Hello and welcome to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Kusick. I'm your producer Brian Beatty. We're currently in our soul care summer looking back at some of the most significant podcasts in our tenure history. Last week we brought you part one of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, one of the most significant voices in the world of trauma, story, and healing over the last thirty years. This week, part two picks up where they left off. Dan opens up about his own mother, his own wounds, and what it actually looks like to walk a healing path over decades, not as a technique, but as a life. This is one of the most honest conversations in 10 years of this podcast. Here's part two, and your host, Michael John Kusick.
Michael John CusickCan
we go back to this idea of uh dealing with our wounds from our mother? And um last year at the restoration of the heart conference that you did with your buddy John Eldridge, um, you spoke pretty vulnerably, well not pretty, very vulnerably, uh, about your relationship with your mother and the wounds. And I heard you speak about some of that uh 29, 25, 20 years ago, and and yet you had gone to a whole new level in your own life of understanding that. So for the man who is kind of on the edges of dealing with their story, can you talk a little bit about your process of uh what you've had to do to deal with that relationship and how that's affected you today?
Yeah, and let me start by saying uh my mom died this last March. Uh and it it was as all death, it is an aberration and a violation of what God intended. So, in that sense, there's always a sense of something is wrong in death itself. Um, but where my mom and I had come to be, um it was once that said, it can also be said it was a good death, um a death in which by the the finish of my mom's life, there was much that we had talked through, much that we had engaged, a whole lot that was left for only what eternity can enable the two of us to be able to engage. So I'm not wanting to overstate it, but uh I I was able to deeply grieve and honor uh and let go and surrender um my very deeply broken mom. And to name a sentence or two about that relationship, um, my my mom uh depended upon me as her solace, uh, her source of strength, of um I was her confidant. Uh in many ways, I was her lover, um far more so than what uh was true with regard to my stepfather. So the the reality of being a what I refer to and others refer to as a triangulated relationship. I was in an intimate bond in which I was more her surrogate spouse than I was her son, created massive complications, particularly given that my mom fits. If our audience has a sense of what I'm saying without going into great detail, she she fit very well the term borderline personality disorder. Um, but without the specific specifics of that to say, she was highly seductive. Um, in some ways, she was a very young little girl, uh very sexualized little girl. And on the other hand, uh could be uh brutal, cruel, uh, and deeply distancing. So, and that could all be in two minutes. The nature of that kind of unpredictability of arousal uh of punitive violence, but also of weeping that requires me to hold her and soothe her and comfort her. Uh let's just say that there's a whole lot of people hearing this who would say, oh my God, that sounds awful. It's nothing like my mom. And that's part of the complication of my story. Right. Story has a lot of extremity in many areas. The reality, however, is that all of us are in a war of intimacy and individuation. I mean, just to put it in those blunt terms, the more intimate we are with others, the more we seem to give up individuation. And what I mean by individuation is the capacity to choose and be who you are. But the more we choose that, then there's the price, on the other hand, of a loss of connectedness. So, you know, you can be who your mom wants you to be and be pretty close to her, but you lost your soul. You gained your soul, but you lost your mom. So that that's the tension I was in at a very volatile level, pretty much every second, let alone minute. Most people are at least our today. Uh so in that sense, they're at a different level of uh of extremity. But but in that, uh, the weight of pressure of bearing her soul, and the sense of what do I do with the amount of arousal and need I feel for her, she feels for me, parallels, oh my goodness, to the nth degree, the effects of sexual abuse, grooming, uh, touch, uh, relational engagement that feels powerful and yet also nauseating. All that's going on. And, you know, for me, being able to go, oh my gosh, in some ways, I can say with incredible integrity, I have seldom ever struggled with pornography. Um, and and people kind of come back and said, but you're you say you're sexually broken, you don't struggle with pornography. And the answer is, no, not much. Because uh, you know, as an 11, 12-year-old boy, my mother took me first to a uh a strip club called the Moulin Rouge and to far darker strip clubs than that. Uh, and I saw my mother in various stages of undress through most of my life. I remember uh hooking and unhooking her bra as a seven, eight-year-old boy. Um in that sense, pornography always provoked in me a sense of being erotically uh arrayed in the presence of my mother. So I I mean it's it's heartbreaking to say that, but on the other hand, she has always been a kind of prophylactic against uh uh uh you know the power of uh visual eroticism. So as you begin to name what's the nature of the relationship and how did sexuality get played out, uh, I always go back to this core assumption. Unless there was true love between your mother and father, true love, meaning true delight, true honor, and the capacity to be restored to one another when there was failure. Unless there was love, then you can almost be assured there was a drainage uh of some uh of the war with intimacy on you as a child, or at least someone in your family as a child. Uh so the issue of triangulation is huge across the border in most in most families, because most families do not have a mother-father, a husband-wife who love one another with true delight, honor, and great capacity for restoring rupture. So if all that's accurate, then we go back to that fundamental point that we are at war with the core first woman in our lives.
