The Place We Find Ourselves

You have a story and that story matters. Your story in your family of origin significantly affects the way you think, feel, and act in the world today. This is why Dan Allender says, “It is time to listen to your story.” What if healing begins by listening to your story? By reflecting on—and engaging—the experiences in your growing up years, you can better understand why your brain has been shaped...

Your body knows things that your enskulled brain does not. Moreover, if you listen, your body will tell you important things—things that will help you heal. Your body is a truth teller. It is the trustworthy prophet from within. In today’s episode, I explain why it’s so important to listen to your body… and how to do it.  Support the show

Friend and fellow therapist Matthias Roberts joins me today to share a very vulnerable story involving triangulation with his mother. How does an adolescent boy answer his Mom’s questions about his homosexuality when Mom is disgusted by it? This is a story about Matthias’ deep love for God… and the torment he felt as a result. We talk about Matthias’ immense hope that God would “heal” his sexualit...

Therapist and fellow podcaster Vanessa Sadler shares a story from when she was 11 years old. As children, all of us needed to belong—to feel “a part of.” If we did not receive sufficient attunement from our primary caregivers, we likely experienced high levels of loneliness. The dilemma is that it may not have felt like loneliness because it was such a normal part of your life. Vanessa talks candi...

I am joined today by therapist Jenny McGrath who is passionate about helping people heal from the damage of purity culture. One byproduct of purity culture is a disconnection from your body and a distrust of your body. If you feel shame about your body, or especially shame about your sexuality, this episode will hopefully help you. For those who want to dive deeper into these things, please consid...

Matthias Roberts joins me today to talk about his book Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned By Religion . Topics covered include: why belonging is so crucial for each of us, how to trust when you’ve been betrayed by others so many times before, and why it’s hard to open ourselves to actually receive care when it is available. 

We pick up with Curt sharing about Cora’s experience in a story group. Specifically, we talk about about why Cora’s intense bouts of panic were her body’s way of saying “something is wrong and needs care and attention.” We also talk about a woman named Cheyney who experiences deep healing as a result of taking in the acceptance and embrace of other group members in the precise moment when she is f...

Curt Thompson returns to the podcast to talk about how we heal from trauma. In short, trauma and emotional pain begin to heal when our stories are witnessed by an empathetic other. Curt shares a story from his newest book about a woman named Cora, who is disconnected from her emotions and finds it very hard to receive care from Curt. Curt’s newest book about suffering and healing is called The Dee...

Jimmy McGee and Rebecca Wheeler Walston join me to talk about how they came to understand the importance of trauma and story engagement. If you want to engage your story in more depth, the Impact Movement is hosting an online event called Hope and Anchor Story Weekend. This zoom event will take place Sept 30 to Oct 1. You can find out more here .

Jenn talks about how she often felt excluded and on the outside during childhood—“I felt so far from people all the time. I felt so far from myself. I was always over-thinking, never in my body.” As she grew into adulthood, Jenn became opposed to weakness. However, something in her broke after having children and not being able to hold it all together. In today’s episode, Jenn shares a story from...

I am joined today by my friend Rebekah, who shares a story from when she was six years old. Topics covered include: feeling like there is something wrong with you but not knowing what it is, self-doubt about how you see reality, difficulty trusting your gut, learning to listen to your body and to trust the information that it is giving you.

Fellow therapist Mary Ellen Owen joins me today to share her journey with sorrow. Like many people with trauma, it took Mary Ellen years to find her tears, years to befriend her sorrow. Although she cognitively knew that grief was necessary for healing, something within her said “hell no” to feeling the unfelt sorrow. In this final episode in a series on grief and sorrow, Mary Ellen shares how she...

I am joined today by Heather Stringer, who has lots of experience creating rituals that heal. Heather begins by describing two rituals: one focused on recovering from sexual assault and the second focused on preparing for a double mastectomy surgery. Heather and I talk about why ritual is so unfamiliar to many of us, and the healing that occurs when we begin to move our bodies in particular ways,...

