning to form.
And you become curious instead of critical. What is this about? What is this reminding me of?
When have I felt this before? What conclusion am I beginning to draw about myself?
How old does this part of me feel? And you begin to recognize these inner movements with
compassion, with curiosity and without shame. And then you return. You return to that place with
compassion and with God's loving. presence. I mean,
the beautiful thing about God's loving presence is it doesn't know the bounds of time or space. And
so when you connect with that memory, with that place inside where the narrative still lingers,
where the wound was first formed, God's loving presence goes back in time and is with you right
there where you need healing the most. And through the miracle of God's design,
we are able to bring every part of ourselves back into loving presence.
This is the theological movement we see in Psalm 27. David doesn't bypass his feelings about
rejection. He names it. He brings it into the light. He says, hear me, answer me.
Do not hide your face. Do not turn me away. These are the prayers of someone who longs for
connection. And then he says, your face, Lord, I will seek. He brings the fear of being turned away
into relationship. He doesn't suppress the longing. He doesn't deny the ache.
He directs that aching place inside of him toward the one who can meet him in it.
And it's then that he remembers, the Lord will receive me.
Every part of himself is now connected to the truth that God's love receives him,
that he is loved even here. And here's the thing. God's welcome does not mean that human rejection
stops hurting. We were created for connection. And I hate the experience of rejection.
And I hate that I feel it. And I hate that many of you listening will relate to this story.
I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it go away. Sometimes when I imagine heaven, this is what
I imagine. I imagine us all finally being with one another without the rejection, without the pain,
without the small feelings, without the insecurities. We're just with each other in love.
That's a miracle. We were created to live in connection with one another.
We need friendship. We need love. We need community. We need to belong. It's not immature or weak
to care when another person shuts a door. But God's welcoming presence to every part of us keeps
another person's rejection from becoming the final authority on who you are.
God receiving you means that there is no closed door that can remove you from the place where your
deepest lies. belonging begins. Another person may not recognize your value.
They may not create room for you at their table. They may misunderstand you. They may choose
someone else. They may even act carelessly or unkindly, but they do not get to determine whether
you are worthy of belonging. They do not get to determine whether you are worthy of love.
They do not get to define your place. in the world, and they do not get to write the ending of your
story. And this is where we also begin to hold two truths together.
When we feel that sting of rejection, one of two things can happen. Sometimes we rush to be so
gracious that we rush too quickly to the other person's perspective. We make excuses for the other
person. But in doing so, sometimes we bypass our own hurt. But on the other hand, sometimes we rush
to blaming the other person. We harbor resentment. We make up excuses about their character that
may not actually be true.
does is it allows you to hold compassion for yourself and an open posture toward the other person.
As you're compassionate toward yourself in that moment of rejection, it also gives you more
perspective about what happened with the other person. Maybe you'll never know what happened,
but you'll be able to mentally let it go, let them off the hook, kind of a go in peace.
Maybe I'm not going to give you a lot of my time or energy anymore, but I'm not doing it out of
resentment. I can genuinely just let you go, right? And there's such peace in that,
especially when you don't really know what happened. Maybe if the person really did hurt you and
maybe they did do something wrong and they're not owing up to it, once you've been compassionate
toward yourself, you're more able to walk through an actual process of forgiveness. Or in some
cases, maybe you'll soon discover that this person actually does care about you, that they,
for whatever reason, let you down in that moment, but that it wasn't worth getting resentful or
cutting off the whole friendship. Maybe you'll work through a... process of repair or you'll
reconnect. So the goal of this work of self-compassion,
of being with yourself at the place of rejection is so that you,
in partnership with God's Spirit, have tended to your own soul and you can move forward in peace
regardless. of what happens and as you do this work you keep the wound from becoming resentment
toward another person or a verdict against yourself
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So the next time rejection stings, here are a few questions you might ask yourself.
First, what actually happened? Try to name the present hurt factually without minimizing it,
but without trying to interpret it. So maybe that's the fact that someone didn't respond. Or maybe
they said no. Or maybe you didn't get invited. Or maybe this relationship has changed and this
other person isn't making time for you in the way they once did. These are all facts.
So first, look at the facts. What happened? Second, ask yourself, what is the most gracious
explanation you can honestly offer? Not a false... and not one that denies harmful behavior,
but the most generous explanation that actually still respects reality.
Is it possible that this person is overwhelmed? Are they limited? Are they afraid?
Are they distracted? Are they simply unable or unwilling to give what you hoped they would give?
Third, notice where the disappointment starts to become an inner narrative.
What are you beginning to conclude about yourself? Maybe you're starting to notice those faint
whispers or loud shouts of, I don't matter. This always happens to me.
No one wants me. I'm always overlooked. I'm too much. I'm not enough.
I'll never belong. Right? Start to notice those inner narratives. Next,
do a little journaling prayerfully with God. Ask yourself when you first remember feeling that way.
What memory comes to mind from when you were young? You don't have to force a memory,
but simply get curious about the history of this narrative. Does it remind you of being on a school
bus or in a classroom? Does it remind you of an old relationship?
Maybe of a relationship in which it always felt like you had to earn your place and couldn't quite
fit in? Just notice this is a younger place inside of you that's carried a history.
And then as you pray or as you journal, bring that younger place, that memory, that place where
this narrative lives into connection with God and with you. What does that younger version of you
need to hear from your present day self?
Maybe she needs to hear your validation. Yeah, this hurts. I'm with you. Maybe she needs to hear
your perspective. You didn't cause this closed door. Maybe she needs to hear your reassurance.
You do not have to prove your value. You are not trapped in the past.
You have choices now.
And then ask what that younger place needs to receive from God. Maybe it's the simple truth of
Psalm 27 that God receives you. God does not turn away from the tender,
disappointed places inside of you. That God's face is not hidden from you.
That you are never left alone on the outside.
And then lastly, return the present disappointment to its proper size.
You might ask yourself simply, what is true about this moment? And what is not true?
It may be true that this door closed. It is not true that every door will close.
It may be true that this person did not choose you.
unworthy of being chosen. It may be true that you are disappointed. It is not true that you're
stuck back in the past. It may be true that you feel alone. It is not true that you have been
abandoned by love. This is one of the most healing practices that I found is learning to let
today's hurt be today's hurt. And it starts by noticing those tender places inside that are longing
to return. to love. May you have the courage today to acknowledge when rejection hurts.
May you resist the urge to turn someone else into a villain or yourself into the problem.
May you recognize the younger places where today's disappointment has landed. May you meet those
places with tenderness, with truth, and with the steady presence of God. May you be gracious toward
others without abandoning yourself. And may you let today's pain become today's pain instead of
every pain you have ever carried. You are not standing alone on the outside.
If you found your way to this place, there are so many of us who are right there with you.
And above all, there is a God who receives you. You are already held in love.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to or
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Join us each weekday for the best of you every day, a brief daily reflection to help you start your
mornings with a steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor
God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
What if the greatest risk isn't failing?
What if it's losing yourself while trying to succeed?
In this episode, Dr. Alison sits down with Survivor 50 winner Aubry Bracco for a conversation about resilience, identity, and what it means to stay grounded in yourself through both success and disappointment.
Aubry shares the deeply personal journey behind her years on Survivor—from experiencing a panic attack on national television and falling just short of winning, to stepping away from the game entirely after realizing she'd become disconnected from herself. Years later, she returned with a different mindset—not to prove herself, but to trust herself. That shift changed everything.
Whether you're facing a setback, navigating a major life transition, or learning to quiet the pressure to achieve, this conversation is a reminder that true confidence isn't found in controlling the outcome—it's found in staying connected to who you are.
You'll learn:
- Why resilience is built by staying present, not chasing perfection
- How setbacks can become invitations to deeper healing
- The difference between adapting and abandoning yourself
- Why taking risks doesn't require certainty—it requires trust
- How to distinguish your own inner wisdom from others' expectations
- What it looks like to pursue success without losing your sense of self
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn't guaranteeing the outcome. It's trusting yourself enough to take the next step anyway.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
i'm watching survivor but i'm in survivor wild i'm in the tv this is really confusing and i had a
full-on panic attack i like blacked out i don't remember it yeah that was a wild experience
because then i was on the bottom of the pecking order on that tribe very quickly i just was like
all right aubrey you have to focus you have to win this next challenge and if you can put one foot
in front of the other now tomorrow could go a different way and that's what Survivor is all about.
So I modified my game so much and it got me close but not far so I modified myself again but I was
so far away from myself that I realized I was untethered and no longer knew which Aubrey I was
listening to. If it doesn't bring you joy it's okay to stop and pause and figure out why that is.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You. I am so
thrilled you're here with me. We are more than halfway through the summer, and we are also right in
the heart of the launch for my new book, The Secure Soul. It comes out August 18th.
You've been hearing about it and everything I do. And before we dive in today, I just want to take
a minute to tell you about something I'm so excited about. It's coming up next week.
So many of you. You joined me for the five toxic traits webinar that we had last week.
It was such a powerful gathering. I've heard so much great feedback from you all.
And next Wednesday, July 29th, at seven o'clock PM Eastern, we are continuing that experience this
time with a live round table. It will be with my friends and fellow therapists, Jenna Reemserma and
Tammy Sollenberger. You may recognize their names, Jenna and Tammy. two of the most popular,
most downloaded guests we've ever had. They're amazing women with amazing stories.
They're therapists, but they're also fellow travelers with us on this journey, just like me and
just like you. They don't simply teach this work from a distance. They understand what it means to
live it and together. The three of us are going to talk about how the wounds we've carried from
childhood have followed us into adulthood, into our adult relationships, and what it looks like to
begin to heal. We're going to share personally, and we're going to share some of our insights from
our work. And we're also going to guide you through some live work, real time. You won't be on the
camera, don't worry, but you'll be right there in the room with us, beginning this practice and
some of the work that's at the heart of this. secure soul. It is such powerful work when we begin
to turn our attention inwardly and give the younger parts of ourselves the attunement and the
presence and the love some parts of us have never gotten. So I can't wait for this roundtable.
The price of admission is just one pre-order of the secure soul.
Okay, so you may have noticed I'm talking about pre-ordering quite a bit right now. And I want to
tell you why, because there's a reason I'm doing that. There's so many great books out in the world
that just never get widely read. publishing market pays attention to what happens early in a book's
release. Pre-orders signal to booksellers and distributors and online platforms and algorithms
that a book is worth noticing. And that helps the book reach more people. It's going to help the
book reach more people like you and me who need this work. And so a lot of you will write in to me
and say, how can we support you? We're so grateful. And this is one of those moments where I will
say the best way you could support me in this work we're doing together is to pre-order it. copy
of The Secure Soul. And part of what I'm trying to do, because it's kind of weird to...
order a book that you won't get for another six weeks. I'm trying to create these moments,
these opportunities like next week's roundtable so that when you pre-order, you're already getting
something. You're getting to start the work now. You'll also get the first three chapters so you
can start reading immediately, then attend the roundtable. We'll have a few more things going on.
There are other bonus items, but that's my way of saying, hey, I would be so grateful if you would
go ahead and if you're planning to buy the book, buy it now. Join in some of these gatherings. It's
been a great excuse for me to create some of these gatherings. I love doing it. It's been such a
great journey so far. I would love for you to join us next week. Jenna and Tammy are amazing.
This is going to be a beautiful time. It's going to be intimate. You'll be in the room with us.
We'll take your questions. Like I said, well, you'll have a chance to do some of the work
internally to kind of see what that's like to be with yourself in this way that I teach.
All you have to do to join is order. one copy of The Secure Soul, anywhere books are sold.
You can go to Amazon or Christian Books or... anywhere at any independent bookstore,
go to your local bookstore and order it. It also helps get the word out to independent bookstores.
Just order a paperback copy of the book is preferred. One copy,
then go to the secure soul book.com and submit your order confirmation. You just need to put in
the numbers. It takes less than a minute and you will then receive immediately at your email
address, the first three chapters of the book, along with all the other bonus items and your
personal link to Register for the live roundtable. That's next week. It's next Wednesday,
the 27th at 7 p.m. Eastern, but you will also get access to the replay if you can't join us live.
If you can't find the link, if you have any questions, email us at info at drallisoncook.com.
This is going to be such a personal and special. gathering. So speaking of,
today's episode is a really special one. It's also really personal. To me,
it's a little different from some of the conversations we typically have on the podcast, but it
highlights one of the six marks of a secure soul that I write about in the book.
And that's this, a secure soul learns how to take a risk. Taking a risk can be challenging if
you've felt stuck in fear or self-sabotage or if you felt invisible and you're unsure how to put
yourself out there. And here's the thing, taking a risk doesn't mean you know you'll have instant
success. That's what's hard about it. It doesn't mean you won't fail. It doesn't mean you won't be
misunderstood or it doesn't mean you won't fall flat on your face. Sometimes we take a risk and we
do stumble and we do fall, but it It does mean you become secure enough that you can put yourself
out there, that you can take the risk and that you're resilient enough and you trust yourself
enough that you can get back up when things don't go the way you planned.
And today's guest has taught me personally something powerful about what that looks like.
So a couple of weeks ago, I posted on my Instagram story that I just met one of my heroes from
reality television.
love of reality television. You'll learn more about that in the book. But this one, Survivor,
is my favorite all-time reality show. I started watching it the very first season.
It aired more than 25 years ago, back when you had to watch one episode at a time,
right? You'd get one episode, and then the next week, the second episode would come out. And the
first season of Survivor came out near the end of my doctoral program. And this was during a
chapter in my own life I write about. the book where my soul was completely divided.
I was trapped inside the controller part of me. I was trapped inside my own mind. I was hiding from
real life in an effort to stay safe. I didn't realize I was doing this, right? This was one of the
ways a part of me had learned to stay safe. I was deeply lonely on the inside,
but I wasn't building the kind of relationship. or living the full wholehearted life that I wanted.
And Survivor became a strange kind of companion to me. During this year,
I would watch the people put themselves in an extreme environment. They were out in nature.
They were forming relationships. They were taking risks. They were sometimes making errors,
but they were putting themselves out there into an experience. And there was a part of me that
longed to become that alive in my own life. Well,
years later, during the pandemic, my family, my two kids, they were in high school and early
college. We're all stuck at home. We began to watch season after season of Survivor together,
and they fell in love with it just like I did. And this is when I first encountered today's guest,
Aubrey Brocco. The first time we met Aubrey, she was experiencing a panic attack on national
television. She recovered. She stayed in the game somehow. She formed relationships and made it all
the way to the end of that first season, only to experience a devastating loss where her teammates
didn't vote for her to win. It was crushing to watch. And then she returned to play again,
continued to face setbacks, and eventually realized that she had moved so far away from her own
self that she needed to step away from the survivor world altogether. And you'll hear her talk
about that story on today's episode. She went to therapy. She became a mother. She began to reclaim
her own life. She began to loosen her grip on an achievement-oriented part of her to reconnect
with herself. And then she decided to take another risk. She returned for the show's historic 50th
season. And spoiler alert, if you haven't yet seen it, she won the whole thing.
And what inspires me most isn't simply that Aubrey eventually won Survivor.
It's who she became along the way. She didn't return with a guarantee that this time everything
would work. She returned more grounded in herself. She played differently.
She played more in tune with herself by remaining present, listening to her inner wisdom and
trusting herself to adapt and trusting herself that if she did fail again, she would be.
Okay. And this to me is a powerful evidence of a secure soul.
A secure soul isn't someone who never fails. It's someone who can risk failure without abandoning
yourself. You can be overlooked, disappointed, or misunderstood and still find your way back to who
you are. You can step away. When something is costing you too much and you can discern when it's
time to set back in a secure soul as a strong inner base.
I love how Aubrey shows us that through her story, the story that played out nationally on
television. One other really fun connection, I found out that Aubrey attended the very high school
where my sister taught English for years. And so Aubrey was one of my sister's students. That's how
I made this connection. I was able to reach out and Aubrey graciously agreed to join us and share
the mental health journey, the journey of resilience behind what we watched unfold on television.
I love her story, and even if you're not a fan of Survivor, I know this has something for every one
of us who has ever felt overlooked, lost our bearings, or wondered whether we have the courage to
try again. Please enjoy my conversation with the winner of Survivor 50,
Aubrey Brocco.
I'm so thrilled you're here with us today. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for
having me. I've never had a cooler podcast guest in my kids' eyes and also in my own eyes.
Thank you.
You know, I was thinking about my journey with Survivor. I actually watched the very first season
when it came out on television. I was living in Denver and I was getting my PhD. I have a new book
coming out and I was writing about how it was very lonely. I was very much in my head during this
season. So I vividly remember. that very first season. So I have a long history with Survivor.
Wow. So you're saying you were in your head that first season of Survivor. So you remember watching
it? Yes, it was like my buddy. It was like my companion that year. Back in the day, you know, when
it came out, you know, every Thursday night or whatever.
When did you first get interested in Survivor, let alone think about, you know,
applying to be on it? It's just I'm blown away by the parallel when I heard you talk about how you
kind of remember that time. of watching Survivor. So I watched from season one.
I had just graduated from the eighth grade and my best friend and I were all excited.
The show was so exciting. And I vividly remember watching it. And I would watch with my family and
be like pizza night every Thursday night. It was on Thursdays at that point. Yes, yes. And I
watched, I'd say when I went to college, I kind of fell out of it a bit. Yeah. But then I remember
after college. let me see, it was probably like 2011,
2012, 2013, I think it was. I was working a corporate job. I had wanted to be a newspaper
journalist. I graduated in 2008, kind of a rough year to graduate in general and find a job.
But I also wanted to write for newspapers, which was also kind of a hard thing to do. So I pivoted
into marketing and I found myself in a corporate job. It was a good job, but I felt stifled. I
didn't feel like myself. And I actually was in my head and I wasn't feeling myself. That's why it
really struck me. And I fell upon Survivor. 28, I think it was,
Cagayan, which was the first brain brawn beauty. And that was a season with huge characters like
Tony Vlachos. Yes, great season. Wonderful season. And I was like, oh my gosh,
these people are so alive. Cagayan was incredible. I mean, Tony, Trish, Spencer,
Raymond Bledsoe, Sarah Lucina. And I was like, this is incredible. It is my buddy,
like you said. And my family had always said, like, you're a newspaper journalist. You do
marketing. You should put in a tape. I said to myself, finally, my family had always told me,
but I was kind of not loving where I was in life. I was like, Aubrey, put in a tape. So I did.
I put in a tape in July 2014. Yes, it was 2014. And then I got called in October 2014.
And it all started there.
That
is fascinating because it is. It's funny because the other. So so back then it was just there's
something about it that captures both the the just being it's like man against nature.
It's just you and not in your head. So same for me. I was just living so much in my head and there
was something about it. I never had the guts to put in for it. But then also the relational stuff.
And then my family in covid, my kids in high school.
started watching. And we literally watched every season. So it kept us company through that amazing
year or two years. We watched all of your seasons. And you've just always been someone.
And I, I talk about this a lot on the podcast. And you've I've heard you use this word, but you've
always captured my attention from the first time I saw you on co wrong is kind of someone who's
underestimated in the game. And I
Before we get there, there's so many places I want to go. I want to start with when you get cast,
you get on.
You have this sort of corporate background. You have this incredibly well-educated,
incredibly, I imagine, can get lost in your mind. And suddenly you're on this island with all of
these people. What was that like for you initially? I believe, is that the season where you did
have? the panic attacks on air. Yes. So talk to us a little bit about that journey from when you
got there through some of recognizing whether you knew it or not, that there was a lot of anxiety
involved for you. Sure. Yes. So when I applied, I knew it was interesting because I knew the role,
the archetype I would be. Lived in Cambridge near Harvard. I went to Brown.
I went to Phillips Exeter. I had the glasses. So I went in, I'm like, I'm the nerd. And I ended up
being on Brain Brown Beauty 2 on the Brains Tribe. And I remember going in,
I'm really analytical. And before you go and you play, you sit in quiet in pregame in Ponderosa,
which means that the game hasn't started, but you're doing interviews, you're doing med checks,
you're doing swim tests, very in your head. all of a sudden jeff says gather everything you can off
this boat go so all of a sudden i'm in this experience i get to camp with my new tribe and i
remember dr allison having this moment where i was just fully out of body i'm like i'm watching
survivor but i'm in survivor wild I'm in the TV. This is really confusing.
And I remember it was like 118 degrees. It was really hot. I was afraid of drinking the water
because we hadn't had fire yet. I wanted to make sure we boiled it. And I had a full on panic
attack. I like blacked out. I don't remember it. I didn't think it was a panic attack then. I
thought it was just like dehydration. It was like on day two. And yeah,
that was a wild experience because then I was on the bottom of the. of the pecking order on that
tribe very quickly. So I want to get to that because that's fascinating to me.
I think that's hard enough in life, let alone on national television. Yes. Did you have a history
with anxiety or panic before going in or was that did that totally surprise you out of the blue?
So I. I know now after kind of introspection after and finding out I had mild generalized anxiety
disorder after that I've always had a little bit of like kind of an OCD tendency.
I would call it perfection or high level of achievement or always being on guard or always
anticipating the emotional texture of the room. And what do I have to do next? Yeah. But I also
think that you can tend to be on the anxiety scale when you have that.
And I have a very acute intuition. Yes. And I think sometimes anxiety comes with that.
I just didn't call it that. I come from the kind of more neurotic ilk.
My parents are from Brooklyn. It's a very fast paced. And I think I was anxious my whole life and
didn't even know what to call it. And it probably worked for you on some level with high achieving,
high performance, but suddenly you're completely out of your element, which happens. I mean, yours
is a little heightened on national television, but you're right around the age. How old were you
when you first started? 29. Right. So in our 20s is kind of at the age when suddenly it's like,
oh, wait a minute. This isn't, you know, and you have this heightened experience. It really makes
sense. that that happened how did you cope so so couple that with socially finding yourself at the
bottom i mean finding yourself that's talk about resilience how did you what did you muster up from
either inside yourself or or from you know memories of you know loved ones to kind of help you stay
in the game you stayed in the game all the way to the end that first season Yeah, well, I would say
now I see through my whole life I've been like that. I can get really in my head, really. And I
knew that I use that language on the show. I'm like, I get really in my head and then I like kind
of freak out and then I'm fine. I will tell you, after freaking out like that, everyone had seen me
kind of crash out on my tribe. I really just went back to my kind of ability to make one on one
connections. And I really bonded with the two older members of my tribe. And I was able to kind of
hold space for people for who they were. It was a bit of a season where we had kind of misfits and
then kind of the popular kids. I mean, it's a stereotype, but it was brain brown beauty.
And we were divided that way. And I knew how to like kind of take my ragtag group of people. I've
always loved talking to different people, kind of like collected different kinds of people. I
always was a floater between different groups. So, I mean, after you have a panic attack like that,
you know, it's on TV. You really don't have anything to lose. So I just was like,
all right, Aubrey, you have to focus. You have to win this next challenge. And if you can put one
foot in front of the other now. tomorrow could go a different way. And that's what Survivor is all
about. So when something seems good on Survivor, it can kind of be bad, meaning like you can feel
like you have a great alliance and then something unexpected happens. Or when something seems bad,
like I'm on the outs, can actually be good because then it can only go up from there. powerful.
But that's a lesson in life too. Right? The minute you feel at the bottom, the minute you feel at
the outs, if you can mentally adjust, and I love what you said, and look for the other people who
are also maybe on the outs, look for the other people, there's power in that,
that you know, that's a very sophisticated mindset shift that I think we don't always feel.
like when it feels like everybody everybody around us yes has more than we have and you're proof in
the pudding for how far you got in the game but i do think it's also true in life do you do you see
that you know same skill set helping you in in life yes and i will say so many things happened
after that first season where i think kind of my exploration of How do you deal with setbacks?
How do you come back? I've become like I never realized that Survivor would give me the gift of
like breaking the entire system of achievement that I was raised with and help me look at failure a
completely different way. Like I do believe now that I have a good friend. I always call him out.
His name is Chris Savage. He's a CEO that I work with. And he says that luck,
the recipe for luck is persistence and the mindset that good things can happen. And I really
believe that now, like I celebrate failure because I know that I can learn more quickly and then
pivot more quickly. So that's something like all these little lessons about how to turn things
around. I wouldn't say I came to terms with them like right after that panic attack. That's been
like 10 years of work after it. But those are things that very much had their beginnings in that
first season when it all fell away. Yeah, because, again, I think this is why I'm so drawn to you.
So many of us are so drawn to your story is we see ourselves in you. Right.
So it's not just the panic attack. It's not just clawing your way up from kind of this where you
were in the game. But then in that first season, you have that heartbreaking loss where you get.
Right. So close. So I just it's you know, it's like we all watch you and kind of feel like,
oh, I know what that feels like. And also this is a magnified version of this.
When you. got back into your life. I've heard you talk about,
did you go, did you start therapy right away? Was that, where did you kind of begin to unpack that?
And how did you begin to unpack that? And how did that,
tell us a little bit more about how that began to dismantle some of that achievement mindset and
who you were before going into the game? Great question. So the show has a therapist who's always
very helpful um and wonderful but i decided to go on my own to seek a therapist locally and it was
really interesting because i thought i was going to a therapist to kind of unpack the anxiety the
panic attack or just like the fact that I'd lost. And it very quickly turned into something so much
more than that. It was this whole system of achievement that I'd been raised with. That if you work
really hard, you will arrive and you will achieve the thing.
But I learned that I'd worked as hard as I could. I did everything I could to get to the final
three of Survivor 32. That's co-wrong. And I was controlling things.
it did not work. So it really dismantled my entire inner system and scaffolding.
I call it scaffolding as it pertained to achievement. This idea that one plus one will always equal
two in life. Yes.
I work hard and I try to get to the top. It'll work out,
but it turns out it's not as... simple as that it's not as linear well and there's a there's a real
um reckoning with that that can either i believe break us yes or as we see in your story make us in
that sense of a kind of i'm kind of you know i'm curious about the words for you but like just sort
of there if you can make peace with that it's almost like nothing can break you then In a way,
because it's like, well, I've experienced something so hard and I know that I have what it takes.
And so it gives you a paradoxical kind of confidence if you can work through it. But not everybody
does. Yeah, there was another layer to it that's actually interesting. So I played Survivor 32 and
I realized, whoa, the achievement. There was far more to the story. And I also realized that like
my perspective of achievement wasn't necessarily other people's perspective. So I was in this world
where I had broken away from my perception of achievement and I had lost because a jury had to.
perceive my achievement, whether it was worthy a certain way. So I'm dealing with my feelings of
achievement getting broken down. I'm dealing with a jury having a completely different perspective
of reality than me. And then I'm dealing with this like parasocial aspect of other people watching
me, feeling really close to me, feeling like they understand me. And then I go, I lose on national
TV over a year. We have the longest wait in the history of the show. Oh, that's right. I lose. I
knew I was going to lose. But then I went back nine days. later and played again and I came in
fifth place. So I modified my game completely. But that that then I had to sit with that.
But the real part of what you were talking about, like the lessons I learned after the first time
really didn't kind of peak until I played a third time. And I didn't listen to my inner voice.
So I almost modified myself after losing achievement doesn't work. So I modified my game so much
and it got me close, but not far. So I modified myself again, but I was so far away from myself
that I didn't even listen to my own intuition. And that's where I like really broke down because I
could no longer trust my gut. So then I had to like take myself away from the experience completely
because it wasn't just achievement was broken. It's that I completely realized I was untethered and
no longer. knew which Aubrey I was listening to interesting yeah yeah gosh gosh real life playing
out and that happens that that to me makes sense where I'm even thinking of the listener if you've
been in a in a relationship that didn't work and so you modify yourself you make changes it doesn't
automatically mean that suddenly you know the next relationship you still might you might lose your
bearings that's that's normal because growth requires a process of yes a little bit of trial and
error a little of okay i'm going to try to let this go but there's another part of me i i do a lot
of parts work in therapy but that was maybe the strongest muscle that i had and i these other
muscles these other resources maybe whatever they are are underdeveloped still and i don't know
exactly and so we can almost feel worse and that that's kind of what i hear you saying it was
almost worse before it was better and that could be really demoralizing if you're not aware that of
what's happening yes and i'd also say like i've learned through survivor that you can i
intellectualize everything i learned that i would intellectualize my own emotions and just be like
get over it or like you know that you you need to think about achieving a different way but just
because I know something intellectually doesn't mean that I feel it in my heart,
but then there's like also fully digesting it so that it's a part of me and I've taken the parts
that work for me and I've made sure to kind of deprecate the parts that don't work for me.
