“Make Sense of Your Story” with Adam Young, LCSW

Today, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen welcome longtime friend and Allender Center Facilitator Adam Young, LCSW, for a deeply moving conversation about the unexpected plot twists that shape our stories—and how they can become sacred invitations to connection, healing, and transformation.

Adam, who is a counselor, author, podcast host, and an NFTC Certified Instructor & Facilitator with the Allender Center, joins us to talk about his new book, Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything.

He vulnerably shares about a life-altering moment that brought him to his knees, and ultimately, into deeper communion with God. Together, Adam, Dan, and Rachael explore why revisiting the painful parts of our stories isn’t a detour from growth, but the very path that helps us make sense of who we are today and imagine who we’re becoming. Whether it’s the story of our family of origin, our bodies, our culture, or our relationship with God, Adam offers practical and grace-filled ways to approach our histories with kindness instead of shame.

Join us for today’s conversation to consider how you can engage your past with even more courage and kindness—and to discover freedom, healing, and hope along the way.

About Our Guest:

Adam Young is a therapist who focuses on trauma and abuse, and the host of The Place We Find Ourselves podcast. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Caroline and two children, a daughter (14) and a son (11). Adam is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with Masters degrees in Social Work (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Divinity (Emory University). He is also certified in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Adam is an Allender Center Fellow, and enjoys mountain biking, skiing, soccer, and windsurfing.

Related Resources:

• If you haven’t yet, be sure to get your copy of Adam’s new book, Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything, at adamyoungcounseling.com or order it on Amazon.
• Adam references Becky Allender’s book, Hidden in Plain Sight, which you can order here.
• Check out previous webinars with Dan Allender and Adam Young, including “Exploring Triangulation in Your Family of Origin” and “Sexual Abuse and the Dynamics of Shame.”
• Get a free, guided exercise to engage your story: We believe that stepping into significant stories in your own life will open up a desire to better know and reveal the story that God is telling. That’s why we’ve created a free resource to help you deepen and further your engagement with your story through guided reflection and writing exercises. Download it today at: theallendercenter.org/story 
• Join a Story Workshop: If you’ve been doing some personal work—maybe through journaling, therapy, reading, or even listening to this podcast—and yet still feel like there’s something missing… you’re not alone. Our stories were never meant to be engaged in isolation. That’s why participating in a Story Workshop with the Allender Center can be such a powerful next step. Learn more and register for an upcoming Story Workshop at: theallendercenter.org/workshops 

Episode Transcript:

Dan: When we invite you to think about a new book, there’s always a sense of what are we getting you into? And this is one of those conversations where I just want to say, oh, we’re taking you into some good stuff, good stuff. And we have the pleasure, Rachael, of having our dear friend and colleague.

Rachael: That’s right.

Dan: Adam Young. Adam. Greetings and welcome.

Adam: Thank you. It’s good to see you both. It’s good to be here.

Dan: Well, we are here. It’s been out for a few weeks, but I still want to say this is a brand new, gorgeous book. Make Sense of Your Story: Why engaging your past with kindness changes everything and all I can say again is I’ve been through this book several times now, and it is just one of those sweet, sweet gifts of being in the presence of a master storyteller who’s inviting me not just to story, but to my own story. And you can say, come on, you’ve done this before. And the answer is, this is a gift that always brings you back to the fact that your story has to be entered and reiterated, told and engaged again and again and again, not because it’s tedious, but because each and every time there is something in the heart that comes to know more, not only of oneself and others, but ultimately of the goodness of God. So again, thank you for the labor to write this book. And so just to jump in, how are you doing now that it’s been launched for at least a few weeks?

Adam: I’m doing fine. I’m thrilled that it’s out in the world. I’m proud of the labor, which was really two years ago, not this past six months. So that’s just the cycle of producing a book. And it is very meaningful to me when I get a social media message or I get an email from someone who’s read the book and they’re letting me know how it’s affected them, that gives me a sense of nunc dimittis, the Latin for “I can depart, I can die.” I’ve done the labor that I was called to do and it’s moving people and there’s just, for me, there’s few things as sweet as that.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. Rachael, I’m curious what it was like for you as you went through this labor of love.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, I mean, Adam, I know others have said this about you and to you, but I just so deeply appreciate the way in which you take actually fairly complex processes, but weave them together with such accessibility and not just in the way in which you share information, but the way in which you bring your own story to bear as a vulnerable template showing just as much as you’re telling. And I think also helping people understand because for better or worse, we are children, especially in the West of the Enlightenment. And so this sense of story, we still in our imagination, think of as something outside of us or just in our thoughts or our imagination, not something that’s deeply embodied. And so I was just really grateful for the ways in which you brought science to bear and get into a lot of the brain science that has to do with attachment and trauma and how we’ve made sense of our stories. And I just feel like you and who I know you to be also really came through in your writing, which is very fun because sometimes people write very differently than maybe you experience them. And I love it when someone comes through in their writing in a way that I think people do get to encounter you. So really grateful for this labor and I can feel and see and taste something of your labor to bring these words to bear.