I am joined by Cathy Loerzel to talk about how to engage another person’s story. Effective story engagement is not a magical skill that some people have and some people don’t. It can be learned. Today we give a preview of some of the principles and tactics of effective story engagement. If you want to learn more, consider joining us on Saturday, May 13, for a zoom conference on How to Engage Anoth...

Jay Stringer joins me to talk about the relationship between our current sexual difficulties and our story in our family of origin. Sexual struggles are rooted in our stories—and, very often, our stories of attachment to our primary caretakers. As Jay puts it, “When it comes to sexual struggles, there are always two story lines at play: there is the story line of your present sexual struggles, and...

In order to heal from sorrow, we need to move our bodies as we participate in rituals of honoring and releasing our sorrow. A ritual is a sequence of bodily movements and symbolic actions performed with emotion and intention for the purpose of healing and transformation. By the end of this episode, I hope you have a good understanding of what a ritual is and why rituals work. And I hope you begin...

This is part 2 in a series of episodes on how to engage our sorrow and grief in a way that brings healing. The focus today is on the four conditions needed to allow us to work with sorrow and grief. First, we need to own that our sorrows and griefs matter and should be taken seriously. Second, we need to gradually move from a posture of contempt toward our sorrow and grief to a posture of compassi...

For most modern people, the place we find ourselves is in a land where grief and sorrow are unwelcome. Most of us do not feel like the people around us can bear the depth of our sorrow and grief. And since we don’t want to risk our sense of belonging—our sense of acceptance—we hide our sorrow and grief. But sorrow and grief are real. In today’s episode, I identify some of the types of sorrow and g...

This episode is a joint release of The Allender Center podcast and The Place We Find Ourselves. We have all experienced hurt, abandonment, or disappointment at the hands of our parents or caretakers, whether it was intentional or not. So much of our beauty and brokenness — so much of what makes us human — is tied to our family of origin. In today’s episode, Dan Allender and I discuss what it means...

I’m joined today by theologian and author Pete Enns, who also co-hosts a podcast called The Bible for Normal People. Although we talk about quantum physics at the end, the focus of our conversation is “What do you do when you experience something that calls into question your understanding of who God is and what God is doing in the world?” Pete calls these experiences curveballs, and he suggests t...

God created our hearts, minds, and bodies to heal. When the conditions are right, healing will occur. Therefore, it’s important to clear away the things that block the right conditions for healing. Today I discuss four of the most common obstacles to healing: minimizing your story, spiritualizing the bad things that have happened to you, self-contempt, and the frenetic pace of your life.

Last year I saw an Instagram post asking people to share stories of Bible verses that had been used against them. The comments section was devastating. I read story after story of how the Bible had been used to do immense harm. The verse that was most frequently mentioned? Jeremiah 17:9, which says, “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” In today’s episode I take a close look a...

Connections between brain regions lead to a healthy and stable brain (and a healthy and stable life). Trauma prevents these brain connections. This is known as fragmentation. In today’s episode, I explain how trauma leads to fragmentation in the brain and why fragmentation makes you feel unstable in your day to day life. I then suggest that when we feel unstable, we are drawn toward theologies and...

Pascale Wright joins me today to share a very vulnerable story from her childhood. The temptation is to view her story as one of neglect… but it’s not. We cover a lot of ground today, including: Pascale’s ambivalence about longing for care from her therapist and being afraid of his care at the same time, how our family of origin story plays out in the client-therapist relationship, how our family...

Today’s episode looks more deeply at the spiritual abuse KJ Ramsey suffered at the hands of Christian leaders. We begin by talking about the relationship that many Christians have with their emotions. Drawing from her story of spiritual abuse, KJ talks about the pull to silence parts of ourselves in the name of belonging. We each have a deep desire to belong… and the fear of exclusion sometimes ke...