The Truth About Marriage—Dan Allender on Healing, Intimacy & Hard Fights
Episode Notes
In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender, a pioneer in Christian counseling and the founder of The Allender Center, joins Dr. Alison to explore the raw, real work of marriage, trauma, and intimacy. Known for his groundbreaking book, The Wounded Heart, Allender has spent decades teaching how personal trauma shapes relationships. And on the very day of his 48th wedding anniversary, he openly shares how these dynamics continue to play out in his own marriage.
In this episode, we dive into:
* The surprising (and hilarious) fight he and his wife had the night before their anniversary
* Why marriage is both heaven and hell—and why that’s actually a good thing
* The childhood wounds that have impacted his own marriage
* Why logic doesn’t help when we get emotionally hijacked
* How to fight well and grow through conflict
Check out The Deep Rooted Marriage anywhere books are sold.
Resources:
- The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan Allender
- Episode 147: Breaking the Cycle—Making Sense of Your Family Story and Healing the Trauma of Being the “Chosen Child” with Therapist Adam Young
- The Allender Center
- The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight by Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Steve Call
- Romans 8
- Matthew 7:3-5
- Romans 2:4
- Romans 8:38-39
- 1 John 3:1-3
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 137: The Mindful Marriage—Overcome Pain Cycles and Discover the Surprising Secret to Lasting Love with Ron and Nan Deal
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. 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:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I couldn't be more thrilled to share with you today's conversation with Dan Allender. Dan is a hero of mine, and for so many of us in this field of trying to bring together the best of psychology with faith and Christian spirituality,
Dan is a trailblazer in the field of counseling, especially known for his groundbreaking work in the book, The Wounded Heart. Adam Young refers to the significant role that Dan's book played in his journey in last week's episode, Episode 147.
Dan has also played such a significant role in training Christian therapists. He is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy called the Allender Theory, which has brought healing and transformation to hundreds of thousands of lives by bridging the story of the gospel and the stories of trauma and abuse that mark so many.
Many of you are probably familiar with his work at The Allender Center, which is part of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. The far reaching impact of Dan's work on so many of us seeking to combine Christian theology with psychology cannot be overstated. It's incredible.
To my delight, I discovered that the day on which Dan and I recorded today's episode was in fact, his 48th wedding anniversary. He's such an authentic, true soul. He opens up right away, telling me about a fight he and his wife of 48 years had on the eve of their anniversary. And that's what I loved about this conversation and about this brand new book that Dan has written.
It's called The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight, and it's filled with really honest stories. He doesn't mince words. He's a truth teller. In our conversation today, he shares some new stories about his own marriage and he talks about how he and his wife have learned, over these 48 years, how to uncover the deep roots of trauma in each of their individual lives and how those deep roots impact their ongoing interactions with each other.
This is such a powerful episode. I particularly love his challenge at the end of the episode about what he would like all couples to know about the reality of what it means to leave one's family of origin and cleave to your new partner, and how important that is to the health of your marriage.
He also shares, at the end of the episode, some personal reflections on his own 48 years of marriage. He had me laughing and he had me crying throughout this episode. I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with one of my heroes in this field, Dan Allender.
***
Alison Cook: Dan, I have tears in my eyes. You've been such an amazing mentor and role model to so many of us in this field.
Dan Allender: Thank you.
Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to get to have this conversation with you today. I feel so honored.
Dan Allender: Me too. These are the kinds of things where people don't realize how fun this is. Yeah.
Alison Cook: We put on these headsets, but really it's our modern way of getting to connect.
Dan Allender: Yeah. I prefer it to be in a nice coffee shop, but it's hard to bring in a few hundred other people or a thousand or whatever.
Alison Cook: Yeah. This new book, there's so many things we could talk about Dan, but I was saying before we started recording, I love what you're doing. You and your co-author, Steve, bring in this lens of trauma into marriage, and you write about it so beautifully. It's in many ways intuitive.
