The Allender Center

11/14/2025

Marriage always carries both joy and challenge… but what happens when life pushes you to the edge? When trauma, illness, loss, stress, or sheer exhaustion stretch your relationship beyond its limits?

In this tender and often humorous conversation, Rachael Clinton Chen interviews Dan and Becky Allender to explore what it means to love and be loved through seasons of extremity—those times when the demands of life exceed our capacity to meet them.

🎧 Listen to "Marriage in the Midst of Difficult Seasons" today on the Allender Center Podcast, available anywhere you get your podcasts, and at:

Marriage always carries both joy and challenge… but what happens when life pushes you to the edge? When trauma, illness, loss, stress, or sheer exhaustion...

11/07/2025

We are honored to be sharing space with and Center for Transforming Engagement at this year's CCDA Conference.

11/07/2025

Ever have a day where everything goes sideways and your body just won’t calm down? In this episode, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen explore emotional dysregulation: why our nervous systems spiral under stress, especially with a history of trauma, and how we can respond with mercy rather than shame.

Through humor, real-life stories, and insights from both neuroscience and Scripture, they show that dysregulation isn’t weakness; it’s a signal from your body asking for care and compassion. Their conversation also offers practical ways to tend to your body, mind, and soul.

Listen to "Trauma & Emotional Dysregulation" today on the Allender Center, available wherever you get your podcasts, or streaming at:

Ever have a day where everything goes sideways and your body just won’t calm down? In this episode, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen explore...

11/06/2025

Join us for the Marriage Conference in Atlanta on February 6-7, 2026! In-person and livestream tickets are now available at
🔗 theallendercenter.org/events

Every marriage has a story—one shaped by how we grew up, what we’ve lived through, how we love, and how we protect ourselves when things feel difficult. Over time, those stories can bring connection… but they can also create distance we never intended.

If you’ve been wanting space to slow down, listen to one another, and grow a deeper, more life-giving relationship, we’d love to invite you to the Marriage Conference from the Allender Center.

Over the weekend, Dr. Dan & Becky Allender and Dr. Steve & Lisa Call will guide you through the core movements of a healthy marriage—leaving, cleaving, and weaving—while helping you better understand how your stories shape your connection, your conflict, and your desire.

Tickets are now available, and there’s a bonus if you register early: Everyone who signs up by December 12, 2025, will receive free access to "Stories That Shape Us: The Deep-Rooted Marriage," a 2-hour webinar designed to help you navigate conflict.

If you’re ready to invest in your marriage in 2026, we’d love to walk with you.

In-person and livestream tickets are now available at
🔗 theallendercenter.org/events

-- With Reconnect Marriage Institute, Dan Allender, Becky Allender, Trinity Anglican Church

10/31/2025

If you’ve ever wrestled with the long, uneven work of healing, we hope today’s conversation offers courage for the journey.
Dan shares his recent reflections on the lament of waiting found in Psalm 13 and the persistent pursuit of justice embodied by Erin Brockovich as he rewatched the 2000 film. He and Rachael explore the tension between justice today and the full restoration that is “not yet,” bringing these insights into the lingering impact of past sexual abuse.

Healing after sexual abuse shapes not just your body but your whole affective and relational world. When harm happens in relationships, it distorts your sense of safety, trust, and even goodness.

Healing is not a linear path or a once-and-done process. It’s a lifelong journey of tending to what remains—the physiological, emotional, relational, and spiritual aftermath of trauma. And yet, even in the hard work, there is invitation: keep choosing life, goodness, and the beauty of your own desire.

Every small act of caring for your body, each moment of speaking truth, each return to beauty becomes a protest against despair—a glimpse of the wholeness that is coming. Healing itself is a form of justice.

🎧We invite you to listen to this week's episode, "Psalm 13, Erin Brokovich, and the Debris of Sexual Abuse," with Dan and Rachael on the Allender Center Podcast. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts, or at:

If you’ve ever wrestled with the long, uneven work of healing, we hope today’s conversation offers courage for the journey. Dan shares his recent reflections...

