397 - The Deep Rooted Marriage w/ Dr. Dan Allender

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Listener. I am your host, Nick Stumbo, and you are listening to the Pure Desire podcast, your biblically based and clinically informed approach to healing from betrayal and breaking free from compulsive sexual behaviors. Today is episode 397 and here joining me as my co host for this series is Mr. Rodney Wright. Rodney, welcome back to the podcast.

What's up doc?

I see you. You're bringing a colorful.

That's my best attempt at giving a Nick Stumbo response to introduction. If those of you who've been listening for a while, that takes me way.

Back to the early years, yes, some of our veteran listeners will appreciate a lighthearted greeting and they've maybe missed that over the last few dozen episodes.

Oh, Nick, it's good to be with you. This podcast is so good. Dan Allender is someone I admire once I got a hold of his. Of course, people like Jay Stringer who have been deeply influenced by him and are doing such good work in the faith community and integrating the therapeutic approach to trauma and addiction and recovery. It's just what a healthy voice and what a tribal elder in many ways in our faith community.

Yeah, he is definitely someone that I have looked up to for a long time and we got an email from his group saying, hey, he's putting out a new book. You want to have him on the podc? It was like, yes, you don't have to ask us twice just because he does and listeners are going to hear it from the get go. He brings a wisdom, a depth of experience and I would say in a way a simplicity. And I don't in any way mean that as like a negative. Like he makes maybe complex relational issues simple in a way that we all go, oh, I think we could do that. I think we could try some of those things in our marriage.

And he does it where he takes the biblical narrative of the text and kind of shares it in a way that's a little bit more palatable for how we live here today and ways that we can integrate our faith and that really maybe even see scripture a different way than we've ever seen it before. He shared an insight that I hadn't really seen or thought through today that was really great. So I think our listeners are really going to enjoy this and whatever you can get ahold of his stuff, it's in my opinion, just really great stuff.

Yep, absolutely. Dan Allender is a gifted storyteller and you get to hear some several of those in the podcast and we really hope that you will check out his new book because that is why he's on talking about a book that he co authored called the Deep Rooted Marriage. Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight. Doesn't that sound great for our marriage? So a little bit about Dr. Dan Allender. He is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy. He earned his Master's of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, followed by a PhD in counseling psychology from Michigan State University. He has served on the faculty of the Biblical Counseling Department at Grace theological seminary from 1983 to 1989 and at Colorado Christian University from 89 to 97. And in 97, Dan and a cadre of others founded the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where he served as the president from 2002 to 2009. In 2011, he established the Allender center with the mission of fostering healing and equipping leaders and mental health professionals with the courage to confront other stories of harm. Dan has authored or co authored over two dozen books and continues to serve as a professor of counseling and psychology at the Seattle School. And now here is our conversation with Dr. Dan Allender on his new book, the Deep rooted marriage. Well, Dr. Dan Allender, welcome to the Pure Desire podcast. We're so glad to have you on today.

Nick Rodney, thank you. What an honor. And just looking forward to our time.

Yes, well, we are big fans, and I know many of our listeners will probably be familiar with you and will have read some of your books, but the point or purpose of today's conversation is to get to kind of preview or introduce our listeners to a new book that you have coming out. And so let's start there. You know, in your career, you've written quite a few books, as I understand it. So why this one? What motivated you to write this book?

Well, I've said publicly, and I would say almost in any context, I have never known more of a taste of heaven than in relationship with my wife. No one has given me a greater sense of the goodness of God in the land of the living. But you know, with a but you know what's coming. But no one has ever given me a taste of hell in the way that my wife has. So in one sense, what I would say is true for me, but I believe for everyone, marriage is a relationship of extremity. There will always be highs and lows, heartache and goodness. And in that, I do believe that our marriages have the potential to be one of the most revelatory and transforming relationships we'll ever be in.

Yeah, you know, Dan, I kind of feel that way, just about human sexuality. When done right, it can be heaven on earth. And when mismanaged and done wrong, it can be a living hell. And so that's such a true statement. In your book, you talk a little about honor, delight and healing. Talk about what does it mean to honor our spouse as you write about that.