It's just a lot. It's that you can intellectualize. Have you internalized it? Like, do you take the
external feedback? But how much? What advice do you take? What do you not? What do you listen to in
yourself? What is yourself protecting your ego? What is yourself actually being honest with
yourself? So it was it was very hard. And I didn't feel like I could fully digest everything until
I did intuitive healing after I did. third experience and it was really about understanding what
was mine what was other people's so probably working through some like codependent stuff um And
really trusting my own intuition. I don't want to say conventional therapist,
but my first therapist was amazing. She wasn't an intuitive healer, but she would always say,
you're putting your hand on your heart when you speak. She identified that I really would feel
emotions in certain places. So once I learned how I took in emotion and where I felt it and
listened to myself, that's when it started to click a bit more. somewhere in there you became a
mom. Is that right? Yes. I became a mom. How did that help?
Or how did that impact this journey? Because you took, well, let me get the timeline right first.
You took time away after that third. Did you take, was it 10 years? Seven.
Seven years before you went back for 50. And in that seven years, you're doing a lot of this
healing work. You also become a mom. Is that right? Yep. I did healing work. I moved to Oregon from
LA in the pandemic. I met my partner. My dad had a heart transplant. We moved home.
And then I had a son and I just think I had so much more life experience. How did it help?
I'd say just like that perspective of like. There are so many other things in life I'm capable of,
like the human bodies and capable of amazing things with my dad and the heart transplant. And then
just like having a baby, it just really made like achievement feel lower and lower kind of on that
list. And in that time, I also became an entrepreneur. I have my own marketing consultancy, and I
really got to learn what it's like to do fun for yourself and celebrate failure and pivot quickly.
And as a parent, you have to be an entrepreneur. You fail every day. hey, you don't know what
you're doing. So that just helped me become more comfortable with very much rolling with the
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Yeah, I mean, I just, I think about that seven years of doing all the inner work and all of that.
What's so interesting to me is as you're becoming more integrated,
more able to... your emotions, listen to your own inner voice,
be grounded in something outside of other people's perceptions. You're saying it so well, Aubrey,
like we do want to take in other people's perceptions on some level.
We don't live in a vacuum, but we don't want to be completely. And again, your experience is so
heightened, you know, because it's millions of people, not just my local community, but it's true
for all of us. Like, how do I learn to take in? enough because i want to understand how i'm being
perceived in the world but not so much that i'm changing who i am for other people it's so nuanced
and there's not a lot of good you know tick tock memes about that that is a journey it is and so
i'm hearing that you did a lot of that work a lot of stuff going on in your personal life and
somewhere then some part of you is like, let's try it again. So how does that decision show up?
I was shocked. I mean, I never thought, I mean, Survivor season 50, which is like the celebration
of 25 years, Survivor players were talking about it for a long time. Dr. Allison,
it was like the talk about town. And I had stopped watching Survivor for a bit. And I was on a
podcast with Rob Sesternino, who's like kind of the... We love a celebrity in the Survivor
podcasting world. Rob's amazing. And I was on his show talking with T-Bird. T-Bird played season
three Africa. And they asked me if I got called for 50, would I play? I thought to myself,
what are you talking about? And in that moment, it kind of was like, oh, maybe that was July 2024.
And then I got called in November 2024. And I really thought about it because I remember when I got
called the third time. My inner voice is saying, you're going to lose your mind if you play this
again. Interesting. I really listened to my inner voice this time. Like, will this have an impact
negatively on my family? And I realized I think I can do it. So I got, I went into casting.
I got cut from the cast in March, 2026. And then I got re-added to the cast in April,
2026. And I went on to play in June, 2026. That is wild.
It was wild. And then you win. Spoiler alert. And then I won. It was a wild game.
I won. I played completely differently than my first time. I would not say it was the game that I
would ever go in and plan to play, but it was the game I needed to play to win with a cast of very
big personalities. I really have learned that in Survivor,
when you play with returning players especially, that you have to hold the space for these big
characters who have... of them have lost most of them are trying to rewrite their story and i
learned the power of holding space and letting other people's stories take center stage until the
right moment and so i played a very much an observational game a social game and then i came in at
the end and pulled out a win when i had to and I had studied the jury for so very long because
that's where I lost the first time. How do you crush other people's dreams and then do it in a way
that they want to vote for you to win $2 million in my case? And I realize they really have to be
in service to the jury. And being in service to them means validating their experiences.
I'm not going to vote for someone to win if they invalidate my experience. So I really it was just
this nuanced lessons from along the way. Were you aware in internally as you were playing season 50
of the shifts inside of you? Because you just you said something so interesting. You said it was a
very different game than I would have planned to play. So that achievement, you know,
there's still that part of you that could have mapped out the perfect. And that went by the
wayside. Were you aware of that agility, of that ability to be in the moment, of that ability to
stay grounded in that observational? Tell me about what that experience was like inside of you.
Yeah, it's interesting because I remember in 50, there were times when I just kind of completely
let go. To the point where, and I'm like a narrator on that show usually. I didn't always have the
words. I just knew what I had to do. Interesting. I was like, I knew how to move.
I was feeling my way through. I was just being myself. I remember having chats with some of the
producers being like, I'm just being myself. Like, I just know that this is what I have to do right
now. This is what this person needs. I have to. practice restraint here. A lot of it was what you
don't say and what you don't say in the quiet moments and leaving space for that. And I, I was very
aware that it was a different Aubrey. I very much had my foot off the gas more than I would.
I like to take charge and go, but it's survivors not, you know,
it's fun to watch survivor where someone gets a big resume and they're Tony Vlachos and they take
everybody out, but great TV. Doesn't always win the game. And I went to win.
So a couple of things I want to highlight here, because I think it's really powerful.
One, I learned a long time ago that being the stake in life is better than being the sizzle.
And there's a lot of sizzle. And by that, right, there's a lot of sizzle in our world.
The biggest personalities, the biggest houses. the biggest, flashiest,
you know, cars. And if you get smart and you start looking beneath the surface, sometimes there's
steak beneath the surface, but often there is not. There's not a lot of substance. And if you can
learn, but when you're someone, maybe more deeply feeling, maybe sometimes in our heads,
maybe someone who's underestimated, you can feel like... you know,
less than or everyone else has. And what I hear in you is just a grounded, just stay with myself.
Yes. Stay with myself. And I think that's powerful. It's nuanced.
It's not what we see, you know, necessarily getting the buzz. But if I can stay with myself.
And I heard, Aubrey, different interviews. And I don't want to get into the I do want to get into
the weeds of Survivor. But for the purpose of this podcast, I did hear some interviews.
I think I heard Rizzo. I heard a couple other people talk about moments where you would be really
kind to them. You would offer where there was a genuineness where you would and maybe part of that
was tactical. Right. To because you knew. Yeah. Talk to me about that. But I heard in that just you
being very present. very available, very genuine.
And all of that is what got you those votes in the end.
Yeah, I think, well, that's great to hear. I guess I haven't really heard that.
I think that's just, I mean, I think there is a humanity involved in Survivor. We're all living out
there together. I do try to understand other people's perspectives. Like I do value.
um other people's perspectives there's a really great um a guy who studies the game who says our
different frames our local frame Everyone has a different local frame. They're looking at the world
through their eyes. And I think a key to life and survivor is really like understanding and
validating that somebody else has a different frame that they're looking at the world from.
And I do think that's one of the things that I'm meant to do in life. Like one of my strengths is
my ability to fully step into someone else's frame and try to see the world through their eyes. And
so I did try to be present with people. I do genuinely care about them. I've come to really care
about the survivor players. through this experience four times because i've been through it like i
have a genuine care i feel it in my heart and my power space when i when i say that to you because
i know what it's like yeah and it can be hard and you can do things in a somewhat humane way in a
show that's about cutting people and crushing their dreams yeah there's a way yeah the other thing
that i think is So interesting listening to your story and this this theme of sort of one plus one
equaling two. And if I do all the right moves and if I follow the right course and achievement
versus the kind of surrender that isn't doing nothing,
but it's staying with oneself, being in the moment, being very present.
What's so fascinating to me is you could see when Jonathan lost. almost I could almost see or hear
that but I did everything right almost that same am I am I missing that it felt like almost the
same thing you're describing you felt after your first season of yes but I did everything right and
I just wanted to say oh you're so you know and he's young you know it's like oh my goodness do you
I know that is not how life works it's you know and that's a painful loss but did am I reading you
know I just I felt like that You could just see his, he hadn't learned that lesson yet in life,
you know? Yeah. And I, I don't want to speak for Jonathan's experience,
but I do relate to him. We've had those conversations. We're friends. He comes similarly from a
background where it's like achieve and like one plus one equals two. And if you do this,
but something I've learned about achievement and like playing survivor for a resume or doing the
same in life is that when you are acting to win, And via action,
you leave a wake sometimes that might be bigger than you think. Yeah. But when you play in the
moment, trying to understand the people, I'd say the other thing that I did in 50 is I am more
grounded than ever, but I'm able to like healthfully disassociate and look at the bigger picture of
how it's going to affect people and look at like, am I leaving a wake if I make this move?
Yeah. By looking at it with the people first versus the action first, I was able to get where I
needed to go. And in Jonathan's case, I think I very much see how we had kind of a similar
experience and trajectory. Him in 50 and me in 32.
We've had those conversations. It's really pretty wild. You don't know the full survivor.
And I'm not saying this like in an arrogant way, but like. oh, to be second place,
that really will make you do some inner work and like undo everything you learn. Because you're so
close. So close. And yet it's an amazing feat in and of itself.
That's the paradox with that. It's so fascinating,
Aubrey, again, full circle with all the growth. And again, this is such a lesson in life that as
you differentiate from other people's perceptions and you're more grounded in yourself your true
self you just said it so well but paradoxically that gives you a maturity and a perspective to be
able to understand other people's perspectives which actually at the end is what allows for a more
um wholehearted you know ironically the goal stops being i need people to like me you know and i
need to be myself and co you know paradoxically that's actually what allows us to actually earn the
trust and favor of other people it's it's such a weird um it's bizarre it's it's such a bizarre you
know when you stop trying to manage everybody's perceptions actually that's kind of when people
begin to
You know, you begin to find the people who get you and see you and and and at the very least have a
respect and an honor. And it's a journey. It's a journey. It's been quite the journey.
And it's funny, I left even socializing with most survivors for seven years. It's like the only way
to win the game is to completely leave and not. I mean,
I was able to gain perspective on it. It's a whole other world beyond survivor. And by leaving
Survivor, I mean, very much when you love it and you're a super fan, you're like, you almost have
like preconceived notions of how something is, how it should be received. And it's funny when I
listen to a lot of people who are like, you know, picking apart every move in the game.
For me now, I always, and I respect that. And I love that. That's the fun of watching it. But like
after making time to like go live for seven years, I'm like, oh, but it's still people.
Like, are you looking at survivor? I said this to someone last week. Are you looking at survivor as
if you're looking down at a chessboard and you're talking about making the moves? Or are you able
to stand in the chessboard and realize that the other pieces are people? And I think that comes
from living life. I love that. There's a lot of wisdom in that.
You can love something, but we have to have that perspective on it or we will get whatever it is.
I mean, something like Survivor, whatever it is, but that healthy differentiation. And again,
which is what allowed you to, again, reenter it and then look at you now.
Well, do you have any sense of your relationship with the game going forward? Do you do you feel
like you're kind of finished? Do you do you have a sense of or even how you'll begin to continue
to. Yeah.
I'm just excited to watch other people play. I know there's a new era. There's going to Jeff ropes
is amazing. He's a Scorpio. He loves to evolve. He's always pushing the boundary. So I'm just
excited to see where the show goes from here and see other people. yeah play this game that i love
and make something of it and continue to push it in different directions so it should be incredible
well i just have such tremendous respect for the process as someone who um you know sits and
watches and and i'm just so aware that everything you're learning in this very public way is really
they're really life lessons that are hard to learn in front of a lot of people and the fact that
that just that crowning achievement um I think uh you know I think we all you know those of us who
loved love survivor loved one Christian said it's there's a narrative warfare right there's a
narrative and you your narrative it wasn't just words there was a such a genuineness to the story
arc of your journey and it really um just i think made all of us go right this is this is this is
what it's about and it's so it is hard to put words around it's it's and there's nothing you know
there are lots of different ways to play the game a lot of people played a good game But there are
a lot of variables, and it's true in life, too. You've got to stay in it. I guess what words of
wisdom for someone listening in their own life who has felt overlooked, who has felt like they have
to leave something, even something they love, because it's taking too much from them, maybe who's
felt misread or misunderstood, what words of encouragement or wisdom would you offer?
I think it would be to kind of hold the space for yourself to kind of pause and to kind of consider
everything that's gone on and why you might feel a certain way. Someone who's resonated with me is
the woman who won the gold medal in figure skating. It was Alyssa Liu. Yes,
I think that's right. Where she quit because it didn't bring her joy anymore. And I think that's
okay. If it doesn't bring you joy, it's okay to stop and pause and figure out.
if why that is and to be curious and ask questions and it's okay if it's not all figured out and I
really think it's about giving yourself the patience some things really do just require you hold
the right space and give it some time and so much can transform if you give your soul a little bit
of time to breathe that's beautiful that's a great word. I love it.
Thank you for joining us today. So thrilled for you and for the Survivor family.
Thank you for having me, Dr. Allison. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best
of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify,
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Every marriage goes through difficult seasons.
But what happens when you're the only one willing to do the work?
When every conversation ends in blame, defensiveness, or silence? When you're trying to repair the relationship, but your partner refuses to take responsibility?
In this week's episode, Dr. Alison sits down with licensed clinical social worker and relationship expert Leslie Vernick to explore the difference between a marriage that's simply hard and one that's become emotionally destructive.
Together, they unpack the patterns that quietly erode trust, why healthy relationships require repair, and how to begin reclaiming your own stability—even if your spouse never changes.
You'll learn:
- The difference between a difficult marriage and an emotionally destructive one
- Why repair—not perfection—is the mark of a healthy relationship
- The warning signs of blame, gaslighting, and chronic deflection
- How to stop centering your life around changing another person
- Why becoming a God-centered person changes the way you navigate unhealthy relationships
- Practical first steps you can take when you're the only one pursuing growth
Whether you're navigating a difficult marriage yourself or supporting someone who is, this conversation offers wisdom, compassion, and hope.
Because healing doesn't always begin when someone else changes.
Sometimes it begins when you discover what it looks like to stand on your own two feet while remaining deeply rooted in God.
Take Leslie’s free quiz “Are you in an emotionally destructive marriage?”
Make sure to read Leslie’s book “The Emotionally Destructive Relationship: Seeing it, Stopping It, Surviving It”
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 203: Staying Close When Connection Feels Hard—The Relationship Skills No One Taught You (with Relationship Expert Dr. James Cordova)
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
No one gets all 52 cards in the deck. So do you know which cards are missing? Not everyone comes to
the marriage. Nobody comes to the marriage. Perfect. whole or halves everything together. So those
are the things that create disappointment. That pattern of deflection, blame, gaslighting, those
are your red flags. It keeps happening and there's no repair and it destroys trust.
If it goes on and on and on, it can destroy your own mental health and your own physical. Ask
yourself the question, have I been a husband centered or a marriage centered or a man centered
woman instead of a God centered woman? Have I put all my self-worth into him loving me well.
And when he fails, I'm devastated.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You. As you know,
if you've been following the podcast over the last few years, I've had some incredible guests on
the podcast, experts who are talking about marriage and relationships and communication and skills
and how to show up as a healthier version of yourself with the people that you love. And almost
every time I air one of these episodes, I get some interesting emails.
I love getting these emails, by the way. So I love hearing from you. And often I hear, you know,
this was so helpful. This thing cracked a code in my own marriage or this naming really got us
unstuck. And almost always, I also get an email that essentially goes something like this.
Allison, you know, this is all great. But what do I do when I'm the only one in my relationship
that's willing? to do the work? And I get it. I hear this question.
It lives with me. Even when I'm having the conversations with maybe the marriage expert on the
podcast, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, what about the folks who are in a marriage where the
other person just not only isn't doing the work, but is actually maybe even sabotaging or
undermining or creating a toxic environment? And this is real. This happens.
And so I've been wanting to have my guest today on for a long time because I want to talk about
what I think she names so beautifully. My guest today is Leslie Vernick.
She is such a trusted voice in this space. She's biblically grounded and she has so much compassion
for women in these kinds of marriages, marriages she describes as emotionally destructive.
I've known Leslie for a number of years and I've come to really trust her voice in this space.
She's a licensed clinical social worker. She's a relationship coach. She's a speaker, and she's the
author of several books, including her book called The Emotionally Destructive Marriage and The
Emotionally Destructive Relationship. And she has spent decades in the trenches with women who
aren't just navigating a difficult season in marriage, but something more serious than that,
which again, she has come to call an emotionally destructive relationship. And what I love about
Leslie is the nuance she brings to this conversation. Leslie has been married for 50 years herself.
She believes deeply in what marriage can be. And perhaps because of that belief in what marriage
can be, she refuses to let women confuse a marriage that is hard or a marriage that is
disappointing with a marriage that has crossed a line into something that is destructive.
And she doesn't offer easy answers for what to do when that happens. She does help us name it,
and she comes to us with really practical skills and a practical starting place for where to start
if you think this is the kind of marriage or relationship that you're involved with. In today's
conversation, she talks about the difference between a difficult marriage or a hard season and a
destructive marriage. And I found this so clarifying. I think you will, too.
We talk about the role of the church, how to find wise, helpful friends to come along.
side of you and what you can do, not as the extremes, right? Sometimes we think we have two
options. We can leave or we can just suffer. She talks about this middle ground of different steps
you can take if this is the kind of relationship you're in. One of the things I love that Leslie
describes in today's episode is this idea of, yes, we are all sinners, for sure, as we come to
marriage, but that there are healthy sinners and unhealthy sinners. And I just really liked how she
named that. We're all imperfect, yes, but there are different degrees of how we're managing our
imperfections or how we're dealing with our sin, especially in the context of our closest
relationships. I'm so excited to bring you this conversation today, and I think there's a lot of
wisdom in it. Whether you're someone who thinks you might have what Leslie is calling an
emotionally destructive marriage, or whether you're someone who's walking beside a friend or has a
family member or someone you love who's in a marriage that seems to be beyond something that's just
hard, right? It's something that is not only not flourishing, but maybe causing damage to someone
you love. There's real wisdom in this conversation. And it also just helps us understand just the
normal seasons of marriage, of close. relationship. So I'm so excited to bring you Leslie's wisdom.
If you are listening, I wanted to mention this right at the top. In addition to Leslie's resources,
she has a ton of them and she'll talk about them throughout the episode. But if you find yourself
wondering, is this me? Is what she's describing my marriage? Leslie has a free quiz on our website
that you can take. It's at leslievernick.com and it will help give you clarity. And so I'd
recommend that to you if it's something you're wondering about. She's also got a supportive digital
community to come alongside women who are struggling in marriages where maybe they don't want to
leave or aren't ready to leave, but they do need support in a way that's wise and helpful and
healing to the soul. So again, that quiz is over at leslievernick.com. We'll link to that in
today's show notes. All of Leslie's resources are super helpful. I'm thrilled to bring you my
conversation with Leslie Vernick.
I'm thrilled to have you here, Leslie. You are just such a trusted voice as I've gotten to know you
for so many women. And I think I mentioned this to you when I reached out, but we've had a couple
of marriage experts, relationship experts on the podcast over the last year, and they have great
wisdom and great, you know, just nuggets of insight.
I almost always after those episodes, both in the back of my mind, but then I get the emails
saying, but what if your partner isn't doing the work? And what do I do in those situations?
And I kept thinking to myself, I've got to have. Leslie on to speak to so many women who are
willing to do, would love to be doing the work of couples counseling or each person learning those
skills, but their partner isn't willing to or able to or wanting to do that work.
I mean, I guess they're able to, but they're not willing. So thank you just for your years of hard
-earned wisdom in the trenches, helping women in what you've coined this term, emotionally
destructive relationships. Yeah, thanks, Alison. When I first started thinking about this in my
practice, when I was doing marriage counseling and I saw either the woman being mandated to do all
of the work, the heavy load of the marriage, like forgive 70 times seven and keep trying to trust
and keep forbearing and keep... and keep sacrificing or the other person just wasn't willing to do
the work. You know, it's what's the answer for this? And how does she live in a relationship where
she doesn't feel safe and she can't trust the person she's living with? And that's pretty darn
hard, whether it's a husband or a roommate or an elderly parent or whoever it might be.
Your body doesn't live very well. And so this was the break point when I had a woman. She was
seeing me for counseling and she was. drinking vodka and taking Xanax every night so that she was
able to have her conjugal duties with her husband. And she was just a mess emotionally,
physically. But this was her Christian duty. And I thought, certainly, God, you have better answers
for women than this. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. What a moment to go. There's got to be something else.
So let's dive in. here. When you talk about an emotionally destructive relationship,
what do you mean? How do you define it? How is it different from what we might think of as a
difficult marriage, right? Just a marriage that's hard, which is a lot of marriages or a
disappointing marriage, or maybe even a marriage going through a hard season. What is an
emotionally destructive marriage and how is it different than those other categories? Yeah. So let
me just say that I've been married 50 years to the same person. So that gives me some credibility
that I've been through difficult. I've been through disappointing. There's not a few destructive
moments, all right? And we're still together. So it doesn't mean that you are going to have a
horrible marriage if you go through those seasons. Those seasons are directed by God in some ways
to help you mature and help you grow and help you do the work that you're avoiding, that you've not
done before marriage. Because who gets totally mature when you're 23 or whenever you get married?
So marriage and family life, having children taught me a whole lot about maturity and how I have.
to learn to control my temper and how I had to learn to speak the truth in love and all the things
that maybe I didn't have to be so careful with, with another grownup. You do have to be so careful
with, with a little one. And so all of these opportunities to self-reflect and look at yourself
are part of the deal in family relationship. God cares about this. All of the 10 commandments have
to do with relationship building or relationship repair, or not to do something that will hurt a
relationship. So we know that God cares about relationships. And so every relationship has seasons
of difficulty. I would define those as outside pressures. You know, one person's in the military.
Somebody's chronically ill. You have a child with special needs. You have financial difficulties.
You're out of work. Pressure, stress. Every family goes through that. And this is part of learning
to. problem solve, learning how to manage your body when you're under stress.
How do you not let it deform you? And how do you let it create some formation in you? And all of
the things that we've learned spiritually and we're working on. So that's difficult. Everyone goes
through seasons of that. Disappointing is everyone, I think, goes through seasons of that a little
bit too, because the person that we marry usually isn't the person we completely thought they were.
And hopefully it's not a big disappointment. When I used to do premarital counseling, I used to say
to people, No one gets all 52 cards in the deck. So do you know which cards are missing? Right?
Because your husband might not be real handy. And that might be really important to you.
Or you might not be really good with managing a budget. Do you understand that ahead of time when
you're accepting that? Or maybe they have a porn issue and you don't know that.
And so not everyone comes to the marriage. Nobody comes to the marriage. Perfect.
Full. or has everything together. And so the more that you know someone well and see clearly,
the more you can make choices of, hey, he's a great guy, but he's so disorganized.
I don't think I could live with that. And to know that, but we don't. We get married young and we
don't know those things. So those are the things that create disappointment. In my book, I write
about a woman who grew up in a very chaotic family. This guy was a steady Eddie.
He was very responsible. He went to work every day. He paid his bills. He was a good guy. He was a
Christian. And oh, so boring.
She loved him. She married him and she thought, this is my safety net. And after a couple of years,
his responsible work ethic, steady Eddie kind of guy was rather boring for this woman who grew up
in this. Totally chaotic environment. And she was tempted to have an affair. And so she came to
counseling. And so this would be a disappointing marriage. She's disappointed that it's not
everything. There is no marriage that's everything. And so I think part of our maturity is coming
to accept and love the person we're married to.
Destructive marriages. Unless we handle it in a destructive way.
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that's so good. That's so helpful to just talk about what a destructive marriage isn't.
And there are different paths to working through those disappointments than when we get into this
category of destructive. It's not that it's not hard. It's not that it doesn't require something
else. And that's where it strikes me, Leslie, as you're talking some of the, what I feel like the
The biblical passages that get over or misconstrued in certain settings actually...
apply. In some ways, often they're used too simplistically,
but where this idea of we do want to work it out. We don't want to just check it in because of a
disappointment in that regard. So then tell me then what is different about a destructive marriage?
What are some of the signs that we've moved? Because I could imagine some of that. There's some
overlapping circles, but how do we know it's moved into the category of, no, this is destructive?
So I think that there's two big signs. First of all, I want to say that all of us are capable of
doing a horrible, destructive thing in a marriage or to your children. I mean,
who hasn't screamed horrible things to your child when you are dysregulated and tired?
And then you come back and you... own it and you apologize and you hopefully don't do it again.
It's a wake up for you to say, oh my gosh, I don't want to ever do that. I don't want to ever see
my kids scared of me again. Right? So any one of us could do something horrible. A husband can
cheat on a wife. A wife can call her husband horrible. It happens. It happens. We're sinners.
So one incident doesn't create a destructive marriage. It can destroy a marriage for sure.
One is, but it doesn't, I wouldn't call that it's destructive. pattern of relationship.
And so what incident, now we're going to look at something. So when something destructive happens,
he lies to you. He cheats. He doesn't tell you something that was important for you to know, like
he didn't pay the taxes, right? Or that he has a porn addiction before you got married, right?
And so there's some deceit or there's some mistrust going on or some safety issues,
right? That may happen in a marriage. He lies to you. So what happens next is really important.
Because what happens in Christian counseling is it gets levelized.
Well, we're all sinners. Who are you to judge? Right? We're all sinners. And that's true. We're all
sinners. And so what I say is, okay, what does a healthy sinner do when they have caused harm to a
person they say they love? When they have broken trust in a relationship, what does a healthy
sinner do? Well, most healthy sinners admit it. They apologize. They do do the work.
So that they don't repeat that again because they see how much it's harmed someone they say they
love. Whether you're a parent, whether you're a spouse, whether you're a grandma, whatever you are
in this relationship, a healthy sinner owns it, accepts responsibility for the consequences,
does the work to repair the relationship and does the work internally so they don't repeat that
behavior again. Yes. An unhealthy sinner denies,
I didn't do it, what are you talking about? You're imagining things they blame. It's your fault I
did it. Right. It's your fault I watch porn because you won't hang upside down and let me have sex
with you five times a day. Right. It's your fault that I acted this way. Or, you know,
it's really you. You're too picky. You're too sensitive. So it's completely gaslit,
deflected, not blame shifted. So that pattern, when someone does something wrong,
which every marriage is going to have. incidents of wrongdoing. That pattern of deflection,
blame, gaslighting, ignoring, minimizing, those are your red flags.
It keeps happening and there's no repair. There's no taking responsibility. There's no change.
And so that becomes the destructive pattern in a marriage. And it destroys trust. It destroys
safety. And if it goes on and on and on, it can destroy your confidence.
your sense of who you are, your own mental health, and your own physical health. And so that's why
it's so important that we talk about it. So good. I love how you just take that language of we're
all sinners and turn it on its head. Yes, we are all sinners. And also there are healthy sinners,
healthier sinners, and unhealthy sinners. That's such a wonderful way to flip that because I think
so many women have heard that. So, Leslie, before we... want to just pause here for a second.
So because I see this a lot and I get questions about this a lot. What about this category?
I love how you're describing the destructive patterns, the way we deal with when we do something
horrible becomes that differentiating factor between being destructive and not.
What about marriages where someone, maybe they're not watching porn,
having an affair. Maybe they're not even lying. But they're just not interested in looking under
the hood. They're just not. And there is some willfulness in it.
