Turns out, the stuff we haven’t dealt with from childhood shows up… right in the middle of our relationships. Grab your Java and read what Juli and Dr. Dan Allender had to say about why we must be willing to explore our own stories in order to create safety, nurture curiosity, and repair what’s broken in our marriages.
Prefer to listen? Listen to the full episode here.
Juli
Well, hey, friend. Welcome to Java with Juli. I am Juli Slattery and I want to let you know that this podcast is listener supported. It’s an outreach of a ministry called Authentic Intimacy and we exist to help you make sense of God and sexuality. Well, my guest today is my friend, Dr. Dan Allender. Dan is one of the leading psychologists related to sexual abuse and trauma, particularly from a faith perspective.
Dan has been on the podcast before and in the show notes, we’ll link to a classic conversation that I had with him around his bestselling book called The Wounded Heart. Now, what I love about Dan is that he’s always calling us to deeper places. And in this conversation, he’s going to help us recognize unconscious reasons that we may have married the person that we married and how you can begin to call these things out, identify them, and work through them in a way that creates greater intimacy in your marriage. Today’s conversation with Dan revolves around his new book called The Deep Rooted Marriage. So let’s head to the coffee shop for my conversation with my friend, Dr. Dan Allender.
Juli
What a joy to have you back on Java with Juli, Dan.
Dan (01:35.179)
Thank you so much. Juli, you know that being in the sandbox playing is so much fun with you.
Juli
Yeah, well, we’re going to play today. We’re going to talk about, and I think something I haven’t talked to you about before, which is marriage. And you have a new book that just came out called The Deep Rooted Marriage. So we’re going to spend the majority of our time on that, although I know you, and you always come up with interesting side trails for us to go down. I’m always looking for that.
Dan
Yeah. I think rabbits take you down the, shall we say the rabbit hole. So yes, let’s go.
Juli
For sure. So let me first start by asking, so you’ve got this new book coming out right now, it’s just released. What are you working on these days? Like what has your heart and passion?
Dan
I think one of the things as an older man with, you know, who knows how many more years left on this earth, I came to this core question of what do I most find joy, delight, life in? And the simplest way of putting it is my relationship with Jesus lived in and through my relationship with my wife, Becky.
Dan (02:53.288)
So I really want to spend a good portion of what years I have left talking about marriage, which I think we both know has always been, but seems to be even more so, under significant assault.
Juli
It sure is in these days. And I feel like you wrote on marriage maybe a few decades ago. Is that right? I think I read like the one you wrote with is it Trevor Longman, Intimate Allies? Is that correct?
Dan
And then it’s terrible when you get asked that and you kind of go, my gosh, I think I’ve forgotten the name of one of my children here. But I think we also wrote another following that called, I can’t remember. I’m literally blocked.
Juli
That’s okay.
Dan (03:52.162)
But yeah, what we wanted to do in this book that I wrote with a dear friend, Steve Call, was to engage marriage through the lens of conflict. That is trauma. When we’re in conflict, we’re in some degree of trauma, but also almost any level of conflict brings to the forefront something of our own history of how heartache, conflict, trauma has been addressed. So that’s one thing we had not done well enough in the intimate allies focus and intimate mystery. I just remembered it — the book was called Intimate Mystery.
Juli
Okay, I haven’t read that one. I’ll have to check it out. But I feel like when you’re early in marriage and maybe even when you’re early in the marriage space, you’re interested in teaching kind of tools and techniques like how do you communicate? How do you build your spouse’s self-esteem? And then once you’ve been in marriage yourself for some time and then you’re working in this field, you start to realize that.
All those techniques can only take you so far. And it seems like in this book, I really enjoyed reading it. Like you have us dive deep into what’s going on subconsciously in marriage, like why with the best communication skills and intent, you just can’t seem to connect. So yeah, it’s a fascinating read, but I even wonder if developmentally, like when you were writing those earlier marriage books, has this new book of come out of things that you’ve learned personally and professionally.