Well, you know, first, the reality is, I think a lot of marriages are, I'll call them good marriages. And all I mean by that is you get along most of the time, you like each other, you have good vacations, you have children, you have grandchildren, and generally you're going to stay married. That's great. I love that. It's just not enough. It's not indeed entering into the fullness of what I believe a marriage is meant to be. If we stay with this one thought, a marriage is meant. Sexuality is meant to be an image and physical taste of worship. If we understand why God brought us to leave our mothers and fathers and to unite with our spouse and become one flesh. It is about the sweet intersection of oxytocin bonding by a chemical. It's about dopamine. You know, intercourse provides 400% the dopamine we normally experience on a day to day basis. So when we begin to talk about what marriage is, it is meant to be a image of what it means to worship the living God. So to honor is to bring a sense of deep respect to the other. But I want to go further. I want to say honor is really a commitment to curiosity. A commitment to in one sense be in awe of the other. And to be delighted in the presence of the other is to know that there is something about this person who brings you such a taste of beauty and goodness that you can't help but say, thank you. Thank you. So the essence of worship is gratitude and awe. And we come to that through the experience of delight and honor. So if our marriage is not, at times I want to be realistic, not stupid, naive, but at times not a relationship that brings us to say, I wonder who God is. Because of the nature of this relationship, then your good marriage just isn't enough.

What I hear you saying, Dan, is how or what comes to mind for me, how easy it is for a marriage or any relationship to really become routine. We have our rhythms and our patterns and we figured out who's picking up who from school and how we figure out dinners and groceries and that whole world and we make the family run. But that's not the essence of relationship. That does not speak to man and wife. Becoming one flesh and being that image of the Trinity, that there's something deeper. And I think for all of us, we can slip into those routines of, well, we managed another day. We're fine, we're good, but is that what we've been created for? And I hope that your book and this podcast get us thinking a little deeper about what is this marriage intended to be, and if there's a place we are stuck in, just some, you know, same old, same old. What is God inviting us into with our spouse?

Well, boredom or something tedious is really an escape from reality. Because if you're really in a relationship with a person, they're going to piss you off, they're going to offend you, they're going to, indeed disrupt you. I mean, over the COVID era, I didn't travel like I used to, and I was in my wife's domain, I. E. The kitchen, way more, way more than almost ever before. And so at that time, we'd been married about 44 years. And as I came to bring my own culinary capacity into her kitchen, let me just tell you, even though we're somewhat over Covid, we have continued to have tensions, arguments, just unpleasant interactions about what happens. Like a dish rag. She held a dish rag up. This was a while back, and she said, are you afraid of dish rags? And I'm like, no. And she said, then why do you leave them soaking wet? And I'm like, what do you what? She said, you will never dry out a dish rag. This became, I'm not going to call it World War 3, but it was a bit of a skirmish as to how things ought to be done. Like how you put silverware into a dishwashing machine. So the tensions that are there, this is where boredom comes in. Most of us develop patterns of escaping, interacting in a way in which we're going to feel discomfort. That sets you up in many ways for what we call in the book a dmc, a demilitarized zone where you create ground that neither of you go to. I mean, the typical four areas for couples to have money, sex, children, and in laws. So when you've got all those tensions and you come to a point of going, we don't want to fight. It's not fun. It just leaves us empty. You learn to avoid. And so when you have patterns of avoidance, of not engaging, you're not literally stepping into the terrain where you've got to be willing to deal with conflict. So a marriage that doesn't deal with conflict, well, I promise you, will become tedious, boring, and at some level, that demilitarized zone, the ground you won't step on, let me promise you, evil will. And it is brilliant at sowing seeds of discord in that ground. Again, it's tragic to say that what's called now gray divorce, that 35% of divorce is now with people 50 and above.

Yeah.

And so as you begin to look at the reality that you've got couples who have just lived, quote unquote, good, normal lives, but they have so little capacity to deal well with conflict and heartache and past harm, but they end up, by the time they get into that later years, they've got so little sinews, so little connection.

Yeah.

That tragically, it ends with, indeed, divorce.