We know we bring our baggage into marriage, but the way that you're speaking into this current moment, where a lot of us are aware more and more of our baggage, how then does it affect our most significant relationships?
Dan, I would love it if you would start, like you do in the book, with a little bit of your own story and some of your own stuff that you unwittingly realized–oh my goodness, this is now coming into my marriage.
Dan Allender: First and foremost, Alison, what a delight to be with you. The reality is, people often see therapists or people who write books as those who have it all together and therefore want to offer from their vaunted high self the glory that we would wish other people to participate in.
But last night, Becky and I, my wife today of 48 years, our fight was over whether a baked potato was actually fit to eat. Whether it was done. We're in it. We're in it far enough that all of a sudden you realize, oh my God, we are actually having not a knock down drag out, but an unpleasant interaction.
So in some ways, to begin this process, as we've been married 48 years, it's getting worse and it's getting better. That's often the key to a good marriage. There has never been for me with any other human being more of a taste of what I believe eternity and heaven will be like.
But I'd also say with no other human being have I ever had such a taste of hell. Again, to hold that and to be able to say, what we have written is a good book. But it's an honest book about the reality that no matter how well prepared, thoughtful, and educated you may be, your marriage is one of the hardest relationships. And certainly, it's meant to be one of the best relationships you'll ever be in.
Alison Cook: I love the honesty. There's this quote toward the end of the book that I thought was so good. Essentially, it's about war. You say, “It is not likely at your wedding that the officiant said a war had to be fought for these two to be at this altar. Even more unlikely is that they'd continue. Now, in fact, there will commence an even greater war.”
It is a very hopeful book. But that reality testing pushes so much against our culture, especially in the last century in American culture, what we've come to understand to be love. And yet you and your wife share a beautiful love and some beautiful moments that bring you to tears.
Dan Allender: Oh, thank you. Again, there's no relationship, as I've said, that matters more to me. Yet, if you were to see the interaction, it's over a freaking baked potato. You'd go, what in the name of God is wrong with this couple?
The answer is that the reality of brokenness, the reality of sin, the reality of our own stories play out in every arena, but particularly, for some reason, our kitchen is the ground of engagement, to the degree we don't have language to name what's actually happening. We're lost in the fog.
Again, we're clearer about what happens than we may have been five or ten or twenty years ago. That only gives you the access to begin the process of humbling, honoring, blessing, and engaging the other for the ultimate purpose of drawing one another to be more like Jesus.
If that's not the goal, I get it. I get it. I like comfort. I like convenience. Marriage is the great character transformation place.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that word, humble yourself, that word, making conscious choices. So there's a fight, you tell them the story in front of the fridge, so it sounds like it might not be unlike the baked potato fight.
Dan Allender: Yes, I'm telling you, we've had, since COVID, I would say 80 percent of our conflict has happened in the space of our kitchen.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Let's talk about it, Dan, because you talk in the book very candidly, at least in your own life, about where some of that comes from. Here's the thing that's interesting, 48 years in. You can have all the self-knowledge and know, because in the book you talk about as a kid, food scarcity, the way that it triggers you.
You can know all that, your spouse can know all that, but still in that moment, you can get hijacked by that young part of you. It's not that it stops happening, it's what you do with it.
Dan Allender: I love that. It's so important to underscore that. When we, again, divide our brain in terms of left and right hemisphere, and again, it's too general, but there's some truth to the fact that our left hemisphere is much more logical, linear, able to “think”. Our right hemisphere is far more affective, far more visual, far more affected by the reality of trauma.
So what happens when we get hijacked? We got hijacked over whether or not the fork went deep enough into the baked potato to warrant being said to be done. I didn't think it was. She did. The kitchen has been the realm of where my wife has felt both her deepest pleasure and power.
It has been the realm for me of a lot of warfare. To begin with, my mother had borderline personality disorder. She was eccentric. She was incredibly powerful. She could be weak and frail, and then like Cruella de Vil. And you never knew what moment, but food was never her realm.