Dan (05:23.946)
Yeah, I think it has. My initial work was really in the realm of abuse, sexual abuse. And even though we didn’t use the word as often back in the 80s, trauma has really been the work that I have focused my calling and life on. But marriage has always been for me the realm in which I have known something of the interplay of heaven and hell. I would say there’s no one who has brought more a taste of what I believe I’ll encounter when I face Jesus than my wife, Becky. Yet, you hear the implication that I don’t think I’ve ever tasted what I will not have to suffer, and that is a taste of hell in our relationship. So I’ve always known that marriage is a relationship of extremity, at least ours is.
And in that, trauma, Becky has a history of past abuse, so do I. We both have, in many ways, heartbreaking homes that we came from. But over decades, it should dawn on you, at least for me, wow, we all know we bring baggage. But that’s one word. But another word for that is we all bring the heartache and the trauma and how we’ve attempted to address that in the past. We bring that into our marriage and it shows up in literally every conflict we have. And if we have eyes to see, we can’t cut the weed off at the top and hope it’s gonna go away. Actually, in most occasions, the weed gets stronger. We have to go to the roots. And that’s why we named this the deep rooted marriage.
Juli
So you make this comment in your book, every marriage is built on the unconscious intention to find redemption. And I think about that, like, that’s profound. And I’m just wondering, like, how does that place demands on marriage? Like, if I married my husband, Mike, because I’m looking for some kind of unconscious redemption, we’ve been married now for 30 years, like, how does that play out in the demands that I put on him and that he puts on me?
Dan (07:38.668)
Whoa, but you’re so brilliant. You named the very core issue immediately, demands. All of a sudden, there is a demand, you be more for me than you can ever possibly be. And therefore, I’m asking Becky on some level to be God and to redeem me. And therefore, I’m gonna be more often disappointed without even knowing why. Because I hadn’t faced the reality that I demanded that she be what my mother was not and not require of me what my mother did. And when we have conflicts, one that came up over a dish rack as to whether it was squeezed enough to be dry, it provoked for both of us her history of what the kitchen meant and what, indeed, being in the kitchen with my mother meant.
We didn’t know what was going on below this tumultuous underneath the surface until we began to name, my gosh, what the kitchen means for you, for the kitchen to be clean, means something really different for me. Now, COVID, because I ended up being home far more than I had been practically in our whole marriage.
We began to see things cracks in the surface that needed, in one sense, greater division to be able to get below the surface to see there are things we need to address that are not really just between the two of us, but come from our history that need to be named.
Juli
Okay, so at the time of COVID, which was about five years ago, how long had you been married?
Dan (09:33.422)
I think at that point, 42, 43 years.
Juli
Uh-huh. And you’ve been doing this work of therapy and teaching and you still had these aha moments. And I think that’s important for us to hear that you never like quite outgrow this.
Dan
No, I may not be one of the brightest bulbs in the pack. But I do believe that redemption is cyclical, meaning there are things we faced and dealt with in our 20s, I mean, when we’ve been married 20 years. But some of those same realities have come to the surface in a way in which we are seen much more clearly and therefore have so much more capacity for compassion.
Juli
Yeah.
Dan
And sweet curiosity for one another. mean, tensions that would have caused an explosion between us now might still have an energy that’s unbecoming, but it ends a little bit more quickly, not so much as a behavioral process, but more like, I think I understand your heart so much better after 48 years than I did prior.
Dan (10:48.524)
Again, I hope for us that we are well past our 50 years together before one of us departs. But I know that even in departure death, there will be things we are meant to learn until we come to be with him face to face, where we will become as he is. This is a long journey of maturation for all of us.
Juli
Mm-hmm. Dan, how old were you when you got married?
Dan
I was 24.
Juli
Okay. It’s weird to think that in 24 years, that much is happening to you to where you keep living that out for decades and decades to come. And I think for some people they’re like, how could it be that my childhood is so instrumental in how I do life now? Like years and years and years later, how do you explain that?
Dan
Well, I think we understand that due to the technology of what’s often called an fMRI, ability to understand or read the brain in new ways, we have data that, for example, children are able to read their parents’ motivation as young as age four, to know when a parent’s lying, not telling the truth at age four.