Michael John CusickAnd that's
been an ongoing process for you. Thank you for sharing all that, by the way. Um, that wasn't one therapy session, that wasn't reading your own book and some somehow, you know, figuring it all out. That is a that is a process of uh tell me what that process has been like over what span of time?
Dan AllenderWell, uh I I would say minimally, uh I probably didn't even begin to address some of the implications of this until I first met Larry Crab back in about 1975-76. Um, but yet the rage and then the intimate resolution of that rage with my mom, I mean, it didn't take a lot to open the door to the reality that this is a pretty screwed-up relationship. Uh, but then to actually take that and to say, it shaped how you engaged women, that took a lot longer. But I looked at the track record of my very broken sexual history with women, and it wasn't didn't take a lot of labor to basically take that one little flashlight and begin to go, oh my goodness, what heartache got lived out here, what violence got lived out here. Uh but then the harder work, even though it sounds so at one level pathetic, was um it actually shapes something of your inner world. It actually shapes something of your own identity, your sense of who you are in the world. It actually shaped how you engage God. I mean, that feels like um I I don't I I haven't even looked to see what day it is. This is November, isn't it? Uh sometime in November. November 3rd.
Michael John CusickYeah, well 2023.
Dan AllenderUh if if if it is 2023, I just woke up from a long nap. Uh but it's today. It's still affecting who I am in a way in which my heart cries out, Maranatha, come quickly, Lord Jesus. May there be, and there will be one day, full, complete, glorious restoration. So that framework uh is an evolving, uh put in a little bit more technical terms, it's an evolving hermeneutic. It's an evolving way of reading oneself. And hermeneutics, as you know, is the study of how we read, how we study what we're reading. And that process of going, um, you know, as as my daughters are, two of them are now in their 30s, uh, conversations we're having now, you know, decades later, about me as a father of them as young teenagers and teenagers. Oh my gosh. It is a humbling gift to have children who are articulate and honest uh uh about the reality of how the shadow of my mother played out even in my fathering of my children. One can be suffused in shame, uh, or one can somehow be immersed uh in the goodness of what it means to be forgiven. But in being forgiven, we don't erase the harm. We come to engage it with new eyes and a far more tender heart.
Michael John CusickSo I
want to just summarize what I hear you saying, maybe to address the question I'm imagining somebody might be asking, especially a man who's dealing with um pornography or uh sexual sin or some kind of sexual brokenness that's hidden or that maybe has just come out, and they're not sure they want to plunge into this pool. You know, they just want to bounce their eyes and get more accountability. Um why bother? And what I'm hearing is uh that our story that's broken, that initial first relationship with the woman, our mother, all the ways that that plays out, as well as all of the other wounding that comes to us in life and all the warfare and all the lies, that if we don't deal with that, um we will be diminished and inhibited in our capacity to flourish as we were meant to, and to be able to, let me use a very evangelical term, glorify God and receive love from God and to live beloved and to be able to have our soul rest.