Right. You know, Dan, I've heard that it's not the amount of conflicts that couples have that determine their happiness in their marriage or their enjoyment, but it's how they're handled that determines it. And so on. That. Let's talk about conflicts in marriage. And I'm smiling because the kitchen is a metaphor for Rodney and Tracy Wright. So anyway, when my wife listens to. To this, she'll just know we're right there. Among some of the best, Tracy, when it comes to conflicts. But how do you resolve it without one partner feeling like they have to submit their will every time? You know, this importance of active listening and being assertive. I remember when I was young in marriage, my wife's very assertive in a healthy way. So I would just always say with sarcasm, you're right and I'm wrong, but I realized I wasn't always wrong. And it was okay to have an opinion on something, but just say it in a way that's respectful. But it created conflict when I lifted my voice. And so we had to learn how to resolve that. How can you just give us a framework about resolving in a good way without feeling like you always have to submit to the other person?

No. It's such a brilliant question. Start with a very, very hard but simple fact. You cannot change what you don't name. And so the question is, how do you. How does your spouse engage conflict? Conflict, let's just say, is tension. And tension, even if it's over a dish rag, has a certain dimension of trauma, meaning it's going to raise your biochemicals, your stress biochemicals. And so you are going to have cortisol and adrenaline, noradrenal catecholamines, beginning to flow through your body, even over something as small as X, Y or Z. So to begin with, the reality of when you're in conflict, there is a degree of trauma. So what has to be asked is, what's your history? What's your story? How have you handled significant and minor traumas in the past? So we always have to go to our earliest learning classroom, which is why Scripture begins with this, leave your mother and father. Now, that wasn't physical, because in the ancient near east, people didn't go off to college and then, you know, they.

Often stayed under the same roof.

Yeah, yeah. They lived in a rural agricultural world. And it isn't because they would be independent financially. So this is a deeply psychological process. Leave the loyalty, leave the structure. Leave the processes that have formed you to be who you are. But you can't change what you don't name. So I came from a family that had not a lot of conflict. But my mom, I'm an only child, my mom, if you know the term, she was borderline personality disordered, which means she could be weeping one minute, raging the next. She could throw a pot and then be as apologetic and then make a joke about it. And I'm talking about that all in about a two or three minute period of time. So I learned to live with unpredictability. A lot of. Lot of tears, a lot of rage. Becky, my wife, ended up in a family where she had a very playful father, but a very angry and cruel mom who was demeaning, critical. So Becky learned to hide. She literally learned to play in closets because it was a safer domain. And she learned to avoid conflict. So already what I can say is you've got two profound different styles of dealing with heartache and conflict. I'm belligerent and I'm verbal and I get into the middle of it and she hides in a closet and avoids. Well, that worked pretty well for a while until, and I mean it very significantly, until she began to grow more in Jesus and then began to get a voice and began to name things about my own failure. And then all of a sudden, for the first number of years, we were absolutely compatible in our sin. And then in part because of her maturing, things got a lot more, shall we say, spicy. And it wasn't pleasant, but it's been. We've been married now 48 years. A long, sweet, horrible, glorious disruption of the story, structures of how each of us came to manage something, of the heartache of life. And that's what I mean by a marriage is meant to be revelatory. It's meant to expose you, but not in a way that leads to judgment and shame. It's meant to expose you so you're invited into a far deeper relationship, not just with one another, which is fabulous, but far more into a far deeper relationship with Jesus. Beautiful.

Yeah. I love what you're saying, Dan, that we want to connect what's happening in the moment to our story and to our past. And I think that's been a huge growth area in our marriage. And for me, when there's conflict, it's to realize. It's to ask the question, like, what's the conflict behind the conflict? Or to ask, like, what's really at stake here? Because when my wife and I are having an issue, often around money or in laws or kids and our different styles, when I begin to notice in me that my level of reaction is getting really, really strong, there is always. I have found, and I don't recognize it in the moment. It's often in the retrospect. It's in the looking back. It's in analyzing, like, man, what was going on. There is. I will realize there was something more at stake for me in my story or the message I was hearing then that maybe has things to do with bigger questions, like, am I being respected? Do I matter? Does my opinion count? And. And whatever has happened with my wife is tip, you know, tipping me into that much bigger question. And now I'm fighting to protect what I think is at stake without even realizing that's what I'm doing. And so I love how you're equipping couples to think through that. And I assume the book's gonna do a whole lot more. And if. If someone's not already interested in getting it, that, to me, that answer alone should be enough to go, okay, how can I figure out what's really going on in our conflict? Because if you don't really know what's at stake, what else is coming into the picture, you can't resolve it. And then I think back to what you were saying earlier. It tends to move us towards, well, we never seem to be able to fix this. So now we just figure out how to avoid it or to kind of live in this neutral zone where we're no longer engaging. And that's certainly not healthy. So I think you're giving some really, really good principles there.