Dan (12:12.024)
So we’re understanding so much more how our brain, cellularly, are affected by trauma. To a point where we can say that we’ve been able to study a significant part of our limbic system, the hippocampus, which in some sense regulates our ability to assess danger and come to some mediation and comfort, you know, the hippocampus shrinks somewhere around the range of about 8 to 10 percent in almost any significant trauma and goes at times up to 18%. So when we’re looking at the heartache of living in a fallen world, we certainly knew it had an effect on our bodies.
But I don’t think we really understood that that carving, that shaping of our way of engaging the world is not just a cognitive behavioral response, but a deep, deep, deep carving of our way of being in the world. Now again, I believe repentance has the possibility and potential to bring about radical change in the heart and behavior. Nonetheless, it’s a lifetime process. So when we embrace that, we don’t feel as frustrated with our own or our spouse’s, shall we say, slow change as we might be if what we were demanding is your new creation now.
So be different. And the answer is, yeah, we’re a new creation being formed.
Juli
Yeah. So it’s almost like a rock formation and it’s been chiseled a certain way. And yes, over time you can start to soften some things, but the way it is formed is the way it is formed. is that too much of a metaphor? Okay.
Dan (13:59.032)
I love the way you put it. it’s a brilliant. I think that slow progression also has a kind of like when things begin to dawn on you, like, wow, you know, with my mother who was borderline personality disordered, I lived in chaos. I lived with a lot of intense interactions. And when Becky was able to say, you know, when I seem to require of you a level of emotional engagement, you back off. But you don’t do that with clients. You don’t do that with friends. You do it with me. And it was one of those moments of just going, my gosh, this is so heartbreaking to have to hear. But it’s true. Because again, unconsciously, it wasn’t in my brain as a choice.
But I married her because of her radical independence, which came from a family where she felt constantly criticized with a very cruel mother. So the interplay of my chaos and her ability to avoid conflict, it looked like a great marriage for a lot of years. Well, that had to be exposed in the process beginning to be reshaped.
Juli
Yeah. So some people would say, why mess with it? Like if you don’t want to be married to somebody super needy and she wants to be independent because of the way she grew up, why does it have to be exposed?
Dan
Well, that’s somebody who is living for mere comfort, convenience, and at some level control. And to go, well, did you really marry the other for that? Again, I’m not saying comfort is wrong or even moments of convenience and efficiency, but I would hope that you married your spouse with some awareness that this relationship, more so than any other in the world, is meant to shape you to become like Jesus.
Juli (16:10.134)
So if we’re story people, given that 70% of the Bible is story, how do I get to know you if I do not have access to the stories that have shaped you to be who you are? And the reality is, we all know we have weeds. Back to that image, just want to cut them off at the surface, avoid them? The good fruit your life is meant to produce, particularly in your marriage cannot come by that level of indifference.
Juli
Yeah. You told the story in the book that was so gripping. It was a story of Becky’s courage and kindness with you. You were on a mountain skiing with your son. Can you talk about that? It was just such a poignant story.
Dan
Well, we were, when we lived in Colorado, our glorious publisher gave us a literally a family pass to ski. None of us skied except Becky. And it was like, we’re going to ski because it’s free, whether we like it or not. But we were in that third or fourth season where our son was excellent skier. He’s age eight and been skiing since he was four years of age, but he had a terrible fall season before.
So we’re at November, we’re at a lovely resort called Beaver Creek, and it’s icy. So our girls wanted to go in quickly for lunch. so Becky and I and Andrew are standing up on this blue slope looking down that’s pretty miserable. And he freaked out and began literally crying, screaming, mom, mom, get the car. Like, I don’t think we can bring a car up here.
Dan (18:00.59)
I did what I’m so heartbroken that I would do. And that sort of pushed him, like, get going. You can do this. You’ve done this actual slope today. Blah, blah, blah. Becky at one point looked at me and just said, it’s not helping. Why don’t you go down? I’ll get him down. And I’m like, fine. So I skied down 300 some yards, waited. She was working with him, I’m sure, being very encouraging. And I saw him literally collapse on the ground, kick his skis off and I couldn’t hear him, but I know he’s wailing. And I’m like, I waited another five minutes and it was like, okay, I have to go back up and get him down. So I took my skis off, a slippery slope, made my way up. And let me tell you, I was one cold, angry, boiling hot man by the time I got to the top. Put my skis on, began to move toward them and Becky slid in front of Andrew.