I don't even know what to call it, right? They're just not willing. And I want to say anecdotally,
I have found in my own work with women myself, if you're an Enneagram person, if you're not, that's
okay. But saying, you know, we don't all marry Enneagram twos. You know, and so there are types of
men and women, but we're mostly talking about men here that aren't going to have that emotional
awareness, that aren't going to be wanting to look at their feelings. And that could come in that
category of disappointment. But man, they are handy or man, they are great, you know, whatever. And
that's a thing you have to accept and agree. But there is this category that I see sometimes where
it isn't so much a personality thing, but just I don't want to look at my childhood trauma. I'm
doing good enough. I'm loyal. I'm bringing on the paycheck. I'm going to work. I'm here for the
kids. But there's a shutdownness. Does that make sense to you? What do we do with that situation?
Where does that land? So it can land in one of two places, depending on how the person who's living
with the shutdownness of the person handles it. Right. Yeah. So I think that I think someone is
shut down for a reason. Either it could be. It's too scary. It's too painful.
I don't want to go there. I don't go deep. Those are some phrases I've heard. Or I'm kind of lazy.
And, you know, laziness, Scott Pack from The Road Less Traveled said, that's one of the hugest
issues for people. It's one of those absolutely sins. And some of us are just kind of lazy. We want
all the perks without having to do the work. And so we, that sloth is,
you know. This is one of the seven deadly sins. And so I think it's important that we as a partner
of someone like that kind of be discerning. And if it's laziness where I expect all the perks of a
great life without having to put in the work, then that's a different kind of response to I'm so
afraid to go there. Yeah. So I think that the wise has to have some discernment about which.
category that is. But you talked about how do we sometimes enable sin.
And I think sometimes part of our job with our spouse, as well as our children, is to invite them
into that work. Now we can't force someone into their work. We can't even force our kids to do
their own homework. I mean, once they get to be, you know, past seven or eight years old, I mean,
you can sit them down and you can tell them to do their work, but you can't make them read. You
can't make them put it in their head and have it come out their hand and do math problems.
And so I think that it's really important that you invite someone to do their work by saying some
things of the impact it's having on you. Like, I would love to have a better relationship with you
sexually, but you don't feel close to you when we can't ever talk about anything that's bothering
me, that I seem to just be a body that you want to use when you're horny and not a person to get to
know as a woman. And that bothers me. That's so good because that can become destructive.
And I love how you're saying that laziness, that just like deception, just like coveting, just like
cheating can become a destructive pattern because it's a willful unwillingness to,
to your point, engage in this, in this intimacy, in this relationship. That's so helpful.
And I think, I think how a woman approaches that is because, you know,
we've all had the story and I'm sure you have to Allison too. You're much younger than I am, but I
grew up in an area, I got married in an era where we didn't have phones and GPSs and all that. So
we had to actually stop and use a map or ask for directions. And so when we would get lost, I would
say to my husband, you know, there's the gas station, let's just go stop. And he would be like
insulted, like, no, we're not stopping. Don't you think I'm capable of figuring this out? And so
there's this way that we approach someone about their... They don't know something.
And for males, they get very insulted if you criticize them or you somehow imply that you don't
respect something about them. Like you don't know where this is. Let's ask some other guy. Right.
And so if a man is lazy, I think how we approach it is important because if you just call him lazy,
it's probably not going to work. But to say, I'm concerned that you're not willing to put the work
in to grow. And that's what God. YouTube, then you're functioning as his, as are his biblical
helpmate. Yeah. And then it's in your office. Yeah. I love that. So this is, this is good.
So this is what I want to get into now is how do we, um, you know,
so we hear them, the marriage advice, like I said, at the beginning, some women are like, I'm
willing, I'm willing to put the work in, but they're not willing for whatever reason, for whatever,
all the reasons we've, maybe they don't want to, maybe they've developed a porn addiction and they
don't want to face it. They don't want to talk about it. They want to, you know, gaslight, maybe
they, they just are lazy. They, for whatever reason, they don't want to, whatever the reason is,
you're, you're kind of getting there. You're, you're, you're giving some good principles, but what
are some principles for women that what I see is it's, it's, there's these,
these two extremes, you know, one is sort of those, those simplistic church. messages, just love
him into change, which can become enabling and doesn't work. But then the other extreme is,
and I get it, is just like, I've had enough. I'm gone. I'm out. Right. I can't. And what I find is
there's a lot of middle ground there. Talk to us a little bit about how a woman who's,
who's in a marriage that feels destructive on some level. It's not just a discipline.
This isn't working. What are some steps she can take between, I just have to keep trying to kind of
create a climate where he doesn't hurt me, you know, over responsibility, to I've got to give him
an ultimatum. I'm out. What are some things she can do, you've touched on it,
to honor herself, honor her own dignity, and invite him into change without trying to sort of
pretend like things are fine. Yeah. And I think that's the right word, pretend. Yeah.
So I think that Christian teaching has sort of given this pressure for women to pretend all is well
when it's not. Yeah. And so I think there's two things. One, the phrase that we use in our ministry
is that we say that you have to begin to shift. So the woman is going to change. All right. So
instead of being, oh, I'm going to do everything and just love him into change, which doesn't work.
And, or I'm done. I've had it. Before she gets to that place,
she may still get to that place. But before she gets to that place, there's things for her to learn
in the middle ground that she will miss out on if she doesn't take that time. And so the first
thing that she needs to learn is to ask herself the question, have I been a husband centered or a
marriage centered or a man centered woman instead of a God centered woman? Have I put all my self
-worth, all my potential, all my wellness, all my life into him loving me well?
And when he fails, I'm devastated. I'm empty.
I'm bereft. Well, I think that God says that although marriage is supposed to be a wonderful
relationship, it's not your primary one. Our primary relationship, where we get our identity and
our sense of who we are is not from a husband who may say, I don't really want to invest much time
or energy in loving you because you're not that important. Cohen is much more important to me. He's
not going to say that, but that's how he's saying it, right? And so she's devastated in her self
-esteem because she's allowed him to define her as not worth much when she's been a husband
-centered woman instead of a God-centered woman. So that's the first shift that she's invited to
make in the hardship of this kind of icky marriage. So just to pause there,
that's powerful what you're saying, because two things can be true. She didn't cause whatever it is
that he's doing. It's not saying, oh, it must be my fault. I love how you said there's actually
growth for her. And again, not because she's carrying the weight of his actions,
is responding to the invitation of, okay, here's the reality. This is a destructive marriage.
This is a marriage that is not thriving. Before I make any big decisions,
what is the invitation for me? Again, I imagine abuse and domestic violence aside, that's a
separate category. Physically safe, yeah. As long as she's physically safe. Is there an invitation
here for me? Have I subtly... put so much energy into him and trying to get this marriage to where
I want it to be that I've lost sight of my true focus. And can I really, I think of that word
differentiation. Can I really find some kind of a re-centering in Christ?
And my marriage doesn't necessarily get better, but I actually find some, that's a really powerful,
profound step. Do you see women able to make that distinction?
Well, this is what I see, Allison. I see one of two things. If they don't make that distinction,
they will either live in bitterness and resentment.
Yep. Or they will end this marriage and look for another man. And we have women in our organization
who have been married three, four times to destructive men because they haven't done their own work
first. Right. And so we invite you a woman who's in a difficult time.
Yes. You're, you're probably perfectly diagnosing him. Maybe, maybe not. Mostly you are,
you're correct. He is a narcissist. You're correct. He is me. You are correct. He is lying to you.
And how is that impacting you? Yes. That's the question you need to do because you can't fix him.
Yeah. Right. But you can learn to set boundaries. You can learn to become a God-centered woman
instead of a husband-centered woman so that his words aren't as potent as they might be if you're
so focused on his words. Oh, that's good. And that is powerful. And that will change something.
He may not like it. I would, you know, initially at first, because I do think what I see in long
term marriages that kind of function are dysfunctional is it does shape you. It does shape one of
the partners. You do build yourself around that. And you are essentially saying it is very similar
to what we do in family systems. You're like, I'm going to break this cycle. Can't change them, but
I'm going to break this cycle by changing myself.
And the other thing I would say, Allison, is your kids, the little kiddos who's watching what's
happening in the marriage.
They need one help.
And so when you are unhealthy in your own way by saying, like Leah, please love me.
If only I have one more baby, he'll love me. Please, he'll love me. You know, the story of Leah and
Jacob. You know, she's thinking, if only I have one more baby, then he'll love me, then he'll love
me. And then finally she realized, wait a minute, he's probably never going to love me like I want
him to love me. And God loves me. I am a loved woman. I don't have to live with this empty.
anymore and it's not about him it's about me trusting God and that's a huge shift that a woman can
make because your children see what's happening even if you don't explain it with words they feel
the energy in the marriage they feel the lack of love in the family and so as you're handling your
side of the street not as a pretend faker but as a godly strong woman who is truthful hey daddy and
I don't have a great marriage you're right you observe correctly kids and You know what? It's not
going to destroy me.
It's so good. As someone, I married later. I didn't meet my husband until my late 30s.
I was single for a long time. I will say that was hard. There was a lot of pain in that. I will say
that is one of the things that I took from that time that has helped me so much is you have to,
you have no choice but to figure out how to be a whole person by yourself. And it's hard and it's
lonely. And it's not, I prayed for, I didn't, it's not what I wanted. And in marriage now,
16 years in, I'm like, actually, that's one of the things I'm most grateful for that skill.
So I know it's possible. I think it's hard within marriage, especially when you marry young and
you've kind of built your identity around this person. But it will help you in every,
in every way. So what? I know, Leslie, you have so many resources, and this is part of why I wanted
to bring you to my audience, not only for your wisdom, but to introduce them to your resources.
This is hard to do alone. And there are, I don't want to, I think the church can be an incredibly
helpful support network, and it can also be hard for women in these situations. So talk to us
about, I think knowledge is power. What might, for the woman listening is going,
this is me. What should she know about church messages that won't be helpful to her?
So she can kind of steer away from them or just not absorb them, just kind of go, that's not for
me. And what support does she need? Because I would imagine this is not something you want to do
alone as you take this step. I think it's much harder to do it alone. And again,
we crave community. We crave companionship. God is just wired as that. And so it's really important
that the Bible does tell us to pick our friends wisely because they will influence us. And so you
do want to have wise companions when you're going through tough times, because otherwise they may
drag you down into your anger, your resentment. We all have those things. And so depending on the
company you keep, one will help you to deal with it in one way and one will help you deal with it
another way. And so you get to pick who you hang out with. But I think in churches, at least my
experience in A lot of it's changing in some churches. So I'm very grateful for that. But I think
that this sanctity of marriage, we need to keep the marriage together. So don't talk about it.
Don't be honest. Don't be real. Don't don't bring your garbage here because we don't know how to
deal with it. They don't say it that way, but they kind of give you these platitudes like, well,
you know, you're not you're just a sinner like him and love covers a multitude of sins and love,
you know, believes all things and love always trust all the things that we get taught. You must die
to yourself. So thinking about yourself and your own feelings and your own lives is selfish and
setting boundaries is selfish. So there's a lot of spiritual bypassing and twisting of scripture.
God hates divorce. It never says that in Malachi, but we do get told that. It says God hates when a
man treats his wife treacherous. That's what God hates. He hates the way a man treats his wife, not
the institution of divorce. So I think. God loves the sanctity of marriage,
but not more than the safety and the sanity of the individuals in the marriage. So if a woman is
listening right now, God sees. God saw Abigail in her marriage with Nabal. And Abigail was a
strong, resourceful, beautiful woman in an empty marriage. And sometimes you may choose to do that
for the sake of... Your children or for the sake of finances that you are 65 years old and you've
tried to support him and his business and you haven't worked and you don't have a retirement
account. And so it's not financially wise for you to end this relationship. So how do you live in
this relationship as safely as you can with a person that you're not going to feel close to,
but you don't feel afraid of? That's good. That's really good. That's really good that.
And. Touching on the friend, the wise friend versus,
tell me a little bit about that. Both as a friend, I've noticed it's easy to, again,
friends can, they can join us in building resentment. They can offer quick fixes.
What does a wise friend look like? What are we looking for? Yeah.
So a wise friend, one, is going to sit with us in our sorrow, you know?
Job's friends, when he was so broken over everything that happened to him, when they were in their
better self, they were sitting with him and they didn't give him advice. They didn't say anything.
And so a wise friend will let you be in your place,
your sadness, your hurt, wherever you are, even in your resentment, without trying to drag you out
of it or without trying to tell you why you're wrong for being in it. Right.
They'll just sit with you for a bit. That's good. And then friends will give you feedback,
honest. They're honest to you. So they might say, you know, it sounds like,
this is a funny story, Allison, but a woman who was at a conference with me, a business conference,
she wasn't even a Christian. She heard what I did and she said, oh, I was married to a narcissist.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I'm like, what? Tell me more. She said, it
taught me how to stand up for myself. It taught how to have boundaries.
And so that's what I would say to the woman, that you have things to learn in this fire. And it
might be, I need to learn to find a good attorney, or it might be, I need to learn first before I
take that step to just set some boundaries. Or maybe I need to learn to work.
And I need some friends who will support that journey. What kind of friends will not tell me,
oh. You're putting your kids in a public school. Shame on you because I thought you were supposed
to homeschool when you need to go to school so that you can relicense yourself as a nurse so that
if your marriage doesn't work, you can support yourself.
Yeah, I love that. I love that. I love the friend of Job analogy,
kind of with you in it, because it strikes me there is a grief in this,
whether there's a loss and whether it is the loss of a marriage, whether you stay.
And realize this is not what I had wanted or even what I think God wants for marriage.
There's a loss in that. There's a loss if you leave. The loss if you leave is at least more open.
And that's also its own grief and has a different sort of pain. But almost there's a, I feel like
almost for the woman who's like, you're saying for whatever reason, I'm going to stay. I'm going to
do my own work. I'm going to differentiate. I'm going to find my wholeness in Christ even as I stay
because, like you said, it's not what I want and it's not even what God wants,
but I'm not going to leave because I'm not unsafe for whatever reason. That loss strikes me as that
grief is really hard because it's hidden in a way.
And I would imagine that's where you need a couple of friends who really know what's going on,
where you're not the only one carrying that. And that's actually, you know,
15 years ago when I was starting this book, my book came out and I was, you know, getting a lot of
phone calls and I'm thinking, I can't carry this whole load by myself. And so we started a support
group called Conquer with the other women could meet each other and they could, you know, even if
it was online. And so we have grown and we've got women all over the world who are identifying as
being in a destructive marriage. And they are, you know, they're happy to be able to. contact
someone who knows what their life is like, who's not going to judge them, who's going to support
them, who's going to, maybe they're a little further along in their journey. And so they may have a
little bit more wisdom on, you know, hey, I wouldn't say it that way. I said it that way.
And that's what happened. Maybe you could say it this way or those kinds of things. And so you can
be really honest and have that support and have those wise friends, because God says, when we hang
out with wise people, we will grow wiser. And we hang out with foolish people. we will become more
foolish. And I find that sometimes Christian women who have been so burned by Christian pastors,
churches that have not seen or heard them, start listening to their secular friends and they may,
you know, start going to the bars and start flirting with other men at the bars. And that feels
really good, but it's not getting them healthier. Yeah. Yeah, it's an avoidant,
it's an escape tactic. And like you said, it will catch up at some other point. And I love what
you're saying. You're not saying, You know, you've been very clear, like there may be a time where
you leave. There may be a time where you decide to leave and then after a process start dating
again. But that's very different. That's a mindful, intentional process of letting the spirit do
its work. And you will be so much better off later for having done that work.
Yeah, I would say that to any person who's ended a marriage that if you.
don't know how to stand on your own two feet. So part of adulting, and I say this more to women,
but men too, part of adulting is learning to stand on your own two feet. And you had to do that
because you didn't get married right away. But some people, yeah, I got married right out of
college. I never had to stand on my own two feet, but my husband got very ill early in our
marriage. And I, with a, with a, he had cancer. And so I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to be a
widow. And so I made sure I knew how to stand on my own two feet early in marriage, not only
financially. but emotionally and spiritually and physically so that if I became a widow,
I could take care of my kiddos and whatever. So I think it's really important that women stop,
you know, even with this whole trad wife movement and all this, you know, oh, he's going to take
care of me. Well, that's great if he takes care of you for a season, but you should also be capable
of taking care of him if he needs a break or it's disabled. And if he cheats on you or leaves you
or abuses you, You don't want to be stuck because you can't take care of yourself. Yeah. Yeah. You
don't. Yeah. You want to be that you want to be staying in the marriage out of not because you're
trapped, but because you're choosing that out of agency. I love that.
You want to be a God centered woman above and all. Marriage doesn't doesn't go above.
And you're right. There is some because of the and again, you and I both are, you know, you've been
married 50 years. Like I. You know, we're pro-marriage, you know, there's a lot,
but marriage doesn't come above our relationship to God at the end of the day.
I've always wondered, you know, I'm kind of asking you this out of left field, but when Jesus says
there is no marriage in heaven, you know, I don't really know what that means. But to me, there's
something in that of what we're saying. At the end of the day, it does go away at some point on
some level. Yeah. And I think, you know, he talks a lot about the most fundamental relationships
going wrong, like in the Psalms, where he says, if your mother or father forsake you, the Lord will
lift you up. So he's saying, you know, and he says, I'll be your husband.
God even says, I'll be your husband. And so I think that we have made our human relationships,
which he wants us to have, and he wants us to have good ones, but we have made them into what they
were never meant. An idol, sort of. Yeah. Where they come above.
And it's subtle. You know, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking that could happen. Again, you're
married really young. It's not conscious. It's not like you thought, I'm going to make my husband
my world. It's just over time, your soul kind of gets shaped.
And that's the invitation. It's so powerful. Leslie, as we close, what would you say?
What would you speak directly to the woman listening? is in this position of recognizing there's
something destructive here. What would you say to her? So I would ask her to ask herself.
And so what women do that we work with in this situation is they're trying to change the hell in
order to fix whatever's going on. So the impact that you have on me. So now I feel insecure. Now I
feel like. you know, garbage because you called me a name or now, you know, whatever. So we try to
get him to stop doing those things or start doing those things so that we don't feel insecure. We
don't feel afraid. Let's switch that around. The serenity prayer is really good. Lord, help me to,
you know, accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can change and the wisdom to know
the difference. And so. Part of our work with women who come to us saying, what do I need to do?
What are the magic words, Leslie, that will wake him up? What do I need to say? What boundaries do
I need to have to shake him? The question I want you to ask is, what do I need to feel safe?
What do I need to trust this person with my children, with my finances,
with my life, with my health? What do I need, right? And so ask yourself,
then he may not be giving you that, right? For sure. So now I'm not getting that from him.
What do I need to do to get my needs met? Right? Because I might need,
so I might need to create some boundaries. I might need to sleep in a separate bedroom if I'm not
safe. I might need to go to a lawyer. I might need to understand the law and what rights I have.
I might need to get some coaching or counseling so that I get stronger inside. Instead of focusing
on how do I... How do I be the person to change him? That's not your job.
Your job is to love him, honor him, not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
How do I do that? How do I speak the truth and love to him? It's all your work to do, right?
But if you need safety, then the person who needs to take care of that for you is you,
the prudent see danger and take refuge. Yeah, yeah. That's good.
What do I need to be this, this person? I, I, I think that's so helpful.
Tell my listeners where on that night, if they need more support, if they need, if they're
listening to this, where they can find you and your resources and what's the best place to plug in
with what you're doing. Cause you're helping so many women, Leslie. Yeah. Thanks Alison. Let me
just say one more thing about that if I can, because I think that so many women start to feel, feel
so selfish. Bible tells us not. So let me just say one more thing. There's a couple phrases that
I'm just going to say. Guard your heart above. Of all else, it is the offspring of life. Proverbs
says, set for you if you don't. Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
Who does that for you if you don't? And so you are called to steward your one precious life and not
to squander it living afraid because he's given us a spirit of fear.
All right. And so those are the things that I really encourage you. And this is hard work to do all
by yourself. And it's hard to find someone who gets it. So we have an organization and we have lots
of resources. And so you can start by just taking a quiz. Am I really in a destructive marriage?
It's on my website at leslievernick.com and go through the quiz and evaluate yourself. Watch the
videos. What does God have to say? And then if that resonates for you, then you might want to. Join
some small groups that we have, or you might want to join our Conquer. We have some coaching groups
around these issues that will really help you do your own work so that this isn't as devastatingly
awful as it could be if you don't do your own work and then you just go repeat the pattern in the
next relationship. So good. So good. I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for your ministry.
And thank you so much for just taking the time to be with us today. Thank you, Allison, for having
me. It's been great. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would
mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever
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you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
"Can I forgive someone and still keep healthy boundaries?"
"Why does forgiveness still feel impossible?"
Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful teachings of the Christian faith—and one of the most misunderstood.
Many of us learned that forgiveness meant moving on quickly, letting go of our anger, or restoring a relationship before trust had been rebuilt. But what if forgiveness isn't about minimizing harm at all?
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with theologian, author, and advocate Dr. Amy Orr-Ewing to explore a richer, more biblically grounded understanding of forgiveness. Together they unpack the difference between forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, and repair—and why naming the truth of what happened is an essential part of healing.
Whether you're navigating family wounds, betrayal, church hurt, or simply wondering why forgiveness feels so difficult, this conversation offers both compassion and hope.
You'll learn:
- Why forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.
- How forgiveness differs from denying or minimizing harm.
- Why anger can be a healthy and necessary part of healing.
- How forgiveness and justice can exist together.
- What Scripture teaches about forgiveness after abuse or betrayal.
- Why forgiveness is often a journey rather than a single decision.
- How God's grace empowers forgiveness without requiring self-abandonment.
Forgiveness isn't pretending the wound never happened.
It's telling the truth about what was lost while slowly allowing God's grace to heal what was broken.
Make sure to check out Amy’s new book, “Forgiveness: Reclaiming Its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear”
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 78: The Mental Health Benefits of Forgiveness and Thoughts on Grace with Max Lucado
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Forgiveness is required where repair is required in a relationship where a loss has occurred.
There's an actual place for visceral anger when a human being has been harmed or hurt.
You don't stay there, but to pretend that that anger and rage isn't a real part of the human
experience of suffering is not a requirement of a Christian faith. We don't have to pretend that.
As a Christian, when I forgive, I'm not alone in like covering,
paying for the debt that has been incurred. There's this source of grace, this source of payment,
which comes from outside of me that I receive and I become a channel of when I forgive and I become
active as a participant in something divine and something really beautiful and wonderful.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I am so
thrilled you're here with me today. Today's conversation was so rich.
I got so much out of it, and it really inspired me to think more deeply about this topic.
Today, we're talking about one of the most central, beautiful, complicated,
and often deeply misunderstood words in the Christian faith. forgiveness.
For so many of us, forgiveness is a word we learned early on. We learned that God forgives us.
We learned that we are called to forgive others. We learned the cautionary tale that bitterness can
take root in the soul and that we should be forgiving of others. And all of that is true.
But some of us also learn something else along the way that isn't true that isn't helpful that
isn't what forgiveness actually means we learned that forgiveness means to rush past pain we
learned to silence anger before we've even named the harm we've learned to feel guilty for still
feeling hurt by someone we've learned that forgiveness meant pretending something didn't matter or
minimizing what happened or restoring trust with the other person before there's even been
repentance recognition repair or safety. And this is where things can get really confusing for many
of us because forgiveness isn't a denial of harm. Forgiveness isn't the same as reconciliation.
Forgiveness doesn't erase the need for justice. And when we reduce forgiveness in that overly
simplistic way, we actually lose sight of the power of what it really is.
Forgiveness doesn't mean staying in a relationship. that is unsafe. It doesn't mean protecting a
system, a leader, a family image, or someone else's reputation at the expense of the truth.
And yet forgiveness is still one of the most powerful, beautiful, and distinctly Christian gifts
we've been given. So how do we hold both? How do we reclaim the power of forgiveness without
weaponizing it? How do we honor the command to forgive others without rushing the process of
healing? How do we tell the truth about what happened to us and still remain open to the
supernatural grace of God? And this is what today's conversation is all about.
My guest today is Dr. Amy Orr Ewing. Amy is an international author, speaker, and theologian who
helps people think deeply and honestly about the Christian faith in the midst of some of the
hardest questions of our time. She holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford.
She's so well read. You'll hear that in today's episode. She goes so deep on this topic. She's an
international speaker, theologian, and a public advocate for the Christian faith. She is also the
founder of Advocate Collective, which supports her writing, speaking, justice, advocacy,
and her work with survivors of abuse and church hurt. She is the author of several books,
including Why Trust the Bible, Where is God in All the Suffering, and her latest book, we're going
to talk about today, forgiveness, reclaiming its power in a culture of outrage and fear.
What I so appreciate about this conversation is that Amy doesn't flatten forgiveness into a slogan
or an easy catch-all bucket. She helps us see that biblical forgiveness begins by telling the
truth. It begins by naming the harm, naming the loss, naming the reality of what happened.
It doesn't ask us to pretend. In fact, it can't exist if we don't first acknowledge what happened.
It doesn't ask us to bypass grief, anger, or our body. response to trauma.
And at the same time, Amy helps us see that forgiveness isn't weakness. It isn't being passive.
It isn't letting someone else off the hook. It's a courageous participation in the grace of God.
And the process cannot be rushed. Forgiveness is a journey that can take time to move through the
whole body, the whole nervous system, the whole soul. So for those of you who have ever wondered,
why can't I just forgive or does my anger mean I'm a bad Christian or can I forgive and still
maintain distance? from someone. I know this conversation is going to be deeply freeing and hopeful
and encouraging to you. You'll hear us talk about forgiveness and justice, forgiveness and
reconciliation, the Psalms and holy anger and what happens when forgiveness is coerced and why true
forgiveness never minimizes the dignity of the person who has been. This is such a rich and nuanced
conversation. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Amy Orr Ewing.
Well, I'm thrilled, Amy, to just meet you and just benefit from your expertise today.
This is such an important topic. And as I was saying before we started recording, I just so
appreciate how... and how nuanced your work is on the topic of forgiveness not undermining its
importance and also not minimizing what it's not I would love to just start personally what's your
own experience with forgiveness whether personally pastorally maybe with your work with survivors
of abuse what What's your own personal experience with forgiveness that made you interested in the
topic? Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you for inviting me on.
It's such a deeply, sometimes actually triggering word for Christians,
this idea of forgiveness. So my context is that I grew up in a family where my parents radically
experienced Christian faith. in their 30s so they had both come from atheist backgrounds and then
you know they were sort of all in for jesus and became church planters my dad was an amazing bible
teacher and evangelist and so i would say i grew up in a context where was very kind of biblically
based and um you know deeply rooted in us was this truth that you know we need to be really careful
not to be unforgiving I mean you know it's really really important that you forgive and that you
you know repent and repair relationships and so in the faith tradition that I was in I think there
was a high value placed on that and I remember as a younger person you know experiencing hurts and
you know sometimes quite quite painful things and worrying as a follower of Jesus that I might be
in danger of unforgiveness when I experienced pain, including after I thought I'd forgiven someone.
So, you know, that was kind of my faith context. And then, you know, I've been married for nearly
30 years. I have three sons and my husband in 2020 went through a really profound experience of
CPTSD. He'd had traumatic abuse as a child and for various reasons,
bereavement and other other reasons this kind of flared up um for him and so uh having you know my
husband's also a pastor and so I'd We'd walked with people in our own lives and in our church lives
who'd experienced abuse, walked through this journey of figuring out how you feel the feelings in a
healthy way, how you go on a therapy journey where that is needed, and how forgiveness can feel a
bit dangerous in the context of someone who's experienced egregious abuse.
And then in my work life as well, I was figuring out how to process,
you know, like catastrophic, egregious spiritual abuse and sexual abuse by the founder of a
ministry that I had been involved with. He's called Ravi Zacharias. Your listeners may be aware of
that case or, you know, maybe could look that up.
walking with women who'd experienced sexual abuse at the hand of a very senior christian leader and
seeing then in the christian community how the concept of forgiveness was sometimes it felt like it
was sometimes used to sort of prop up the system around a christian leader who'd you know caused
tremendous harm including sexual abuse so those are some of the some of the strands and then my
actual work in public theology i'm involved in apologetics and kind of presenting the christian
faith in contexts where people have objections, intellectual objections to faith.
