Preview:
Dr. Dan Allender: And for many of us, we have learned to temper our desire to a point where just getting along, being, you know, “I love you. Yeah, I love you. Yeah, just not deep enough.” So do you want more? And if so, what would it mean without accusation or judgment for you both to be able to express we are meant to have more than what we have today?
End of Preview
John Fuller: That’s Dr. Dan Allender, and he joins us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I’m John Fuller, and we’re so glad you’re here.
Jim Daly: John, marriage is such a special bond. We feel that, right?
John: Mm.
Jim: I mean, we fall in love, we make that commitment, we’re gonna do it till death do us part. And it is a beautiful gift from God. Um, sometimes it’s like shaving off the rough edges, right?
John: (laughs)
Jim: I often talk about how marriage can be the way to making you more like the Lord, that is selfless, loving, and kind that so often comes with, uh, you know, taking off the barnacles of our selfishness and all that. But we’re gonna talk today about truly how to know yourself and know your mate and know how to love well, which is always a good thing.
John: Mm-hmm.
Jim: And we have one of our favorite guests, Dr. Dan Allender here to help us think it through, apply biblical principles, psychology, all of it working together so that we can honor the Lord in our relationships.
John: Yeah, and I’m, I’m looking forward to this conversation as we especially dial into kind of how our past affects the present in our marriages. And, uh, Dr. Dan Allender is well respected in the counseling community and, uh, he and his wife Rebecca are the co-founders of the Allender Center at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Uh, Dan’s a very popular speaker. He’s written a number of books. He’s been here a number of times. Uh, the book that’s going to really form the foundation for our discussion today is The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight.
Jim: Dr. Dan, welcome to Focus, back to Focus on the Family. Good to have you.
Dr. Allender: Oh, Jim, John, so good to be with you both.
Jim: Let me ask you about this. I’d like to ask those that are trained, I mean, this idea of, of theology and psychology. So many people struggle with that concept that those two can be in the same room together. And I just wanna tee it up for you to say, as a Christian, as a person who studied psychology, we don’t have to run from it. We just need to put it in a biblical context.
Dr. Allender: Absolutely. A good, a good point to think about that is leaving your mother and father, core to what it means to indeed be married. But leaving was not a physical reality in, in the ancient near East. It, it wasn’t a financial. It was psychological. That is the issue of loyalty. So when we’re dealing with Scripture and we don’t think about the human condition and the human heart, we’re always going to miss something of the depths of what Scripture offers us.
John: Mm.
Jim: You share a story, uh, in the book right from the get-go about you and Becky, your wife, meeting, and then your second night of marriage. I mean, it is actually humorous, but it probably didn’t feel that way.
Dr. Allender: Oh my gosh. We were on the way to a free cabin that-
Jim: (laughs)
Dr. Allender: … one of the elders in our church gave us, which we had no money.
Jim: This was the honeymoon.
Dr. Allender: This is the honeymoon. And it didn’t have running water, which is really problematic. But nonetheless, we got stuck, uh, in this very old car on the way up this mountain. And we’re literally eating the top of our wedding cake because we’re starving and we don’t know if anyone’s going to pick us up.
Jim: (laughs) This is terrible.
John: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Allender: Uh, it’s just one of those moments where you go, everyone gets in a jam if they’re married. And it’s gonna happen. It just happened sooner for us.
John: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Allender: We did end up having someone drive by and seeing us in our desperation. And they took us to the very cabin. And the gift of it was, given that we didn’t have running water, they invited us to come and shower and eat and dine with them. We had a great honeymoon.
Jim: (laughs) So it turned out pretty good.
Dr. Allender: (laughs) It did.
Jim: You got the best of all worlds.
Dr. Allender: But it was horrible sitting in the car going, “I think I may end up freezing my young wife.”
John: (laughs)
Jim: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever shared this publicly-
John: Oh.
Jim: … but Jean and I, on our honeymoon to Cabo, we both got sicker than dogs day one. So our entire 10-day honeymoon was basically holding hands (laughs) lying in bed, sick as we could be, fighting over restroom privileges.
Dr. Allender: (laughs)
Jim: And that was it. I mean, that was our honeymoon. So sorry, hon. We’ll have to make that up at some point, right?
Dr. Allender: I guess so.