And I could see exactly what she was doing. She was protecting her son. And I looked at her and I mouthed the word move. And she shook her head very slightly, not angrily, just slightly. And at that point, when I got to her, I looked at her and I said, move. And she said, I know the men who have humiliated you. And she had her hand on my heart when she spoke that. I couldn’t have been more shocked by that sentence, I know the men who have humiliated you. I mean, literally, I have faces, moments flashing at 600 miles per hour through my brain. And then she said, and I know that is not what you want to do with your son. And why this moment and not others? Tears came and it became so clear.
I am about to humiliate my son just as I’ve been humiliated. And my wife, courageously, bravely, wisely, without rage, without demand, stood in my way and in some sense of the word exposed me and blessed me within literally two sentences. And when she saw my tears, she said the words, you’re a good man.
Juli (20:24.11)
Hmm.
Dan
I don’t think I have ever before or after had a blessing and honor bestowed as those words offered. And she skied away, left my son and I to engage. And again, it’s a longer story, but I’ll say that eventually got on the ground with my son and held him. And he eventually said, and he put his hand on my heart and said, Dad, thank you for apologizing. And mom’s right, you’re a good man, but you’re too angry at times. So I’ve got an eight-year-old prophet following the wisdom of his mother, inviting me again to this interplay of you’re a broken man, but there is something of the goodness of God in you that I can see. So it was a huge gift.
Juli
Yeah, huh.
Dan (21:21.806)
To begin that process. And yet, how many years ago? My son’s 36, you do the math. And we’ve had many moments since where it may not be identical, but the gift of that level of exposure and blessing, honor, and yet holding you accountable to become the person that you’re meant to be.
Dan (21:50.914)
That’s what I understand a Christian marriage to be versus merely going to the same church, merely holding to some of the same doctrines, merely in some sense having prayer at dinner and maybe occasional engagement with the Bible. Now, if your relationship is not changing one another, already I want to say, what’s going on?
Juli
Yeah. Yeah. It seems like in most situations, people find their way in your office. They seek marriage help because either they get to a place where they realize like, okay, yeah, this fits, but I can’t connect to you. I’m lonely. Like there’s an awareness of there’s something missing or one of the people has started to grow out of their patterns. So let’s say Becky is going through a season where she becomes needy.
And you’re like, wait a minute, I married you because I thought you were super independent, but she’s maybe growing and growing out of the independence. And so now I think a lot of couples would just say, we’ve fallen out of love. Like we’re not a good fit anymore. Has that been your experience of where people hit kind of the wall of this?
Dan
I think that’s again brilliantly put. When I think about it, I’ve been married four times to the same woman. There was a marriage of that early joy of sex, of conversation, of getting to know one another. It was a playground. Then the first child, a second child. It was a second marriage then because career and children. Then what I would generally call middle age, somewhere between the 40s and the 60s. And you go, wow, a lot more exhausted, but a little bit more stability, even though there are many people having to deal with what’s called gray divorce. Like the heightened level of divorce, 50 and above, is so heartbreaking.
Dan (23:58.798)
But we’re in the final, what I would call, the dying age, where the reality that one of us will likely depart before the other. And in that, as a 73-year-old, we’re at that point of saying, we need to count our days so that we grow in wisdom. That’s true, Psalm 90, for everyone always, but even more so. So when you begin to count how your marriage shifts by your body, by your age, by the different levels of portions of demand,
And then to be able to go, every stage is going to have new requirements to begin facing things that have shaped you and in some sense, own you more than your following and calling into Jesus. And when you begin to do that, there’s no relationship that’s more revelatory than your marriage. And certainly no relationship that’s meant to be more transformative than your marriage.