She didn't care whether or not we had food. A normal meal of mushy canned peas, corn, and ham baked on one side and pretty much raw on the other, that was actually a pretty big good meal. The rest were Swanson TV dinners.
Becky's world was a world in which she had a pretty vicious and cruel mom, but who loved to cook. So the kitchen was the one place where love was shown. So when I walk into the kitchen, at some level, the haunting presence is, this is a war zone. For Becky, it's a world of love and lush and delight, smell, good flavor.
For me to in any way question, or have any significant influence in the kitchen, oh my gosh. For some people, it's a bedroom. Again, not to say that we have not had our own sexual struggles with both of us having histories of past abuse, but the kitchen! A lot of struggle.
Alison Cook: Yeah. When you're describing that, I think about it through an IFS lens. You talk a lot about the brain in the book. There are so many different ways to look at this, but it's almost like parts of you when you walk in that kitchen, no matter how much work you've done, there's some stored memory.
It's in you, and so to this day, sometimes that comes up. I guess there are a couple of questions in that. One is, we can try to know, every time I go in the kitchen, okay, I've got to be on my best behavior. The willpower thing. But sometimes that can make it worse.
Dan Allender: Oh, it inevitably always makes it worse, because the pressure you put on yourself to escape what you perceive to be judgment only creates much more sensitivity to it.
Alison Cook: So if we can't do that, then we're going to have to acknowledge, from time to time, this is going to happen. We're going to erupt.
Dan Allender: Yes.
Alison Cook: How do you do that? Do you know that together?
Dan Allender: Again, without going through the entire dialogue, there was a point we started laughing. Because it was ridiculous that we're having what seems to be a significant war on the eve of our 48th anniversary over a baked potato. But, in the moment, and it's such an important category to understand about trauma, there are triggers.
Even if these events are 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, our brain is wired for safety. When we have a sense of threat, even if it's not conscious, there is going to be a biological process of stress and chemical production. Cortisol is the one that most people know about, but adrenaline, noradrenaline, catecholamines, they're all working at that moment.
I'm being flooded with stress biochemicals over something that doesn't matter. Put ketchup on the baked potato, it'll be fine. To be able to have language, to be able then to go, oh, we're both getting triggered here. Oh, this is not the direction we thought dinner would go. But then, instead of being conciliatory, like “Oh, I'm sorry, oh, I'm sorry. Forgive me. Yes, let's have dinner.”
That's good. I'm not by any means saying that's not helpful, but to be able to go, wow, what came online for you and for me? A good portion of our discussion was going back to stories we've told one another multiple times and new stories about the reality of what gets triggered in that moment.
The more you understand the context, the roots of what's flooding you, the better you can be, on behalf of the other, bringing both compassion and kindness, but also curiosity. Gosh, were there other things going on in the day that brought us to this point? For us, we couldn't come up with anything other than I was standing in the realm of where my wife feels like she gets to lavish me with goodness.
I was questioning her. But again, whether the baked potato was truly done or not, you can imagine whether it's about sex, whether it's about finances, whether it's about where you vacation, almost every area is going to have the realm of difference. And difference, for most of us, triggers a sense of threat rather than warm, engaged curiosity.
We feel challenged or we feel threatened, and that now brings us into, how do you manage in the broadest sense of the word, any sense of threat? I'm much more of a stress-oriented “fight”. My wife is far more stress-oriented “flight”. So the fight-flight response of trauma, in the initial first five years, worked really well for us.
Until she began to mature and began to name my bluster and verbosity and intensity as contrary to the man I claim I want to be. So as we began to grow together, let's say growth itself always has at its core, a transformation that feels more dangerous than whatever the status quo was.
Alison Cook: Wow. It's deep. Hence the title of the book, The Deep Rooted Marriage. Okay, so Dan, the good news for the listener is, it's worth it. The reality news is, we're going to be doing this. I often find it hard to figure out referrals for couples in therapy, because there are a lot of false promises. There's a lot of, if you do this, this will happen, and scripts, tips, those kinds of things that can be helpful.