And so I'll be on university campuses and taking live Q&A and often thinking about the question
from an intellectual point of view of God and suffering. And so I began to wonder whether this idea
of Christian forgiveness was something that I was being called to think about more deeply and to
integrate. some of the sort of theological thinking, but also experiences of supporting people who
are survivors of abuse journeying into a healthy spiritual place and how there was a tension with
forgiveness there. Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, that's why you really come to this with some,
you've been around the block in many different ways with this.
Before we... dive in, I'm curious, because that's also been my experience that forgiveness is,
for many of us who grew up in Christian homes, it is sort of a very essential,
sort of central idea. Why do you think that is?
Well, I think one of the reasons might be that some of The kind of female heroes of the faith that
I grew up being exposed to would have been like the top two I can think of are Corrie ten Boom and
Elizabeth Elliot. And both of them, if you think about their hero stories for us,
the sort of heroic Christian. woman is a woman who's forgiven horrific harm yeah whether that was
the death of her husband or for Corrie ten Boomie the death of her sister and you know wider wider
suffering so I wonder whether that's part of it interesting I think as well you know it is true
that a healthy functioning relationship any healthy functioning family you know you you need to
learn how to practice sort of everyday forgiveness for community to to work right and so anyone who
maybe was exposed to Bonhoeffer's teaching on community or or even if you're a mum just trying to
figure out how to get your kids to get along you know on a very basic level it is like important
but the problem is when you sort of apply what works or what is needed to work in the normal rub of
everyday community living. And you apply it at a very simplistic level to egregious moral
wrongdoing without more nuance. I think that's where some of the problem comes in.
Yeah, that's really interesting about the heroes because it is powerful in those settings.
But I also think, I wonder as we're talking, because I was kind of trying to get,
just thinking about this whole topic, you know, we have, and it's true that we've been forgiven.
We've all been forgiven. Right. And that is such a starting place of.
Yeah, exactly. It's the starting place of being a Christian. I mean, it's just. Yes. It's kind of
this idea we were talking with. I don't know if you know Stephen Tracy's work with mending the
soul, but he was talking about how we have this idea we're all sinners, you know, so there's.
But that sort of is a is a debt clear where there's different ways in which we've been impacted by.
sin and harm as humans. And so that kind of leads me into,
before we kind of get into, because there's justice issues and there's all the issues you were
talking about where there's been deep, egregious harm. How would you define forgiveness,
what it is and what it is? biblically,
theologically, and then even psychologically? How do you think about what it is? That's a huge
gauzy question. Let's just start there. Yeah, I've written a book on this one.
It's like, yeah, how do you do this in 20 seconds?
So I think for me, the starting place for Jesus's teaching on forgiveness is he sort of helpfully
conceptualises forgiveness in the realm of debt and loss.
You know, the New Testament language, when Jesus is talking about forgiveness, the mental picture
is that a loss has occurred and a debt now exists because that loss has occurred.
Now, that loss could be a financial loss. It could be a loss of bodily autonomy. It could be a loss
of peace. It could be, you know, loss of dignity. It could be some kind of loss psychologically.
Forgiveness is required where repair is required in a relationship where a loss has occurred.
Forgiveness is forgiving or releasing the debt that is actually owed to you because of the loss you
have experienced. Now, if we sort of then zoom out a little bit and think about it from a Christian
point of view, if we're followers of Jesus. at the centre of the Christian faith is this image of
the God made flesh you know God in Christ Jesus of Nazareth not just living a perfect life and then
you know dying an unfortunate death but that his death is actually a sacrifice for all the losses
of all the harms of all the people in all the world like a cosmic sacrifice occurs that that gives
tremendous value to the loss you or I have experienced because it says that to release it to
forgive it would require this kind of cosmic intervention this from from outside of ourselves and
so as a Christian when I forgive I'm not alone in like covering paying for the debt that has been
incurred There's this source of grace, this source of payment,
which comes from outside of me that I receive and I become a channel of when I forgive and I become
active. as a participant in something divine and and and something really beautiful and wonderful
that actually dignifies me as the one who's suffered but also empowers me to do something I
actually wouldn't be capable of which is forgiving this harm that has been done to me without
minimizing either my own value or you know the value of of what's occurred so um one of one of the
crucial steps I think that is often missed both in the church but actually outside the church if we
don't have the Jesus and God bit when we talk about forgiveness is this that number one forgiveness
is conceptualized so without God or Jesus forgiveness is conceptualized a bit like Elsa in that
movie Frozen where she sort of sings just let it go like you release into the universe
you let it go and that in a way requires you to play a psychological trick on yourself because the
body keeps the score right and you in the mind you know that what has happened to you really hurts
and really matters so you letting it go requires you to somehow feel that either it doesn't matter
anymore or that it is released in some way um that is sort of on you but crucially and uniquely
christian forgiveness doesn't ever ask you to do that christian forgiveness begins with saying the
harm that happened matters it hurts it was wrong and that a debt has been incurred that is so huge
that to forgive it would require this cosmic help from outside i think that's really amazing
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Yeah,
that's really beautiful. You can't gloss over the depth and the darkness and the evil,
for lack of a better word, of the crime, of the harm in rushing to the unforgiveness.
And you see that in the story of Jesus. You're right. It's awful. horrific but you have to start
with naming the violence and the and the and the yeah exactly and the new testament doesn't skirt
over that yes so yes you know when jesus says father forgive them for they know not what they do
We've had all these other words from the cross, I thirst, like the physical penalty and cost to the
human body of crucifixion, the physical suffering. We've had the dear woman, here is your son,
like the devastating relational fallout of the pain and suffering of this world.
there's not like a rush to just say the magic words and we're done. It's like,
no, Christian forgiveness is a journey that doesn't ask us to minimise the harm that has happened
or rush over it. In fact, you know, as I was writing the book, one of the things I found really
fascinating is how, you know, in the Bible we have... you know what we call the imprecatory the
imprecatory psalms the psalms where a human being voices the unsayable like i hate you so much i
want your children to die violently because you've hurt me so much you know which obviously we
don't condone but those words are there because there's an actual place for visceral anger when a
human being has been harmed or hurt And, you know, you don't stay there.
But to pretend that that anger and rage isn't a real part of the human experience of suffering is
not a requirement of the Christian faith. We don't have to pretend that. And the journey of
forgiveness is... is not about glossing over or trying to make the pain or harm smaller so that we
can you know by sheer force of will forgive it's like no acknowledgement and that's also why
confession and repentance are so important and you know god doesn't forgive us without confession
and repentance And there's a very, very deep and close relationship then between how we forgive
people as followers of Jesus in terms of the person who's harmed us actually confessing and
repenting. There's a close relationship there too. Yeah, I love that you brought up the Psalms as
an example of the journey. That we meet the psalmist in there,
you know, kill the, you know, the... The real vitriol in many ways,
we meet them on the journey. This is how I feel, God. And we can.
And find consolation in that when we are on the journey. Right now, what I feel like is I want that
person to die because they've hurt me so much. That's what I feel like. That's the emotional truth.
Do I think that's where I want my soul to stay? No. But biblically,
that is part of the journey. I think that's really a really beautiful.
way to look at those psalms uh for the listener there's a place for that yeah exactly the idea in
psychology of effective justice like yeah the the experience of anger and and rage or just you know
not even just for the person who suffered but often for the the loved ones of the person who
suffered to be allowed to feel This is really wrong.
Like everything in my body tells me this is wrong. Everything in my soul tells me this is,
you know, a violation of what we hold dearest. And what I've so often seen,
unfortunately, in the church and is that that step is just not allowed.
It's like, you know, you are a very bad Christian if you in any way.
voice any of that or even are sort of seen to feel any of that and um that I found it really
interesting in the research for the book looking at some of the studies around forgiveness and
obviously there's this as you'll be aware this strand of work that looks at how forgiveness can be
harmful There's a whole body of psychological literature that says forgiveness is harmful.
And what I wanted to do was make sure, you know, I don't just sort of cherry pick the research that
is kind of good for our side, for Christians. You know, this says forgiveness is so great and these
are the benefits. But also to try and grapple with what does that mean?
How could forgiveness be harmful?
The study suggested that forgiveness was harmful where it was coerced.
So where a person who was not ready...
and was not really choosing this themselves but was either shamed into or you know that there was a
social pressure or other kind of pressure they were kind of coerced into forgiveness then it
actually became psychologically harmful to them because of course they weren't actually really able
to experience the joy of forgiveness and the benefits it was not real so coercion was harmful and
then the second thing that was harmful was this element of being rushed through the real stages so
that you don't actually get to you know i i would argue is it really forgiveness if there's a
minimizing of the anger that that isn't actually what what what what forgiveness really is meant to
be so yeah this can actually cause harm and unfortunately in the survivors that i've worked with i
don't think there's a single one who hasn't had that harm layered on top of all the other harm
they'd already experienced. And so I really wanted to, you know,
write into this and speak into this so that we can stop causing further moral injury.
Often it's really well-intentioned, you know, it's Christians saying, I want you to have this
spiritual benefit of forgiveness. Yeah. But you're actually causing moral injury to people who've
already been crushed and trampled underfoot. by the beast they experienced.
That's such a powerful way to untangle that knot,
right? So in Christian spaces, and we'll get to kind of where you were talking about with the sort
of, it almost seems like sort of a shallow let it go that isn't really forgiveness outside of,
but in faith spaces, the harm has been rushing at Best case scenario,
rushing people and worst case scenario, abusively coercing people.
And here's, let me give you a really practical example. Here's, you know, what I've heard in every
single case, I think, where a survivor has been sexually abused within a Christian setting.
So either an organization or a church by a senior leader. And there will be,
at some point, an equivalence made between the sin of the sexual abuse and the sin of unforgiveness
of the survivor who's coming forward. And, you know, they're causing division and gossip and,
you know, they're not forgiving. Letting this guy who, you know, made some mistakes,
he and his family need to be protected here. It's like... I mean,
it's so outrageous. And, you know, when I say it out loud, we can think how ridiculous. But
honestly, it is every, every situation that I've been involved with that dynamic has been in play.
So a psychological pressure to silence the victim who themselves is a Christian and believes in
forgiveness and is then made to feel this kind of moral dilemma about speaking up,
which is hard enough already.
That's what I mean about the sort of weaponization of it. It is.
It is absolutely a weaponization and it is absolutely a re-traumatizing of someone who's already
experienced trauma. It's abuse. It's spiritual abuse, you know, and there's just no other way to
look at it. And a total failure to draw a distinction between truth-telling and forgiveness.
You know, I love Rachel Denholland has been such a pioneer in this area. I think her speech,
I'm sure your listeners will be aware of her sort of victim impact speech at the sentencing of
Larry Nassar, the sexual predator who abused the US gymnastic team.
And she spoke about, as a Christian, her, you know, heart...
felt and honest offer of forgiveness to this man who'd absolutely marred her life and her call on
the judge to hand out the fullest sentence of the law and there is no discontinuity theologically
as a christian biblically there's no discontinuity between those two things so i can forgive and i
can pursue the full civil or criminal penalty of the law yeah That's right.
That's right. Both of those things can be true. And that person can receive divine forgiveness for
the spiritual wound they've caused. And I think evidence that they've actually repented would be a
willingness to admit to, to own up, repent and plead guilty and pay the civil or criminal penalty
for the crime. Right. So in this case, I'd love for you to talk to us a little bit about this.
You know, that's a great example. I think about similarly to a marriage that's been destroyed by
betrayal or infidelity. I can forgive this person. I might not stay married to them. I might let
the natural consequences play out, right? Forgiveness does not equal reconciliation.
Forgiveness does not equal repair.
Talk to us about then, you know, you describe forgiveness as a rat,
kind of getting at why then? What is the purpose of forgiveness? not very clearly.
It's not letting somebody off the hook necessarily. It's not removing consequences.
It's not repairing. It's not going back into relationship with them. So you talk about it as
meeting a great human need. So what then is the need underneath it?
I would draw the distinction between there always being repair.
And reconciliation possible. But if there is ever going to be repair or reconciliation possible,
there would have to be forgiveness there. Sure. Yes. So we can have forgiveness that doesn't then
flower fully into repair and reconciliation. There could be numerous reasons for that. Normally,
the most significant one would be that the person who caused the harm and the breach.
is either unrepentant or is in a state that they are an ongoing danger to the well-being of the
person that they've been closely aligned to in a covenant, whether that's a parental or marital
relationship. And there needs to be healthy separation for the safety of the individual.
Yeah, I mean, the beauty that forgiveness brings, I think, is then a different kind of relationship
and connection. So Rachel Jen Hollander can forgive Larry Nassar and he can go to jail.
He can go to prison.
But there's still a beauty in her forgiving him. There's a release for her from the woundedness,
from the ongoing need to get vengeance and any sort of festering bitterness.
And there's incredible health benefits. Again, you know, the studies suggest that the practice of
forgiveness for the person who practices it, regardless of whether there's a reconciliation,
just the practice. practice of forgiveness you know impacts diabetes and heart disease it impacts
like brain function and you know levels of anxiety and depression i mean the impact is absolutely
is absolutely vast for for the person in the instance where there's been a separation or a divorce
um even though that marriage hasn't survived in the form it was in previously like a reconciliation
hasn't been possible for whatever reason that could be that there was violence or addiction or
ongoing harm it could be any reason um but if the party that's been harmed is able to forgive and
is putting boundaries in place you know and not continuing to be a wife or husband but is forgiving
the person that's really harmed them i think that has huge implications for any children involved
it has huge implications obviously for the person themselves as they're able to go on and rebuild
their lives and learn from what they've experienced it may also be that you know being forgiven but
also
being allowed to actually experience the consequences of that poor behaviour enables that person
then to go on and get help, the cheater or the person who is primarily at fault.
So forgiveness can do so much good even when it doesn't flower into full-blown reconciliation in a
way that we might have hoped it would. And I think it undermines the power of forgiveness to say,
that in every case if it really was forgiveness it has to equate to full reconciliation so one of
the things that i um do in the book is sort of suggest you know that there are multiple models of
what forgiveness actually is operating particularly in the church and i suggest that um This view
that there's a big difference between forgiveness and reconciliation is actually the correct one.
So sometimes if someone accuses you of being unforgiving, it may be because,
you know, they haven't got the desired outcome that they want. But there could be all kinds of
reasons for that. A lack of repentance, you know, lack of confession. Other biblical reasons why.
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Yeah, I love that. I always say it takes two people to reconcile. It takes one person to forgive.
Reconciliation requires both people to come to the table. Forgiveness doesn't. And you talk about
this in the book, and I just kind of want to shift gears here to as much as forgiveness is...
I love how you just really talked about when it's weaponized and not used appropriately.
You talk in the book about these stories, and I think about the book The Shack. Do you remember
that book? Did you ever read that book? I don't want to spoil the ending, but that's kind of that
at the end. And it's just such a gut punch at the end when that's... The invitation to him,
I think, you know, the work you've done with these women survivors where most of us are just like,
how could you possibly forgive? How could you do that?
And this is a unique, as much as it can be misused and as much as I want my listeners to hear you
say, if someone is weaponizing it against you, it is so wrong.
It's not. It's not the way of Jesus. It's not what the Bible is saying. It is a journey.
You need to go through that full process of grief and pain and anger.
And just like the psalmist did, that whole journey is so valid. Do not rush it.
Do not let anyone coerce you into it. And all of that being said, what is this unique gift?
that the power of forgiveness brings into a world in your subtitle that is filled with rage,
that is in many ways, on one hand, there's a superficial sort of let it go kind of everything goes,
but on the other hand is angry and outraged and punitive. What is Christian?
a truly Christian understanding of forgiveness bring into this world?
Yeah, thank you. That's such an amazing question. And this is really how the other sort of route
into writing this book came about through just seeing the rising anger and outrage in the culture,
whether it be through identity politics and, you know, the idea of sort of power through grievance
and rage that, has sort of taken hold of a generation like we assert our identity on the basis of
intersectional injustice and then you know we're propelled forward on this power of rage and how
that's breaking apart families and communities and so countries I wanted to do in the book yeah and
nations I wanted to do in the book was to look at the question of whether There could be such a
thing as forgiveness, which really identified with and kind of upheld the impetus of that rage
where it says, you know, injustice matters because people matter and people are made in the image
of God. So harm experienced by a image bearer, a divine image bearer matters at a really visceral
level.
Ask whether, you know, if there was this sort of extraordinary cosmic intervention into our world
through the person of Jesus of Nazareth and his extraordinary death on the cross,
which, let's face it, the symbol of that is, you know, the defining symbol of the whole of Western
civilisation for the last 2000 years. Could it be that there is a key in the person of Jesus that
answers the heart cry of this generation that says, yes, your intuitive sense that harm matters,
that injustice matters. There's a truth in that, but that alone will lead you to where we are with
all this division, rage and grievance. But there's a power in the person of Jesus and his death by
crucifixion that's a power outside of ourselves, which both means that we can be forgiven for the
unforgivable and be reconciled to God and each other, but also empowers us to rebuild our world,
our communities, our families, our nations in a way that...
dignifies what it means to be human, but also offers this opportunity of redemption and grace.
And I think only in the Christian faith do we have that possibility. I think it has all kinds of
ramifications at the end of the book. I have a chapter where I think about nations,
what this could mean for nations and try and draw a distinction between patriotism and nationalism.
So, you know, you can probably tell from my accent that I don't live in America, right? I live in
the UK, but I'm in America a lot and I hear lots of people talking about Christian nationalism.
And then I'm in Europe and I hear, you know, the rise of nationalism in Germany. Father is German.
Rise of nationalism in France. We've got a kind of rise of nationalism in Britain. And thinking
about there's this real confusion between love of nation and nationalism.
So I began to think about that. What would forgiveness have to say even into that conversation?
And I realised that... The key distinctive between patriotism,
which, you know, we can believe that God orders people into nations, that a love of nation is a
godly thing to love the land you're born into and to want the good of your people. But that doesn't
require you to scapegoat the foreigner or to hate. the other nations you can have a love of nation
that can say i love my nation and i can recognize that there are things in my nation for which
we're not totally proud so i'm british we've got a history of empire you know pre-abolition we had
a history of slavery yeah i can look at my nation and say i love my nation But not everything we
have done or do is altogether perfect. You can't do that in nationalism. Nationalism is about
domination, superiority, expansion. It's about being better than others and forcing our will on
others. And the key difference between the two... It's forgiveness. Do I recognize I need
forgiveness? Do I recognize I sometimes mess up? Do I believe in the possibility of a second chance
or do I assert my superiority at all costs and scapegoat and go after anyone who challenges me?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's powerful. I think it has massive implications. Yeah, it's powerful.
And just as I'm listening to you, it just strikes me that It's the truth,
as Jesus said, that sets us free. And the truth cuts both ways. The truth of harm,
the truth of injustice, the truth of pain. We have to face it in our country,
in our community, in our family, in our church, in ourselves. And the good,
what's worth salvaging, all of that. And forgiveness.
It's really interesting listening to you. I mean, that forgiveness is that bridge between the two
things we all hold. Yes, it's like kind of integral to even how our society has been built.
So if you think about the impact of Protestantism, even on our form of capitalism,
where, you know, you have a limited company, you have the possibility of trying something that
could fail without your family being destroyed. You know, there's like this idea of forgiveness and
the possibility of second chance being built in there. And, you know, one of the things that I
found most moving, I think, when writing this and thinking about it was just seeing the beauty of
Jesus, you know, as a follower of Jesus in the midst of this. I was reading...
Peter Levine about the polyvagal therapy and came across this phrase where he talked about what a
trauma survivor needs in order to recover is for someone to bear empathetic witness.
The bearing of empathetic witness to what occurred and it struck me that That's exactly what the
centre of the Christian faith says God has done in Jesus. And so when we talk about forgiveness,
the central idea is that God in Christ has borne empathetic witness to the horror and harm and
trauma and suffering of this world and has said that we matter and our pain matters.
he's going to redeem us and give us this second chance and new life and grace and then when we
become his followers we experience so I think a Christian who forgives someone who's harmed them
doesn't necessarily just muster the strength to do that we receive a grace a power from outside of
ourselves but it's not just an idea it's real it's tangible it's granular and it's you know through
the power of the cross so we're kind of receiving this help this flow of grace which then we offer
to to to the world around us and that's kind of how communities are healed and families are healed
and like when we've really suffered egregious harm you know it can be a really important step in
our own healing this is a great place because i wanted to as we wind down because what i'm hearing
you say i love how you paint that picture because that also gets at the journey aspect of it
because sometimes the The quick fix forgiveness is out of our own willpower.
Whereas what you're describing is a process. And I felt myself as I was listening to you,
I was thinking in my head, it's a process of saying, a process, key word, of in my whole body.
And I do a lot of the parts work, the inner parts work, different parts of us. are on board before
other parts of us. Part of me wants to forgive and part of me is like, uh-uh. And it's a process
of getting your whole soul on board with, I trust you, God. I do not trust this other person.
And I maybe don't even trust that justice will play out in this lifetime, but I do trust you
ultimately. And that is supernatural. And therefore, because of you, I can.
release i can somehow because we trust justice will ultimately be done yes and it's not just lip
service it's in our nervous system it's in our bodies and that takes time that takes time yeah that
takes time i had a a um profound sort of traumatic experience in my early earlier in my 40s and had
um amazing therapy my psychologist was a practitioner of schema therapy so very much embodied and
um I really resonate with what you're saying that healing kind of it takes time to sink in to to
every sort of part of ourselves and i think the same is true of forgiveness which is why i want i
hope that both the message of how powerful this is as a tool and as a positive agent to heal the
world and to help heal us but also um i hope that those who've perhaps been in faith spaces here
today that this is not a weapon to kind of beat you with and make you feel guilty that you you're a
failure as a forgiver you know um or to feel coerced to be rushed into it but to be kind of invited
into this beautiful gift that we get to receive and share in but that we also get to practice and
then the impact on the body the impact on our relationships is so incredibly positive It's so
beautiful. I love that, you know, to really be invited. I love that word into the journey.
Two things can be true. And to really honor how powerful it is means we have to honor the depth of
the journey. Because it will transform us. And it is deeper. It's not lip service.
It's not shallow. It's not trite. It is profoundly transformational.
And maybe the next step is to just trust, just to let one part of us believe that it's worth the
journey. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What would you say as we close?
You've kind of said it, Amy, but, you know, just for the listener. who says, who's feeling that
way, is feeling that way. I do believe in it. I know it's good, but I'm not ready. I don't,
I'm angry. I'm, you know, I don't know how to get there. What would you want to say to that woman
listening today?
Well, I've been there. So first thing I would say is you're really not alone.
And you're not a failure as a person of faith. So to have those feelings. is legitimate as a child
of god and as someone who wants to follow jesus and you're not sort of required to um be rushed
through that in in a way that actually wouldn't be real or true so to just kind of pretend
forgiveness or even fake it till you make it i think the second thing i would say is that i love
the lord's prayer when jesus says when you pray say father that's an expression of attachment of
healthy attachment with the heavenly father hello be your name holy is your name a sort of
acknowledgement of god as transcendent and beyond us and then it goes on forgive us our sins as we
forgive those who sin against us and i would say as part of your daily prayer ask the lord to help
you Because the beginning of forgiveness is to even want to be in a position where it could be
possible. I think that's what our part is as disciples of Jesus.
It's just wanting it and asking for the Lord's help. And then I think the third thing I would say
is that if you've experienced abuse, egregious harm, violence,
spiritual abuse, sexual abuse and any of these deeper wounds it's worth um going on a journey with
someone who's actually trained to help you recover from that and sometimes you know we can i think
think like there's a quick fix but we wouldn't look at someone strangely a christian who broke
their arm and went to hospital and got it in plaster and got their professional help as well as
obviously their small group to pray for them and in the same way you know if there's this longer
term wrestle in your soul like it is it feels impossible on a human level to forgive it may be that
you you need some help in that journey with people who are trained and skilled to do that So I
think that's the last thing I would say and, you know, reach out for and seek that help. I love
that. Thank you so much just for. Diving into this topic, it's so important.
I feel just personally really enriched by your work. Tell, you know, tell my listeners where they
can find your work and find the book. Thank you. We'll be sure to link to it. Thank you so much.
So, yeah, it's called Forgiveness, Reclaiming Its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear.
You can find it on Amazon or any bookseller, Barnes & Noble,
anywhere you buy your books. And if you want to find out more about my work,
I have a 501c3 in America called advocate-collective.org.
You can find me there or just follow my name, Amy or Ewing, on Instagram or Facebook.
I so appreciate the work that you're doing. It's so important and so needed. And we're just
grateful for your time today. Thank you so much.
Have you ever noticed how quickly old patterns resurface when you're around family?
Maybe you find yourself walking on eggshells. Struggling to voice your preferences. Feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions. Or slipping back into roles you thought you'd left behind years ago.
In this episode, Dr. Alison revisits one of the most requested conversations from the podcast, exploring how the dynamics we experienced growing up continue to shape our relationships today.
Through the lens of attachment theory, boundaries, and family systems, Alison unpacks five common patterns that can influence the way we show up with the people we love—and how awareness is the first step toward healing.
You'll learn:
• Why family relationships can pull us back into old roles
• What enmeshment is—and how it differs from healthy closeness
• Five family patterns that often follow us into adulthood
• How childhood experiences shape the way we handle conflict, boundaries, and relationships
• Why naming a pattern isn't about blame—it's about healing
• Practical questions to help you begin breaking free from unhealthy dynamics
Healing doesn't require pretending your family was perfect.
It begins by telling the truth with wisdom, compassion, and grace—so you can love others without losing yourself.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 194: When Relationships Start to Drain You—Using Discernment to Stay Connected Without Losing Yourself
Episode 178 How to Recognize Toxic Tactics, and Stop Taking the Bait
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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*Some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
TRANSCRIPT
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You. We are closing
in on the 4th of July weekend. I cannot believe that. I cannot believe we're nearing July,
that the summer is already a month. behind us it's flown by i hope your summer is going well i hope
you're finding some spaciousness for your soul i know in my own experience with summer both when
the kids were little but also now as an empty nester i love summer but sometimes the absence of
structure it's it's more chaotic sometimes i can lose sight of my own boundaries my own rhythms the
things that keep my soul in healthy shape, if you want to put it that way. It can kind of feel off
kilter when everything's a little more chaotic. There's a lot more time with family and friends and
even some travel and sometimes family reunions and other types of reunions. And all of that can be
wonderful. And also some of that can begin to cause us to lose sight of our rhythms.
And even some of the boundaries that keep us sane and keep us healthy and keep us close to that way
that we always talk about on the podcast of living from love, right? Walking with love,
walking in step with God's Spirit versus just kind of being reactive and over-functioning and
working for love and trying to make everybody happy. And as I was thinking about myself and how I
can get off kilter in the summer, and I was thinking about you and wondering how that's going for
you. I thought this would be a great weekend to re-air an older episode. This is an episode from a
ways back. It resonated with many of you. In fact, I shaped this episode around questions I was
receiving from listeners. And it's all about this idea of enmeshment and how we can become
enmeshed, particularly in our... of origin from the past, but also it applies to our families in
the current day. And enmeshment is just the opposite of healthy boundaries. We'll get into that in
today's episode. But we also get into the importance of boundaries and how to watch out for these
toxic patterns, both patterns that shaped us back in the past,
but also patterns that can sneak up on us. in the present last week in my conversation with dr
stephen tracy we talked about something i think so many of us are trying to untangle and it's all
about how we honor scripture how we honor god while also telling the truth by not denying the toxic
patterns that are sneaking in or noticing harm and not being afraid to name it or at least protect
ourselves from it or protect our kids from it some of this means how do we remain tenderhearted
without becoming naive? How do we forgive without denying reality?
How do we honor our parents without abandoning ourselves? Maybe it's our in-laws that we're going
to be spending time with this summer. Maybe it's our parents. Maybe it's a sibling. Maybe it's a
friend group. And we're aware that some toxic dynamics can sneak in.
And we're not trying to blame anybody, but we are trying to be real and wise and grounded about
protecting ourselves and being wise before God? And these are big questions.