Juli (24:58.286)
Hey friend, I’m taking a quick break from our conversation to let you know that registration for summer online book studies is open. I’d encourage you to grab your spot today in one of our groups going through my new upcoming book called Surrender Sexuality. That’s right, you can be one of the first to read it. Plus we’ve got groups that are going through God’s Sex and Your Marriage, Finding the Hero in Your Husband, Surprised by the Healer, Her Freedom Journey, and Rethinking Sexuality.
Now in these studies, you’ll take part in a weekly Zoom meeting, online discussions, and a live Q &A with the author, which is usually me. The deadline to register is June 14th, but don’t wait because some of these groups fill up really fast. Head to Authenticintimacy.com/online-book-studies, or just click the link in the show notes and grab your spot today. Okay, and now back to my conversation at the coffee shop.
Juli (25:56.312)
Dan, you said earlier that marriage has been like the best, I’m going to rephrase, the best taste of heaven and hell on earth. When you say that, has it been sort of like peaks and valleys in different days and seasons? Like today’s a good day, yesterday was a bad day. Or were there seasons where it felt for a long time like hell on earth, where you felt like we don’t fit at all, we’re not bringing any joy to each other?
Dan
I would say it’s cycles even now. Interactions, Becky and I just did a conference in Dallas together and it was so sweet. I’m watching her grow so much in her freedom to tell the truth and tell it in a way that really is hilarious and compelling. And then on the way home, there was just a failure on my part to make sure we were sitting together. Well, I’m not good at details and she’s like,
Yeah. You didn’t look to see that we were sitting together. And I’m like, thought I did. I didn’t. Now tension. So between two or three days that were fabulous. then all of a sudden we’re both tired. It’s not a good interaction. And now we’re triggering one another. And if you have that language of trauma, you know what a trigger is. It is not a blaming of the other. It is something being evoked in you that needs to be tended to. Not that the surface is unimportant, but there are things happening in your body, in your mind, in your heart that you need to tend to as well. So what I’m saying is I think the process is still ongoing, but boy, we would go back to our marriage when we were 12 years in and Becky would say, I didn’t know if we were going to make it. And I would say the same.
And it wasn’t, I think we were both bored. There was, you know, two young children, a career beginning, and we were missing one another so often, so profoundly that we were at a point where it was like, I don’t know if we’re gonna make it. So entering into counseling, hard conversations was a really redemptive process, but some significant older.
Dan (28:21.206)
In one case, a woman and another case, a man entered into our lives, not as therapists, but as, in one sense, wise presences exposing more me than my wife invited us to, I think, some of the early hard, hard work that we were able to utilize. But again, I love the way you put it earlier. It’s still always going on. requiring a kind of a new, I see. When people ask, when did you become a Christian? The answer is yesterday. You weren’t a Christian before? No, I was a Christian the day before that as well. But there has to be that sense of there are new things you are discovering about one another and ultimately about God that almost doesn’t wipe out the faith you had before, but now reconstitutes it in a way in which I can say I love Jesus more today than I did a year ago. by a long shot. And that’s just a large measure due to my wife’s integrity. Not alone, but certainly a large portion.
Juli
How so?
Dan
Well, part of our conversation about a year, a year and a half ago was, why do we not seem to hear Jesus more clearly? And that question was just one of those like, I think we hear him. I think I have heard him. But why don’t we hear him more clearly? And so we began praying. What’s blocking our ability to hear from scripture, from prayer, from other conversations? And that opened up the issue for us of, I’m not fond of the danger I feel when I’m in close relationship with Jesus. Jesus will keep us safe, but also invite us to the extremity of growing beyond what we’re comfortable with. So a good year, a year and a half ago, that became a major conversation as to what’s keeping us from trusting more, and actually risking more in the context of our ability to hear and move with Jesus. So because of that, I’m like, well, why didn’t we do that 20 years before? And she reminded me, well, we had moments like that some 20 years before. But it’s always built like an accretion, more and more more clarity, I think, as we age and desire him.
Juli (31:01.75)
Yeah, well, that’s beautiful. As you mentioned, Dan, your life work has been around trauma and helping people with trauma. And you also mentioned that both you and Becky came from significant trauma in your childhood. Do you feel like what you’re saying is true for every person in every marriage? Like even those who would say, I had a pretty good upbringing. Like I didn’t experience what people would call abuse.