Dan AllenderAmen to amen. Uh if we can just say it uh as well as what you just put words to. Um I I don't want to have to
grow any more than to be able to make my world work. Uh, but when I realize my world's not gonna work if I'm as mature as Jesus, because his world did not work as we would normally use that phrase. No one was more mature. Uh, and he still uh is despised uh and provokes rage uh and literally goes to the cross. Yes, there's a redemptive purpose, but it the way he loved prior to that called forth something from others that uh simply goes beyond what what any of us feel is reasonable uh or applicable to living a so-called real life. So if that's if that's accurate, then uh we're we're bound. We're stuck and we're bound uh with with the fact that we were meant for more. I I love that, that we are meant for more.
Michael John CusickLast year, Dan, you wrote uh a new book. You have been a prolific author, and 30 years ago you wrote The Wounded Heart, and that
book profoundly uh touched me and helped me heal, but you wrote last year Healing the Wounded Heart. And I regularly recommend that book uh even to uh men who have not been sexually abused in their traditional understanding of I've not been molested, etc. But the book is so helpful to understand sexual brokenness. But why why did you write not just an updated version of the wounded heart, but a whole new book on healing sexual abuse?
Dan AllenderWell, it it we know that in many ways the life of our lives uh is our wives. Uh and Becky was the one who said to me, You're the one who has been teaching for 25 years material that isn't uh is not uh fully uh uh adambraided in in the wounded heart. Why don't you write a 25-year retrospective? Uh and I I just didn't I just didn't want to do it. It was like that that book's fine the way it is, and yeah, there's other material. But she she was kind and and and relentless uh and basically said, you you have changed uh with regard to your understanding of warfare. That alone would be the basis uh to encapsulate uh new material. Uh and she said as well, uh you know, the neurobiology of of abuse is much more clear than it was when I began writing in the mid-80s. So, with all that, yeah, I I eventually relented to her wisdom, which uh probably one of the great errors of my life is even questioning for a moment for wisdom. Uh, but I do so over a recent couch we bought. Uh and uh, you know, the 25-year-old couch we had seemed like, look, we probably only had another 10 or 15 years on the earth. Why do we need another one? Uh, but uh having purchased uh a new couch uh and uh written uh uh a new book, I I will say seldom is my wife wrong.
Michael John CusickWhat's the big idea that you'd want someone to get from reading Healing the Wounded Heart, a man or woman? And by the way, you wrote a chapter just for men and sexual abuse. There's so little written about men and sexual abuse. Thank you for including that. But what would you want somebody to take away?
Dan AllenderWell, that our brains need to be honored. Um, and that uh when we address the issues of our trauma to
ignore that trauma, uh, even trauma of our own shame, meaning my own sin creates trauma for me. Uh and and that trauma doesn't excuse, uh doesn't become a justification for sin, but it has to be taken into account in the restorative process. So to understand what trauma, trauma of having been abused, or the trauma of my own harm of myself and others needs to be addressed, uh, that to me is a very important chapter, particularly how trauma affects our body and our health. So I think that's one key issue. Certainly, thank you for mentioning about men. Uh that that's a very important section. And was a critique literally within months of the publication of The Wounded Heart back in 1988. And that was, you know, you don't deal with men. And it's like, well, at that time, I had not worked with many men. Uh, but what I had found to be fairly consistently true with regard to men and women and abuse had enough parallel. But no, there are crucial things that need to be said uniquely for men. But I think maybe the the thing that I'm I'm most desirous for people to get from that uh is the reality that evil intends, from the harm of abuse, to create certain kinds of internal and external wars. And to the degree that we do not see and name the work of evil, we are far more susceptible uh to the uh continuation of that harm. So bringing that back uh into conversation. Um, well, bringing that into conversation uh I think is a very important part of the book.
