The Allender Center
The Allender Center is an institution housed within The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. Its threefold aim is to steward and advance the intellectual and professional legacy of Dr. Dan Allender, to train counseling professionals and lay workers in trauma and abuse therapy, and to provide hope, healing and transformation opportunities through conferences and workshops.
The effects of abuse are insidious and often hidden in the well forged walls of the human heart. The Allender Center teaches therapists and survivors how to effectively engage stories of harm. Trauma and abuse jeopardizes personal identities by negatively impacting the goodness, beauty, sexuality, capacity for intimacy, and the nature of the human heart. The work of the Allender Center is to engage these issues and teach others to courageously step into the realms of abuse on behalf of others.
The Allender Center Approach to Therapy
Dan Allender’s approach to therapy operates with four main categories with regard to your story:
- God is the author of all story and our narrative bends because God, who loves to author, breathes story into it. Yet as much as God has written into our lives, God is not the author of sin. (Psalm 139:16).
- God has called you to write your own story. Though he has authored it, he also doesn’t tell you your story. He requires and demands that you write with him, that you co-author your story and that you write the story he has for you to live.
- The writing of your story is never outside of the interaction of other stories. You are both a reader of other’s story and a participant in their writing as much as they are to be readers and writers of yours.
- We are not only participating in writing and reading other’s stories but we are participants in translating God’s story into the lives of others, and the ultimate story of God. Ultimately, we are writing God’s story.