But in those moments that you described, that happened last night, it almost always involves these childhood parts of us. It does. There's this adaptation of IFS called “intimacy from the inside out”. Are you familiar with it? It's one I actually think is really powerful, because you don't solve anything.
What you do is you find compassion for your spouse. To your point, what was happening for you? You are recognizing that young part of me. I want that young part of me to be with me. But because I'm complex and because sometimes that young part of me shows up in the kitchen, it means that sometimes this thing happens.
You talk it through so beautifully in the book, how both you and Becky and your coauthor and his wife give your different viewpoints of the argument. For example, let's say at the fridge, where you walk us through what was happening to that young boy inside of you. Maybe then the Lord works on her pride. Maybe I need to get curious.
There's something here that is the magic of intimacy, of love, of marriage that doesn't necessarily take away those rough patches.
Dan Allender: If there's a portion of the Bible that I would say I go to often, it'd be Romans 8. It begins with, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What if there was no condemnation in the context of our marriage? Now that's not the case, but what if?
What if there was a way of engaging one another with hurt, with difference, with struggle, but without contempt, without condemnation? We're not a contempt-free marriage, but it's one of our intentions. Whatever you make as an intention, here's the craziness. It exposes where you're not becoming what you intend, but it also creates the pathway for it to become more and more a portion of your life.
I want to have a contempt-free marriage. We fight, we argue, we see things differently on almost every spectrum. Nonetheless, it's actually fun. It's actually entertaining. There are moments that her differences knock me off my rocker to a point where it's like, I don't know how you married me.
It's one of the best con jobs I ever pulled off in my whole life to get this beautiful, remarkable woman to marry me. Yet, back to that image, there have been harsh moments where we feel the name Satan, meaning the accuser, the devil, from the Greek word diabolos, meaning the one who divides.
We’ve felt accusation. We've felt division, and it always brings to the surface, as you put it so well, the younger parts of us that either knew developmental trauma, which everybody does, but also very unique trauma. She had a significantly emotionally abusive mother. She has her own history of past abuse, which I'm allowed to say because it has been part of her public story.
Same with my mom. So having a mom who was as consuming as my mom was–I described even as a seventh grader feeling like I was living in the web of a black widow spider–I had to make sure I didn't move or if I did move, I created enough trauma in the web that the spider would move away.
So when you've got a woman, my wife, who lived by hiding literally in closets to avoid the rage of her mother, and me, lighting things on fire, stealing cars, selling drugs, creating havoc in my world, in part to keep my mother at bay, you've got a drama.
I don't hide in closets. She does. She doesn't burn things down. I do. Now, if you take that into consideration, these are the younger parts of us that found very different ways to not survive, but to find something that gave us even that modicum of life. Now it becomes clearer in the context of a normal fight why I'm loud and why she's stonewalling.
Again, with that inner play, you can stop and go, you need to learn how to communicate better. Yes, indeed. But if we don't deal with the heart, then it becomes the moral gospel rather than the gospel of there is no condemnation.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I have, very legalistically, as a trained therapist, said the correct words to my husband to let him know that I know what we should be saying in this moment to not be in conflict. It doesn't go over very well.
Dan Allender: No, I'm hoping he's at least at some point said to you, you're not my therapist and I don't pay you.
Alison Cook: It's the most humbling. Oh, he would actually love it if I'd get mad instead, because it's all about the heart, but to your point, if my heart is very pious in those moments, that's leading to contempt.
Dan Allender: Yes, exactly. Oh, so well said.
Alison Cook: What do you think is the key attribute in each individual that has to be cultivated to transform what can be a war into these moments of glory?
Dan Allender: Gosh, I often go back to the Luke 7 passage about dealing with the log in your own eye, and sadly we think of the word log as sin, but no, it's anything that keeps you from being able to see well. So to have compassion for a young four and five year old who's having to hide in a closet, it breaks my heart.