And for many of us, they're very real. They show up with a simple phone call.
from a parent where you immediately start to feel anxious or when you maybe set a boundary that you
really need to set for your own health or sanity, but suddenly you feel guilty or bad or maybe you
feel even judged by other family members or friends or they show up when you have a preference that
you're afraid to state or maybe your life looks a little differently and you're not sure how to
bring that change into a current friendship. And all of this makes me think of one of my favorite
verses. I mentioned it last week in my conversation with Dr. Stephen Tracy, and it applies whether
we're talking about spending time with people we love or whether we're walking into potentially
toxic situations. And it's what Jesus said in Matthew 10, 16.
He said, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
This verse is just so striking to me because Jesus is holding two things together that many of us
tend to bifurcate, right? We keep them separate. He calls us to be innocent. And there's a
connotation of innocence, of being kind, of being open, of being available, of being receptive,
right? He doesn't want us to become cynical or shut down or closed off and definitely not cruel or
always assuming the worst. But Jesus also calls us to wisdom.
And again, I think about that snake, you know, the serpent. None of us like snakes. I know I can't
stand them. They terrify me. But when you think about them as an animal, they're low to the ground.
They're in the dirt. They're in the mud. They're in the muck. They're very aware of what's
happening, right? The dove is high above it all. She's not in the midst of it,
right? She's able to kind of stay outside of things and stay. innocent, but the serpent is in the
muck and the mud. And Jesus is calling us to both. Don't be naive.
That's the part like the serpent that's in the muck and sees what's around us. I'm walking into
something here that may go sideways. I'm walking into a situation where it's possible these toxic
patterns are going to reemerge. I need to be wise about that. I can't pretend that's not going to
happen. I want to be innocent and loving and available. And I also need to be wise and shrewd and
in some ways strategic and smart. about how I enter into this situation.
And this all means we have to learn to recognize what is actually happening in front of us. We need
to be able to discern patterns. We need to be able to pay attention to fruit. What's the fruit of a
certain situation? We need to be able to tell the truth when something is harmful or going down the
wrong path, even when that's happening with people we love, even within families.
And in today's episode, I talk in particular about our families of origin. These could be parents
or grandparents or even in-laws, people who had an impact on your early life or maybe your
spouse's early life. And one of the things I hear so often is about this,
one of the 10 commandments, right? One of the greatest commandments, one of the 10 commandments
that we are supposed to abide by is to honor your father and mother. And that can be challenging
for many people. Even if you had a healthy family, even if you have healthy relationship with your
parents, figuring out how to honor without necessarily losing yourself can be tricky.
Honoring our parents, honoring our family members is a way that we honor God. It's important.
And it also doesn't mean being naive. It doesn't mean pretending. It doesn't mean putting ourselves
in harm's way. It doesn't mean denying the impact of what's happening.
It doesn't mean carrying emotional responsibility that was never yours to carry.
And in fact, what I would argue is that sometimes the most honoring thing we can do for God,
for the other person, and for ourselves is to be honest and to name what's happening with clarity
and compassion. Because when we name the truth of what has happened either in the past or in the
present, we're not blaming. Naming isn't the same as blaming or shaming. Naming isn't about
punishing. Naming isn't about retaliation. Naming is about looking at the truth,
telling the truth, saying this pattern exists. It existed back then.
It exists now. It's still affecting me. It's still shaping me. It's still shaping my partner.
It's still shaping my sibling. This pattern is real. And with God's help, I will not let this
pattern continue to do harm. That's holy ground. That's not blaming.
That's not shaming. That's not being cruel. That's not punitive. That's the holy ground of healing.
The truth is every parent falls short. Every single family has wounds.
Every one of us has places where we need grace, repair, growth, and mercy,
right? All of that is true. And what's also true is that grace doesn't require denial.
And healing and growth can't happen when we're not telling the truth. So in today's episode,
we're going to look at five patterns that can shape us in childhood and that continue to affect us
well into adult. We're going to talk about unpredictability, parentification, criticism,
control, and rescuing. Some of these may apply to you. Some of them may not.
But all of it applies to this idea of how do we create healthy families and how do we heal from our
own wounds? Again, this isn't about shame. This is about awareness. It's about learning to say
there is a reason I tend to revert to this old pattern when I'm with this group of people,
or there's a reason why conflict spikes my anxiety, or there's a reason why I have such a hard time
stating a preference. or even knowing what I want. There's a reason I feel so criticized.
Once you can begin to name the reason, you can begin to get to the root underneath the reactions,
you can begin to heal. And this is why this work matters.
So today, as we revisit this conversation about how our childhood patterns shape us in adulthood,
I want you to listen with compassion. Compassion for your parents who were shaped by their own
stories. Compassion for yourself, because you may still be carrying these patterns you never chose.
And compassion for the people you are caring for now as you learn to show up differently.
Now, listen, before we get started, some of you may have really healthy relationships with your
parents. Maybe they're not perfect, but for the most part, your parents were reliable. They showed
up for you. They support you. And even when there were ruptures, you knew that you could repair.
You knew that you could find a way back to each other. For some of you listening,
there's no relationship anymore with your parents. The relationship got so toxic and the trauma was
so deep. You can't be. in relationship with those people. And that's so painful when you have to
remove yourself from those relationships. And for many of you listening, you're somewhere in the
middle. with your parents. There were some really good and supportive things that you got from your
parents. And there were also some hard things, some things you're trying to unlearn.
No matter where you fall on that spectrum, there are two crucibles where we typically become aware
of these childhood wounds. Number one is our intimate relationships, our relationships specifically
within marriage. That is so often the relationship where suddenly we begin to notice our own
patterns and we're like, oh my goodness, why can't I engage? in a healthy conversation about
conflict. I tend to just go into flight mode or I go into fight mode or I shut down or I withdraw.
Oh my goodness, that's what I did in my family of origin. That's great knowledge, but now I've got
to figure out how to heal so that I can show up in this. current relationship in a different way,
right? So that's one of the gifts of intimate relationships is they bring to the surface some of
these areas where we've got wounds from our past that we need to heal so that we can show up
differently in this current relationship going forward. The second big place where a lot of these
wounds begin to surface is when we have kids of our own. And we begin to realize, oh my goodness, I
didn't even realize. Now I'm trying to parent this child. I want to do it differently. And suddenly
I notice myself behaving in ways I don't like. I notice myself getting angry.
I notice myself getting avoidant. I notice myself avoiding these hard conversations.
Or I notice myself having a really hard time figuring out how to set boundaries.
Or I notice myself having a really hard time when I need to let my... find their own way apart from
me. We begin to notice some of these patterns that likely go all the way back to our own childhoods
when we begin to parent ourselves. And so the stakes can feel really high because we begin to
realize I've got to heal these patterns because I don't want to repeat them.
in these relationships I care so much about in this present day and age with my spouse,
with my kids, with my friends, right? And so I just want to say to you right at the top of this
episode, the goal is not perfection. That is not the goal.
This is a process, that awareness that, yeah, I've got some growing to do.
I've got some things from the past I have to undo. And it's going to take me a little while,
but just my ability to name those things and begin to even say some of those things to the people
that I love. Hey, I know I'm not great at conflict. I know sometimes I can actually flee any
conflict before it even surfaces. And I want to let you know that I'm aware of that. And I may not
be able to change that right away. but I'm going to work on it. And I promise you, I'm going to
keep coming back. Or you might need to say to those loved ones, you know, I know I've got some
anger. I can get really angry and I'm becoming more and more aware of it.
And I want you to know that I see it and I'm working on it. And when I notice it,
I can become more aware of it more quickly. And I can come back to you and say, I'm sorry that
didn't come out right. Can we do a take two on that conversation, right? There are lots of ways you
can let your loved ones know, I'm healing some stuff here. These patterns go way back.
I'm not going to change overnight, but I'm aware. I'm honoring that. And I'm committed to growing.
and healing, and moving forward in a new and better way. Even when you give yourself that
spaciousness, you're calming your nervous system, which allows you to show up more authentically,
with more calm, with more courage, with more confidence. If your spouse or your friend came to you
and said, hey, I know I still do this thing. It's got a long tail. It goes all the way back.
This is deeply rooted. I'm aware. I'm sorry. I know that's hard for you. You know,
we don't expect people to change on a dime, but that awareness is a huge step toward health in all
of our relationships. So remember, you're committing to this journey of healing,
this journey we often on the podcast use that Greek word sozo. in the Bible that means salvation,
that can also be translated as healing. We are on this journey of sanctification.
We are on this journey of being made more and more like Christ, which means being made more and
more like that person who God wants us to become the most beautiful version of ourselves.
This is a process that we will be on throughout our entire lifetime, but every single step you can
take to own it, to honor it, to name it. without shame, both to yourself and to your loved one,
is a huge step and a success in and of itself. I want to start off by naming some key anchoring
terms because I'm going to be using these terms a lot. And then I'm going to move into the five
toxic patterns of behaviors that may have impacted you as a child and that you're carrying with you
into adulthood. The first word I want to name is enmeshment. Sometimes the emotional bond between a
parent and child becomes so intertwined that it's hard to distinguish who you are and your own
feelings, your own thoughts, your own beliefs from that of your parents.
This is what we mean by enmeshment. We can actually become too close, too enmeshed.
We become so caught up in another person that we don't know where they end and I begin.
When you're a child, you are dependent on the adult who is caring for you to be the adult.
It's the adult's responsibility to help honor that balance,
that dance. I go deep into this topic in my book, The Best of You, but I call it that dance between
connection and autonomy, closeness and distance.
We need both in healthy relationships, and it's the parent's job.
to really delineate that dance of being close, but also honoring difference.
I love you. You are my child and you're different from me.
You're a unique individual. And it's my job sometimes to step back and see you for who you are as
someone different from me. That's a really nuanced dance between parent.
and child. And enmeshment occurs when a parent begins to blur those lines. And typically the parent
is depending too much on the child. They want to see the child as an extension of themselves.
This creates a blurred boundary between parent and child. Enmeshment can make the healthy process
of what psychologists call individuation, the process of becoming your own person,
really, really difficult. Even if you've created physical distance, that emotional hold can remain
really strong. And if you're someone who grew up in an amnesty relationship where your parent lived
their life through you, even when you moved away from home, even when you got your own job,
maybe even got married, even had kids yourself, you might find yourself struggling to know what you
think, know what you want, know your own feelings as separate from the people who raised you.
You might even feel guilty about that. That's because it's been really hard for you to individuate.
A parent's job is to essentially raise your child to leave you.
And I think about this in nature, right? We see these moms that there's a point at which you're
raising that child, you're nurturing that child, but eventually that child has to leave the nest.
and learn to fly without you. And so when you have that end game in mind,
when you understand that eventually your child needs to leave you, you're going to love that child,
but you're also going to equip them to leave you, to function on their own,
apart from you. That's your job. And when you do that well, your child will be delighted to
continue to stay connected to you because those roles are clear.
You've built that trust. You've made yourself a safe place for your child to return to as an adult
because paradoxically, you've honored their need to leave you.
You're not trying to keep them close to you in an unhealthy way. You get that your best way of
staying close to you child is to honor that they need to leave you. It's a beautiful paradox.
Now, the other term I want to throw out here is attachment theory. Some of you might be thinking
about attachment as I'm talking, and it can be a really helpful framework for understanding how our
earliest bonds with our caregivers shape our future relationship. But for today's purposes,
it's important to understand that a secure attachment happens when your parents offer that
consistent love and support where they're allowing you to feel safe with them.
But here's the thing, they're allowing you to feel safe with them so that you can explore life
independent from them. That's the essence of secure attachment.
I'm safe enough with these people who love me that I can go out into the world and explore it on my
own. And there are different milestones that I go through in the best of you of... that happens at
different junctures and different ages. But throughout your developing years as a child,
that's essentially what's happening in a healthy, secure attachment. There's that safety from those
parents at home that allows you to go out and explore the world independently. And when that
doesn't happen, we start to notice those anxious attachments, those avoidant attachments, those
mixed attachments, where we don't have that safety at home. And it inhibits our ability to explore
the world outside of us with confidence. So there are a lot of things that can disrupt secure
attachment. Abuse disrupts secure attachment. Neglect disrupts secure attachment.
And also enmeshment can disrupt secure attachment where it's not actually safety in the sense of
that stable home base where this person loves you but does not need you.
When enmeshment occurs, this person loves you to make themselves feel better.
They keep you close to them. There's a sense of closeness that you learn to understand as comfort
when you're doing what the caregiver wants and needs you to do for their sake.
That feels like it's comfort, but it's not actually safety.
So here's what I want you to remember. Healthy parent-child relationships are built on two key
building blocks, connection and separation. Both are necessary.
A parent's job is to help you develop a strong sense of self while also supporting you as you learn
to live your own life. And so this involves encouraging you to learn how to trust your own
instincts, how to make your own decisions, how to explore your own ideas and feelings.
And that leads to healthy individuation. When enmeshment occurs, that process gets thwarted.
You can feel like you're betraying your caregiver. You can feel like you should defer your own
needs, your own instincts, your own decision-making to fulfill the perceived needs of the parent.
Now, there's a really good book. I've recommended this book before. It's a best-selling book by
Lindsay Gibson. It's called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And there's a reason
this book is everywhere, because she just so clearly lays out what some of these patterns look like
in emotionally immature. And so I'm going to give a really condensed version of how I have noticed
some of these behaviors of an emotionally immature parent showing up. But that's really what's
happening here. It's where a parent doesn't have the maturity to do what the child needs to become
a healthy, autonomous adult. Number one is unpredictability. When you're parents,
emotional states are unpredictable. Maybe they had an undiagnosed mental illness.
Maybe there was an addiction. Maybe they just had a lot of emotional outbursts or any difficulty
managing their own emotions where they couldn't take responsibility for their own emotions.
That can leave a child with that anxious attachment. There isn't that sense of safety.
It's like one day mom is great. The next day mom can't get out of bed. And there's nothing to
explain that. I want to be clear. It's not that parents can't struggle while raising kids.
We can. But we have to be able to name it for them. We have to be able to talk to our kids about
that. Listen, your dad struggles with depression. Sometimes you're going to notice that he has a
hard time getting up. It has nothing to do with you. He's getting help for that. We're working on
that. We love you. Here's what's happening. This isn't your fault, right? It's in the absence of
that communication and that honoring of what's truly happening, the kids begin to make up stories.
This is my fault. And kids start to connect dots that aren't meant to be connected when there's
unpredictability. I come home from school and my mom is really sad today and she's not naming that.
She's crying off in the corner and I can see that and that affects me, but she's not talking to me
about it. I don't know what's happening. So as a child in my little brain, what I assume is this is
my fault. I have to come home from school every day, super duper happy because somehow the way I'm
coming home from school. is making mom behave differently, even when that's not true. So again,
unpredictability is when a parent's emotional state is unpredictable and unaccounted for.
The parent does not take responsibility for what's happening. Another example, a parent loses their
temper and gets really angry. We don't love that. That's not great. That's hard for kids. But what
makes it even harder is when it goes unaddressed and unnamed and unrepaired. If a parent is
struggling with an anger issue and they sometimes come down hard, The ability to come back and say,
I got angry. I have a temper. That is not your fault. You did nothing to evoke that kind of
reaction in me. That's my fault. That's my job. to work through that anger.
That is not your fault, right? We're naming it, which allows the child to release the pain of that,
understand that it's not their fault, and see an adult be an adult. An adult takes responsibility,
an adult takes accountability, and hopefully and presumably the adult begins to make changes as
well. And so that unpredictability can also just be part of neglect. Sometimes a parent's just
absent. They are not in the room. They might not be yelling. They might not be crying. But due to
their own problems and their own heartaches and their own hardships, they're maybe going through
the motions of sitting at the dinner table, of getting you to bed, getting you to school, but
they're absent. There's no emotional presence. And it's erratic.
Sometimes they're present. A lot of times they're not. Kids make up narratives in the absence of
consistency. They will make up a narrative about that. Those narratives are almost always self
-shaming. It's me. It's my fault. I'm the problem, right? It's really hard for you to trust that
someone will show up consistently and reliably. Number two, the other one I see so commonly is what
we call parentification. This occurs when the parent relies on the child to meet the parent's
emotional needs. So if you were conditioned to take care of your parents' emotions,
you became the parent for your parents, you may struggle to understand healthy boundaries in adult
relationships. You may feel like it's your job to be the adult in the room for everyone around you.
You may take on more responsibility for other people's emotions than is your responsibility to
take. It's really hard to change this pattern if you were parentified as a child.
So for example, Even a well-meaning parent, maybe you're a highly empathetic kid.
You're pretty precocious and you can kind of read the cues and you can tell that mom is sad or dad
is upset. And you go to them and you say, oh man, are you okay? And slowly over time,
mom or dad or whoever the person is caring for you just begins to confide in you. Yeah, you know,
this is really hard. And you actually have the ability to be there for them, to...
them through those emotions, to cheer them up, to make them feel better. Maybe as you begin to get
a little older, you might even have wisdom for them. And slowly you start parenting your parent.
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Now listen, when you're in an adult relationship with your parent, this is going to happen a little
more. We do. move into two-way relationships a little bit with our parents as we become adults,
although it's always really a one-way relationship. A parent always has more power than the child,
even in adult parent-child relationships. But man, when you're a kid, if this is the primary means
by which you're relating to a parent is that you're caring for them, it's a big problem because two
things are happening there. Number one, you're learning how to always prioritize someone else over
your own needs. And number two, you're not getting your needs met.
Think about that. You're not getting your needs as a child met. Your parent isn't attuning to you
and attuning to your emotional states and saying things like, I love your empathy.
I love that you care about me, but I want you to know this is not your problem.
This is my problem. I'm the adult here. Thank you for noticing that I was sad.
I appreciate that. And this is not your problem to solve. This is my problem.
I'm an adult. I have other adults who will help me through this. I'm here for you.
I want to know what's going on with you, right? That's what a healthy parent does. In those
situations, it's not that we don't want to honor the empathy of our kids. It's beautiful. But we
don't want to take that slippery slope down to letting our kids parent us. And it happens all the
time. We have to watch that as parents because two things are happening there. They're
overdeveloping that attunement muscle to other people, but they're also underdeveloping what it
feels like to have someone else attune. to them. And this sets you up for all kinds of issues in
adult relationships. When you go into your adulthood, you don't know what it looks like to be in a
relationship with someone who's there for you. You only know how to show up for other people.
And that sets you up for a lot of codependency. It sets you up to be taken advantage. of by other
people. It sets you up for one-way relationships that are unsatisfying where a lack of intimacy
occurs. So this is a big one to understand if you see some of those patterns in your adult life
where you really have a hard time receiving care from others, asking for what you need,
even identifying what you need. It may well be that you grew up in an environment where you had to
be the adult way too soon. And so already from a very young age, you were pretty good at assessing
the needs around you, but you did not know how to be a child and receive the care of someone else.
And that's really important in healthy relationships, the ability to both give out and receive
care. Thirdly, we're going to talk about criticism. If you grew up in a culture of criticism,
constant criticism, this damages your core sense of self. It's really hard for a child to
understand that all of this criticism around me is not actually about me because these are my
parents. They know best. That's what kids think. So all of this criticism that I'm getting,
that must be the truth. I must be a bad kid. I must not be okay. They're criticizing me for a
reason. This is really unhealthy. We don't grow up with a healthy sense of our goodness,
of our God-given worth, of the beauty in our soul. We grow up feeling inferior,
feeling insecure, feeling unworthy. We don't understand inherently that we are a beloved child of
God. Now you can heal, but it is so important to begin to connect those dots and go, you know what?
Part of the reason I can't actually believe in myself and believe that I'm worthy of good love is
that I've never experienced it. I've been told in one way or another that I was worthless, that I
wouldn't amount to anything, that I was a failure, that I could never get anything right. the day I
was born. I don't have any other memories. So how would I know what it's like to internalize an
entirely different message, which is I am beloved. I am worth love.
I'm not perfect. Of course, who is? And I am a beautiful soul made in the image of God.
Number four, control comes in. If you grew up in an environment that was highly controlled.
Now again, Sometimes well-intended parents want to keep you overly safe and they want to control
everything. Sometimes it's out of a good intention. They don't let you take enough healthy risks.
Sometimes it's coming from a selfish motivation where they're more concerned about how they appear
in the world. And so they control your behavior so they can look good in the world to their
friends. They want you to go to the right school or play the right sport or have the right friends,
right? And that's really more about them than it is about you. So whether that's coming from a
desire to keep you from harm and they control too much, or if it's coming from that more self
-serving place. It makes it hard for you when you get into your adult world to understand how to
take healthy risks. So if you grew up in a highly controlled environment, you might go one of two
directions. You might take too many risks and overcorrect and blow everything up, or you might just
be really, really scared and stay really, really small because you've never learned how to develop
that healthy tolerance for some of the uncertainty, some of the stressors even, some of even the
hardships. of life. And then lastly, I want to talk about rescuing.
And I see this in certain types of families where the parents, out of usually a goodness of heart,
they're constantly swooping in and rescuing kids out of any discomfort, out of any hardship.
They're fighting their kids' battles. Now, sometimes as parents, we need to intervene on behalf of
our kids, right? Something's happening that is wrong. There's an injustice and we need to intervene
to protect our kids. That is absolutely true. But in parents who are rescuing, it's those normal,
everyday incidences that are hard. I didn't get invited to this birthday party. And no, they're not
ganging up and bullying me mercilessly. They're just not including me in their group. And it's
really painful. And as a parent, we got to help our kids honor that that's hard and also teach them
how to tolerate the pain of that. Two things can be true, right? You have to learn how to navigate
challenges in life. You have to learn how to do that with your parents there as that safe anchor.
They're never going to leave you, but they're also not always swooping in to rescue you out of it.
Sometimes doing things that are hard or even doing things where we try and we're not successful at
them are really important for our character and our growth. So this thing of rescuing can also
create a situation in which you arrive at adulthood without those necessary skills to tolerate the
things that come our way in life. As adults, there can sometimes be an entitlement.
There's just this constant kind of feeling of being disappointed by other people when maybe, in
fact, those other people are actually exhibiting normal behaviors. They're not taking
responsibility for something that isn't theirs to take. It's actually yours to take responsibility.
So all of this comes down to that separation and connection. How do I stay connected to people
while also understanding what's mine is mine and what's theirs is theirs? And so here are five
questions that you might ask yourself. Maybe you ask a loved one or a trusted advisor related to
these five parenting patterns. If you suspect that they may have an impact on you today, these are
just some questions to think about and notice and wonder about and get curious about because it
will help you begin to frame your experience so that you can take brave steps toward healing.
So the first one, as it relates to unpredictability, how do I react? when someone I care about is
emotionally volatile or inconsistent? Do I find myself constantly trying to manage their feelings
or walking on eggshells? And if you notice that inside of you, that when someone else is
emotionally volatile or inconsistent, it sort of triggers a part of you that's like, oh, I need to
do something to fix that. I need to change something about myself to fix their feelings.
That's a cue that there's a wound there. that you could begin to heal. Because the truth is,
if someone else is emotionally volatile, that's their responsibility to work through that.
It's your responsibility to be aware, to notice what happens inside of you, to take responsibility
for yourself in that moment. It's not your responsibility to try to fix their emotions.
Number two, as it relates to parentification, do I feel responsible for taking care of others'
emotional needs before my own? In my adult relationships, do I struggle to ask for help or set
boundaries because I'm so used to always prioritizing others? And just notice that.
Notice if that's true. My default is just to immediately take care of them, immediately go to their
needs, whether it's your friends, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your own parents. I've got
to take care of them. I've got to be the bigger person. I've got to do what they need. Versus
sitting with the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of I wonder what I need in this situation from
myself or from another person. And that may be just that beginning to notice the effects of that
parentification in your own adult life. And then number three, when it comes to criticism,
how do I respond to feedback or criticism from others? Do I immediately internalize it,
criticize myself, or feel like I need to perfect myself? to avoid being judged.
In other words, if I notice criticism around me or even any healthy feedback,
do I immediately assume I'm at fault? I must have gotten it wrong. I've got to do better.
And if so, that's something to notice. What if instead I could take a deep breath and wonder,
is it true? Is that criticism even about me? Or is it more about this other person?
It's possible this has nothing to do with me. It's possible I haven't done anything wrong.
And you can begin to build up that new muscle. Number four, control.
Do I find it difficult to make decisions without seeking approval or validation from others?
Am I able to pursue my own interests or do I feel pressure to live up to the expectations of
others? And just notice. If I were to vote a certain way, if I were to attend a certain church,
if I were to wear a certain article of clothing as an adult, is there just sort of this internal
backlash where it's like, I can't do that. I'd get in trouble. Even though I'm an adult and even
though I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm just doing something a little bit different than other
people. Just notice that. Begin to pay attention. What if I could challenge myself to take some
small steps toward autonomy, toward doing some things that I like to do,
even though they're different from what I was taught was okay.
And you might start with some low-hanging fruit, right? It might start with something you wear, a
food that you eat. That's just a little bit different than what you were allowed as a child.
And then number five, rescuing. When facing challenges, do I tend to rely on others to bail me out,
to fix things for me? Or do I feel empowered to tackle problems on my own? How comfortable am I
with allowing others to fail and learn from their mistakes? How often am I wanting to swoop in and
rescue others? That might be another way this shows up. And just notice that. And maybe ask for
feedback, again, from a trusted advisor, because you're beginning to identify patterns. There's a
reason you're this way. Likely this goes all the way back to childhood. So these questions should
help you identify how these early patterns might still be affecting your adult life and your
relationships. And I want you to remember this above all else. Healing starts with you.
No matter what happened in your past, you have the power to begin to change some of these patterns.
You can do this inside of you. It starts with just beginning to notice and name some of these
patterns and beginning to entertain just the thought, what if it could be different?
What if there was another way? And you will begin to unlock the natural God-given healing inside
of your soul. Because no matter what happened to you in the past, your body is designed with a bent
toward healing. Invite God's spirit into that process and ask God to begin to nudge you when one of
those patterns is showing up in your life. And I promise you, you will begin to see numerous
opportunities and numerous occasions to make a tiny change.
One brave step at a time.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to
podcasts and click the plus or follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode and it
helps get the word out to others. While you're there, I'd love it if you'd leave your five-star
review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best
of who you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self.
Scripture is powerful.
It has the power to comfort, guide, convict, and restore. But when it's taken out of context or used to control, it can also leave deep wounds.
In this conversation, Dr. Alison sits down with theologian and Mending the Soul co-founder Dr. Steven Tracy to explore how Scripture can be used as medicine—or as poison—for those who have experienced abuse.
Together, they unpack some of the most commonly misused passages around submission, forgiveness, honoring parents, and divorce, while offering a more faithful way of reading Scripture: one that reflects God's heart for the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the wounded.
Here’s what you’ll cover
* Why spiritually abusive people often weaponize Scripture
* How to recognize the difference between biblical truth and spiritual manipulation
* What God reveals about His heart for those experiencing abuse
* Why humility matters when we interpret Scripture
* How healthy boundaries honor both God and human dignity
* How survivors can begin rebuilding trust in both God and His Word
Whether you've experienced spiritual abuse yourself, love someone who has, or simply want to handle Scripture with greater wisdom and compassion, this conversation offers both clarity and hope.
Because God's Word was never meant to keep you trapped in harm.
It was always meant to lead you toward healing.
More Resources:
Read Dr. Steven Tracy’s book: To Heal or Harm
connect with Dr. Steven Tracy's ministry, Mending the Soul.
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 163: Healing Spiritual Wounds – Understanding Abuse in Faith Spaces
Episode 17: What is Church Hurt and How Do I Heal?
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone. I’m Dr. Alison, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Today’s conversation is a powerful one. My guest is Dr. Steven Tracy, theologian and the co-founder of Mending the Soul, a global mission dedicated to resourcing and equpinpping community and faith leaders in informed and compassionate responses to those impacted by abuse.
He is the author of a new book called To Heal or Harm: Scripture’s Use as Poison or Medicine for Abuse Survivors.
And that title really says it all.
Because Scripture is powerful. It is living and active. It can comfort us, ground us, guide us, correct us, and bring us back to the heart of God. But because Scripture is powerful, when it is misused—when it is twisted, weaponized, or wielded by someone seeking power or control—it can also cause devastating harm.