Yeah. And I just would add, Nick, Dan, thank you for talking about the psychological leaving and cleaving where I never in all my years ever heard someone say they never left physically, although I knew it, I never made the connection. So that sense of psychologically. I remember when I Was young. I would call my dad to ask before I would ask my wife on a decision that we were going to make in our marriage, I would check with my dad before I did my wife. Right. And it just showed of, well, wait a minute. I got to turn that page and get on to us and take what was good from my mom and dad, but leave what was unhealthy. And that's what we say to our kids in what we give you. Take the health, but leave our dysfunction with us. Oh, brilliant.

Brilliant. Yeah. And again, if we go back to what's said in scripture in terms of the core relationship of male and female, you know, when you look at Genesis, chapter two and 24, there's a sequence to it. Leave your mother and father and then become united, which implies communion and hard to get the word communication there, and then become one flesh. So if there are struggles which are inevitable that there will be sexual struggles, what so often seems to happen is people want to somehow figure out how to resolve the sexual issue rather than working back to the beginning of the problem. The beginning of the problem isn't sexual. The beginning of the problem is you haven't left your mother and father. And that's so easy when I have clients who go, I haven't lived near my parents in 40 years. And it's like, you could be on Pluto. It doesn't matter. We're talking about. You are still bound to the way you handled the heartache of what happened in your own family. And you've not named that. You have become passive, or you have become belligerent, or you have become defensive, and it's got a history. So those are the roots. When we name the book the Deep Rooted Marriage, the reason we name that is because you've got to get to the roots. You've got to dig through the soil to begin the process of tending to the deepest part of what has formed you in order to open the door to the possibility that some of what you're stuck in isn't because you don't have the skill or the motivation. You just are bound to a past. And you keep carrying that luggage and all the particularity in it into every particular fight you have. Can we mess with the. The past to free the present and literally to create a different future.

Amen. Well, and so many of us, I think, are doing those things subconsciously, not realizing that's what we're carrying into the present moment. And until we hear a podcast or read a book or reach out to a therapist that can help Identify that we might just keep blindly on. And so I think, so important that we're having this conversation and this next question, I think, is a great one, because we have kind of a motif in our culture, I think, and we hear it from people time and again, where they'll say, well, you know, when there's a divorce or a real break, a separation in the marriage, they'll say, well, they changed. And yet, as people, we are changing people. And so how do we let go of the expectation that the person we married will always be the same person? How do we let go of some of that expectation?

Well, I remember being with an older man when I was maybe married two years, three years, so I'm maybe 26. And this man was respected. I don't need to name him, but a very respected man in the community of God. And as we were talking, you said, somewhat on to my fourth marriage. And I'm like, what? I had no idea you were. I missed that book, you know, And. And. And he saw my face, and he said, my first marriage was built on being naive. My second marriage was built on being busy. My third marriage was built on a large measure, the success that I had achieved. And all three marriages need to collapse before I began to love my wife in the way that I am today. And I went, oh, there's something here I need to ponder, but I'm hoping I can just stay in one marriage. I don't want to have four more marriages. But the fact is, there is something of that. We were so naive when we made the vows to one another, and then soon, then career, work, young children. I mean, those are eras in which I kind of remember, like, we were in some photos together, but I don't remember a whole lot more. And then I did have enough success. I did have enough, shall we say, benefits of the good hard work of a decade or more. But I began to really know what to do.

Yeah.

And that was the most dangerous period of all. And I think that's uniquely the period where Becky began to mature so much more and to grow. And in that process, began to expose how I intimidated her, how I was cowardly and escaped her, how I made overtures for sexuality, and yet, on the other hand, was highly dissociative due to some of my own past abuse, which I had not addressed. So as you begin to sort of look at how. Wait a minute. All the baggage, all the seeds that have come along with me, it's being planted in the soil, and some of the weeds are literally devouring Some of the beauty and goodness that's there. So I think as long as you know that your marriage is by far the number one arena where you will either grow or you won't, then if you make that intentionality of, I want to become the man that God designs for me to be, it will create multiple marriages.