Michael John CusickIn the uh the groups and weekends that we do for men at restoring the soul, the phrase we use, and I might have gotten this from John, but that that there is a
uh a living presence that hates our soul. And uh his name is evil. And to realize that uh has so many implications, not that there's a devil under every bush, but that the reality of it is real. Um and to understand that can help us to put our story in a context, but also uh to help us understand shame better, because so much shame comes from the evil one. So talk about shame. There's been this kind of uh renaissance, or maybe for the first time, uh, a new discussion, Brene Brown, Kurt Thompson. I I kind of consider you a patriarch of writing about shame, all the way back to the wounded heart and in your teaching, uh in your book, The Cry of the Soul. But with all that conversation, uh just give a couple statements about what you see as important to understand about shame and how it specifically plays out in sexual brokenness and sexual compulsion.
Dan AllenderWell, and not that many would care, but I my doctoral training was with what I consider to be the true patriarch, a gentleman by the name of Gershen
Kaufman. So early on in my work, uh I had that privilege of having shame as a primary focus of the therapeutic process and certainly of understanding the nature of our pathology, but our brokenness. Uh so uh really, I think there are two things that I would underline, and it's there, you know, Kurt Thompson is just, I think, a brilliant writer and one that uh I read and profit greatly from. And Brene Brown absolutely as well. But so the first is that shame is public. Uh to me, it's a huge important category. Most of our affect uh can be public, but is often private, uh, meaning you don't generally feel shame in private uh unless you imagine somebody seeing you doing what you're doing. I felt shame in the car, but only because I was imagining if somebody were to record that, and then I'm to see myself in the presence of how others see me. So, in that sense, it it's it's one of the most God-given uh emotions. In one sense, what we can say, it's the first emotion we see in scripture. Um, Adam and Eve experience shame. And in that shame, the natural response is hiding. So if we start with the assumption that almost all, if not all, our efforts to pose, uh, to hide, uh, to portray something about ourselves that's not true, is shame based. So, as a public affect, uh, it's what in many ways clothes us to hide uh what we know. Will bring us some level of approbation as a result of that experience. So if that's number one, number two is just what the scripture teaches. Our rage comes out of our shame. So the violence of misogyny isn't just because of some broad hatred of women. It's far darker than that. It's a shame-based response to make a woman pay for the vulnerability and the neediness I feel in the presence of. And so in that sense, I'm going to turn against the one who feels like they have brought or exposed my shame. So if we can hold those two things together, we've got enough to be able to do great work in our marriages, to be able to say, every marriage, I don't care how mature it is, has some degree of hiding and some degree of blaming. If we can erupt and disrupt that reality, that erupt, meaning bring it to name so that we're actually face to face with our own effort to hide and our own effort to scapegoat, then we're in a far better position
to actually be humbled. And, you know, it's just a theme that you've struck several times in this interview, and I know by your writing and your life. You know, you didn't want to be humbled, but you were humbled. And in that humility, you actually found a level of relief, uh, of honor and joy that would have come by no other means but in that sense surrender. So, you know, I mean, the testimony of your work and your life is that it is in rest that we will be redeemed. Uh, that is the image of Isaiah 30, uh Isaiah 31. You would not rest, therefore you kept running. Uh, and you will, in one sense, be destroyed by your own efforts to reclaim yourself. I mean, the paradox that so much of our own suffering is because we are our redemption. Uh, we are our own effort to cover ourselves versus being covered, you know, again, in the alien righteousness of Christ, uh, to be covered by his um uh claim of us that we are beloved. Um this is old language, uh, but it is so fundamental to how I addressed, you know, my road rage yesterday, um, and how it is that you know the day's young. I mean, this is an early morning conversation. My day spans many other conversations today. And will there be failure? Has there been failure? Will there be failure? Of course. So, how will I continue to participate in that humility to say, I need help? Um, and I need people uh to help, because I'm not going to find that that help essentially and only uh in my relationship uh with Jesus. I need Jesus and whom Jesus appoints to be part of that process.