Dan: And the two of us, Rachael, have a distinction, a kind of almost eternal honor that very few people have. And do you know what that is?

Rachael: No, I’m kind of scared.

Dan: Adam, could you speak to what the two of us have done, what we’ve shared?

Rachael: Okay. I’m there now.

Adam: You are the only two people that have interviewed me on my podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves. Rachael was the person that I asked years ago to engage one of my stories. I had engaged on the podcast, other people’s stories, and it just seemed fitting and appropriate to have somebody engage one of my stories to do what I was asking guests to do. And so I invited Rachael and she graciously said yes, and I still remember her email back to me when I sent her the story that I intended to read. She said, I feel a fierceness rising up on behalf of the boy in that story. And I still remember that. And from that moment I felt like, okay, this story is going to be held well, and this is a woman that’s going to engage me well. And there are a few things that I need more deeply than for my stories, the pivotal stories of my life to be witnessed and to be engaged. Well. And so Rachael did that. And then Dan, you interviewed me about my book a short time ago, which was quite a ride.

Dan: Well, I don’t think we tend to promote our accolades and honors, but this was really sweet. It was really one of those great gifts. And I feel the same today. Becky said, are you okay this morning? I’m like, yeah, I’m good. She said, how much caffeine have you had? I said, only one and a half cups. And she’s like, well, wow, you seem pretty activated. I said, well, I get to, and I talked about what we get to do this morning with you. So to jump in, I want to just engage a few questions that arise from your book, and I’m going to read a few sections. Your life story has a number of plot twists, so you better be thinking about the plot twists in your life, Adam Young. “Just like all great stories, A story without plot twists is not even a story. By plot twist, I mean that you are headed in a particular direction and have energy toward that end, and then bam, something happens and your trajectory is abruptly changed. All plot twists results in some measure of disorientation. It is in the seasons of disorientation that we find out what we actually desire and what we’re really made of.” So plot twist, dear friend, what were the plot twists that brought you to write this book?

Adam: I was a pastor in 2008. I had gone to seminary after going to social work graduate school. When I went to social work graduate school, I intended to be a therapist, but when I graduated, the one thing I knew is that I had no idea what I was doing. And so I decided not to do that. And I became in time a pastor, and I loved pastoring, and I had a very traumatic experience of being falsely accused and removed from my position. That’s what I mean by the word bam. Like I was headed in a direction. I had hope, I had vitality, I had a sense of purpose. And everything changed on September 26th, 2010, in a nanosecond. And I don’t think that’s very uncommon. It might not be as extreme for some people, but we all have, I think, an experience of we think we’re headed in a good place. Maybe even the healing journey has taken, it’s gotten some momentum for you, and then a betrayal or an experience of immense powerlessness or something enters your life, blindside you, and all of a sudden you’re disoriented, you’re reeling, you’re dysregulated, you’re in what the Psalmist calls the pit.

Dan: And again, to be accused to know that level of betrayal, there are a lot of people, we’ve all worked with a lot of folks who let their heart turn, turn away, shut down, give up, become hard. What’s the plot twist that kept you, I’ll use the phrase, “in the game”.

Adam: I was out of the game for a season. I had a white shag rug that I brought into our living room, and I was prostrate on it for many hours over a six month period of time while Caroline, my wife was working, she was pregnant then we had a very newborn, and I was emotionally disengaged from the marriage, which put a big burden on her. So I was taken out and we’ve had to experience a lot of repair because of how difficult that was for her. I have a lot of kindness and compassion for what my body was enduring. I mean, it wasn’t just the trauma of the betrayal, but it was the loss of my church community, which was for me, our entire community. I mean, this is Rachael’s wheelhouse. The byproduct of spiritual trauma is immense disorientation and a lot of self-doubt.

Rachael: Oh yeah.