Jim: I should have done that a few years ago. You know, Dan, we do something, uh, called Hope Restored. It’s a four-day intensive. It’s amazingly successful. These are people that many of whom have signed divorce papers or have them in hand, and this will be the last thing they try. And it has a 80% post two-year success rate. So they just do a phenomenal job in about 36 to 40 hours of intense counseling to help these couples kind of reorganize how their hearts are and what they’re thinking. But in that context, um, you know, they start with this concept that you once really loved each other.
Dr. Allender: Yes.
Jim: You once made this commitment to each other, so it’s possible to get back there. How does that, how does a relationship go from, “I do,” to, “I do not want you ever again?”
Dr. Allender: It, it is a heartbreaking path, but it almost always is littered with contempt.
Jim: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Allender: That interplay of, again, if you’ve ever had an adolescent in your family, you certainly know, you don’t need me to define contempt. You know that raised eyebrow, the, the eyes that widen, the ju- the voice that just sort of like, “Really?” Um, it’s a way of bringing judgment. So in some sense of the word, we have in very small but profound ways cursed one another over many, many, many decades that leads to a kind of contempt for one another. So contempt is the killer of intimacy-
John: Mm.
Dr. Allender: … killer of trust, killer of the ability to actually want something new with one another. So when you begin to deal with how did contempt corrode our marriage, you’re now in the realm of looking at the interplay of lust and anger as it’s been played out over a long season. Now, can you open your heart to looking at what seems very, very difficult and that’s the log in your own eye?
John: Hm.
Jim: Yeah. I love the way you bring that back to the simple, obvious messages of Scripture. I mean, just that it’s rooted in murder and, uh, adultery. I mean, wow, making that connection that that is the, the motivation of our flesh. And that’s what God warned us about, right? I think one of the most profound stories I’ve heard in reading your book was when you were on a ski trip with Becky and your kids, and she got in your face about something. I mean this, if you’re sipping coffee and half listening right now, stop and listen to this story because I could see myself in this story.
Dr. Allender: Well, we were not a ski family and, but Placid, a publisher gave us a ski pass when we lived in Colorado. I’m cheap and I’d never skied before, but it was very clear we are going to become a ski family, whether we like it or not.
John: Hm.
Dr. Allender: Uh, and we were about third season in and our girls had to, wanted to go to lunch early and-
Jim: (laughs)
Dr. Allender: … and it’s now Becky and I and my son Andrew, who was probably eight at that age. It was an early part of the season, kind of icy, scary. And he had had a bad fall the season before. So he was a little, uh, terrified. He didn’t wanna go down. At one point he fell down and just said to his mom, “Go get the car.”
Jim: (laughs)
Dr. Allender: Well, that would not be very workable. So I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and finally Becky looked at me and just said, “It’s not working. Why don’t you go on down? I’ll get him down.” I went down about 300 yards and at that point I saw her in her kindness and encouragement urging him to go down and it wasn’t working. So after about 10 minutes, I had to go back up 300 yards-
Jim: Hm.
Dr. Allender: … take your skis off and trod back up. By the time I got there, I was hot, but anger-wise, cold. Put my skis on and I ma- I moved toward her and all of a sudden, she moved in front of Andrew. I saw exactly what she was doing. She was protecting her son. And at that moment, I just mouthed to her the word, “Move.” And she just shook her head, not angrily, just slightly, no. And I got in her face and I s- and I was about to say, “You couldn’t get him down. I’ll get him down.” And she put her hand on my heart and she said these words, “I know the men who have humiliated you.” I, I mean, I, to this day, I, I’m so shocked that she spoke those words kindly, tenderly, but very directly. And then she said, “And I know that’s not what you want to do to your son.”
Jim: Yeah.
Dr. Allender: And I don’t know why that moment more so than any other, tears came. I mean, uh, flashing through my mind at speeds of the, of light are so many of the stories of where there was humiliation.
Jim: Hm.
Dr. Allender: So she brought me to my story, brought me face to face with moments of shame, humiliation. And then in one sense, she’s bringing me clearly to the point of, I’m about to do that with my son.
Jim: Yeah.
Dr. Allender: And then she put her hand further against my heart and said those words, “And I know that’s not what you want to do.” At the moment, it is what I want to do, but at the deeper moment, it is absolutely not what I want to do. And she saw the tears and she did what I think to be one of the greatest gifts of my life. She pressed a little harder and she said, “You’re a good man,” and then skied away.
Jim: Wow.
Dr. Allender: That combination was really life transforming. Now, can I say there have been another hundred other examples? Yeah-
Jim: (laughs).