For so many abuse survivors, including many of you, the wound is not only what happened to you. It’s what was said to you in God’s name afterward.
“You need to forgive.”
“You need to submit.”
“You need to honor your father and mother.”
“God hates divorce.”
“Don’t gossip.”
“Don’t be bitter.”
“Don’t touch God’s anointed.”
These are words and ideas taken from Scripture, but when they are ripped from the larger heart of God, they can become tools of silencing instead of pathways to healing.
And that is what Steve helps us name today.
One of the most painful realities we talk about today is that sometimes the most vulnerable people are the ones most easily harmed by distorted theology because they genuinely want to obey God. They want to be faithful. They want to be gracious. They want to forgive. They want to do what Scripture says.
And yet faithfulness to God never means surrendering your dignity to someone who is destroying you.
That’s where I want to pause for a moment with a passage from Exodus 3 that Steven will expand on in today’s episode. God says to Moses:
“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”
That passage gives us such a clear picture of God’s heart.
God sees.
God hears.
God knows.
God comes down to deliver.
God does not minimize oppression. He does not spiritualize abuse. He does not ask the vulnerable to pretend they are fine in order to protect the powerful. God sees the affliction of his people. He hears their cries. He knows their suffering—not just intellectually, but personally, compassionately, intimately. And he moves toward them with deliverance.
That matters so much for anyone who has been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that God is mostly concerned with preserving appearances, protecting institutions, or keeping a family together at any cost.
The God of Scripture is not indifferent to harm. He is not unmoved by suffering. He is not aligned with the abuser. He is near to the brokenhearted. He protects the vulnerable. He exposes what is hidden. He tells the truth.
In this conversation, Steve helps us understand how Scripture can be misused in marriage, in families, in churches, and in counseling contexts. We talk about common passages that get weaponized around submission and forgiveness. And We also talk about how to read Scripture with humility, with wisdom, and with special attention to those who are vulnerable.
One of the things I appreciated most about Steve is his posture. He has deep theological training, but he also speaks with humility. He names how much he has learned from survivors, from women, from marginalized communities, and from people whose life experiences helped him see things in Scripture he had previously missed.
That kind of humility matters. Because when Scripture is interpreted from a place of unchecked power, it can be used to protect the powerful. But when we come to Scripture with humility, with reverence, and with the heart of Jesus, we begin to see again and again that God’s heart bends toward the wounded, the oppressed, the silenced, and the vulnerable.
So whether you are a survivor yourself, whether you love someone who has been harmed, or whether you are a pastor, counselor, leader, or friend who wants to help without causing more harm, I think this conversation will give you language, clarity, and hope.
The title of Steve’s book is To Heal or Harm. And my prayer as you listen is that Scripture would become again what God intended it to be—not a weapon used against you, but a place where you encounter the God who sees you, hears you, knows your suffering, and comes near to bring healing.
Please enjoy my conversation with STeve Tracy
Alison (00:10.962)
So Steve, you start this book, such a powerful book, and there's a lot in it, but you start with a story of a woman named Cheryl. And the title of the book is To Heal or Harm, right? To Heal or Harm. And she is an example of someone for whom scripture was used in a harmful, very harmful manner. Can you share with my listeners who haven't read the book yet?
A little bit about her story and why it was an important place for you to start to frame this conversation.
steve tracy (00:47.296)
Absolutely. I was introduced to Cheryl through my wife Celeste, through their friendship and
Celesta's ministry and Cheryl's life. And Celesta just spoken so highly of Cheryl and said, This woman is has such a heart for Christ, and she just wants nothing but to honor the Lord, follow Scripture, and sadly Scripture has been really leveraged against her. but I just heard such respect from Celeste for Cheryl as she was in a horrible
Abusive marriage, but but trying to figure out, you know, she had a spiritually abusive husband with with advanced degrees in theology who just weaponized scripture against her. She'd grown up in a very fundamentalistic church that weaponized scripture against her. So she really illustrated at the highest level, most destructive level, how
A man or a woman who wants to follow God has and obeys scripture actually can find themselves in tremendous bondage because of that heart to honor God and follow scripture, when scripture is misused. And Charles
Alison (01:53.278)
Yeah.
Alison (02:09.737)
Yeah.
steve tracy (02:11.563)
become a dear friend and I we just so so respect the journey she's been on and she graciously agreed to you know write that introduction to the book really it comes out of a lot of pain but there it's a beautiful sequel in that we've just seen the Lord's healing in her life and rebuilding, restoring. So she kind of symbolizes the the whole picture of the the harm
Alison (02:24.361)
Yeah.
steve tracy (02:39.935)
scriptures weaponized, but that's not the end of the story. It need not be the end of the story. th those same scriptures that were mu used against us can be a tremendous source of life and healing. So, yeah. She covers the whole thing.
Alison (02:43.049)
Yeah.
Alison (02:54.771)
I love I love how you talk about this because you you talk in the book and it and it really makes sense because scripture's powerful. So when it is weaponized, when it is used against us, it's powerful, but it is also so powerful for healing. I always think of the the verse in Song of Solomon that says, Love is as strong as death. The the love of scripture, the love of God is stronger. but
steve tracy (03:17.74)
Yes.
Alison (03:24.625)
You say in the book, and I think it's a really well put that scripture can become poison or medicine, especially for abuse survivors. And tell unpack that a little bit. What is it? Why is you know, why is it so powerful? How you you know, you're you're kind of getting at it with Cheryl's story, but it's like we we want to follow scripture. So we're primed for a vulnerability there if someone is mis.
using it, especially if we're being already being silenced or abused or or a victim. What have you seen in in how's you know, how that happens and why it's so powerful in that way?
steve tracy (04:06.966)
Yeah. abusers take advantage of vulnerabilities, naivities. abusers and not that one size fits all. There's as many kinds of abusers as there are people, but there are certainly gent some general characteristics. And I liken liken abusers to sharks that n that smell blood in the water. They're looking for the vulnerabilities. So often it's
individuals that just have a an innocent, naive trust, you know, think children, others, that that can be so taken advantage of. Or or an an an innocent, naive again, desire to do what's right. And that's a good thing, but if it's not coupled with life experience and wisdom, and it's that's not a judgmental statement, you know,
sometimes we we just haven't had certain experiences so we're we're naive, not in any kind of a bad sense other than we're more vulnerable 'cause you don't know what you don't know. And abusers take advantage of that. that just innocent desire to honor God.
Alison (05:17.535)
Yeah.
Alison (05:24.608)
Yeah.
steve tracy (05:25.334)
That's beautiful, but if you're if you're not astute to the reality of evil, the the the characteristics of evildoers, boy that that can just be deadly. And so often Christians because we want to be trusting and loving, etcetera,
We don't want to be mean. We don't set the boundaries that we need to set. And I know just from looking at your website, you talk, I think, quite a bit about boundaries that's actually necessary. but if if we don't understand that, we don't know how to do that, we can be really vulnerable. And then scripture is kind of the ultimate tool, so to speak, in a spiritual context. It's God's word. So if I can just
dump scripture on you, I I've I've got the trump card, right? Well, unless you know how to interpret it for yourself with some confidence, then I I you you stand condemned. Like you have to do what I say because I'm saying what God says, so you have to do it. And that that's how this often works.
Alison (06:22.686)
Yes. That's right.
Alison (06:33.47)
Yes.
Alison (06:39.004)
Yeah, and this is the essence of spiritual abuse, right? Taking the name of God in vain, you know, misusing the name of God for power and control and manipulation and ill intent, which is just you such the heart of the work that you're doing, you and your wife, as you're trying to help people heal. yes, I so so Steve, my a lot of my audience, we talk a lot about.
steve tracy (06:42.531)
Right.
steve tracy (06:49.75)
Right. Right.
Okay.
Alison (07:06.098)
And it comes a lot out of my own story of being high in empathy, a natural kind of people pleaser, but but that sort of fond response that has been conditioned, and then it's reinforced in many ways by faith culture. Just as you're saying, we want to be kind. And there's a real genuineness behind that. and I always think of the verse, it's just becomes such a a powerful verse for me. Be shrewd.
steve tracy (07:27.938)
Right.
Alison (07:34.226)
As the snake and innocent as the dove, right? It's both. We have to be shrewd and wise. And for some people, one of the other of those is easier. But for many of the people in my audience, it's learning that the shrewd ways where you can kind of outwit the person who's trying to take advantage of you.
steve tracy (07:37.432)
Love that. Right, right.
steve tracy (07:54.349)
Yeah, ab absolutely. And honestly, I think it's more difficult in the evangelical culture for women. In the sense that there's just a lot of kind of innate patriarchy. I don't want to get into a whole gender role discussion here. That's not my point, but if a man sets boundaries often in an evangelical church context, that's okay, he's just being a man.
Alison (08:01.715)
Yes.
Alison (08:22.42)
Yeah.
steve tracy (08:23.32)
But if a woman stands up for herself and sets boundaries, often that's that that's frowned on at best and really demeaned at worst. And that's that that's
Manifestly un unfair and wrong. Every human it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, this isn't a gender issue. You have a right biblically to set boundaries. And and we need to be able to affirm that for people. There's a way to do it, of course. but that's not being ungodly, unloving, etc., if we set healthy boundaries.
Alison (09:03.048)
Yeah. I love that. So there's two directions I really want to go. One is getting at what you're saying, this idea of how power and and even hermeneutics, how interpreting scripture can get misused. the other way I wanna go is more practical. I wanna start there and then circle back to some of the scripture interpretation stuff. Because I remember when I was I first started seminary, because I did my
Initial masters in counseling at a at a seminary. And I remember my professors saying it was the first time I'd heard this, everybody brings a lens to scripture. And just because you're Protestant or just because you're evangelical, you know, our our Catholic brothers and sisters, I think, you know, you can you can argue with some of the theologies, but they do understand that we're bringing an interpretive lens to scripture. But so are are we Protestants, so are we evangelicals. And you again, you can bring one that's harmful or you can bring one
steve tracy (09:40.558)
Right.
Alison (10:00.926)
And I love how you land on this in the book that honors the most vulnerable. I I just I think that is such a powerful place that you land. I guess I just went in that, I guess I just went down that path. So we'll go down that path. we'll come back to the actual scriptures in a bit for those of you listening. But I just I think it's important to zoom up for a second and go, how are we approaching the text? Because
You can you can approach the text with ill intent, but you can also be naive in approaching the t the text and do harm. So tell me a little bit about how you arrived. You you've studied, you know, you've been a pastor, you've been in seminary, you've studied scripture, that this idea that we have to read it through the lens of the most vulnerable.
steve tracy (10:55.758)
Yeah, well I would even even move it up twenty thousand more feet at the highest level and say, I really think the starting point in most respects for sound interpretation of scripture, technical word is hermeneutics, is is to begin with a humble receptive posture. And you know, i in our flesh we
Alison (11:01.512)
Yes, yes.
steve tracy (11:24.908)
we tend to not recognize our own vulnerabilities and biases, etc. And that's not only about sin. It's also just about, you know, we're we're products of our culture. So we we breathe the air around us, so to speak. So if
There are certain things that aren't even questioned. If we lived roughly 150 years ago in the South as Christians, we would have thought, with very few exceptions, that slavery was thoroughly biblical. And and it's easy for us in 2026 to look back and say, what idiots they were. How could they have thought that? But
again, we're w we're products of our culture in in so many ways and so we have lenses that we don't even recognize. We we just it's just how we think.
culture as well as sin, but it's both. They're not the same. But that that feeds in it creates a like a you know lens through which we read scripture. So having a humble receptive posture is the beginning place. Just in essence saying to yourself, and I would often tell my seminary students this, have often said this,
You have and I some really wrong beliefs. But here's the scary thing. Most of them we're not aware of. But I think that's a fair starting place to assume because we're fallible, finite, and sinful human beings, there's some things that we think that are not right.
steve tracy (13:15.648)
And how are we gonna have those surfaced? The only way is if we have a a humble receptive posture. One of the things coming back, Alison, to your comment about
Alison (13:21.876)
Good.
steve tracy (13:29.592)
the vulnerable, the marginalized. I I'm the pinnacle of power, right? I I'm white, I'm male, at least in the church world, I have a PhD in biblical studies, like, you know, how in the world am I gonna recognize some of my wrong thinking if I am not willing to listen to the voices of those with very different experiences?
I shudder in hindsight at some of the things I th thought, said, as a young pastor right out of seminary. my goodness. I I was clueless to the experiences of the marginalized of women, people of color, of of abuse survivors. Those weren't my experiences. So my world was so different, and the only way I could and I read scripture accordingly.
Alison (14:18.228)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison (14:27.199)
Wow.
steve tracy (14:28.494)
But in over the years, God's really humbled me in a countless ways. And I've learned to listen to those voices. It's not that scripture changes, but the lens that I have through which I read scripture has dramatically shifted. And so I see things in the text I just didn't see before. they were there, but I didn't see them. So yeah.
Alison (14:50.912)
Interesting. It's that's powerful what you're saying, that it was through your own. I love that emphasis on humility because there is humility, your willingness to be with others whose stories were so different from your own that challenged. Was there any specific moment or one that stands out of that lens?
getting shattered or at least challenged because I think that can be that's that's a very formational process to open yourself to that.
steve tracy (15:30.536)
absolutely. one of those most pivotal moments, it was really a I mean, I look back on it and say, This is the grace of God. cause Steve Tracy needed some massive reframe in his thinking. I share it in the book. I was doing a s
part of a preaching series. I was one of the teaching pastors and we were doing a series on family life. And my goodness, I had a master's in theology, so I and I could read it from the Greek. So I mean I had it wired, right? And I preached one of the sermons on on family life and I thought frankly it was an excellent sermon. And
Monday morning I had a a letter in my box from a young woman in our church. she was in our singles ministry. I ov I oversaw singles among other things. And she unloaded both barrels on me. And and it was very appropriately so. And she basically said, I I've sat through four or five weeks now of sermons on the family. She said it nicer than this, but basically said, You guys are clueless.
You you're telling us to honor our parents, to forgive, to submit. Do you know what it's like to flee from an abusive father who who beats you senseless? Do you know what it's like to be woken up in the middle of the night by your mother fleeing for her life with her children? And then you tell us we're simply supposed to forgive, submit, respect, on and on. Before you
Alison (16:53.632)
Yeah.
steve tracy (17:12.788)
Issue your grand again, she said it much more kindly, but what I heard from the Spirit was before you issue your grand pronouncements, start listening to the experiences of your flock that are different from your own, and you will be addressing scripture different differently. That was a moment of tremendous humbling for me.
Alison (17:17.525)
Yeah.
Alison (17:31.61)
Mm. Wow.
Alison (17:37.684)
Yeah.
steve tracy (17:38.019)
And I have gone back and apologized to that woman. but that was one of the bigger moments. Going to Africa for the first time in 2007 was the second. it was and and that was to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I've been over twenty times now.
have staff there. It's been called the rape epicenter of the world. There's a level of violence, particularly against women, that's it it just takes your breath away, gives you literal nightmares, but God's it work in profound ways. But that first conference, initially it was how can these people be so
malignantly patriarchal and how can they be defending all this? And and we were there almost a month and then they started in appropriate ways challenging me about things that I'd never thought about.
Alison (18:35.624)
Mm.
steve tracy (18:37.774)
from forgiveness to honoring parents to respect for the elderly to a variety of things. And it and God just overwhelmingly convicted me that I had looked down on people of another culture because I could see certain things that really don't accord with scripture.
But I was completely oblivious to things in my culture that I didn't even question. And they were pointing that out. And that was a second one
Alison (19:04.584)
Mm.
steve tracy (19:08.366)
It was painful, but boy, I needed that. So that's that's just really given those two events in particular. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of others, but those were particularly powerful in just surfacing my need to come to life and especially scripture with some humbleness, a lot of humbleness, and and receptivity. Lord show me. I I love what David says at the end of Psalm 139 when he has spent
Alison (19:12.329)
Yeah.
Alison (19:31.22)
Yeah.
steve tracy (19:38.413)
the whole chapter, or the author, saying, God knows everything about me. If I go to the highest heavens, he's there. If I go to the shield, he's there. Before there's a word on my tongue, he knows it, you know, etc. He knows everything about me. But then you get to the very end of Psalm 139.
Says, search me, O God, and know me. Well, that's not for God's benefit. He's just said God knows everything. That's for the author's benefit. and see if there's any unhealthy way in me. Lead me in the way everlasting, the way of righteousness. He he's saying, God, I'm assuming there's there's there's
Alison (20:03.434)
Yeah.
Alison (20:11.348)
Yeah, yeah.
Alison (20:19.36)
Mm.
steve tracy (20:29.27)
All kinds of things that are unhealthy in my heart. I don't see and you see, please reveal that to me. That should be our posture coming to Scripture. God, I'm sure I've got some s some things wrong here, but I don't know what they are. Show me, Lord. And often what God will use to show us will be other brothers and sisters who've had a very different life experience.
Alison (20:41.501)
Yes.
Yeah.
Alison (20:55.028)
Yeah.
steve tracy (20:55.81)
that see things differently. Their experiences are different. And that'll maybe wake up some things in us that need to be woken up, a a shift of perspective. And it's particularly needed right now. in our culture, we are so polarized. It it's, you know, you're on the right or you're on the left. And then that's light and dark. I mean, there is no middle ground. There's no discussion.
Alison (21:21.205)
I know.
steve tracy (21:23.456)
And we can't learn from each other. And that's not just sad, but it's tragic. Because there's error on the right and the left in every way, you know. W we need to learn from each other, but only a humble receptive posture is gonna let us get those insights that ultimately then are gonna help shape and correct.
Alison (21:31.954)
It's tragic.
steve tracy (21:51.116)
Misconceptions when we come to reading God's word.
Alison (21:54.611)
It it is so everything you're saying is so profound and so countercultural to your point. I I find myself I do a part part for for many of the reasons you do the work you do, I do a now a daily devotional podcast where I I bring sort of psychological wisdom to scripture and I'm very clear. I'm not trying to argue the the doctrines, I'm simply trying to highlight these themes that I think are so evident, themes like attachment and
steve tracy (22:00.046)
Yeah.
Alison (22:24.582)
And securiti and you know, God's love that are in the scripture and suffering and things that don't often get highlighted. And I've heard from so many people that say, Gosh, I I it's so helpful to hear that you know, I I was kind of almost inoculated against those scriptures because of the way they've been used for harm, but then you see them from a different light. And I I say that because sometimes I I sh I personally have
Shy away from taking on some of the, and I guess where I'm going with this is humble receptivity doesn't mean we don't have beliefs. It doesn't mean we don't have opinions. It doesn't mean we don't care. But it does mean we are more interested. I guess I would say I I'm not as interested in being right. I I'm I have, and it gets to me at psych the psychology of differentiation. I can hold.
steve tracy (23:04.312)
Absolutely. Right.
Alison (23:21.48)
A view, I can hold an opinion and also understand that I'm still probably missing some things and I have something to learn from you. And that's just hard. Those kinds of conversations are in the public space. I can lots of people in private I'll have those conversations with are very hard to come by. Very hard to come by.
steve tracy (23:43.032)
So hard to come by. my goodness. but we are
I'll use the word impoverished if we don't have those conversations. We're we'll be in an echo chamber. And then if we're not careful, the only podcasts we listen to, the only news that we listen to, will all reflect our our preconceptions. And so so they just reinforce what we already believe, some of which is dead wrong.
Alison (23:54.942)
Ooh.
Alison (23:58.784)
Mm-hmm.
Alison (24:14.973)
Exactly.
steve tracy (24:23.124)
So we we've gotta have those conversations and voices.
And and and you rightly say, Alison, it doesn't mean we don't have convictions, but this is how we sharpen our convictions. And even if nothing changes in our conviction, it will dramatically change how we view other people. Even if at the end of the conversation we s we still think our conviction is right and that other posture is wrong, and it may well be that we change, but let's assume we don't change. We will look at that other person.
Alison (24:43.498)
Good.
Alison (24:55.337)
Yeah.
steve tracy (24:58.96)
Differently. There'll be a level of compassion that's and understanding that wasn't there before. And that is that's the heart of Jesus. Like he, there's a reason it was the spiritual leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, that hated him and the sinners that flocked to him. And it
Alison (25:19.657)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yes.
steve tracy (25:24.262)
Obviously Jesus had, I mean to use your language, strong convictions, of course, but the way he lived those out was was with such tenderness, such compassion, such understanding. You know, like the woman at the well in John 4. He's not justifying immorality in the least, but he he had such an app
Alison (25:29.246)
Yes.
steve tracy (25:53.135)
appreciation i i in the sense of deep understanding of her woundedness. She wasn't just a Samaritan, let alone just a slut, basically. That's she was engaging in inappropriate behavior, but that that wasn't all he saw the person and the need.
Alison (26:14.046)
Yes. What's the whole story? Yeah. Yeah.
steve tracy (26:16.94)
Right. And that's what we want to learn to do. Jesus models this for us. So we need to do it, especially now in this horrifically polarized age where we slap a label on someone and they're woke, they're right, they're left, whatever, and then we don't hear anything they have to say and we don't learn. We're not challenged and they're they're just a label and not a human being that needs compassion.
Alison (26:22.048)
Yeah, he does.
Alison (26:39.701)
Yeah.
Alison (26:46.28)
Amen. Yeah. Well said. What Steve, what are I'm just curious, in your years of work in the trenches and hearing people's stories, what are some of the most common ways you've seen scripture weaponized, especially in marriage, family, and church contexts?
steve tracy (27:06.39)
Yeah. A as far as specific texts.
Alison (27:10.196)
Yeah, sure.
steve tracy (27:15.186)
It's probably yeah, I mean dozens of texts immediately come to mind. you know, I I give the example Allison in the book years ago when we still lived in Phoenix. We live in Portland, Oregon now, and boy, that's a tale of two cities. Talking about being able to appreciate and understand both both sides politically.
Alison (27:34.378)
Yeah.
Yes, I bet.
steve tracy (27:38.815)
Which has been been really good for for a lot of reasons. But at this time, it was probably close to 20 years ago, one of our board members was on the Phoenix City Council and had a tremendous heart for abuse and abused women in particular and and sponsored a lot of domestic violence programs in the city of Phoenix. So she got me in with all of the domestic violence directors. not
Not just faith-based, but that time there were 12, 14 primary DV shelters, and she got me an audience with all of them, set it up, had me do a presentation, you know, 20-30 minutes on mending the soul and our resources for for abused women, children. And then I took took some QA time and I watched one woman like you can feel the energy, you can like and it was
She was just about to burst. So she I mean, the second I finished and and asked if there are any questions, she literally just jumped up and blurted out, What does many of the soul say about wives smitting? And she in essence was quoting from Ephesians five twenty-four. And again, most of these were not
Alison (28:51.637)
Yeah.
Alison (28:56.756)
Yeah. Yeah.
steve tracy (29:02.978)
Faith based shelters, a couple of them were, most weren't, mainly trained social workers, but boy, all and these were all female directors and w she articulated you could tell what they were all asking. I mean they're all their heads are nodding and I'm on the spot, like what can you say about women submit and everything. So I think that's probably the most commonly as f as it relates to family life, and and the husband's the head from First Corinthians eleven one would be a close second. Those those are really
Alison (29:15.934)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alison (29:32.298)
Mm.
steve tracy (29:32.865)
overlapping though those two texts because on the face if you don't look if you don't use sound hermeneutics you don't apply don't look at the context you don't let scripture interpret scripture you could take both of those to as many do and say the man has all the power the woman just need to submit that's God's plan and if you're not submitting you're out of the will of God end of discussion and if you do that with those texts that we have we have
basically given a carte blanche opportunity for abuse and it's done in the name of obeying scripture. So that's
Alison (30:10.291)
Yeah. yeah.
Alison (30:15.774)
Yeah. How do you so with something like either those scriptures or others, how do you begin to entangle what they actually mean? How how do you approach that? Because I I know sometimes in my own work what I will do is immediately say, I'm not here to to to jump into a debate on whether you're egalitarian or complementarian. I I what I am here to do is say whatever you're you know, believe
you you you that you have to be risk you know we have to honor human dignity. but sometimes I don't know if that's you know how how do you you know so I always try to disarm the immediate like what I feel like is often a red herring like what's the correct interpretation versus what is actually harming human souls? And and and that's sort of my therapeutic lens.
steve tracy (30:51.363)
Right.
Yeah.
steve tracy (31:12.31)
Yeah.
Alison (31:12.518)
Right. So for example, if I have a man and a woman in my office, I I've never done a lot of couples counseling, but let's say, you know, to me it's like I it's less about trying to get the guy to to to have a different doctrine. And it's more about what how can we honor this woman sitting in front of you? Or less about having the woman have a different doctrine and more about how do you honor this person God made you to be? That's my bottom line conviction. But I guess I'm curious because you've been a pastor.
Ан сортов аз а терапист, томі дас ава інте.
steve tracy (31:42.051)
Yeah.
steve tracy (31:45.91)
Yeah, and that's a fair approach at that in that context.
Alison (31:47.614)
I'm curious how you how you try to untangle that. Do you think
There are inherently harmful doctrines that actually need to be dismantled, or how do you actually kind of dig into teasing out the the passage from the harmful ways they've been applied?
steve tracy (32:08.492)
Yeah, excellent question. And given my biblical studies training, I go ahead and go for the details. That's what I'm trained to do. But I I agree with you in that you know, in in this book I don't get into issues of ordaining women. I have some real strong views. I'm and if
Alison (32:09.874)
Okay.
Alison (32:18.142)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison (32:27.55)
Right.
Yeah.
steve tracy (32:35.202)
I'm not afraid to say Slus and I are I don't even like the complementarian egalitarian language 'cause biblically I think both sides are believe in gender complementation. The question is whether it's hierarchical, in a power sense. I I'd rather use mutualist hierarchical as the two categories. But I I don't get into ordaining women in the book, even though I come we
Alison (32:50.377)
Interesting.
Alison (32:57.93)
Interesting.
Ye like the hot button issues, you don't
steve tracy (33:04.15)
Well, it's a i it's a hot button. I'm p not at all afraid to have that discussion, but I try to build on common ground that whether or not one believes that in in more traditional gender roles so to speak, surely from the biblical text we should be able to agree to these things.
Alison (33:26.272)
Hmm, that's good.
steve tracy (33:29.686)
I I do and it's probably the lengthiest or at least this one of the lengthiest sections of the book is is unpacking Ephesians 524. Again, I don't approach it in terms primarily of of model gender model of marriage, but just note several things right in the text that will rule out abuses.
Alison (33:56.97)
Yes.
steve tracy (33:57.419)
Starting with the fact that that the paragraph begins in verse 21, and that's indisputable, because there is no verb in verse 22. The the verb is assumed from verse 21. and then
Everyone all exegetes agree on that. So the the paragraph on guidelines for husbands, wives and marriage begins with submitting one to another in verse twenty one. Now not all self-identified complementarians agree with me here, but I give arguments for saying, no, that's
That's mutual, that's back and forth. And other passages of scripture support that, particularly first Corinthians seven, one through five, in a context of s sexuality in marriage, sexual intimacy, Paul expressly says the wife does not have
Alison (34:41.534)
Yeah.
steve tracy (34:57.868)
authentic authority over her own body, but the husband does, and then he flips it upside down and says the husband doesn't have authority over his own body, but the wife does. I mean that's as mutual as you could ever ask for. So I think that's a very relevant. It's the same author and it's a similar topic. So you know, those are the kind of observations from the text that help really temper even if you one believes that
Alison (35:08.202)
Yeah.
steve tracy (35:27.182)
God has ordained gender roles in a hierarchical way in marriage, there's per I I I call it parameters of submission. some guidelines that we should all be able to agree on, whether one comes from a
Alison (35:37.198)
Mm, mm-hmm.
steve tracy (35:46.157)
self-labeled complementarian or egalitarian position. and then secondly right out of that that passage in Ephesians four, it it's it's amazing to me how and we see this so often with abusive men, they just want to camp on wives submit and completely ignore
the broader context, I mean it's it's just right there in those verses that describe what male I mean if you wanna use male headship language, male authority language, that describe what that looks like. It looks like
self-sacrifice patterned after Jesus who gave himself for his bride the church putting others' needs above one's own, you know, and nurturing for well being. We all wherever we're at on the continuum, we should be able to to agree, 'cause that's what's right there in the text. And if you get that
Alison (36:25.63)
Yeah. Yeah. Laying down your life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's Amen. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.
steve tracy (36:52.426)
Man, you've precluded abuse. And that's out of the picture.