Yet, so often, including the baked potato, it was so interactive in a way in which I'm literally sending her back into the closet. For me to realize I'm replicating some of the same harm she endured as a young child breaks my heart. So the capacity to look at the log in your own eye and to say, with kindness, to those young parts, this is how you survived.
You learned to be verbose. You learned to talk loud. You learned to talk quickly in order to keep a woman who might have eaten you at bay. So with a phrase like Romans 2:4, it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. The question is, can we join God in kindness for the young parts of our own hearts, let alone our partner’s?
What you find is kindness is not niceness. It's not even pleasant-ness. It's the capacity to see the other with eyes that are full of truth and yet are wrapped up in compassion. Therefore, it offers true curiosity, not interrogation, but true curiosity, like God in the garden when he says, where are you, Adam?
The question that I sometimes ask couples is, how do you hear that phrase? Because how you hear it will determine so much of your response. Are you being accused? Or are you being invited?
The idea that we could be in our own pain and suffering, and yet invite our spouse into an engagement where there's honor and ultimately the goal of delight, it changes the tonality, let alone the content of our interactions.
Alison Cook: You open the book with a scene on a ski slope, and you're pretty angry, primarily at your younger son. I won't take everybody through the whole story, but you're worked up. This is early in your marriage. What you're saying reminds me of that moment that you described, where your wife calls out the better angels of your nature, through strength.
Dan Allender: Yes, I was told by my wife to ski down about 200 yards. “Get out. You're trying to get your son down by force and power. It's not working. Go on down”. I came back up when it became clear that her empathetic and gracious, kind way was leaving him on the ground. So I had to come back 200, 300 yards, and I was boiling angry yet cold as ice inside.
As I put my skis on and made my move toward the two of them, she skied in front of him and it was clear she's protecting our insecure son. I mouthed to her the word, move. She shook her head very kindly, and said no. No force, no. When I got to her, and I'm like, move, she put her hand on my heart, and she said the words, I know the men who have humiliated you.
And I am not expecting my life story to be brought in one sentence to bear. Literally, that sense of being haunted, like my father, a coach, several pastors…all of a sudden, at the top of the slope, it's busy and there are people there, she said, “I know that's not what you want to bring to your son”.
Alison Cook: Wow.
Dan Allender: Again, I would wish that each and every time there had been some truth like that, that my heart had softened. But at that moment, tears came. All I experienced was her hand even more firmly on my heart, and she said, “you're a good man” and then skied away, leaving my son and I on the top of that slope to negotiate how we would get down.
That is a family story. My son tells that story. My daughters who had left to go down and get lunch early, though they weren't part of it, they were part of it, because they have known something of my own failure as a father. So all that to say, without being the face of God on behalf of one another, who do we become?
That's what a marriage, from my standpoint, is. The gift of you getting to be the face of God on behalf of your spouse. My wife's face was disruptive, was inviting, but also called me to be who I claim I wish to be.
Alison Cook: I love that story. I love that moment. My guess is, there are moments when you've had to do that for her in different ways. So there are a couple of things going on that soften you. Did I hear you correctly that your 48th anniversary is today?
Dan Allender: Yeah. Today.
Alison Cook: Amazing. Happy 48th anniversary! That's amazing. So over 48 years, moments like that start to crack open the hardness around the heart. It doesn't mean that magically you became the world's best husband or parent. It's a long journey, but it cracks you open, and then you have the capacity, something shifts inside of you.
There are those moments where our spouse holds up that mirror of God. I get that part of it. You lay that out so beautifully in the book, but again, back to these moments where we're both in our worst self. I'm thinking this through because marriage is such a dance, and there are so many different facets of it.
There are those moments that are so powerful, and I have those with my husband where it's like, oh my gosh, he cracked something open inside of me. I still have to work it out, but something shifted,
Dan Allender: Absolutely.
Alison Cook: And I know I've done that for him. Then we have those baked potato moments. Still, I'm intrigued by this. How do you make sense of that? You go back to that moment. You're like, something shifted in me. I guess I'm trying to get at the dance of the marriage, the being seen, the being witnessed changes you, changes her.