Dr. Allender: … I wish I were mature from not only that single event, but it was a gift to have a wife who can tell the truth but also bless.
John: Well, we’re privileged to have Dr. Dan Allender with us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. And, uh, we’re talking, just starting to talk about his book, The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight. And we’ll encourage you to get a copy of it from us. Uh, the details are at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.
Jim: Dan, I, I think what that does for me, it raises the question and the comment that we tend not to fall far from the tree. You know that old saying?
Dr. Allender: Oh, I do.
Jim: And you know, I had a, not a good childhood. My dad was an alcoholic, and I’m always thinking about those things. Okay. I want to fall far from the tree because I don’t wanna be under that shade.
John: Yeah.
Jim: Right? So I’m cognizant of it, but boy, it’s amazing. It’s like a magnetism that you struggle to get away from attitudinally. And it’s those learned behaviors. And I, I guess the question in there is only through the grace of God can you demagnetize from those really negative impacts that may have come to you in your childhood, from your dad, from your mom, whatever your story is. In that way, um, I mean, you and Becky had quite the meet and marry story. Just speak to that generally and then get into the falling far from the tree or close to the tree.
Dr. Allender: Well, let’s just be blunt. Uh, we all live east of Eden, which means you’ve been living in a world where there has been inevitable harm. You cannot grow up even in the best Christian family in the universe with parents who aren’t sinners.
Jim: (laughs) Right.
Dr. Allender: So that means your mom and dad struggle with lust and anger. Whether you like to admit it or not, it’s just biblically true. So no matter how good they were, there is some degree of what we can call trauma. What’s the word trauma mean? It just means a wound. There has been an injury you have suffered in the context of the world you have lived in. And some of us, like you, like me, have capital T trauma, uh, some degree of physical, emotional, sexual harm, or in the presence of people who, because of their own addictions, did harm they may not wish to have done, but indeed they did.
So the question of what were the stories of being in the presence of an alcoholic father? My mother fits, if folks know the term, borderline personality disorder, which means she was chaotic, she was cruel at times, hilarious at times, but that could be within one minute. And I lived in profound uncertainty every day of my life.
Jim: Mm.
Dr. Allender: So our world’s had a lot of harm, but can we own that harm as to how we learn to manage our trauma? I learned to fight. A lot of people learn to run or flee.
John: Mm.
Dr. Allender: Some people learn to freeze or just to be so nice to others they’re trying to avoid. If we can begin to learn that those structures of how we learn to survive were formed before we even had language, before we even had intentionality or consciousness of what we were doing. And those patterns don’t just wisp away because we came to Christ. They have to be engaged, dismantled, and in some ways deconstructed to be reconstructed.
Jim: Yeah. You know, your story is probably very helpful to the rest of us in terms of where you were at, what you were doing. Your mom did remarry and then your stepfather really didn’t know how to cope with that. So your mom leaned on you emotionally.
Dr. Allender: I, I was her surrogate husband. And that’s not uncommon in a lot of families where one child gets chosen to be sort of the solace and comfort for a parent who has their own bad marriage. And so that reality of, I was a young adult when I was five and six. Uh, I was taking responsibilities that no child-
Jim: Mm.
Dr. Allender: … should ever have to bear.
Jim: Mm.
Dr. Allender: And it did make me at one level very responsible. Another level, the only way I could keep my mother from devouring me is to do things that upset her. So I was really good at getting in trouble. Uh, I was brilliant. I got thrown out of school a lot. Uh, I was arrested a number of times.
Jim: (laughs) A PhD. (laughs)
Dr. Allender: I, I had my doctorate before I got my doctorate in terms of causing trouble because when I caused any kind of significant trouble for my mother, she wouldn’t speak to me for three or four days.
Jim: And that was good.
Dr. Allender: Oh, it was like a trip to the Bahamas. But do you see how that-
Jim: Yeah.
Dr. Allender: … begins to develop a kind of like I’m against, I’m conflictual, I like conflict because that’s what I was brought to do in the context of my family.
Jim: Well, and the simple fact that conflict brought you comfort.
Dr. Allender: It did. And, well-
Jim: I mean, think of that-
Dr. Allender: Yes.
Jim: … marrying Becky. Now let’s go.
Dr. Allender: Well, and that Becky had an almost opposite family with a lot of cruelty, a lot of-
Jim: Mm.