Adam: And so I was taken out and the place I found myself was in the Psalms, and I read them, I relied on them. I found the language of the Psalms gave me language for what my heart and body was suffering, and it allowed me to stay engaged with God. Look at times, at times I had rage at God. There was silence, there was distance. But something in my heart, and I don’t know the answer to the question of why some people continue to turn to God in the midst of such heartache and horror and others do not. I don’t know. I just know that those stories matter.

Rachael: Sorry, it’s like I’ve heard remnants of part of your story, but I have never heard it told in that way. So something’s landing in my body on your behalf. That feels like new insights and new heartache even I would say new horror and yeah, deeper gratitude, that as we’re talking about plot twists, that you found yourself in the Psalms and that feels actually really connected to what you’re inviting people to in looking back at the past. Because for so many of us, the past holds moments of great joy and delight and moments of profound heartache like you’re putting words to. And there is such a common misnomer that people still try to hold onto that time heals all wounds, and that if you just get, if you just move or you just join a new community or you just get some distance from that story, certainly some of the body dysregulation can find its coping mechanisms to not be as heightened, but it’s not like we’re on a linear track and we just leave our past behind it comes with us. So I find myself even with more questions like, well, what was the next stage of the plot twist? Because you kept going. You have a public platform. This didn’t become something that made you even in your heartache and agony and terror hide away your face. So what happened?

Adam: Oh, I went to Recovery Week two shortly after my removal, or maybe it was one I can’t remember. But I went to Seattle to spend a week with other men that had experienced sexual abuse. And one of the things that you, Dan, said to me with regard to this particular removal from church was, I’ll never forget the sentence you said, I don’t think they’ve accused you well, Adam, but they’re putting their finger on something that needs to be named. And that opened up for me the reality that anytime we’re accused of something, very often there’s, there’s something at play. There’s a little bit of truth, it can be 1%, but boy, if we can engage that 1% without shame, and here’s the subtitle of my book, “with kindness”. If we can bring some kindness to the ways that our wounding has played itself out in our current present life and often gotten us into trouble, and even at some level led to us doing harm to others, if we can grapple honestly with that, with others who do not hold contempt for us, the possibility of transformation increases like tenfold. But that is a tall order because like you just said, Rachael, my body wanted to shrink, hide, never do it again, never enter a church again and withdraw from life. And there’s immense wars with hope and immense wars with, will I reach, I’m holding out my hand. Will I reach relationally again or not?

Dan: Yeah. Well, you have a phrase that comes later in the book that as I went through the book, the first time, privilege to have had a pre-publication copy, and there’s a lot of markings. Let’s just say there’s a lot of ink that has bled into your book, but this one had underlines, it had the star, it had the notation, NB, nota bene. And it’s a simple sentence. “Tears are a form of confession.” And again, I can never, even my writing or other writings, I never know what sentence is just going to knock me off my chair. And I hope in anything that I write that there are three or four sentences that were worth the book. There’s a lot of sentences in your book that very vastly is worth every penny a person puts in that sentence, took me out, took me down, took me up, took me around. And I just kind of want you to, in this context, talk about what tears have been for you as a form of confession.

Adam: The word confess in the Greek is homologea. Homo meaning sameness. Lego meaning speaking. So to confess is to speak sameness with God about what has been true. So we confess our sin. We’re speaking sameness with God about ways we’ve harmed others, but tears when they roll down my cheek. When I am able to, in a bodily way, experience sorrow and grief about the ways I have endured heartache and harm. I am speaking sameness with God about what has been true of my story, but I’m not speaking it with words. I’m speaking it in an embodied way. And there is something about our bodies that proclaim announce truths in a very deep kind of, we would say limbic way, neurobiologically, and that’s what tears do. But please understand, for all the listeners, it took me years to find my tears. Years.

Dan: To a point where you had to practice.

Adam: Right? I understood from the Narrative Focused Trauma Care Certificate Program that the Allender Center does. I participated in it many years ago, and they told me, the people that stood up front and talked, they said, grief is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So it was clear to me that tears and that grief were kind of like a key to healing, or at least that’s how I was interpreting what was being taught. And so I went into one of my groups determined to cry. And so I read my story, my group leader, a woman named Susan Kim, and the other people in my group listened and I found tears. But when I was done reading, Susan looked at me and she said, Adam, I’ll never forget this. I see your tears, but they seem disconnected from the boy in the story. I was enraged and I felt seen she wasn’t wrong, and I knew she wasn’t wrong. And what she was putting her finger on is that for me, in order to cry, I had to think about something else than the story I was reading. For me, I thought about my therapist, Andy Ide, who was such a deeply meaningful person in my life, and when I was able to think about my connection with him, I was able to cry. But Susan was saying, your connection is not to the boy in the story. So look, it took me years to connect to the boy in my stories.