You each grow individually, but then you're also constantly coming back to each other with all those new things in motion. It's not static.
Dan Allender: No, but again, certain themes play out pretty predictably. I am the messy one. Oh my gosh, Becky is so orderly. But, again, she had to be, to escape the wrath of a mother who would have found fault if a piece of paper were on her desk and not being utilized at that moment.
Whereas chaos was part of my camouflage to escape the pursuit of my mother. So again, I'm not here to blame my mother or my father or her mother or father. I understand that all of us, generation by generation, all the way back to Adam and Eve, we all have trauma.
We all have often managed that trauma by a kind of survival structure that's deeply broken, and sometimes still showing a lot of beauty. Can we stop long enough to go, this is heartbreaking, and I understand it. Can it be used for good? Can it be used for good?
I've created, and I say with some grief, but also some pleasure, I've created a lot of complexity for the believing community asking people to deal with sexual abuse back in the mid-80s. I'm proud of that.
Alison Cook: Good for you.
Dan Allender: I'm proud of being able to have listened to my clients and written. There are a lot of people who hate my guts. I'm not thrilled with that, but if part of the adversarial interaction with my own mother gave me some basic structure for being able to have some thickness of skin to bear that, there's some beauty to it as well.
Unfortunately, the one person in the world who matters most to me, oftentimes gets the prickly, angry part. Yet because we both have language and experience, and we have shared lots of stories, not facts, but stories of the harm that we each have endured, that begins to create a kind of connection on the basis of compassion.
It allows you to intervene on behalf of one another more quickly. We had a traffic situation and she said, people are carrying guns. I'm not ready for you to be shot. Not today. Her humor, her playfulness, her exposure of my anger, I'm like, yeah, you're right.
People are carrying guns more often. It's an angrier world, and I don't think I want to get shot today. It's something that could have been felt on my part as something not very respectful. She's mocking me. But no, she is playfully, prophetically, exposing and inviting. We were able to laugh about that interaction and the baked potato.
Eventually, when you are able to, in one sense, escape the worst parts, there's much more gratitude. But what you were naming earlier is, there are times where both of us are in it. Those are the moments where one has to come back and say, I don't really understand all that occurred, but I know I harmed you. I know I feel harmed by you.
How do we hold together, from the vows we made and from the dreams we have, of how we want our lives to end? You need to know the alpha and you need to know the omega in order to deal with the middle. A lot of our messes are middle messes.
Alison Cook: Which is such a theme in the book. When we have one of those situations where we both go somewhere we don't understand, we call it a Seinfeld. It's an episode about nothing. We both go, oh my gosh, that was a Seinfeld. We don't even know what that was about.
We then can laugh about it, but there's a category for it. There's a naming. But Dan, while you were talking, I got tears listening to it, and here's where I hear the hope in this. Because marriage is hard and you're so honest about that. Here's where I hear the hope. I'm gonna take you off the spot for a second.
You're talking about anger and you're so honest about that. The part of me that's a people pleaser, my husband gets the good of that part when he sees me be kind to our kids. He was a widower when we met, so they’re our kids now, but they were his kids. And my empathy, he fell in love with that part of me.
Also, into marriage, boy, does he get the worst of the codependency of the people pleasing. He sees the worst of it–it's heaven and hell. As an individual, I can be like, why can't I get rid of this part? I know I'm not supposed to think that way, but I still do sometimes.
What you're saying is, this is love. Love is over time. Yes, I do get some of the worst of those parts, but I also get the best, and I'm willing to stick it out to see more and more of the best, and I'm willing to stick it out to see more and more of when you're able to go, yeah, that was the worst.
That's the hope, is that being seen in all of the glory of those parts also demands that we're going to be seen in the worst of it. That's powerful.
Dan Allender: Oh, to me, it's the end of Romans 8, where there's nothing that can divide us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, neither death nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nor principalities, etc. So when you begin to go, oh, we have hurt one another so deeply at times.