Michael John CusickYeah, isn't it so much easier sometimes just to kind of do Jesus and us as if we could have our quiet time and read the new devotion and then
not have to be vulnerable in community. You know, as you talked about, and thank you for referencing my story, and I would agree wholeheartedly that the humiliation, the humbling, the brokenness, the pain, uh that that has all been at this point a gift. And I I wouldn't necessarily wish it upon others or choose it for myself, but the gift has been not just experiencing the the fruit of uh of uh having gone to that place, but everything we're talking about, and and this is one of the reasons why I came to study with you uh a couple decades ago, was I was wrestling with the question, how in the world do I connect what's broken in me with this thing called the gospel? And and and when we do plunge into our story and our brokenness and we make that conscious decision, what you and I have experienced is is that uh Jesus and our in our faith goes from being this add-on or something we believe to something that is as essential as an oxygen tank to a scuba diver. You know, it it's it's it's literally a necessity, or we can't make it through. And that's my passion is to invite people into their brokenness and even even pornography struggles because it's a window into connecting with God and knowing Him and reflecting Him in a way that's otherwise impossible.
Dan AllenderWell, it it again, it's where we we both need to nuance, but we both know this is true, that um that addictions of
any sort uh at least are a passion. Um and in that they are high levels of lost and anger, which means the person's in movement. Uh and and it's a movement toward death, uh, but at least it's movement. Uh uh what what I I fear more than that level of brokenness is a person who's living an essentially good life, but ultimately self-satisfied. Uh ultimately like the life itself: watching Netflix, going out on a weekend, drinking a few beers, watching the end of the world series, um going on a vacation for a couple weeks a year. You know, the essence of what uh a good middle class life generally holds for the Christian community. Uh you you voted for the right candidate, uh, you send your kids to the right school, you drive the right car, you get it serviced, you f you even floss. Um uh and and and then to go, uh, you know, good on you. Uh may you live a good life. But I don't see generally in that kind of person the ache, the sense of I'm lost. Uh I mean, I am lost and I must be found today. Uh, you know, and I can hear at least a few, uh a few good Christians saying, yeah, you sound like you're lost and you need Jesus. Uh and the answer is I am lost and I need Jesus desperately today. Uh at least as I'm aging, I'm getting clearer and clearer. Uh I I need him. Uh I need him at levels that uh feel so deep and intimate, and yet at the other hand, so sweet, so sweet, that I'd go, look, if the price of being lost is knowing something of his sweetness, then let yourself be a lot more lost than you seem to be. But particularly the population you and I tend to work with already have a pretty keen sense they're lost.
Michael John CusickYes.
Dan AllenderUm, and and that's where I think the two of us are are lazy uh because we'd we'd prefer to work with the people who are lost than to help those who are not discover that they are. Uh and I I I take that as a compliment to us both. Um I I don't have the patience or maturity to work with people who don't know that at some level they are lost. Um and and in that when we are found and further found, because it's not lost to found, it's lost to further heard, further seen. Um, and and as a result, then we're brought back to that point of going, gosh, if this is what it means to know Jesus today, I I cannot wait, cannot wait to see what I know of him tomorrow.
Michael John CusickSalvation is uh coming to Christ in that way that we talk about getting saved is really just kind of the trailhead of the path that takes us to the
door to walk into the abundant life of restoration. And there's, you know, as as you, as John, as so many other people say, that there is so much more. Dallas Willard called it a reduced gospel that that we settle for. Hey, before we wrap up, because I know that your time is limited, I want to come back to one thing and then a final question. You said that shame is a God-given capacity. And and um I want to make sure I understand that, that it's a capacity that God gave us, but that God is not the one who shames us. Jesus on the cross is not shaming us.