10/24/2025

Healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma is not a simple, linear journey. In this week’s episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Rachael Clinton Chen sits down with Dr. Hillary McBride—psychologist, researcher, and author of “Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing”—to explore the invisible wounds that trauma leaves on our minds, bodies, and spirits.

They talk about:
🌿 How trauma can be reinforced by the very systems meant to guide and protect us.
🌿 The profound importance of witnessing, connection, and radical welcoming in your recovery journey.
🌿 Recovering parts of ourselves that were buried under burdens we were never meant to carry.
🌿 What it means to grieve, to repair, and to show up for ourselves and our communities.

This conversation is an invitation to sit tenderly with your own story, to bear witness to your pain, and to glimpse the possibility of love, mercy, and goodness in the midst of it.

🎧 We invite you to listen to this week's episode of the Allender Center Podcast. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts or stream it at:

Healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma is not a simple, linear journey. In this week’s episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Rachael Clinton Chen...

10/17/2025

In this week’s wise and profoundly human conversation of the Allender Center Podcast, Dr. Dan Allender sits down with longtime friend and former student Michael John Cusick, founder of Restoring the Soul and author of the new book "Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love."

Together, they explore the link between spiritual exhaustion and divine love, and how attachment, or the way we learn to connect and be connected, shapes our experience of God, ourselves, and one another.

Michael shares pieces of his remarkable story: from surviving profound childhood trauma and addiction to discovering the slow, sacred work of healing that unfolds over a lifetime. He reflects on the moments that first revealed divine love to him and later, the painful exposure that became the turning point of his adult life.

Dan and Michael talk about what it means to practice attachment—to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure—and how even our deepest wounds can become doorways into God’s relentless, restorative love.

🎧 Listen to "Sacred Attachment" with Michael John Cusick this week on the Allender Center Podcast, wherever you find your podcasts, or at:

In this week’s wise and profoundly human conversation, Dr. Dan Allender sits down with longtime friend and former student Michael John Cusick, founder of Restoring...

10/14/2025

Applications for Women's Recovery Week are now open! We invite you to join us May 31-June 5, 2026, in Colorado Springs. Learn more and apply:

A Healing Space for Women Who Have Survived Sexual Abuse Women’s Recovery Week is a focused, immersive experience designed to help survivors explore the ways...

10/10/2025

When you hear the words “surrendered sexuality,” what comes to mind—loss, shame, control? In this conversation, you’ll hear a different vision.

In this week’s Allender Center Podcast episode, Dr. Dan Allender is joined by clinical psychologist and author Dr. Juli Slattery. Together, they open up a vulnerable and hope-filled dialogue about sexuality—one that goes far beyond rules or “right answers.”

Drawing from her new book Surrendered Sexuality: How Knowing Jesus Changes Everything, Juli shares how her own journey, through disruption, prayer, and deepening intimacy with God, led her to recognize the unspoken pain so many of us carry around sexuality.
Rather than focusing on behaviors, Dan and Juli invite you to see sexuality as a core part of being human: your body, your emotions, your longing for connection, and ultimately, your intimacy with God.

They also reframe what it means to surrender. Instead of shame or control, surrender becomes a gentle, ongoing invitation into the goodness of God—an opening to more pleasure in life, meaningful healing, and deeper trust in Jesus.

This isn’t an episode with tidy conclusions or quick fixes. It’s an invitation to step into the mystery of sexuality as part of your discipleship journey, and to discover that in surrender, you don’t lose yourself. You find life: a life that is more whole, more connected, and more deeply rooted in the goodness of God.

You can listen to "Surrendered Sexuality" with Dr. Juli Slattery on the Allender Center Podcast at:

When you hear the words “surrendered sexuality,” what comes to mind—loss, shame, control? In this conversation, you’ll hear a different vision. In this week’s episode,...