Yeah, that's a beautiful way of saying it. It's almost looking back at different seasons in your marriage and saying what needs to die and what needs to live. Here's another question. How do stories from our past, and maybe how we see them shape, cause friction in our reactions to it? So stories from our past and how they shape or cause friction in our reactions to it.

Well, start with that. 70% of the Bible is story.

Yeah.

There are things that your spouse knows about you without question. They may know that you have a history of past abuse, or that you had an alcoholic father, or that your mother was very doting upon you in a way that she didn't seem to engage the other children in the family in the same way. We may know facts, but facts do not change us. I mean, I can hear that a terrible plane accident occurred and 87 people were killed. And I can feel a degree of, oh, that is so sad. But you will not truly enter into real grief till you see the face, till you hear the name and something about at least a few of the people who died. We are storied people, and we are changed by the engagement with story. But what I also find is that most couples, and that's a pretty strong statement, when I say most, I mean, like in the high 90s, don't share stories, particularly of trauma, particularly of where you felt vulnerable, where you felt shame, where you felt exposed and incompetent, you were bullied. We may know the facts, but we have not given our spouse the access to those stories because we don't want access to the stories that linger with some degree of heartache and shame. So one of the things about a marriage that is intended is that a marriage is meant to take on shame chain. It's meant to take on the structure of judgments that we have made against ourselves or others have made against us, or even more importantly, what the kingdom of evil has brought against you. And if there is not that furrowing of the ground, meaning cutting the ground up to prepare for good seed, then we're not going to grow, not in the way we were meant to. So in that sense, the question can be put as simply, what are the top three stories that shaped you? How Much does your spouse know? Not the facts, but context, character, plot? In other words, will you let yourself suffer your story and allow your spouse, spouse to join you? And that's what I mean by leave your mother and father. Not ignore, but leave, not let it go. Engage the stories of heartache, shame, trauma, then let there be a union with your spouse. Which means when Paul says in Romans 12:15, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who who weep. Do you let your spouse rejoice with you? Do you let your spouse weep with you? Without that intensity of laughter and tears, I don't think the soil ever gets soft enough to take good seed.

And Dan, just a little follow up on that. I think for some of us, the safest place we found to own our stories has been in a therapeutic community or in a recovery setting before our spouses. I know that was for me. I felt safer in a therapeutic office or in a recovery group than I even did to go to my wife, Tracy, and say, here's my story. Because the shame was so high. I would say that's a benefit a group in therapy. I mean, maybe speak to that.

And Nick, I'm with you 100%. We don't thank God that God does not require us to be thrown into the deep end of the water where there are sharks.

Yeah.

Without some degree, shall we say, of mutual collegial friendship support.

Yeah.

So a lot of times our courage grows to name what's true. And then we get the privilege to come back to the one relationship that feels even more threatening than a small or working with a therapist. So, you know, as the brilliance of of your point, Rodney, is, it's just so crucial for people to hear, you're not going to do this quick. You're not this without others. But you need to grow with your spouse in what you have gained in the context of your work with others.