Dan
Or even if there’s one person who feels like, I see that in my spouse because their family was messed up, but I’m pretty good.
And I think, again, you have to say on a bell-shaped curve, Becky and I both have homes where there was mental illness. Both have homes where, not directly, but indirectly, forms of sexual harm occurred, et cetera. So I wouldn’t want to compare my life to others. But what I would say in response to that excellent question, did you live in Eden? If not, you lived east of Eden.
And East of Eden, you were with sinners. I’m assuming that your mother and father were sinners. Yeah, of course they were. All right, well, let’s talk about what do you understand sin to be. And we kind of go with Jesus, I think, on this to say he talks about it in two primary categories, lust and anger. And then do you want to blame Jesus for hyperbole? He takes lust to the word adultery. He takes anger to the word murder. So no matter how loving, kind, truly godly your parents were, they were sinners. And if you say they’re not, 1 John says of you and your parents, you’re a liar. Well, it’s the bind. If we say we don’t struggle with sin, we’re put in the corner of you are a person of deceit.
Dan (33:07.0)
Well, if I say my mother, who was uniquely lustful because she used me to fill this deep, deep radical emptiness within her. And when I failed, which I did, sometimes very purposely, to keep her at arm’s length, she made me pay, and she made her husband pay. The bottom line is, it’s not hard to look at my mother and see the word lust and anger, adultery and murder. It may be harder for you to see those realities with a really good parent, but are you saying they’re not there?
And once you begin to own, of course your parent used you to some degree to fill some core emptiness within them and didn’t do it, not perfectly. And how did they make you pay? Even if it’s more subtle and in one sense less dramatic. What I can underscore is it’s harder to face the subtle than the overt.
Dan
For me to face the failure of my mom and dad doesn’t take a rocket scientist. But when you’re looking at the very subtle, it’s much harder to see the domain of its effect on you. So yes, indeed, you’re going to have a hard time. But it’s part of your responsibility to leave your mother and father.
That’s the first calling in terms of what we know to be the basis of marriage. Leave your mother and father. That wasn’t physical and it wasn’t financial because it was an agrarian culture. People didn’t leave to go to the city and start a new career. It was within the domain of the family you’re to leave. So that leaving is fundamentally psychological. It’s the issue of loyalty. So when we begin to look at the fact that most of us have never really addressed the kind of loyalty that sustains a quiet demand that our spouse endure the craziness of our family or even the goodness of our family. We’ve not really established, and this is true for folks I’ve worked with who’ve been married 30 and 40 years. They’ve not left their mothers and fathers, and there will always be heartbreaking consequences of that false loyalty.
Juli (35:32.556)
Yeah, boy, that’s so well said. And you use that word loyalty. I think when you come from the world standard of a good family, it’s harder to name those patterns because you feel disloyal because there’s so much good and you feel grateful. It’s like, wow, how can I call my mom and dad, know, people who lust and murder like, wow, that’s a lot. But you stated that so well.
And the other side of that is I know you and Becky have grown children. My husband and I are in the emptiness stage and there’s an awareness of the ways that we’ve harmed our children. You know, like where you see, wow, a lot of that was about me and it shouldn’t have been about me. And a regret, a grief. Again, they’ve got their 24 years, you know, that shaped them. How do you deal with that as a parent? And then as a grandparent even to see.
Like we continue to pass on the fact that we’re sinful, we have a sin nature and we create some level of trauma in our kids.
Dan
It’s such a good and difficult question. I think one of the hardest things is to invite your children to tell the truth. And our children, all three of our children, fiercely love us. But they’ve been able to name what’s really broken, past, present, about us as a couple, us about individuals. But they also hold our parenting and our family with a lot of sense of beauty and goodness.
So it’s the ability to engage death and resurrection. know, where Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, verse 10, I live every day in my body the death of Jesus so that I might live in my body the life of Jesus. That framework, I think, is so important for how we engage our marriage, how we engage our children. Our children have known death through us, which is heartbreaking.