Dan: And I know I have a sense, so I’m not asking entirely out of the realm of mere curiosity, but every good listener should be asking, how come? What’s the plot twist that kept tears so far and so foreign.

Adam: There is an immense vulnerability in tears like I wrote, tears are a form of confession. It is the acknowledgement that my wounds happened that they’re still affecting me, and we don’t want to acknowledge that. We don’t want that abuser to still be affecting us today.

Rachael: That’s right.

Adam: And so there is a vow inside. There is energy of I am not going to give that jerk one more tear.

Rachael: Well, and I think you talk about this so well in your book and also in all of the other ways in which you’re bringing this good labor to people. And we also turn against those young parts of us. When you say confession and that sense of sameness, we don’t want to feel what they feel. We don’t want to actually offer kindness to them because we still feel, even as adults, so indicted that they experienced that pain at all even though they were children, or we feel shame or we feel contempt. So it’s like to get to the grief and the kindness and the honor and the heartache of what they really experienced or the rage even of lament, we have to weed through so many other emotions that actually oftentimes feel a little more like, okay, I can stay… If I feel anger and judgment, I can stay safe. If I feel like shame, I’m at least not going to let anyone look at me. I’ll make sure you can’t look at my face. So there is such a, it’s a pretty full room there in those places.

Adam: And the other thing I would add is that tears, sorrow, grief opens me to my need for comfort. And I am very uncomfortable with my very godly human need to be comforted by others. That’s a realm that I don’t want to address partly because of my personal story, but I think that’s partly true for everyone, regardless of whether you had an enmeshed, emotionally jacked up relationship with your mother, and comfort is an ambivalent experience for you, like I did. Comfort. What is your relationship to your need for comfort from others? As a 55-year-old woman, as a 45-year-old man, we tend to think children deserve comfort. Adults shouldn’t need it. Baloney.

Dan: Well, I was having a conversation a few days ago with an acquaintance friend from our church, and his marriage is blowing up, and he was expressing a great deal of anger about the harm he was experiencing with his wife. And at one point I just said, are you an agony? And he, enraged, said yes. And I said, I don’t know how to join you in this agony because to join you just in anger, feels like cursing your wife. Are there tears inside of you? And at that point, I was glad, oh boy was I glad we were in a local coffee shop, not terribly crowded, but enough people that if he chose to strangle me, there might be someone who would come to rescue my ancient body. What’s going on, that anger seems to work so much more effectively to engage our rage, our anger, our sense of betrayal than what you have named about tears?

Adam: I can feel big and powerful and in control when I have my rage, when I have my tears, when I connect to the word. That’s a great word, Dan. When I connect to the agony of my life, I am suddenly in a posture of needing care, comfort witness, presence of others. I feel the word is vulnerability; comes from the Latin volnero which means to wound. So vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. When I’m connected to my sorrow, I am open to your wound. You can wound me. I’m in a very vulnerable position, and I need your care. And that, especially for people that have a history of trauma, is an incredibly precarious and ambivalent moment.

Dan: Yes. And so we’re at this bind of the very thing that you most need, you refuse because it feels like it’s going to kill you, be it shame, be it more betrayal being set up and be in some ways, as I interacted with this friend, he passed quickly the statement of, yeah, I know something about abuse, which means he knows something about grooming, which means he knows something about comfort having been turned against his body. So that reality of the very core of the movement of the heart to receive comfort becomes the very thing that we despise. And that war, again, I love what you said earlier, I don’t know. I have no clue how it’s some choose to engage the Psalms and therefore engage the one who sings the Psalms and whom the Psalms are about, Jesus. Yet on the other hand, so many have experienced in the place of Jesus, meaning the church, a absolute eradication of their story. And so the binds are just so severe. And I love what you’ve done, Rachael, particularly addressing these issues with regard to spiritual abuse. Thoughts about how one, hearing this, who’s in the of that war? What is it that you would want to say to them?