Dan AllenderNo. Uh in in in one sense, yes, you're you're you're cutting into the complexity theologically of you know, is shame uh shame
is primarily used by evil to to shut us down, silence us, uh, and separate, divide us uh internally and externally. But but Adam and Eve felt shame even before the first encounter with God. And I think in that sense, shame is an awareness of something within us that is destitute, that that in that, in their sin, they knew at levels that ontologically we can't even begin to name because we were net we have never been pure. We have never, in one sense, been fully righteous in and of ourselves in the way that Adam and Eve were. So we have no clue what the transition is between utter holy righteousness and our own condition. We know what Adam and Eve felt after, but we don't know what that transitional experience would be. We can only suppose. Um, so at least to start and to say look, their experience of shame awakened in them a level of how empty and destitute and violent and dangerous they are and were. Uh, and so in that light, um, shame was a gift, as to you know, an engine without oil seizes and shuts down. Uh that that's not how the designer built the engine to seize. He built the engine to run with oil. But the absence of oil brings about a byproduct, and that byproduct is indeed, I would call a gift of God. Um, but now it's also the tip of the spear for what evil uses to actually separate. So when we hold that complexity, then what we can do is to be able to say, well, Jesus took our shame. I mean, that can be said so quickly, but to let ourselves have that awareness that He took our shame, he took it fully, which means he became shame on our behalf. That means that we, as even post-fall, again, in a way that Adam and Eve didn't have the privilege. Um, they they had the privilege of having shame engaged, they didn't have the privilege of having shame consumed by the one who is our creator and author. So, in that sense, what I would say is shame today, our experience of shame today, is always contrary to what God desires.
Michael John CusickThat's such a helpful clarification. Thank you. So, final question, and neither one of us are guys that say here's the three or five
steps, but you wrote a book called The Healing Path, and you wrote a book called To Be Told, and so many others that spell out how to engage this process. For that man who is standing around the edge of their story and their brokenness, just wanting to modify their behavior. What are a couple of practical macro things to do to get started?
Dan AllenderWell, I I one of the first things would be write your story. Uh, and you can do that on so many levels. You can do a kind of, you know, uh in in the year 1970, I experienced this sexual event. Uh in 72, I did, you know, you can do a bit of a you know, a lifespan orientation of uh of your own sexual wars, uh, just by having it even on you know a decadal, let alone year by year, you begin to name certain things. So we're back to this word name. You you can take a story and write six to eight hundred words, just a story, one story of where you knew sexual violation, uh, where you knew something, uh someone or something did harm to you. Um uh what we find is uh, and the research particularly about writing is when you put things onto paper, something changes in your brain. Right. So that naming process is huge. A second factor is it needs to be read. Uh it it's not just writing, but it needs to be read to at least one other human being. Uh, and I would prefer that human being be you. Uh a person who has done, has a calling to enter into brokenness uh with wisdom, with strength, uh, with audacity, uh, and yet confidence that comes not by a commitment to a methodology, but to the goodness of the one who created us. So you need to read with another, and that sense of third, you need the engagement of the story you've not told. So when we tell a story, there's almost always, inevitably, the unsaid. Uh, and as we begin to explore what was said, but also the unsaid, uh, we begin to get a clearer picture uh of our lives. First of all, that's a huge investment, uh, time, money, but far more, it's the fear of what I'll discover. Uh this is where I as much as all of us are afraid to be discovered of how bad we are, uh the more significant fear uh is is in really how beautiful we are. Uh and that for the person on the exterior, just on the border of thinking about all this, has to be viewed to some degree as a kind of therapeutic bullshit. Uh where you just go, uh, oh, how interesting. No, that's not me. Uh, but the reality is we are all far more afraid of facing the beauty within us than indeed the brokenness. So inviting people to hold, no, you were written to reveal the very name, the very, very being of God. Now, will you let us explore in your life how your life was uniquely meant to reveal something of the goodness of God? Uh, I think becomes um beautifully terrifying, uh, humbling but holy. Uh that's that's the task. Do you know that humility will take you to a holiness of joy? Well, if so, uh, whatever you're doing, I don't care if you're a multimillionaire or you literally sweep floors, uh, there is such a life ahead for you that you couldn't even begin to imagine. Come join us.
Michael John CusickAmen. Dan, thank you for your uh for your time and your heart. Uh conversation with you and hearing you speak is always incredibly stimulating
and provocative. And I'm gonna have to go and unpack this and spend some time in solitude. Uh, this is gonna encourage so many people. Thank you, uh, and we'll talk again.
Dan AllenderMichael, of course. Love being with you again. Thank you so much.
Brian BeattySo we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact,
the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul dot com. That's restoring the soul dot com.