Dan (37:35.096)
They’ve known life through us, which is so beautiful. So can we hold the reality that death doesn’t get the final word, but the reality is there in every moment and in our bodies? I think beginning with what seems maybe too easy to say, but I don’t know how to be a parent without holding the beauty of Romans chapter 8.
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And the end of Romans 8, there’s nothing that can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus, neither death nor life, no powers, no principality. So when you hold the reality of what we need from one another is a kind of honesty and a hope. If both can be held together, I think there’s almost always a sense of ongoing redemption.
Juli
Yeah, boy, that takes courage. It takes courage on the parent’s part and the adult children’s part to pursue truth and be able to tell the truth. Like you think of, and I’m sure you’re aware of families that you work with where there’s unspoken rules that you’re not allowed to acknowledge this. You’re not allowed to ask that question or all hell breaks loose, but what courage it requires.
Dan
Well, and I think that’s why, to me, it’s so important in a culture that does not honor marriage and has so much disintegration that we can’t cover over. There has to be a level of honesty and commitment to growing in our marriage. If that’s there, it will naturally, in one sense, spill over into your relationship with your children, whether they’re young or adults like ours.
And that freedom to be able to go, we’re all in the middle of moving to become more like Jesus. If that’s the true framework versus we really have arrived and there’s a little bit left, but pretty much we’re pretty good. That, again, I think one of the benefits of my life is I work with so many broken people that it’s constant reminder of I’m not that different.
Dan (39:59.112)
And in that, I need grace so desperately, and so does my wife, so does my family.
Juli
Mm-hmm. Dan, how do you encourage an individual or a couple who is hungry for what you’re saying? You know, they’re in a marriage that feels lifeless. They have the same argument over and over again, and they don’t know how to access the stories that keep them stuck.
Dan
Well, again, you do know, my dear friend, that the brilliance of your questions is that often the answer is in the middle of it. And that is that you haven’t engaged one another’s stories. So when patterns are repetitive, it’s because there’s a need to, in one sense, preserve yourself, protect yourself. But often, it’s not the mere surface. It’s a long historical process. So until we begin to go, look, this is not working.
The way we handle the dance of how we manage this kind of issue, be it our sex, be it our money, be it our time, or indeed our children, we know that we’ve come to this ugly dance. Can we both step back and be able to say, well, what marriage research indicates, the Gottmans in particular, 70 % of the problems we have do not have a clear right or wrong.
So we’re bringing our bias, our judgments, our opinions. If we can begin to open our hands and go, how did I get here? How did you get here to these different desires or demands? We now have the ability to, again, dig deeper, that deep-rooted marriage. What’s going on? And once we begin to get a name for some of our trauma and what we’ve done, as to how we’ve managed it, then we begin to have language for the dance itself.
Dan (41:52.854)
So you can’t change what you have not named, and you really can’t change what you’ve not felt with regard to your own experience of these vulnerable moments where there is heightened degree of shame, heightened degree of fear. If we can begin to have language, I don’t think there are many people who will not change. There will be a few.
But the majority of good-hearted people simply have not had, as you put it brilliantly, the courage to enter into the morass and mess of their own heartache deeply enough to be able to go, well, how did I survive it as a four-year-old, eight-year-old, 12-year-old? And how are those patterns playing out today? So when you try to resolve that stuck feeling on the basis of new behavior without the change of a heart,
And you’re barking up, in this case, really the wrong tree.
Juli
Yeah. And you mentioned that most couples don’t have the language, which is why you wrote an amazing book and why you have a podcast and teaching because that provides the language. Obviously we’re both big believers in counseling and that process, but a book can get you started like the one that you’ve written.
Dan
It’s the dream. And I think for both of us as writers, as therapists, podcasters, it’s can we connect story to story? And even if my stories are radically different than yours, the reality that we have far more in common than we have as difference. Everyone’s known some degree of abandonment, loneliness, some degree of betrayal, some degree of that sense of I feel so exposed and so ashamed.