Alison (36:54.686)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That's a I really like how you're describing it's it's about mutualism, regardless of where you land on some of the and being like Jesus. That's the baseline. You can't you can't you can't really argue with that. and if your if if your doctrine is yeah. Yeah. Ha how how you gosh, I could just I could talk to you all day, Stephen. I wanna I do wanna get to this question.
steve tracy (37:10.274)
Yeah.
steve tracy (37:14.008)
Shouldn't
Alison (37:26.568)
We've kind of teased out the way scripture can harm. As you've worked with people with especially survivors of abuse, how do you begin to help people separate out God's actual heart from the distorted image of God through scripture? So that because understandably, sometimes folks, when they come out of abuse, ditch the whole the whole shebang because it's been used against them. How do you help?
steve tracy (37:54.456)
Yeah.
Alison (37:56.171)
Folks, and give I'm curious of some maybe some words of of hope that you've seen. And I know you we kind of brings us back to Cheryl's story.
steve tracy (38:05.708)
Yeah. again, e excellent question. I I was very recently did an online training for 150 or so Spanish speaking leaders from twelve different countries and heard some of the most heartbreaking stories, testimonies of of abuse and what what some of these people, men and women had
experienced and also heard God's redemption. But what I focused on in that training and that's what I would pass on here is again it comes back to scripture but taking different biblical texts that describe God's response to abuse and letting that be our paradigm.
It's easy and we don't want to discount our experiences, but we also wanna be sensitive to the fact that our experiences how we interpret our experiences may be f
may be colored, may may be off. And so that's where scripture can be that healthy corrective. And we look in the book of Exodus, I think it's chapter three, when God sees the children of Israel in bondage, they're in slavery. and and the the language that's used there is is is very specific and graphic of their being just ground.
Yeah.
steve tracy (39:42.103)
You know, it's it's metaphorical, but basically they're being crushed by abuse. And then we we read and it's a fourfold response. This tells us God's response to abuse when especially when we feel like he doesn't see, he doesn't care, where is he? this tells us, and it says God saw maybe I should even read it, because it's just so beautiful, and I actually weave
the a whole chapter of the book toward the end around this Exodus 3 7 God said I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt so God sees our our woundedness the things we've experienced that that are so destructive I have heard their cry
Because they're ta of their taskmasters. so he sees what's happened. He hears our cries as we cry out in our pain. I know their sufferings. And and the language here in Hebrew suggests not just cognition, but a heart response. God feels our pain. And I go so far and I make this argument in the book that God God suffers when we suffer.
Alison (40:58.581)
Mm, mm, mm.
steve tracy (41:10.348)
theologians have debated whether in fact God suffers emotionally, and the consensus historically has been that God's perfect so he can't suffer. I I absolutely reject that 'cause that's not what scripture says. Scripture says God is moved
Alison (41:23.146)
Hmm. Yeah.
steve tracy (41:28.76)
When his children suffer. And and moved in the sense that he feels our pain. He suffers with us. in Isaiah sixty three it says regarding the Israelites who were suffering because of their own sinful choices, in all their affliction he was afflicted.
That's a different view of God. When I, his child, ache, my heavenly father aches. So that's that's God's third response is he he he feels, he suffers with us. And then finally, I have come down to deliver them. You know, supremely we see that in Christ. You know, if we wonder, well, where's God when we suffer? And and of course in our work I'm I'm asked that frequently. you know, where was God when my
Grandfather was raping me, etc., etc. And I can't, no, no theologian can completely answer that question, but I know from Exodus 3 and many other texts that God has a plan for deliverance. And I see that first and foremost in Christ. He's not this detached up on Mount Olympus like the Greek gods, unmoved.
Alison (42:31.552)
Mm.
steve tracy (42:42.638)
mover. No, he came into this world and suffered with us and for us and he continues to. But he has a plan. He's working a plan. he comes down to deliver. So those four responses from Exodus three give me tremendous hope and confidence in a world of tremendous pain.
Alison (42:50.912)
Mm.
Mm.
Alison (42:56.808)
Mm.
Alison (43:02.718)
Yeah, that's beautiful. What what would you you and maybe that was kind of it, but just as we as we kind of wind down here, I'm curious, after all your wor years of walking with survivors, what would you most want someone listening who's survived abuse to know about God, scripture, and themselves?
steve tracy (43:26.734)
Boy, I gotta write another book on that one, Allison. just a couple things. one, you're not alone. There's so many of us. Well, I mean, all of us have experienced at least abuse small a. and a shockingly large percentage have experienced abuse capital A. Those things basically would constitute a crime.
And and you're not alone. There are countless others, both around you and in the pages of Scripture. We often don't come to Scripture with a lens for abuse because that's not what we're modeled and o often pastors don't aren't trained to give that. I wasn't. but it's there, you're not alone. Secondly, there is absolutely no evil you've suffered, no
Alison (44:01.129)
steve tracy (44:23.47)
You've experienced that is too great. That is too great for our loving Almighty God to heal, to redeem, to transform. I say that as someone who has spent 20 years working in war zones, working with
Alison (44:40.0)
Yeah.
steve tracy (44:42.958)
torture survivors, etc. etc. We lost one of our dear beloved staff members a couple of years ago to a terrorist attack. Like I this this is very personal for me. I mean things we've experienced, but w again, we work in the worst of the worst, and I have just seen God give new life, new hope, use horrible experiences.
That others have had and and I just shake my head saying, Wow, there is nothing that God can't. There is nothing He can't redeem and transform because I've I've seen it, I've witnessed it. Scripture testifies to that. Whatever our listeners have gone through, God wants to meet you in that place of pain. He's big enough.
Alison (45:19.336)
Yeah.
Alison (45:36.512)
Mm. That's beautiful. Tell my listeners a little bit more about mending the soul and what you guys do and what you offer. You've got some fantastic resources for folks. I'd love for for folks to know how to find you.
steve tracy (45:47.469)
Yeah.
Appreciate that. Our website is it's pretty simple. W.mending the soul dot org. lots of resources there. we're putting more and more in other languages, lots in Spanish and and this new book, by the way, Doctor Allison, Zondravin has given us permission to translate into Spanish. We're really excited about that. as well as the the
Alison (46:10.496)
Right.
steve tracy (46:14.136)
Book right before that, Mining the Soul, Understanding and Healing Abuse, second edition, is done in Spanish and Portuguese and French. and we make the other language translations available as download online. And there's a lot of free stuff. we have a healing workbook that Slusta did out of came out of her years of clinical practice, Mining the Soul workbook for men and women.
guidelines for facilitators to facilitate small healing groups. We really believe in the power of small groups. So just lots of resources. You know, some are a nominal fee and plenty are are free. our mission is to offer Christ-centered psychologically sound healing resources. I mean that that is what we do domestically and globally. We have a new, I think the first of its kind,
abuse healing workbook written f that's Christian, written by and for Native Americans. That was a collaborative project and we're super, super excited about that. It's really taking off. Yeah. So lots lots of resources you know on on the website. yeah.
Alison (47:15.849)
It's incredible.
Alison (47:25.568)
That's incredible. Well, it's great stuff. I can't, you know, just just think so highly of what you're doing and your years of expertise. And like you said, when you've been in the some of the there's a lot of conviction that comes when you've seen some of the worst atrocities and you see the power of God, you you really live out that love is stronger. You know, love is stronger. It doesn't always feel like it, but it is.
and I can just sense that coming out of you. You've seen it. You've seen some of the worst of the worst, but you also see the power of God is bigger and that's just a beautiful reminder for all of us today.
steve tracy (47:54.562)
Yeah.
steve tracy (48:03.83)
Yeah, I I appreciate that. O often one of the biggest hurdles in beginning a a healing process when we've got some deep wounds is the the thinking that if I open that closet, you know, if I face what's there in my past, I don't even know what skeletons are gonna come out. Yeah, and and it's gonna be a torrent, it's gonna be a tsunami that will engulf me. I I can't afford to even think about what happened to me. I can't handle it. And I I pr I understand and
Alison (48:17.056)
Mm.
Alison (48:21.726)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
steve tracy (48:33.744)
appreciate that. That that's not a a a ridiculous fear. and there's ways to negotiate that and sometimes that involves some professional help and some context, et cetera. But for those who might be feeling that, yeah, you're you're right, Alison, having
Alison (48:36.928)
Yeah.
steve tracy (48:52.838)
seen some of the absolute ninety percent of what we see and experience in Congo, I can't talk about here in the US. It wouldn't even be appropriate. I mean it's it's so extreme that there aren't words for it.
Alison (49:04.458)
Yeah.
steve tracy (49:05.698)
But it has you're right, it has given me a tremendous boldness and confidence. And that's not to say that healing is easy or I you know, I I've had to walk that road myself and deal with secondary trauma and nightmares and and all that. I I take it really seriously. But in the midst of that, when I say there is no evil, no suffering that's too great for God to heal
Alison (49:13.802)
Yeah.
Alison (49:19.52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison (49:23.593)
Yeah.
steve tracy (49:31.842)
mean that to the absolute core of my being. Yeah.
Alison (49:33.876)
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. Thank you. Thanks for your time today. It's the book is called To Heal or Harm. It's a powerful book. It's it's meaty, it's deep. There's it's practical, but there's also a lot that I think is really just interesting about how we approach scripture academically and it's just a really rich rich resource. So I highly recommend it and just appreciate you and all all your work.
What if healing isn’t just about changing your circumstances—but also tending what’s been growing inside of you?
Last week, we explored the metaphor of seed and soil: the way your nature and your nurture shape who you become. This week, we’re going deeper. Because your inner world isn’t just one plant—it’s more like a whole garden.
In this episode, we’ll explore the difference between tending your inner garden and tending the outer soil around you. You’ll learn why old patterns can still show up even after you’ve changed your life, why boundaries are not punishment, and how real healing involves both compassion for what grew inside of you and courage to change what surrounds you now.
Here’s what we cover:
*How to recognize the tender, resilient, overgrown, and buried parts of your inner world
*Why changing your outer environment helps—but doesn’t automatically heal the inner one
*The difference between boundaries as punishment and boundaries as self-stewardship
*How differentiation helps you stay connected to yourself, even in difficult relationships
*Why real change is possible, even if the soil around you has been hard
Real healing is rarely a single breakthrough moment. It's the slow, faithful work of tending what has been entrusted to you, one step at a time.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 212: Why You Feel Everything So Deeply (and Other People Don’t): Childhood, Sensitivity & the Nervous System
Episode 20: Making Peace with Yourself (& Facing Your Fear of Disappointing Other People)
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Last week I shared a metaphor with you that my daughter brought home from medical school.
So today we're gonna move into part two. How do you steward this plant? And what does healing actually look like? Not just theoretically, but in practice. So I wanna organize this episode around two themes. We're gonna adjust the metaphor just a little bit. I love that. Metaphor of thinking of your brain as a plant, and we're gonna keep going with it. We're gonna adjust it just a little bit to this idea that your brain is actually a little bit more like a garden of related plants than one plant. The first theme we're gonna dig into today when it comes to healing, when it comes to stewarding that brain of yours, that beautiful brain of yours that you've arrived at adulthood with is thinking of it like a garden. And the first part of healing and stewarding is to tend to the inner workings. Of that garden, the unseen parts. And the second theme we're gonna dig into today is tending to the outer garden, the soil you find yourself in today, because that's what you have control over today. You have control over that inner life of the plant, over the root systems, and the different pieces of the inner workings of that inner garden you've inherited today. And you also have some control over the outer. Soil. You didn't get to pick your family of origin, but now you have agency to adjust the nutrients in the outer soil that is shaping you today. And these two things that inner work and the outer work go together. You need to tend to both components in order to fully thrive. So last week we talked about this research on dandelion children and orchid children, and I heard from a lot of you, and I really appreciated your feedback that resonated. And a few of you wrote back to me and said, I think I'm a little bit of both dandelion and orchid. And I loved that you said that because that is exactly where we're going today. Just to refresh your memory, those dandelion children, these are the ones who by nature. Are a little more hearty. They can grow almost in any kind of soil, and we likened it to dandelions In real life, they can grow anywhere. They don't need a lot of special nutrients or a certain kind of temperature or climate around them. I also likened it to a wildflower. I wrote about it in my email that I sent out to you last week. I was hiking in the mountains and we saw all these different kinds of wildflowers, and there are just some wildflowers that grow. They go through snow, they grow through drought. They just. Grow. And then there are the other kinds of flowers. These are like the orchids or in wildflower language, more like forget me, knots or other kinds of flowers that are really sensitive. They need a specific kind of soil, a specific kind of environment. They wilt if they get too much sun or they don't. Thrive. If they don't get enough sun, they need a certain kind of humidity, a certain kind of temperature, a certain kind of climate around them to thrive. And we talked about last week how these flowers don't do well in certain types of soil, but when given the right kind of soil, they can almost do better and surpass the dandelions. And this is where the science gets even more interesting. 'cause I wanna add to the metaphor, I wanna build it out a little bit this week because your brain is complex. In fact, I ran across some really interesting recent research out of Harvard that uses this phrase called brain architecture to describe how the brain is built over time. This research talks about how simple neural connections form first and then more complex circuitry and skills develop over time. The brain also prunes. Refines those connections, making certain pathways stronger and more efficient. The brain is constantly growing and changing and adapting. In other words, what grows inside of us. This plant that we arrive at adulthood with isn't one single thing. It's evolving. It's adaptable. It's able to be changed. Another word for this is what we call neuroplasticity. So for today's purposes, I want you to think about this inner world, this inner architecture that you've arrived at adulthood with as more like a whole garden of plants. There may be parts of you that are tender and sensitive, like that orchid that have been buried. Or hidden because they weren't in the right soil. And there also are very likely parts of you that are hearty and persistent, like a dandelion. These parts of you may be more natural, or these might be parts of you that you've had to develop to survive. But the point is your soul is more like an ecosystem, a garden than it is one plant. There are likely patterns within your soul that grew strong because you needed them. You may have learned to please others as a form of survival, and this pleasing part of you is hearty like that. Dandelion, no matter what context you find yourself in now, you do not stop pleasing other people even when it no longer serves you. Or there may be pathways inside your soul that became efficient because they helped you survive. You learned to focus on tasks, to get things done, to make things work, and you're still doing that now, even when it comes at a cost. There may be those tender places inside your soul that never got the care and the nutrients that you needed that need to be brought out of hiding and into the light of the sun so that you can finally lean into that sensitivity, that receptivity, that is a beautiful God made part of you. And so the question I want us to sit with today is what is growing inside of me? Now I wanna get curious about this inner garden. What's beautiful, what's buried, what's covered over with weeds, and how can I now tend it? Because the beautiful part of this journey that's ahead of us now as adults is that we can. Tend this garden, we contend it inwardly and we contend it by shifting the soil we put ourselves in, including tending the relationships we put around us. This is the hopeful part. If you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you've heard me talk about how healing isn't just about what happens inside of us. Our nervous systems are constantly responding to the world around us, and sometimes what feels like stress, brain fog, poor sleep, or just feeling off, can be influenced by factors we don't immediately think about. One of those factors is the air. In our homes, if you notice waking up congested or dusting constantly, or basically things feel heavier than they should, then you might look into investing in Air Doctor. It's the only air purifier we use in our home. What I appreciate most is the peace of mind. I've noticed fewer odors, less congestion, and overall better sleep. But what really impressed me was learning how it works. Air Doctor uses a powerful three stage filtration system that captures particles about 100 times. Smaller than what many standard air purifiers can remove. It helps filter out things like dust, pollen, mold spores, pet dander, wildfire, smoke, bacteria, viruses, odors, smoke, ozone, and VOCs that can affect the quality of air We're breathing every day, and I'm not the only one who's noticed a difference. Over 93% of Air Doctor customers report fewer allergy symptoms and air Doctor recently won Newsweek's Reader's Choice Award for best air purifier. If cleaner air is one small way you can support your wellbeing and create a healthier environment for yourself and the people you love, I'd encourage you to check it out. Head to air doctor pro.com and use promo code. Best of you to get $250 off select Air Doctor Air purifiers, including the 30 504,055 500 models. We're so confident you'll love Air Doctor that every purchase is backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. This is an exclusive podcast only offer. Available now@airdoctorpro.com. That's A-I-R-D-O-C-T-O-R-P-R o.com using promo code B-E-S-T-O-F-Y-O-U. So let's focus first on that inner garden. What's going on inside of you? For example, there may be a part of you that's sensitive, attuned part of you that picks up on the emotional temperature in a room. Maybe you feel things. Deeply. Maybe you notice what's going on in other people, and maybe you even notice things that they tend to miss. It might be your own kids, it might be in friends. It might be that the wild flowers in your life come to you because you have an insight into them that they don't have into themselves. And part of nurturing that inner garden is really honoring. That gift and protecting it because that is your gift to steward, and it also is a gift that can grow weary if overused. The goal intending these more sensitive parts of you is to understand the rhythms that help this part of you thrive. It's understanding that you get to choose, right? You don't always have to extend that gift of empathy. That's your gift to steward. You get to pull back and say, I need to take some space for myself because I've been pouring out a lot, and that's not. Selfish part of stewarding, tending those sensitive attuned parts of you is learning when those parts of you need. Rest. I tell the story in my new book, the Secure Soul of a Breakdown, essentially, that I had in my early thirties, and one story that I don't tell but is pertinent here to this conversation is I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. Now, that in and of itself is a little problematic because I was. Almost finished with my own doctoral work in psychology, but for the first time, I finally set the help of a therapist and he said something that I just thought was so beautiful to me. I had this gift of being a healer. And I think a lot of you who listen have this gift too. It's what I'm talking about when I'm describing this process of being attuned to the movements of others. You have a high empathy, you have an ability to read emotional subtext. You have a sense of what's going on in the people around you, and that gift is beautiful. But if you don't A, know that it's your gift, and B, know how to pull it back. So that you don't get depleted. It can also lead to burnout. And that's what had happened to me. And I remember this man, this psychologist, he was Argentinian, and I remember he said Jesus couldn't help but heal if people touched his garments. Healing came out of him, and this is why it was so important for Jesus to step away by himself. To rest. And when he said that to me, it gave me permission that my soul is a soul that needs spaciousness. I don't like thinking of it so much as taking space. 'cause that sounds like we're taking space from other people, which can sound negative. I like thinking of it in the positive that my soul is one that thrives. With spaciousness, and what that means is because I absorb a lot of data from people around me and I almost can't help that, it just happens. I need periods of time where I'm away from other people and that's how my soul thrives. Now practically what that means is I sometimes have to say to people, you may not hear from me for a couple of weeks. It's not because I don't love you, it's because I'm taking time to pray and rest and receive, or I have to gently remind a friend if you don't hear back from me for a few days. It's not because I don't care, it's because I don't do well with instant. Communication. Right? I have to translate that reality that mine is a soul that needs spaciousness into communication with others whose souls are wired differently. But that therapist was the first time, and again, I was in my thirties, that. I felt like I had permission to do that, and when I looked at the life of Jesus, I saw that he often stepped away from the demands and the crowds and the people around him. Not because he did not love them or did not care, it's because he needed to receive something himself. Now, different people have different. Needs. One of the most well-researched traits is the introversion extroversion scale. This is one of the big five personality traits, often named by the acronym ocean, and the E is the extroversion scale. This is something that is somewhat hardwired into us. Certain types of people by nature need more spaciousness, more solitude, more quiet to recharge. You probably know who these people are if you're not one. They're the folks who turn their phone off or who don't go on social media or who take a while to reply. They tend to run deep, not broad. Too much social stimulation might deplete them. And if that's you, the tending here is to learn how to communicate on behalf of that part of yourself. Because if you don't learn to take that spaciousness, you do run the risk of depletion and burnout. And resentment. And. And sometimes the wildflowers in your life are higher on that E scale. They are energized by constant connection. They wanna respond immediately to every text, to every social event. They show up all the time. And again, this is a beautiful quality. There's no right or wrong here, but it's so important to know your nature so that you contended. Well, if you're an OrCAD living with a dandelion on this dimension, you have to have conversations about how to navigate rhythms of togetherness and a apartness of spaciousness and of speed. The dandelion in this case has to learn that someone else's need for solitude is real, and they have to learn to honor that and not see that as rejection. That's not a diminishment on their own self. And the reality is if you have that sensitive side of you, you may have learned to adapt based on the soil in which you were raised, whether it was your own family that tended to be more extroverted or more. Emotionally charged, and because that was overwhelming to you, you may have developed a part of you that figured out how to adapt to that and survive that. You've never known how to give yourself permission to actually honor that need for more. Quiet. Now, you don't wanna do away with that. Part of you that learned how to survive, that part of you that learned how to show up in a room full of extroverts, right? That can really serve you in certain situations, right? You've learned how to masquerade as a dandelion in some ways, and that's not all bad, but when it becomes a problem is when it's not you choosing, right? The goal here is. Agency. The goal here is you leading you. You having the self-awareness to know the sensitive part of me needs some quiet. I need to log off. I need to not be reading other people's subtext in this moment, and that's okay, right? This other part of me that's gonna come in and try to criticize me and tell me I'm being selfish. That part of you needs that reframe to step back and give you space to refresh yourself so that you can show up for other people in healthier, more sustainable ways. The bottom line here is that the work of healing, the work of stewarding this plant you've been given, you've arrived at adulthood with isn't to shame any one part of the garden. This is the way the garden grew. If you don't wanna rip out the dandelion part of you that learned to survive because it looks too tough or it's overgrown, right? You wanna help it find healthy boundary lines within your soul, and you don't wanna criticize the more sensitive parts of you, the orchid part of you, because it needs more care. The work of soul tending is to become a wise. Compassionate gardener of your own soul to notice what is growing inside of you, to understand why it grew the way it did, and to offer each part of you what it actually needs. Some parts of you need to be drawn out into the light to be made more visible, and some parts of you need healthy boundary lines, healthy containment. Maybe you grew up in a home where the emotional atmosphere was unpredictable. Maybe a parent was loving one day and then withdrawn, or guilt tripping the next. Or maybe you grew up in a home where conflict was always simmering just below the surface, and nobody ever talked about it directly, and that kind of soil is sensitive, emotionally aware, attuned part of you, the orchid part of you learned. Something maybe you learned that you needed to be vigilant. You had to read the room constantly. You could never shut it down. You had to be ready and prepared, reading everybody's verbal and nonverbal cues to the point where you never learned to read your own exhaustion. Maybe that part of you got really, really good at scanning for danger at anticipating other people's needs at making sure nothing escalated into conflict. And over time that part of you got overburdened. It's been working so hard for so long that it doesn't know how to rest. Or maybe you grew up in a home where achievement was what got celebrated, where love felt connected to performance, where the message around you, whether spoken or unspoken, was that you were valuable, when you were useful, when you were successful, when you had it together, when you didn't have needs or weakness in that kind of soil. The hearty, capable, dandelion part of you got a lot of sunlight. It thrived. It got really good at producing. But the more vulnerable parts of you that are still there in all of us, these are the parts of you that just needed to be held at times that needed to be taught. That it's okay to have moments of tenderness of weakness. Vulnerability and those parts without that learned to go underground. They learned that they weren't welcome and you may have spent years, maybe decades shaming any sensitive part of you for even existing. And because you shame that part of yourself, you sometimes shame the sensitivity in other people. Some of you may have navigated real pain in relationships in a marriage that was hard. A friendship that ended in betrayal in a faith community that was more wounding than healing. And somewhere in that pain, a part of you closed off, decided it was safer not to need people, decided that vulnerability was the problem, not the solution. And so now there's this walled off place within your soul, and you're not entirely sure how it got so thick or how to get to the other. Side of it. These are the kinds of narratives that the soil writes inside of us and the work of healing. Real healing starts with being willing to look at those inner narratives to notice them, to name them. In the framework I use in the Secure Soul, I talk about recognizing these inner bids. For connection, a flash of anxiety, a moment of loneliness, a longing that surfaces seemingly out of nowhere. These are inner bids for connection. Some part of you saying, I need you to recognize what's happening within. And so tending your inner garden starts with something that seems rather simple, but is a practice you have to develop. It means recognizing those inner movements and notice where you feel self-critical. Instead of compassion, where are you rolling your eyes at yourself? Where are you shaming yourself? Where are you telling yourself to just get over it, to toughen up, to stop caring so much? Because that self-criticism, that self contempt, these are weeds that cannot be allowed to crowd out your inner garden. So how do you begin to pull the weeds and prune that inner garden landscape? First, it starts with getting curious. The next time you find yourself reacting in a way you don't like shutting down in a conversation or snapping at someone you love or spiraling into anxiety or resentment, instead of trying to fix that feeling or shame yourself, get. Curious. Ask yourself what part of me is showing up right now? What part of me is longing for connection? Second, it means bringing compassion to these parts of you instead of beating yourself up again. And curiosity and compassion are closely linked, right? Getting curious is often an easier first step to just notice with curiosity why you're feeling the way you're feeling. Compassion takes it one step further to say, I get it. I understand why being around that person brings out the guilt, the anxiety, the big emotions. That part of you has been cultivated in that soil and it needs care, not contempt. And then lastly, this moves into the outer world around us. It means letting yourself be seen. These different parts of us learned to hide and healing asks us to bring these different parts of us back into relationship with yourself, with God, and with trusted other people. Initially, that might mean a therapist. It might mean a spiritual director, but over time it also means the people that you put around you that reflect soil, your soul actually needs tending. Your inner garden isn't a one-time event, it's a practice. It's ongoing and as some of the most important work you will do. If it's really true that we are what we eat, I'm always on the lookout for snacks that actually fuel my body instead of filling me up with sugar and processed foods. That's why I love mosh protein bars. 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Start building Brain Health into every day with Mosh Bars. Thanks to Mosh for sponsoring this episode. Now let's talk about the outer garden because as you well know, the soil you were planted in as a child is not the only soil you're living in now. You've been making choices consciously or not about the soil you surround yourself with as an adult. And some of you have done real hard, courageous work to change. That soil, you changed the kind of people you put around you. Maybe some of you left a family system that wasn't healthy. Maybe you drew a boundary with a parent or a sibling who was harming you. Maybe you ended a friendship that was draining the life out of you. Maybe you found a church community that actually sees you and nourishes you. Feeds you. Maybe you married someone who is genuinely safe. You built a life that looks different from the one you came from, and that was brave. It took a lot out of you, but you've done it. And even as you've changed that outer soil, you still have to do the inner work. I also know that some of you have used this framework in your own families. Right now I've heard from a few of you have already been talking about seeds and soil at your dinner table with your own kids, with your spouse, noticing which of your children are more like orchids, which one are more like wildflowers, adjusting how you tend to each other accordingly, and this is so beautiful. This is the outer garden work in action. You're creating healthier soil for your own family. And here's what I wanna say to those of you who've worked really hard to change that outer soil, who've found healthier relationships, a better environment for your soul, a safer community, you may have noticed that even in that good healthy news, soil, old patterns still show up. Maybe you're in a safe marriage now, but you still brace for criticism. That never comes. Maybe you found a community that genuinely welcomes you, but you still hold back. You still find it hard to trust. You still maybe perform or please or perfect still trying to manage their perceptions. Maybe you know, intellectually that you are safe now, but something in you keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is simply a cue of the earlier soil that still has lasting effects. The outer soil changed, but the inner garden still carries the memory of the old one. This is why the inner work and the outer work have to happen together. New soil creates great conditions for healing, but you still have to tend what's growing on the inside. And some of those roots go deep and it can take a while to change their patterns. Now, some of you listening today still find yourself in difficult soil. Some of you are in a marriage that is really hard. You're not just going through a rough season, but something has been depleting and withering for a long time. You're committed. Maybe there's not infidelity or some other clear cut reasons that would make you feel like you can leave, but something is really hard, whether because of you or because of them, or because of the soil you've tilled together. Some of you are still enmeshed with parents, with siblings in ways that are costing you. You're still getting pulled back into old dynamics, still playing the same role, still shrinking yourself to manage other people. And I want you to know that the fact that you're still here, still listening, still asking questions, still wanting to grow, this is so beautiful. It's actually this seed of healing. You haven't given up on yourself even when the soil around you has made that really. Hard, and there are a couple of things I wanna share with you in particular because I find that when people are in difficult soil, they often see two choices. Stick it out. Or leave, and I talk about this a little bit in my book. I shouldn't feel this way, where there's this third category about moving slowly with wisdom. Because the reality is there's often a lot of territory between those two things. And that territory is where two key terms, differentiation, and boundaries. Tend to live differentiation. This is a concept from family systems. It's the ability to remain in relationship with someone else while staying connected to yourself. Maybe you don't feel like you can leave altogether. Maybe a parent who's been toxic or still is toxic needs your care. As they age, or maybe it's a spouse who's really hard to live with, who isn't doing their own work, but you don't feel like you can leave for whatever reason. You learn how to stay present to the other person without being swept away by their soil. Research on couples and family systems consistently shows that even when one person in a stuck system begins to differentiate, begins to respond differently. That's all that means to make different choices in small, nuanced ways to hold your ground calmly without withdrawing, but without escalating the entire system has the opportunity to shift. You don't have to wait for the other person to change to start making changes yourself. It might mean simply that you stop over explaining yourself. To a family member who is never going to validate you. You're not doing it to be cold or to be punitive, or to be retaliatory. You simply choose to stop outsourcing your sense of reality to someone who cannot see you. And when you make this choice out of agency, out of the own health of your inner garden, the other person will pick up on that. They may not like it at first. You don't need them to like it because you know the truth of what you're doing. It might simply mean you stop participating with certain activities with a spouse or with a friend. You just say, I'm not doing that anymore. You're free to do it. I'm not gonna do it. It's not healthy. For me, this can be so hard to do, especially in a marriage. It's hard to start drawing boundary lines in a marriage, but I just want you to hear me say that drawing boundary lines is not punishment. It's not harsh. It's not about trying to get the other person to change. It's about tending your own inner garden. It's saying, this is what I need to thrive. This is what I need to be a healthy human in this relationship. I can't control you, but I can control me. And then you let them have whatever reaction they might have. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes it doesn't feel very good, but over time, they have an opportunity to change. Boundaries in this context are not walls. They're not ultimatums, they're not all or nothing. They're small, consistent acts of self stewardship. Research on boundary setting and close relationships shows that clear, calm, consistent limits. Even tiny ones, reduce anxiety over time for both people in the relationship. It takes time, it takes work. Get some support as you do this, but you can create new soil. What I most want you to hear is that your healing is not contingent on someone else changing. First, you can begin to tend your own inner garden regardless of what the soil around you is doing, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes when one person in a system begins to grow, heal, and change the system around you begins to shift to. Finally, some of you need to hear that it is okay to create more distance from a soil that is harming you, not because you don't care about the people in it, but because you cannot grow in depleted soil indefinitely. And your growth, your healing matters not just for you, but for your children and for the people you lead and love and care for. Then there's a last group I wanna speak to directly. Some of you didn't inherit your difficult soil, you chose it out of love. I hear from many of you in my email, maybe you're parenting a child who is bringing real turbulence into your home. Maybe it's an adult child whose choices are creating chaos that keeps spilling into your life. Maybe you're a grandparent who stepped in when the original soil was. Two Toxic who said, not on my watch, and brought a child into your home to give them a fighting chance. Maybe you're a foster parent or an adoptive parent or a stepparent who walked eyes open into hard soil because you believed that healthy love could prevail over toxic history. I want you to know that it can, the research on what's called earned security, the idea that a child who didn't receive safe, consistent attachment early on can develop it later through a reliable, attuned relationship. That research is real and hopeful. You are doing something so powerful and so beautiful, and it's also. Really hard. I want you to hear me say, the courage it takes to do this work is real, and it can be incredibly depleting. And I think sometimes people in your position feel like you're not allowed to say how hard it is because you chose it, because you love this child, because you know their history. But knowing why someone carries toxic soil doesn't mean that soil stops affecting you. You are still a plant. You still have a seed with its own needs and you are trying to grow while also neutralizing poison that was never yours to begin with. I think of Isaiah 43 when I think about some of these tricky situations. God says, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you. God doesn't promise that faithful presence will always be easy, but he promises he will be with you. In it. We have really incredible research on compassion fatigue that tells us the most important thing you can do for the difficult soil you've chosen to tend is to make sure you are being replenished. Somewhere you need at least one regulated, nourishing relationship. It could be a spouse, it could be a friend, it could be a therapist, someone who functions as what researchers call a co-regulatory anchor. This is someone who can sit with you through the turbulence. They don't necessarily take away the hard soil, but they can keep you from becoming consumed by it. Often the boundaries that you may most need in these situations is the internal one. You have to work on setting limits with the part of you that is tied to outcomes or timing, or how well or how quickly they improve. The bottom line for all of us is that you can be a faithful. Present loving gardener to others and still tend your own garden. In fact, the research is clear that the caregivers whose presence most effectively creates conditions for change in others are the ones doing their own inner work. Your wholeness, the health of your own soul isn't a luxury. It's part of what spills over to them. Here's where I wanna land today. Number one, the inner work and the outer work are not separate. They're in relationship with each other, just like the seed and the soil. As you do the inner work, as you turn toward the parts of yourself with compassion instead of contempt, when you start to name the narratives the old soil wrote inside of you, you become more capable of making healthy. Choices about your outer soil. You stop unconsciously recreating the environments you came from. You develop the self-awareness to make different choices. And two, when you do the outer work, when you change the soil around you, when you differentiate, when you create healthier relationships and healthier environments. It creates the conditions for the inner work to take root. Good outer soil isn't necessary to change the inner soil, and it also won't do that work for you. Changing your outer soil is only half of the equation. Both matter. Both are essential. Healing is rarely a single breakthrough moment. It's the slow. Patient faithful work tending both your inner garden and that outer garden that surrounds you together. Over time, and here's what I believe with everything in me, both from the research and from what I've seen these past few decades, real change is possible no matter where you are today. Real lasting, meaningful change. Is possible. You can become healthier, not by changing your seed, your DNA, the way God made you. That's not the goal. And you wouldn't want to, but you can learn how to steward how God made you to be. Well, you can tend to the garden you're growing now with the awareness and the agency you didn't have as a child. You're not stuck where you are. You can create richer soil boths inside your soul and outside your soul. One brave step. At a time. If what we talked about today resonates with you, if you're starting to see the connection between the soil you came from and the patterns you're living now, I wanna invite you to go deeper with my new book, the Secure Soul. It also has a secure Soul companion guide. Workbook. It's the heart of everything we've been talking about in these two episodes. You can find a link to it at the secure soul book.com, and you can get the first three chapters of the book as well as the first few chapters of the workbook. Now, when you pre-order, thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to apples. Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to or watch podcasts, and click the plus or follow button that'll ensure you don't miss an episode, and it helps get the word out to others while you're there. I'd love it if you leave a five star review and be sure to join us each weekday for the best of you every day, a brief daily reflection to help you start your mornings with a steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God. You heal others and you stay true to your God-given self. I.