It occurs to me that that's often what makes a pure desire group so powerful. And I'm sure the work they're doing with you, Dan, is the ways in which, like in my story, the first group I went to and we're walking through this workbook that's asking me questions like, you know, name your 10 worst moments. Describe your relationship with your parents. Talk about something that happened when you're a child. And I knew these things, I knew they'd all happen. But what I had not done and what the group environment did was help connect the dots between some of those childhood stories and my current reactions, patterns, behaviors. And for My wife and I, in the first group that we did, we had to drive 45 minutes north to attend a church that had groups. Cause nothing around us did. And we both will talk about the power of the car ride home because of how many times I would say, you know, tonight, it never occurred to me how important this story was in shaping my sense of self or of needing to perform, to be loved. And I would share that with her because I was processing it. And she would say, nick, that's where I got to know you. Right? I mean, she knew what I liked and didn't like. You know, she knew my favorite color and things like, you know, things around our environment, my favorite sports team. But to actually know me. And part of that was I didn't necessarily know myself. I knew those stories had happened. I didn't know they mattered. I didn't know the impact they'd had. And it was in group, it was in counseling, that as all that comes together. Well, now I'm regularly telling my wife these stories, and she's doing the same because she was in a group for betrayed spouses. And we're just, like, connecting all these pieces of our story in a way that, like, we know each other. And that's where we'll say, and I hear this a lot from couples that go through pure desire groups together. At the same time, they'll say our intimacy level grew. And they're not talking about sex. They're talking about we actually knew each other. And they'll say this crazy thing like, we're so glad this happened. It's like, what do you mean you're glad addiction happened? Like, how could that be? They say, we're so glad this happened because we don't know any other way that we could have come to this level of knowing one another because it helped us see all these things we didn't know. And I think that's what you're describing. And it's what makes me excited about people getting ahold of this book and really wrestling through, like, okay, if I'm not comfortable with that, if this isn't the language I grew up with or learned, how do I start engaging in that kind of storytelling with my spouse and recognizing what I need to share so that we know one another? And I think you're going to equip people for that in many, many ways. And so to continue leaning into that, we've kind of talked around some of this. But what are other ways in which intimacy gets hindered in our marriage? What are the kind of Things that you discuss in the book about what gets in the way of intimacy.

Well, before I jump there, let me just say what you put words to, Nick, is just, you know, in some sense it's, we can end right here. It's so beautiful. Both of you have named this that in so many ways. Yes, the heartache of struggling with any addiction. You would prefer infinitely not to have been in that battle.

For sure.

This is the paradox of the goodness of God, that there is no cacophony, that he does not orchestrate into a beauty that just takes our breath away. So for us to be able to say, as Paul says, shall I sin so that grace abound, may it never be. But when sin abounds, grace abounds more. So for us to be in this position to go, we really aren't meant to be surprised that our darkest moments literally open up context for some of the sweetest interactions we may have with others, but particularly with our spouse. So your good question of what gets in the way, I think three things quickly come to mind. First of all, busyness, where we are pursuing false gods and doing so energetically when, when we're doing little but engaging one another. We can call it busyness. But underneath it, what you have to ask is what passion are you living for that causes you to be so busy you don't have five minutes. You know when people say to me, I don't have time to exercise, well, how long does it take to do a sit up? Yeah, one's better than nothing. So five minutes of writing a note to your spouse and having her write back to you. Don't tell me you don't have time. You've got five minutes now use it. And it may open the door to a sense of there's so much more. Uh huh. So a second word is disappointment, where you feel to some degree like, I've tried, I've done my best, I've done my best. And, and it's. Nothing's really worked out. It's, you know, we get along, we do like each other, but anytime we begin to open the door to more, it does not go well. So disappointment that literally, even if it's quiet, begins to move toward resentment, toward a structure of I don't trust you here and I'm not willing to even name I don't trust you because that would require too much trust. So between busyness and disappointment, I think the third and a comeback to this is shame. Again and again. We spend a lot of time in the book trying to dismantle the place and power that evil uses shame to shut its us down. You know the beginning of Romans 8, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The end of Romans. There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. If we were to actually believe even a little itsy bit that there is no condemnation, that would mean we would leave no room for contempt for ourselves or for a spouse. And if there is no division, then we can take the risk of being in an engagement that feels dangerous, that bears threat, but do so with kindness and to do so with a growing sense of safety on behalf of one another. So when you've got busyness, disappointment and shame, oh my gosh, without question, you will not grow in the intimacy you were meant for.

Wow, Dan, that's good. You know, as I'm listening this whole podcast and doing this, I, I get, I just got flooded with emotion listening to you and Nick. And part of it is I appreciate how you're sharing the gospel, the, the, the scriptures, the way of Christ, not as a get us out of here to heaven someday, but how to best live out our human humanity. And I, I so appreciate that. I think that is the message, that is the good news of how to be fully human and how to live this experience in a way that honors ourself and honors other people, which I think ultimately honors God. So I, I just thank you for just putting simplicity and, and simple language and clarity of helping us take what's so amazing about scripture and just applying these pieces for those of us as people of faith. How do we use therapeutic skills to strengthen our marriage? And again, just, you know, biblical, non biblical therapeutic. I just like the term healthy. I think healthy is the new holy. And so what's healthy for us to integrate therapeutically into our, into our marriages?