Dan (43:47.18)
Well, that’s human. That isn’t just because I’ve had trauma and you’ve not. We’re talking about the reality that shame begins in Genesis 3 and doesn’t get resolved into the last chapter of Revelation. So when we begin to know, look, there’s shame in your marriage. And the response for most of us is some degree of contempt against ourselves or against the other.
How does that dance play out in your marriage? It’s there for sure. But naming it and then being able to hold that without blame, but with honor of you were harmed and you came to learn how to survive. And it’s etched deeply into the molecules of your being. Yet, we can talk about neuroplasticity as a great gift, but far more when you have a passage like Romans chapter 2, verse 4, it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. And then Paul asks, I think with heartache, why do you treat the kindness of God with contempt? So if we’re willing to engage the fact that we deal with God with contempt, because we, as much as we may claim we want kindness, we’re really terrified of it.
And I think that’s one of the gifts that Becky has brought me. I don’t know of a kinder person on the face of the earth. And there are times I’m a billionaire with regard to her kindness, but other times I’m terrified of it because it’s calling me to a level of trust and becoming the man that I’m meant to be. And it’s like, haven’t I grown enough now? And the answer is not even close.
Juli
I want to ask you one last question. And I had this in mind the whole time we were talking. Most people don’t talk about marriage at 73. There aren’t many books written of the challenges. Like I’m seeing my parents, I’m seeing my in-laws and that generation. Nobody helps with what intimacy looks like in the 70s and 80s.
Juli (46:07.71)
And I’m not just talking about sexual intimacy, that’s a piece of it. even, Dan, as you were saying, like, I know we’re going to lose, one of us is going to lose the other. We’re watching our bodies fail. What are you learning about the beauty and the hardship of marriage in this season?
Dan
Oh, what a beautiful question. Like, I would say less than eight months ago, we were on a walk and Becky just said, you anticipate you will likely die before me. And I’m like, yeah. I mean, come on, actuarial tables seem to indicate, and my wife’s been in a Bible study with women who are 10 to 20 years older and she has watched these women she loves, six out of the eight have lost their husbands over the last two years. So yeah, when she asked that question, I was like, well, yeah. And she said, have you prayed that you would have the honor of seeing me home? Wow. I can barely tell you that without tears. I was so stunned when she asked me that question.
Juli
Mm.
Dan (47:22.658)
She might as well have said, have you made any particular plans for the summer going to Pluto, be like, no. And she said, I think it would be the hardest and most courageous thing you’ve ever done in your life. You can’t be guaranteed that your prayer will be answered, but you can begin praying that you see me home. It’s been a regular prayer for the last eight months. I want to become healthier. I need to lose weight.
I need to exercise with a little bit more focus. I want to see my wife home. And I think it will be then the hardest days I will have ever lived on this earth if she departs before me.
Juli
What changed? Like what changed in that eight months from just the assurance and really not wanting to be the one left to now saying that that’s your desire?
Dan
Well, I think her brilliant exposure of the fact that hadn’t even crossed my mind. And in that, it’s not operating merely by actuarial tables. It’s a form of cowardice. cannot imagine a day on this earth without her. Yet, one of us will depart. Why shouldn’t I? I mean, if someone broke into our home, I would give my life to protect her. Why wouldn’t I begin praying that I get to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done on the earth and that is to see her home.
Juli (48:50.478)
Well, I warned you at the beginning of this episode that Dr. Dan Allender is someone who is always going to push us to go deeper. And so let me ask, are you willing to ask God to show you the things that you can do, the hard and the courageous things to create safety in your marriage and to repair the places that are broken? Boy, this book is a great place to start. And so if you’re feeling convicted and challenged, I hope you’ll pick up a copy.
Again, Dan’s book is called The Deep Rooted Marriage, and we’ll put a link to that in our show notes, as well as the episode that I mentioned at the top of the show. It’s number 169, Your Wounded Heart. Now, if you are an AI member, that is part of our podcast archive that you can access for free. As always, you’re going to find blogs, videos, books, and other digital resources that help you make sense of God and sexuality at our website, Authenticintimacy.com.
Hey, thanks for listening and I look forward to having coffee with you next time for more Java with Juli.