Dr. Allender: … uh, you know, if she spoke about something, she would be critiqued at a level that was just so ungracious. She learned to keep her mouth shut. Well, here you’ve got a man who talks a lot and a woman who’s willing to listen. It was a marriage made in heaven until it was not.
Jim: (laughs)
Dr. Allender: And when that moment comes where you go, we’re both living out something of our own past trauma. It looks fine because we love God. We, we’re living according to His scriptures, but we’re not dealing with what it really means to leave our mothers and fathers.
John: Hm.
Dr. Allender: We’re not dealing with the baggage, the brokenness that we bring into marriage because we look pretty good on the surface until those issues began to actually disrupt any level of joy.
Jim: Yeah. And I think most married couples would identify with that. Even generally healthy married couples, you’re gonna deal with some of that fallout from childhood, et cetera. In fact, you identify four issues that act as weeds within the marriage. Again, I love that metaphor, you know. Those that you identified was lack of delight, loneliness, contempt, and feeling stuck. And I’m sure, again, many couples, maybe not all, but many couples will identify with one or more of those. Speak to the issue of lack of delight. When I hear that, what I feel is I need to entertain, I need to perform. That probably shows something about me. (laughs) But what do you mean by lack of delight? And who delivers that delight?
Dr. Allender: Well, uh, if we go to the Sabbath, which I know is the strange first thought, what, what is God doing when He’s resting? Uh, He didn’t need rest. He’s delighting in His creation. And there’s something about what marriage is to hold that we are meant to look at one another and go, “Wow.”
Jim: Boy, that’s good.
Dr. Allender: “Oh, wow.”
Jim: I like that.
Dr. Allender: And yes. So that interplay of awe and gratitude, that’s the core of worship. Therefore, it’s the core of what we bring with delight.
John: Hm.
Jim: You know, a common one that we get here, uh, in our counseling time and hearing back from people listening and calling us, and I would say, again, not to be stereotypical, but a lot of wives feel desperately lonely in their marriages. Um, I think most men don’t comprehend what does that mean? I mean, “We have dinner together, we watch TV together (laughs). We’re spending time together. That’s together.” And the wife’s going, “It’s not. There’s something deeper I’m yearning and needing, and it’s not coming in the marriage.”
Dr. Allender: Yeah. Uh, let’s just put it again bluntly. It’s because men don’t have the courage to name what their wives have the ability to say. And that is everyone is lonely at some level. Uh, you were meant for the very presence of God, and until you are before God and you become as He is, there will always be a sense in which we are not home yet. So loneliness is that sense of homesickness. And there is no homesickness quite like a marriage where you know joy at times and then things are just bland or bad. So if you’re not lonely, you’re not alive.
John: Hm.
Jim: Huh. Wow. That third one, and then it, I’m gonna follow up with this and just talk about how we break the shackles of these things, but contempt you’ve talked about. When you talk about shame and humiliation, um, boy, that comes through in the Scripture. I mean, when, when people are shamed, not good things happen. And in that regard, um, it’s such a powerful negative thing. I’m thinking of, you know, the parent that was shamed as a child. It feels to me like shaming is one of the things that is most difficult to change. If you were shamed as a child, you have a propensity to shame as a parent, as a spouse. Speak to the severity of it, and then how do we begin to unshackle shame with our mouth and our tongue?
Dr. Allender: Well, if you were ever on a third-grade recess, uh, you know shame, uh, because it’s part of cliques. It’s part of the reality. W- you went through junior high and you don’t know shame? Uh, the experience of shame is exposure, that raw sense of “I don’t fit. I’m not wanted. There’s something not good about me, or even worse, I’m bad.” So when we have to face shame, we feel shame at a level that we work very hard to annul it or deny it. So every marriage is an opportunity for shame to be indeed engaged in a way in which, how has shame shaped your heart? Because I know it has. We’re not talking about a few people on the earth. We’re talking about it’s a reality to every human being.
Can we now see that shame often is how, what sets up why we use contempt because contempt becomes the way we blind ourselves or blind others to see our own vulnerability. And so contempt almost always is the smoke that reveals the fire. What’s the fire? It’s shame.
Jim: Hm.
Dr. Allender: So when I’m using contempt against my wife, it’s primarily because I feel vulnerable, I feel stupid, I feel like I got caught. And on those moments, rather than having the humility to say, “I, I feel really vulnerable right now. And I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying I need a moment. I need a moment to be able to just come to myself again and then engage you with a different heart than what I’ve tended to do in the past.”