Well, when we begin to get a vision as simple a phrase as this is, you will achieve what you attend to. Now again, you may not achieve it to the degree you wish or fully as you wanted, but if we don't intend. First, I want to be a contempt free marriage. I want to be a marriage and a partner, a husband whose kindness invites my wife to transformation. You've got a passage in Romans 2, 4 that says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. Repentance being that turn from death to life. I want life for my wife, I want it for me, I want it for us. And the only way is niceness and niceness are not similar. So niceness is an avoidance conflict, kindness Is I will step into your world because I believe such goodness exists in you, and there is more on your behalf. So that's where my wife's holding up the dish rag and saying, are you afraid of dish rags? At one level, it was exposing. Another level it was playful. But she's inviting me to the reality that, you know, when I'm in the wilderness, leave no trace. I believe that deeply in my own kitchen. I don't follow that philosophy at all.

I tend to agree with your wife. But anyway, we'll move on.

No, but do you see?

Yeah, for sure.

When she began to name that, one of the things that she began to do is to say, what was it like for you to be in the kitchen with your mother? And as soon as she asked that question, literally, there was like a veil over my face, like. Like an iron door shut. And I just said, go there. That was not good. So as we began to explore the problem and the larger. Which Nick, you put words to brilliantly before, it opens the door again to this. There is so much more for us to grieve, but also so much to celebrate. Can we hold death and resurrection together? So wholeness, from my standpoint, is, can we grieve together? Can we laugh together? And where there's a failure on either side, there's a failure to enter death, there's a failure to enter resurrection.

You know, sometimes when we use a phrase like in the question Rodney asked about, you know, therapeutic skills, that. That feels like that's otherworldly. That's way too hard for us. We can't do that as a couple. And yet what we're doing in this conversation is we're inviting couples to pull out. What are you feeling? And try to understand where might that be coming from? How does it attach or connect to your story, which really is the work of so much therapy. It's to help someone sit and be attuned to what they're feeling and try to piece together where it's coming from, what's this pattern in their life? And then as that's identified, to practice, as you said, Dan, to practice kindness towards yourself first. And that curiosity of, okay, how did this come to be and where might this have been? Something I unfairly put on myself. How can I let go of that? You know, in another word that I think we use closely with kindness is graciousness. To be gracious to our ourselves because of Christ's grace to us, and then to offer that to our spouse again, I think that's what is the work of therapy is as people are exposing their story and the lies they've believed about it, it's helping them learn to be kind to themselves and work through that feeling. Well, we can do that in marriages. And I think that's what you're presenting is like, hey, as those happens. And I think it's good to remind, too, and you've kind of mentioned this, that it doesn't mean every time we're able to do this or right in that moment, but there are times of reflection. There are times, and if we'll take time for it, we can come back and say, hey, you know, yesterday when I made that comment about you picking up the kids and, you know, you kind of snapped at me. I'm just curious, what did I make you feel, by the way? I brought that up because that's the issue in our marriage as we so often discuss, my wife and I. It's not what I said, it's how I said it. And I can get defensive like, well, you read in. It was like, well, no, if I'm honest, she didn't read into it. There was a tone, there was a look, there was a little word used that I knew it was making her feel something. And when she's able to name it and go, oh, I can own what I need to own, but she's also able to recognize how it connected to other parts of her story or our story. So, yeah, I just wanted to maybe demystify that for some listeners. When you hear a phrase like think therapeutic skill, it's like, oh, we could never do that in my marriage. And I believe, no, you can. You can become attuned to what you're feeling, ask the questions of, why am I feeling this? And then help one another. Be kind and gracious in how you respond in that process of revelation.

Well, you're describing the reality that contempt doesn't have to be like vomiting, cruel, but it can be a raised eyebrow. It can be just a look like, what? What do you want?

What?

And in that, we are in some degree of crisis or espouses. So the incredible courage. I mean, there is incredible courage for you to describe what happened over just a small comment and then being willing to say no, There was something in my voice, something of contempt that my wife just suffered. And even if it's not egregiously awful, it's still enough to create tension. Now, curiosity. So those two words, courage, curiosity, but with kindness. That alone, I will give almost a 98% chance that you, too, will grow in remarkable ways. If those factors are there, so good.