In those moments, I won't go into all the details, but my wife had three miscarriages in our early years, and whenever one of our younger friends is in the middle of a miscarriage, the two of us look at one another with a look like, oh, that is still broken, barren ground.
My inattentiveness to what she was going through in that loss, I go, who were you? How could you? Yet, the reality of how our culture has changed and come to own the affect of miscarriage today, I'm not excusing myself, I'm simply saying that we are meant to grow through the community that grows in an understanding of heartache and loss and yet goodness.
So when we hold something of our past together, there's forgiveness. But there's still joint suffering we can enter, without accusation. It's without demand, without fear. Nothing can separate us. That's the ultimate truth and our ultimate desire in a marriage. Now, will we get close?
Yeah, closer, but as 1 John 3 says, when we see him, then we will be as he is until that day. The radical notion of sanctification is, the more we grow, the more we see how far we have to grow. So it's not American democracy nor capitalism, where the more you get, the more you have. It’s, the more you see, the more you're aware of the desire for redemption to be the deepest reality of how I engage, not just my wife, but my children, my grandchildren, the grand-dogs.
I have three grand dogs. When I had children, I knew there might be a day with grandchildren. Nobody told me about grand-dogs, and tending to them for a week while they vacation. So all that to say, none of us really ever fully understood what we were getting into. Yet the more we're in it, the more it is that I can't believe we get to love one another as we journey.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful, because I never thought about that sanctification process. The closer we get to God, the more we see our need for him, which is hard, but it would apply to marriage as well. The beauty part is, you're also seeing your spouse, your significant other, see that you're with them in it.
You're not bypassing it. You're not saying, oh no, it's fine. You're saying, yeah, there were some really rough patches. Also, here we are. Before we wind up, because I want to honor your time, this part of the book hit me and I want to get your thoughts on it. We've touched on this, but I want to circle back to it. I thought this was so powerful.
You write, as much as I loved Becky, I was more loyal to the role and demands of my family. As much as Becky loved me, she was more loyal to hers. You were more loyal to the demands of your mother. As much as Becky loved me, she was more loyal to being the bright sunlight for her father, and we didn't know it.
You're part of this becoming one. It's cliche, but there's so much depth to how you write about it in the book, of leaving those family of origin patterns that are so strong. 48 years in, they're still there. I really resonated with that.
You talked about how early on, the thing that attracts you about this person, because you get to leave these things of your family of origin behind, might then become the thing that you then dislike, because you actually have to change.
Dan Allender: Yes. Yes. I love how you put it. You put it so brilliantly and clearly. What do you want me to do other than to go, “Amen, sister”! I remember I had the privilege of officiating all three of my childrens’ weddings, and I remember sitting with one of them, and she said, look, dad, you've done this a lot.
You've had the privilege of marrying other people. What do you recommend for my future husband and I? I said, at some point during the ceremony, you should turn to us. I'll go from the front, sit with mom, and you and Driscoll will look at your parents and say, thank you for all that you've given us.
But from this moment on, as I turn my back on you, my loyalty no longer is to you but to my spouse. My daughter looked at me and she goes, it'd be the weirdest wedding in the world–I'm not gonna do that. And I'm like, oh yeah, I guess it would be, because nobody says that.
Nobody comes even close to saying what the scriptures say: leave your mother and father. Now, that's not geographic and it's not financial, because what we know about the ancient Near East, it was an agrarian culture. You didn't leave and go to the city. Your finances were bound into the larger family. So it is a deeply, shall we say, interior psychological process.
Right from the beginning, when you don't leave, the next portion of becoming one flesh, becoming one soul, ain't gonna work out. So much of what we're trying to do in The Deep-Rooted Marriage is to invite people to look at structures of how they interact with the history of what the roots are that allow you to make this transformation.
As you put it, and you put it so well, the passage and process is endless, but not hopeless. At times I find myself going, really? You didn't get this? I've written three books on marriage. Two with my best friend, Tremper Longman, and then with my dear friend, Steve Call.