Why do certain situations overwhelm you while someone you love seems completely unaffected?
In this episode, Dr. Alison explores one of the most important questions we ask about ourselves: Why am I the way I am?
Using the image of a seed planted in soil, she explains how your God-given wiring, childhood environment, sensitivity, and nervous system all work together to shape the person you are today.
This conversation offers a compassionate framework for understanding yourself—and the people you love—in an honest, empowering way. (You’ll want to share this episode with your loved ones!)
You’ll learn:
- Why your brain is like a plant
- How childhood shapes your mental and emotional health
- The difference between your wiring and your wounding
- The research behind “orchid children” and “dandelion children”
- How different kinds of “soil” shape your nervous system, relationships, resilience, and sense of safety
- Why highly sensitive people may struggle more in hard environments—and thrive more in healthy ones
- Why healing begins when you understand both the seed you were given and the soil that shaped you
This episode will help you see your story—and your loved ones—with more clarity, compassion, and hope.
More Resources:
You can now preorder Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul, and immediately receive the first 3 chapters as well as early access to the companion guide!
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Curious what Family Role may have shaped you? Take the Family Role Quiz to learn how you may be showing up in your relationships with others.
Want to hear more like this? Start here:
Episode 143: Reparenting Your Younger Self—How to Stop Seeking Approval From Others & Find Inner Security
Episode 22: How to Build Trust with Yourself
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
Don't forget to browse this week's sponsors, who make it possible for me to bring you these resources for free + provide you with additional discounts!
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*Some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
TRANSCRIPT
Your brain is like a plant and every plant, if you think about it,
starts with a seed. It's the wiring you came into this world with, the way you process the world
around you. This is your seed. Now let's talk about the soil because you can have the most
beautifully made seed in the world and if the soil is wrong, if it's depleted,
if it's toxic, if it just doesn't have what that particular seed needs,
the plant, is going to struggle. It might survive but it won't thrive.
The seed and the soil don't operate in isolation. They're in constant relationship with each other
and that relationship is where a lot of the story of your current life actually lives.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Deep Dive episode of The Best of You. I'm Dr.
Allison, and I'm really excited about today's episode because I want to share something with you
that I learned recently that I couldn't wait to share with you here on the podcast. It's a
metaphor. I heard it from my daughter who was recently home visiting us. She's in medical school.
She was sharing it with my husband and I as we were driving up for a weekend getaway into the
mountains. And honestly, it stopped all of us in our tracks. We couldn't stop thinking about it and
how it applied to our own lives individually and the lives of people we love. Because I think this
metaphor helps explain one of the most tender questions so many of us carry.
Why am I the way that I am? Why do I get overwhelmed so easily?
Why do I shut down when someone gets too close? Why do I feel anxious even when everything is
technically okay? Why do I keep reacting in ways I don't want to react? Why does healing sometimes
feel so hard? Why am I the way I am?
And underneath those questions is so often an even deeper one. Is this just the way I'm wired or
did something happen to me? And if so, what? In other words, how much of who I am is just my
nature, my biology, my temperament, my nervous system, my genetics, and how much of who I am is
nurture, the environment I grew up in, the relationships that shaped me,
the stressors, the wounds, the messages I absorbed along. way.
And here's where this gets tricky. When we put too much emphasis on nature, we can start to feel
helpless. We think this is just my brain. This is just my personality. This is just how I'm wired.
And while there may be truth there, it can leave us feeling stuck as if change isn't really
possible. But when we put too much emphasis on nurture, especially on parents or childhood or
family systems, we can end up feeling overwhelmed in a different way. We can start searching for
someone to blame. we can feel crushed under the weight of trying to figure out exactly what
happened and how to fix it. And if you're a parent yourself, that kind of nurture emphasis can also
become terrifying because suddenly it feels like every mistake you make might permanently damage
your own. child. Either of those extremes can leave us with a victim mentality,
feeling helpless or stuck. We feel like we can't change ourselves or we can't change what happened
to us. We need a better way to understand the relationship between how we're wired and how we've
been shaped. A way that tells the truth without making us feel hopeless. A way that honors the
impact of our environment without reducing us to our
ourselves with compassion and still believe that growth and change and healing is possible.
And this is why I love this metaphor. Here it is.
Your brain is like a plant. And every plant, if you think about it,
starts with a seed. That seed is your nature. It's your DNA,
your temperament, the raw material that God put into you before you ever took your first breath.
It's the wiring you came into this world with, the way you process the world around you,
the things that come naturally to you, the things that cost you, that are hard for you. This is
your seed, the seed of this plant. that is your brain. And that seed gets planted in soil.
The soil is your nurture. It's your family of origin, your parents or step-parents,
your grandparents, the town you grew up in, the culture and community that surrounded you.
The soil is everything that was already there when you arrived. You didn't choose it.
You were just planted in it. Now, here's the thing. Both make up who you are today.
The seed cannot grow without the soil. And soil without a seed is just dirt.
Both matter. Both shape who you become. And the relationship between them,
between the seed you were given and the soil you were placed in, that relationship is,
I would argue, one of the most important things you need to understand about yourself.
In today's episode, we're going to dig into both of these elements. What kind of seed were you
given? What uniquely makes you you that cannot be changed? And what kind of soil shaped you?
We're going to go through some of the different types of soil that I see and how that impacts the
way your brain, your nervous system, who you are today developed. Because I don't think you can do
the real work of healing, of becoming the best, most whole version of yourself without getting
honest about both. So I want to start with the seed because I think this is where a lot of us have
some catching up to do in terms of our own understanding and self-awareness. Seeds are not all the
same. I have this Christmas cactus sitting in my office. And this is a true story.
I'm a little embarrassed to tell you this, but I have not watered it in over six weeks. I haven't
touched it. My mom gave it to me and I was so excited. I do well with succulents. I am not a plant
person. I don't have a green thumb. I'm a little too, let's say, scattered. I get distracted and I
forget to take care of them. This hasn't been touched in six weeks and it still looks pretty good.
It's a little droopy. The dirt this morning was just bone dry. I've watered it now,
but it's a lot. it's still looking okay. And this is the thing about a cactus or any sort of
succulent. But this is the thing about a cactus or any sort of succulent. The seed is just hardy by
design. It can go without a lot of nutrients for a stretch of time and still be okay. It still
suffers, but in a different sort of way. It was built differently. And then there are other kinds
of seeds in the plant world. These are seeds that grow into some of our most beautiful flowers,
the gardenias, the orchids, and flowers like those. And these types of plants,
these flowers, these are not like my... cactus, they need regular watering.
They cannot have too much direct sun. They need rich soil, careful tending,
the right temperature, the right humidity. If they get neglected, they wilt or die on the vine.
But here's the thing, when they're cared for well, they're extraordinary. There's nothing quite
like a gardenia in bloom. I love both types of flowers. I love my succulents and I love my more
delicate blooming gardenias. And here's where I think this gets interesting.
This is supported in research in psychology. Researchers in psychology...
childhood development have actually found something very similar in humans. There's a concept in
developmental psychology called differential susceptibility. It's a term that was developed by Jay
Belsky. And the shorthand version of Belsky's research, it's fascinating, is this.
Some children are by nature more sensitive to their environment than others.
Belsky used the metaphor of orchids. and dandelions. Dandelion children are the ones who can thrive
almost anywhere, put them in a challenging environment and they survive, put them in a flourishing
environment and they do well. hearty. They're resilient. You've seen these people,
maybe in your own family, maybe in your friend group. Maybe you are this person. I like to think of
them as wildflowers instead of dandelions, but these are the people that just seem to get up and
get going no matter what soil they're planted in. And then there are the orchid children.
They're more sensitive to their environment, to stress, to conflict, to the emotional temperature
in a room. In difficult soil, they really struggle. But here's what the research also shows.
When orchid children are placed in a supportive, nurturing environment, they don't just do okay.
They flourish often more than their wildflower peers. The same sensitivity that makes them more
vulnerable also makes them more responsive to goodness and nourishment.
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There's another framework that I think also speaks to what Belsky's research is getting at.
And this is the well-established framework called the highly sensitive person. This is research
that was originally developed by psychologist Elaine Aron. And if you've never heard this term
before, it might be worth pausing here for a moment and checking this research out. About 15 to 20
% of the population is wired with what she describes as a deeper processing of sensory information.
Highly sensitive people notice more. They pick up on subtleties in a room,
in relationships, in tone of voice, in the unspoken tension that other people might walk right
past. They feel things more deeply. They tend to get overstimulated more easily.
And I've worked with a lot of women in particular who have this designation. And sometimes we can
shame ourselves for being too sensitive when in fact, this is a beautiful way that God has made us.
I've always been highly aware of the emotional environment around me. Even a little bit of unhealth
in a room registers in me. It always has. And for a long time, I didn't understand why other people
seem to just be able to move. through the world and in and out of groups of people and not be
affected by things that would have derailed me. And when I've come to understand that this is not a
deficiency, it's the seed God gave me to steward. And that seed needs a very specific kind of soil.
On the other side, I think of people I know. One of my closest friends, a roommate I had for years
comes to mind. My mother-in-law comes to mind. These are people who grew up with very little,
who've navigated enormous hardship. My mother-in-law ended up as a refugee in a resettlement camp
for years. She then became an immigrant in this country where she spoke English as a second
language. And she is just... She can just adapt. She just shows up in a certain kind of strength
wherever she is planted. She's a wildflower. I see it in her.
I just... Throughout the course of different seasons of her life where I've traveled with her, I'm
just amazed at her ability to adapt to hard situations.
We need people, friends, family members, loved ones, maybe it's you,
people who can hold steady when things are hard. Now here's why this matters.
Neither is right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse. Neither kind of seed is the problem.
But if you don't, know what kind of seed you are or what kind of seed your loved one is,
you will likely spend a lot of time either berating yourself or struggling with things that don't
seem to bother other people, or you'll be completely blind to what it's costing you to keep pushing
through without care. And both of those things will catch up with you eventually.
So I want to pause here. for a moment and ask you as you're listening,
where do you land? Are you more like a wildflower, like a dandelion where you can land almost
anywhere and land on your feet? Or are you more like an orchid where you need the right kind of
soil? You're sensitive, you're attuned. If something's off, it's going to get to you. Or are you
somewhere in between? How much do you... understand about the raw material you came into this world
with. The way God designed your nervous system, your brain, your psyche to work and move through
the world with its unique gifts and unique challenges. Because that self-knowledge,
that ability to understand yourself, this isn't just interesting. It isn't just good for cocktail
conversation. This is foundational to how we see ourselves and how we become a healthier,
more whole version of who God made us to be. Now let's talk about the soil for a minute.
Because you can have the most beautifully made seed in the world. And if the soil is wrong, if
it's... if it's toxic, if it just doesn't have what that particular seed needs,
the plant is going to struggle. It might survive, but it won't thrive in the way it was meant to.
And the thing about soil is you didn't choose it. None of us did. We were planted and we grew up in
whatever was already there. I want to walk through a few different kinds of soil,
and I'm going to be personal here because I think sometimes stories are the best way to make this
real. In my own case, you already know I was given a highly sensitive disposition.
I grew up in a small town. My parents were good, kind people. My grandparents lived down the
street. Wherever I went in this town, people knew who I was. There was good and bad with that, but
there was a stability and a rootedness to my childhood that I didn't fully understand until I left
at 18. That soil had a lot of nutrients in it, genuine connection.
consistency, the security of being held by a community. And I don't want to paint it as perfect.
It wasn't. You'll read about some of the wounds I carried out of that childhood in my new book,
The Secure Soul. They're there. We all have them. No soil is perfect.
But looking back, that soil gave me a really strong root system.
But here's the problem. When I left that soil as an adult,
when I stepped into the real world with all of its complexity and hardship, I wasn't always
equipped. There were rainy seasons. I didn't know how to navigate dark seasons,
lonely seasons. I hadn't learned certain skills because my soil had been in many ways.
sheltered. Good soil can sometimes mean you haven't been exposed to enough of the hard things that
build resilience in a different way. So I struggled a lot in my early years as a young adult.
Now, I want to contrast that with a different kind of soil, a soil that is also characterized with
loving, good nutrients, but where hardship enters in young. And for this soil,
I think of my own two stepchildren who came into my life having already navigated.
profound loss. At a very young age, they lost their mother to a terminal illness.
They had to adjust to the loss of their mom, to grief, to so much change,
and then to me, eventually coming into their family and their family structure shifting.
Now, there were a lot of really good, beautiful ingredients in this soil. They had a wonderful dad,
an incredible grandmother, my mother-in-law, who I told you about who stepped in to that role in
those couple of years. And then I came in and I think I understood because of my own disposition
and my own wiring, I understood intuitively how to be a healthy presence as they began to slowly
attach to me in new. So there was a lot of good in this soil,
but it was still bumpy. It was still rocky. It was soil that required them to adapt and develop
resilience. early on and these two kids i'm so proud of are some of the most resilient people i
know now as young adults the soil they grew up in demanded something of them very young and they
rose to meet that challenge cultivating skills at a level of maturity that i see in them as young
adults that still is amazing to me and i'm so grateful for that you may relate to that kind of soil
where there was a lot of good nutrients But there was heartache or suffering or sorrow introduced
early on that gave you an understanding of what grief feels like,
of what resilience requires in a way that not everybody has.
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And then there's a third kind of soil. And this is the one I think about often in my work.
And you may relate to this. There are people who grew up in soil that was in ways you may not have
fully understood at the time, genuinely harmful, constant lying,
deception. gaslighting, maybe bickering or fighting that never resolved,
maybe walking on eggshells, maybe a home where love was conditional or unpredictable or chaotic or
simply absence. And the painful thing about this kind of soil is that you don't always know it's
toxic until you're out of it because it's the only soil you ever knew. Had a conversation about
this with my guest, Melanie Schenkel. We'll link to that episode in the show notes.
But she talks about her experience of getting to adulthood and looking back and realizing this
childhood wasn't normal. The way my mother treated me wasn't okay. This soil wasn't just neutral or
benign or filled with a certain kind of suffering. It was toxic. It wasn't only lacking certain
essential ingredients. It was also poisonous. Now, I want to name here that as we talk about the
soil you were planted in, this isn't about laying blame. I want to say that clearly because I know
that a lot of people I encounter feel some resistance to this kind of looking back.
It can feel disloyal. It can feel like you're reopening something that you'd rather just leave
alone because you can't change it. here's what i've come to believe you cannot heal a wound you
haven't named you can't tend a garden you've never actually looked at and naming what was real and
hard in your soil, especially if there were toxins there. This isn't the same thing as blaming the
people who were in it. Sometimes the harm was so pervasive and deep and profound that there's
hardly any good that you can see in it. Sometimes it was otherwise good people who were wounded and
as a result wounded you. Often it's somewhere in between.
of these cases the work is the same you have to be able to see the soil clearly to understand how
to heal the you that came out of it you have to be able to understand where were their nutrients
where were their good things and where were their deficiencies where was their toxins or poison
that was never actually named that i need to be able to name in order to move forward in healing
Where was there too much shade where I was left alone too much and was neglected to where parts of
me were never really seen? And where did the sun shine so harshly that maybe all of my achievements
or all of my performance or all of my pleasing had a light shined on? But the other parts of me
never got seen, the ones that were messy, the ones that needed care too.
Where did things in my life and my soul not get watered or tended and they had to learn to go
without? Where were you not taught how to survive the hard seasons, the droughts,
the dry spells? Because nobody around you knew how to do that either. Here's the thing,
if you can't look back at the soil in which you were shaped, it's really hard to steward the plant
God has given you to steward now. It's hard to have those hard conversations with a spouse about
why you sometimes do the things you do. It's hard to explain to your own kids, hey,
I'm not making an excuse. for this behavior, but I want you to know this is something that happened
to me that I'm trying to change when it comes to how I'm showing up for you.
If you don't take the time to look back and understand that soil that shaped you,
it's really hard to show up in healthy ways now. Again, this isn't to blame our past.
This is to see it clearly, to name it. Honestly, and it's the root of what I think brings about the
ability to heal. So now I want to bring these two things together because the seed and the soil
don't operate in isolation. They're in constant relationship with each other. And that relationship
is where a lot of the story of your current life actually lives. I want you to think about it this
way. A hearty seed, a wildflower or dandelion, whichever you prefer. planted in difficult soil will
probably survive, maybe even thrive in certain ways. But even that seed has limits.
Even the most seemingly resilient person has a point where the soil has taken too much from them.
And the thing is, they don't always. know it because they've spent their whole life being the one
who's fine, who's getting by, who's being strong for others. I hear this a lot from couples,
actually. One partner is more of a sensitive seed, more like the orchid,
and they tend to know they're struggling because they feel it and they need something to change.
And the other partner is more like that wildflower, dandelion, more blinders on. And they've been
pushing through for so long without tending to themselves that they sometimes lack empathy for
others or for themselves. They sometimes deny the reality that the soil could and should change.
Sometimes these folks are resistant to change, right? Both. Types of people need to grow in self
-awareness. Both people need to know what they're working with in their raw material to have that
perspective, to see the other, to see outside of their own box, to see that the two together make
something beautiful. And then there's another thing that happens that I think about a lot. A tender
seed, an orchid, is planted early on as a child in depleted soil,
you needed. This is where some of our deepest wounds come from. And here's what I want you to know.
It also is where some of the most profound healing is possible. The research on highly sensitive
people actually shows this, that when an orchid child or an orchid adult finally gets the right
environment, the right support, the right nourishment, they don't just catch up.
They often surpass what anyone expects. The sensitivity that makes you so vulnerable on one hand to
hard things also makes you exquisitely responsive to the good things.
So wherever you land in this conversation, whatever raw material you are getting, whatever soil you
are planted in, neither one is a verdict. If you identify more with the orchid type of seed,
it's an invitation to recognize that you can flourish, to look at the soil and begin to understand
the nourishment that your soul needs to thrive. And if you identify or if one of your loved ones
identifies more with that wildfire, you've just plowed through the soil and kind of stayed hardy
without. ever really taking a look the invitation for you is to take a look is to recognize that
that soil still matters just because you've survived doesn't mean You're thriving.
And this kind of honesty, this kind of ability to name and to see is how we begin to heal and
become the best version of who God made us to be. We do it for ourselves and we do it for our
families, for our children, for our marriages. We do this work of honest naming in order to heal.
Here's where I want to land today. Every single one of us carries something from the soil we were
planted in. It's true for all of us. There is no person listening to this who came through
childhood without some deficiency in the soil, some place where it was too dry,
too harsh, too uncertain, or simply not enough. This isn't a flaw.
This is just the condition of being human. And here's what I've seen over and over again in my own
life and in the lives of the people I've worked with. Healing is possible. It's more than possible.
It's one of the most amazing things that God has designed us to be able to do. Real,
meaningful, lasting change is possible. You can't change the raw material,
the seed you were given. You wouldn't want to. This is how God made you to be in this world who you
are inherently. matters not only to you, but to the world around you. You are a part of this
overall system, this ecosystem of humanity and who you are in your essence matters.
But you can change the way you carry that essence forward. You can change the soil you create
around yourself now as an adult with the awareness and the agency you didn't have as a child.
And this work starts with two. things. Number one,
knowing the kind of seed, the raw material, really understanding it without judgment.
And number two, looking honestly at the soil that shaped you without blame, but without flinching
either. Next week, part two, we're going to... about what that healing actually looks like as you
do it, what it means to notice and name and tend the garden you're growing now with everything
you've learned about the ground you started in. For today, I want you to... sit with a couple of
questions first what do you really know and understand about the seed the essence the raw material
god gave you this can come through looking at personality styles or tools we have a podcast episode
on ocean the the personality traits we understand to be the most inherited the most in that nature
category i'll link to that in today's show notes that could be a place to start understanding
yourself as a orchid as highly sensitive, looking at patterns that have just been true your whole
life. Make a list. Begin to talk to God about God. What are things that are just how you made me?
Things I accept about myself, even am fond of in myself. Yes, there are things about it that
sometimes drive me crazy. And also, I'm grateful, God, for the person you made me to be.
And then number two, what have you been willing? to see and really look at about the soil that
shaped you, what was good, but also hard at times,
what was lacking, what was not there at all, and what maybe was toxic,
poisonous even, that you haven't really fully wanted to name, which means that toxin still has some
access to your own soul. I want you to get honest with yourself about these two dimensions of your
own being. Let these questions sit with you. Pray over them. Talk to God about them. God,
help me to see. Become a student of your own soul in partnership with God's spirit.
And if you want to start going even deeper, a lot of what we're talking about today is at the heart
of my new book, The Secure Soul. It's all about healing the wounds that form when the soil around
us wasn't quite what we needed. You can actually start reading the first few chapters as well as
the first few chapters of the companion guide workbook. Now, when you...
-order. You can find the details about how to get that information emailed directly to you at
thesecuresoulbook.com. I'll also link to all the other resources I mentioned in today's episode in
the show notes, or you can head over to my website, drallisoncook.com backslash podcast.
Thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to be with you for part two next Thursday.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
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The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