Adam: I would want them to listen to the desire in their heart. There’s a Greek word I just love. It’s the word splognos. It’s the word for intestines. And Acts two and Judas Intestines come out, it says Splognos. But the New Testament writers turn it into a verb. And anytime it says, Jesus is deeply moved with compassion and troubled, it’s some version of this word splognos. And what I have found to my utter astonishment is that some of the most wounded people I know, some of the people that have endured immense trauma, there is something in their splognos, their guts. There is a fire in them that says, I want release healing, freedom, vitality, joy again in the land of the living. Now, how that bursts into flame for somebody in the midst of such horror and torment in the wake of abuse and trauma, I have no idea. I just know that I get to see it firsthand front row when I work with people. And that’s one of the deepest honors that I have. And it keeps me believing that the spirit of God is at work in the world in some of the darkest places that I am aware of.

Rachael: Well, and I think it’s ultimately, I’m going to preach to myself here. So I’m just confessing that I’m going to say something that I am deeply wrestling to believe in this season, or at least to surrender into in a way. But it is really the heart and mystery of the gospel, like a God of all power, whose greatest strength, greatest birthing power is God’s vulnerability and God’s capacity to not only possess that vulnerability, but to act into it like coming in the form of a baby in this world that says something to me about God’s belief in our human possibility to nurture innocence and vulnerability unto life. And when we are personally, it feels so risky right now to enter vulnerability when the world, the powers of this world, especially in our nation, are turning to a kind of worldly power that stands in direct opposition. That says empathy is a sin. That says vulnerability is disgusting, you know so far from the gospel. It feels so dangerous, and it feels like, no, I got to power up in all my more violent defense mechanisms, and how can I trust other people? How can I let my grief and agony and sorrow take up residence in my body? How will I be able to fight because I’m ready to fight and how will I protect my people? How will I protect other vulnerable people? And there’s just something about the exponential power of receiving the beatitudes. Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. They will be comforted. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. That’s such a paradox. And there’s something in me that just has to hold on to the profound mystery of the gospel. That exactly what you’re saying, Adam, the power of the spirit is being made manifest in the most impossible places, not in the sense of, I think how I was raised in a more deterministic theological frame that was like God’s going to bring you to a place of horror and heartache and surrender so that God’s power can manifest. But a sense of like, no, the God of the universe promises that at every turn we are not alone. That the darkness is light to God. There’s literally nothing on this earth, nothing we could even imagine or experience that could separate us from the love of God that is birthing new life in impossible places. So I’m going to try to remember that in my own war with comfort, which definitely has some of that sense of being exploited, being groomed for sure also has that sense of being orphaned and neglected. And I have to be able to comfort myself. If I can’t provide my needs, there’s certainly no one else that’s going to come. And to be in both of the poles of that polarity is sometimes such a burden. But I do believe there’s something of the power of even collective limit of our story. But it’s hard to get there if we don’t have permission in the very particular personal places that our body holds those truths.

Dan: Well, that, yes, and I don’t in any way mean to be unkind. Are you comforted by that proclamation?

Rachael: Yes. In some way I feel an invitation stirring. I feel my own resistance, but I feel my, like Adam, you were saying, a deep longing to be comforted and knowing that to be comforted with our task today. And I think even for you as therapists and for me as a pastoral presence that doesn’t pastor in a traditional way who doesn’t pastor a church, it doesn’t feel like, okay, so we get comforted and then it all works out. It’s like we get comforted to stand up and be a presence of comfort with ourselves and on behalf of others on this side of eternity when the need for comfort will remain. It will always remain. But it feels like such a defiance against misuse and abuse of power against cruelty, against abuse, and the ways in which abuse rewires our bodies. So it just feels comfort, feels very, like a very defiant… vulnerability feels very defiant. So yeah, I can get behind that.

Dan: Well, and the glory to me on many levels of what you’re inviting me to is to proclaim the gospel to myself that there is something in me that deeply believes, and there is something in me that does not believe, and that process of engagement. And if that’s a helpful category for folks, we are meant to proclaim the gospel to others. But in some sense, we are our first audience to engage the very thing that we believe and don’t believe. And I think, Adam, as you have engaged the plot twists and your own tears, I didn’t ask you this before, but how has your book been part of redeeming your own heart?

Adam: Well, anytime you write or do something publicly, you are putting yourself out there in a different way. And you’re doing it on behalf of… May this result in freedom, release, vitality, renewal for someone who’s on the other end of the book or on the other, the listening end of the podcast. And that for me at some level is repentance because there are so many reasons, and there are good reasons for me to say never again. I am not putting myself out there. I’m going to, the biblical language is I’m going to hide my gifting under a bushel because it costs me too much. And I think that is true. I really want to underscore this for everyone, no matter what your gifting is, you have gifting it is different than mine, but why do you dismiss it? And to what degree are you putting it under a bushel?