Like, do you not get it? It's part of the kindness of God that his response is, of course you don't, but you do. So let's move on with what you do, but allow your heart to be open to what you don't see and have not named yet. Trauma experts will say, we need to engage traumatic stories up to 30 times for the neuroplasticity of our brain to change.
So if one were to measure my cellular process, there have been immense changes in the last 48 years. That's why, as an older man married to an older woman, every day we walk for about a 45 minute period, and it's our time to talk about the day, to pray, to laugh, to anticipate what the day holds.
The simple phrase of count your days. Becky and I don't know how much longer we will be on this earth. Count your days, that you might grow in wisdom. If what you want is a comfortable marriage, this is not a good book for you. But if what you want is something of the wild life of God, then I can't invite you any more to what your spouse reveals about you and what your spouse reveals about your heart with God.
What a process. Nobody could have told me when I made the vows I made 48 years ago today, at about 4:30 Pacific Standard Time, 7:30 Eastern Standard Time, what I was getting myself into, but I would not trade it for a living second, not for billions of dollars.
Now ask me if I'd be willing to have my children again, and it would take a second. Yes, the answer is yes, but give me a second. Much of my career, nah, I wouldn't do it again. But my wife, yeah, without a question.
Alison Cook: I want to do another podcast episode on that. That's interesting. I love it. It's so encouraging because it's so honest. It's so honest. That's your gift, Dan, that's why so many of us revere you. You talked about things before anybody else was talking about them. You said the hard things.
That's why it's so powerful. Now, when you're like, that's great, people love me for that. Guess what? Here's the other side of it. Let my wife talk to you about that. But it's hopeful to me here in my age where I've been writing books about codependency and boundaries, and I'm going through a whole ‘nother round of being horrible at it all.
And it's actually oddly hopeful to go, I’ll probably have another iteration of it as a grandparent. I'll have another iteration of it–
Dan Allender: –with grand dogs.
Alison Cook: Life is never boring. It’s a joy having someone like you and Becky to share the stories. There are so many good stories in the book. Sometimes I laughed out loud. I want to ask you questions I ask all my guests, Dan. The first one is, what would you say to young, newly married Dan now? What would you say to him now from who you are now?
Dan Allender: Hey, you got one of the most amazing human beings to marry you. And, yes, you pulled this off. You lied to her directly. She said at one point, I can't wait someday to walk the Appalachian Trail. I didn't know what the Appalachian Trail was, but I said, oh my gosh, me too. If she said, I want to go to the moon, it'd be like, that's absolutely my dream.
So yeah, courtship is a hopefully beneficial line without absolute cruelty. But you're on a journey that you cannot comprehend until you enter it. Even after you've been on it for 48 years, you can't imagine what's going to be required of you to die together. So you better know this is about life and death.
It isn't about owning a home or having children or having a nice vacation. This will shape you to be who you are and what you become for eternity. You are not up for it. You do not have the capacity. So you will have to depend upon me. I wish a good, wise, kind man or woman would have said that to me.
Alison Cook: Wow. What's bringing out the best of you right now on this day?
Dan Allender: Here's the intersection. We've had such a good day so far. Early in the morning, we took our walk and then we opened up our wedding photos. It's not the first time, but we laughed about where we were, what we saw. About two hours later, we got the news that a dear friend's wife has intractable and incurable cancer.
When we got the news, we sat on a couch and wept together. So a day where you laugh and you weep is a good anniversary.
Alison Cook: Oh, I love that. That's beautiful. Yeah. You do it together. That's beautiful. Dan, thank you so much. Where can people find the book?
Dan Allender: I'm not that fond of Amazon or its owner, but let's say Amazon's probably the quickest place to be able to get the book. But Alison, thank you. Thank you for the time with you. Your wisdom is very deep and sweet. So to join you in that, it's a great honor.
Alison Cook: It's been a pleasure. I hope we get to do it again and bless you on your anniversary. Blessings to Becky. Thanks, Dan.