Dan, let me ask you this question. I think you address this in your book. How can you adopt a posture of defiance against the things that divide us in our marriage, that, you know, courage in a direction about those things that are destroying us. Shed some light on that for us.

Becky has her own history of past sexual abuse. I have my own. So we've struggled sexually. How could you not when you have had the kingdom of evil work so hard to create some degree of fear or obsession or violence? So the framework of being able to say we are meant as individuals, but as a couple to look at one another and be able to say, hell, no. Evil brought harm into your life and to mine and hell, if we are going to let it continue to have its place in power, individually and corporately beautiful. But the glory here is we get to say heaven. Yes. And that is we get to create together something of beauty in our children, in our grandchildren, in our front yard, in the way that we have hospitality and the way I cut the lawn. All the realities of creating beauty. So a marriage that begins to say, we've been harmed, evil, work very hard to ruin you, me, and us. It's my enemy. And so I get in and through my marriage, the privilege of being able to defy structures, schemes that indeed would have meant death. And I get to be part of creating something that reveals the glory of the resurrection. I can't think of a better way or anything better to live for than that. The idea of I want to. I want to live my life so I can get to 65, and then I can play, you know, pickleball for the rest of my life. I just want to go. Pickleball's fine, but if that's your intention, all I can say is, you hollow man.

Yeah.

Be around, be aroused. There's a larger life to be lived, including playing pickleball. But where that framework is defiant in the right context.

I love that. Saying no to hell and yes to heaven is just. It's a beautiful way of seeing. Focus what you're against, but really what you're for. And thank you for that framework.

Yeah. So good. It reminds me of the thought that there is an enemy and it's not your spouse. That some of us get so busy fighting the wrong enemy. We think it's something about our spouse, but aren't able to see the ways in which a fallen world has impacted us. Evils come into our story. There is an enemy of our souls that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. And how could we as a married couple see ourselves as co combatants, not against each other, but with one another against those things, even when they're present in our own lives? But to think that I'm not here to fight you, but I do want to stand, and I love that phrase, I want to stand in a posture of defiance against the evil that has tried to wreak havoc in us. Dan, this has been amazing. So many things I'm writing down that I want to come back to and I'm sure our listeners as well. And if we haven't given them enough reasons yet to check out this new book, I don't know what else we can say. But I would love to just hear, you know, as we wrap up our conversation today and you think about the themes from the Deep Rooted marriage and encouraging couples to grow in that, what is some final encouragement you would like to leave listeners with today?

Well, to be honest, I think we've done really well enough. But what I would say is, again, one of the reasons I was so excited to do this podcast with the two of you is that pure desire is such a revolutionary context to create a level of honesty that moves to a level of humility and yet opens the door to being able to literally put, put a sword into the heart of shame and then to begin to see contempt turn to both curiosity and kindness. See what you all are doing both as a podcast and your life and ministry. That's the very soil, that's the kind of integrity, courage, curiosity, honor, growth, delight. So what you do in your work is the very thing I'm wanting people to have a taste of and being able to do in their marriage. So my final words are just, I'm so grateful for what the two of you do.

Thank you, Dan.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And we're grateful to be in this space with you and trying to help couples heal and grow and become more and more who God made them to be. So we would love it if people picked up the book and connected with you. So let our listeners know. How could they if they wanted to follow Dr. Dan Allender? How do they do that and how do they find this book, the Deep Rooted Marriage?

Well, they can look on the Allender, the allendercenter.org or not that I'm fond of Jeff Bezos. Not really I'm fond of him, but you can go to his lovely company Amazon and get the book.

Awesome. And we will put theallendercenter.org in the show notes and encourage you listener to pick up a copy of the book. We're so grateful for your time. Dan. Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you. Thank you both.

Thank you Dan.

And to you our listeners, thanks so much for joining us. If you're a fan of this content, it would mean the world to us if you would subscribe, share it with somebody, leave us a like or review. It helps other people find this life changing content. And if you would like to know more about Pure Desire, groups, counseling or resources, Visit us@puredesire.org and finally, Journey on My friends, you are not alone.