Dan: And your next response to not just why, but what’s going on that we would want to hide, hide, cover, cover, that gifting.

Adam: To manage envy.

Dan: Say more.

Adam: There are a few things I think as cruel as contempt driven envy. Envy is one of the most powerful in my experience, both personally and professionally, energies at operation in the world, which means in your family and in your organization and wherever you find yourself. And the nature of envy is that something in you is wanting to be like they want to consume something about you, and they want to make you pay for the very thing that they love about you. And if we’re honest, we all bear envy. We have envy. I know what it’s like to envy. But for most people, they can write on a three by five card the things that they envy, the people that they envy. What they can’t do is write on a three bike, five card who envys them and for what?

Dan: Yes, yes. So we are only too aware of our own consumption and in many ways desire for degradation, harm of the other, at least some degree. But what keeps us from being open to addressing that other side of the three by five card.

Adam: Well, it’s this sense of if they knew me, they wouldn’t envy me because I know how hard my life is. I know how much doubt I have. I know how much insecurity I have. I know how much, how needy I am, and if they knew that no one would envy me. But they don’t know that. They just see your public facing persona. And by public facing, I don’t mean you’re a podcaster, an author. I mean, you’re a community group leader. You had the women’s ministry. All of us are doing something in our respective communities and others see your gifting. And sadly, what you want is you want that gifting to be enjoyed, delighted in, and you want to be one among many at the table. But in our culture, so often, instead of being one among many at the table, there is a, I’m going to make you pay because God has gifted you in ways that I am not fond of and that I don’t feel like I have been similarly gifted in. And so when we’re not clear about our own beauty, when we won’t own it, when we minimize it, when we dismiss it, when we discount it, we tend to be filled with envy for others. And if you’re listening to this and you are aware of your own envy, what I would say is that the single best paragraph written about that comes from a book by your wife, Dan Becky Allender, in Hidden in Plain Sight, where she simply makes the point that envy disguises an ache so deep that we are not inclined to look at where our ache is in our past story that is resulting in the envy in our present life. And so her invitation is the same as mine. It’s to look back at the ways your heart aches because of the ways you were not well loved and delighted in as a boy or a girl, and to therefore have some compassion for the envy that you have now, cause it makes sense.

Dan: I’m very fond of that author and very fond of that particular portion of what she wrote. And again, not to step away from what we’re talking about, I remember when she wrote that, and I remember reading that, and I remember the complication of, what’s the ache, my beloved that you’re beginning to name. And I remember the look in our eye, we’ve only, I think it was probably married at 42 or 43 years at that point. It was the look like you haven’t been married to me long enough to be able to get the access to answering that question. It doesn’t matter how deep our love is for one another, there is still this exclusionary… I will not invite you into those raw, dark, deep, and in some sense, shame-filled worlds. And that’s in part of the beauty of your book is you give much of your story and you put words to some of the war of what we generally call triangulation. But the bottom line is the war, the war of your heart with your mom, and some of the implications of that. Before we end, how did doing the work of writing, because you put words to this before I’ve been in your presence, but how did writing help you engage more what you were naming?

Adam: I found tears when I wrote the autobiographical parts, I shifted into a different place in my body, not every time, but at times. And I was just with that 5-year-old, that 10-year-old, that 15-year-old. And I was newly aware. Again, this is, we need our stories to be told over and over and over. I was newly aware of the cost, the suffering, the heartache, the binds that that boy was in. And I had some kindness. Now look, it’s taken me years to find kindness for that boy. But in the writing of this book, there were many times when I was writing about my own story where I just had compassion and kindness for what it was really like for me as a boy. And that’s very healing for the human heart.

Dan: Oh, it’s huge. Well, in ending, I want to read another glorious paragraph. “You will not experience freedom from the places where you are bound until you name what is most true about your story. In many ways, healing and growth are simply a matter of getting closer and closer to naming what is truest about your story.” And that is truest about the heartache, truest about the lover who has most deeply pursued you and relentlessly intense to invite you to life and to more life and to even greater life. And to say it as simply as this book invites the heart to life makes sense of your story, Adam Young. Adam, thank you again for our friendship. Thank you again for your collegiality. But most of all, thank you for your kindness.

Adam: Rachael. Dan, it’s been a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Rachael: Yeah, indeed.