Jim: Yeah. The fourth was feeling stuck, but I wanna kinda combine this because back to the shame issue. If you’re a spouse married to a shamer, what do you do? And if you’re the shaming spouse, what do you need to be aware of in terms of extinguishing or getting to the fourth, which is this feeling stuck attitude? ‘Cause those to me interplay with each other.
Dr. Allender: Oh, totally so. It’s brilliant. Uh, let’s just say until you name again, I feel shame right now. But you do see how shameful it feels-
Jim: Mm.
Dr. Allender: … to admit you feel shame?
Jim: (laughs) Right.
Dr. Allender: So it’s easier to occlude it, hide it, shadow it versus being able to go, “Right now I need to tend to my heart because I know I’m feeling exposed, I’m feeling vulnerable, I’m feeling enraged or I wanna shut down.” So naming as much as we might underscore this a million times, it’s 90% of the battle. So if you can name, I, I was trained in shame and indeed I use shame, or I have been in one sense, the receptacle of my husband or wife shaming, then the question is, how did you learn to eat what was never yours to devour? So you begin to have to mess with how we fit in this dark dance.
Every marriage has certain dark dances that we sort of glide into and do it pretty much without a whole lot of thought. But being able to name what’s your first step, what’s your second step? Third, fourth, fifth. Once you get three rounds of knowledge of how we fight in a way that doesn’t tend to be productive-
Jim: Hm.
Dr. Allender: … you begin to be able to go, “What’s triggering you?” And a lot of times what’s triggering is shame. So back to your excellent point, we’re stuck often in that dance because we’ve not had the courage or the honesty to name what’s actually true about one another, about myself and about you. I’ve got the log, you got the spec, and when you’re speaking to me, you got the log and I’ve got the spec. And if we were to actually engage that truth, I’m telling you, most conflicts would actually lead to curiosity, not to combat.
Jim: Yeah. Man, we, uh, have covered a lot in day one, but I do wanna come back for another day and talk further about this. We’ve kinda, I feel like we’ve ripped the Band-Aid off and we’re talking about all the symptoms, but we need to give some solution.
John: Mm-hmm.
Jim: So let’s stick around. I hope you’ll come back and listen to part two of the program. And remember, you can always download the app-
John: Mm-hmm.
Jim: … so you have access to the full library. It’s a great way to do it. And, uh, and we will continue, if you’re willing, to talk about this great content.
Dr. Allender: Delighted to.
Jim: Yeah. Uh, the deep-rooted marriage, it’s possible. It takes vulnerability. It takes all those things that we in our flesh tend not to want to do. But if you want to have that deep-rooted marriage, get ahold of us.
Uh, if you can make a gift of any amount, we’ll send you Dan’s book as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry. If you can’t afford it, we’re into helping your marriage. I mean, our goal is to help you thrive in Christ. That means your marriage, your parenting, everything we can do to help you, we want to do that. We feel that is our calling. And if you can’t afford it, just let us know. We’ll send it to you. We’ll trust others will cover the cost of that.
John: Yeah. And Jim, let me share this note that we received from a listener named Valerie who said, “I’ve been struggling in an unhappy marriage for many years and praying for God to help me. When one morning I turned on Focus on the Family, the program spoke directly to some of the struggles I was facing, and I immediately began thanking God. It was exactly what I needed to hear, right when I needed to hear it. Thank you for providing relevant biblical encouragement that helps couples better understand the challenges in their marriage and find hope for moving forward together.”
Jim: Wow, that is so good. And I wish I could, uh, just take each one of our donors, listeners on a trip where I meet people like Valerie-
John: Mm.
Jim: … and they say the same thing. “I was listening to the program, and it spoke right to my heart.”
John: Yeah.
Jim: It is so, so good, and I wanna say thank you to Valerie for sharing that with us. I love hearing how God is using the ministry to touch lives. And when you give to Focus on the Family, you’re helping make moments like that possible, uh, providing biblical hope and practical resources to people like Valerie who are looking for help in their marriages, their families, their parenting. Man, you can make a difference, so please donate today.
John: Yeah, be generous when you get in touch. Request Dan’s book, The Deep-Rooted Marriage, and, uh, ask about Hope Restored. Uh, Jim mentioned that earlier. If that sounds like a marriage-intensive program that you’d like to participate in, we’d be happy to tell you more.
You’ll find all the details at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast, or give us a call, 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. And thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I’m John Fuller, inviting you back next time as we continue the conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and once again, help you and your family thrive in Christ.
