The Research Behind Narrative Focused Trauma Care®
If you’ve experienced the healing power of engaging your story—through a Story Workshop, Recovery Week, Narrative Focused Trauma Care® (NFTC) training, or a Story Group in your own context—you may have found yourself wondering: Why does this work feel so deeply transformative? What’s actually happening here?
In this special episode, we’re pulling back the curtain on a groundbreaking, multi-year research project that’s beginning to explore those very questions. Dr. Danielle Zurinsky of the Allender Center and Dr. David C. Wang of Fuller Theological Seminary join Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen to share what they’re discovering so far—and why this moment matters.
This work is part of a broader initiative we’re calling the NFTC Model Research & Publication Project. It’s an ambitious, long-term effort to clarify, codify, and formally articulate the core framework of Narrative Focused Trauma Care. Grounded in the decades-long work of Dr. Dan Allender, this project is about more than research—it’s about building a foundation that allows this healing model to be recognized, trusted, and shared more widely.
In today’s conversation, we’re letting you in early—before the publications—because we want this process to be rooted in relationship, transparency, and shared vision. Whether you’re a practitioner, a past participant, or someone simply curious about the impact of story, you’re part of this unfolding journey, too!
And if your own healing has been shaped by story engagement with NFTC, this is a chance to be part of something bigger. You can support the continuation of this growing body of research—fueling everything from the team of scholars and writers to expanded training opportunities and broader recognition in therapeutic, academic, and spiritual spaces.
You can visit theallendercenter.org/give to contribute at any financial level. We are currently fundraising to support the next phase of this project’s continuation. Your contribution will help ensure this work continues—so more people, families, and communities can experience the deep transformation that comes through engaging their stories with courage and care.
Listener Resources:
- To learn more about Narrative Focused Trauma Care® (NFTC), visit theallendercenter.org/nftc
- Danielle references Johannes Haushofer’s CV of Failures, which you can see here.
- Dave references a quote by Robert Stolorow.
- Danielle also references the following research:
- Lim C, Sim K, Renjan V, Sam HF, Quah SL. Adapted cognitive-behavioral therapy for religious individuals with mental disorder: A systematic review. Asian Journal of Psychiatry. 2014;9:3–12. doi: 10.1016/j.ajp.2013.12.011.
- Anderson N, Heywood-Everett S, Siddiqi N, Wright J, Meredith J, McMillan D. Faith-adapted psychological therapies for depression and anxiety: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders. 2015;176:183–196. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2015.01.019
About Our Guests:
David C. Wang, PhD: As Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair for the Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders, David Wang’s academic and applied work focuses on the holistic formation of Christian leaders, inclusive of the formation of emotional health and resilience alongside the leader’s intellectual and spiritual formation. With this expertise, Dr. Wang helped draft the accreditation standards of the Association of Theological Schools pertaining to the spiritual formation of seminary students. He also serves on the advisory boards of the ATS Trauma and Spirituality Initiative and the Global Awareness and Engagement Initiative, where he is supporting efforts to bring together global theological educators to better understand and support the unique spiritual and mental health needs of diverse Christian leaders around the world.
Wang is a licensed psychologist, pastor, and editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology, and serves on the editorial board for the APA journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice. He has procured over $5.7 million in funding as principal investigator of multiple research grants and $12 million in funding as co-investigator or advisor. He oversees the Seminary Formation Assessment Project, a program of research funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust, conducting longitudinal empirical research on the human and spiritual formation of Christian leaders from the Orthodox, Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic traditions. He is also co-principal investigator for the Trauma-Resilient Church Collective Program, a 5-year project funded by the Lilly Endowment mobilizing diverse local congregations to address both individual and systemic factors as they meet the spiritual and mental health needs of trauma survivors. Wang’s research interests include trauma and traumatic stress, spiritual formation and spiritual theology (with special interest in the experience of the spiritual desert), and various topics related to multicultural psychology, peace, and justice. His research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Positive Psychology, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Mindfulness, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Disasters, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, Traumatology, and the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care.
Wang teaches and speaks internationally, maintains a small clinical practice in Fullerton, California, is pastor of spiritual formation at One Life City Church, and serves on the advisory board of the Caring for Clergy Field Guide, Joya Scholars, Speak Your Truth Today, and the Mosaic Center for Spiritual Formation. He has also consulted with the Global Aftercare Program of the International Justice Mission, an international nonprofit organization devoted to ending the global slave trade, and has co-authored their manual on Trauma Informed Care. He has also contributed to and/or appeared on several media platforms and podcasts, including Christianity Today, Psychology Today, Dawn and Steve in the Morning (Moody Radio), the Backstage Podcast of the Billy Graham Center (Wheaton College), and Faith & Leadership (Duke Divinity). Dave and his wife, Vivian, live with their two daughters in Fullerton.
Danielle Zurinsky, PhD: Danielle Zurinsky is passionate about building community and exploring the intersection of psychology and theology. She joined the Allender Center in 2022, and her current role as Research and Evaluation Manager involves the design, implementation, and oversight of qualitative and quantitative research studies as Principal Investigator. Data-driven decision making is her specialty, and she brings to The Allender Center team a sharp eye for program evaluation and improvement, as well as a holistic feedback and assessment approach.
Her background includes a PhD in Psychology from the University of Liverpool and a Masters of Science in Health Psychology from the University of Surrey. Zurinsky’s research interests include patient-centered research, weight management interventions, obesity, eating and addictive behaviors. Her research has been published in journals such as Substance Use & Misuse, Obesity Surgery, and Appetite.
Danielle also brings to The Seattle School expertise in teaching research methods, with an approach that emphasizes practical application and critical thinking, empowering students to integrate theory with real-world scenarios. From her years of supporting journals and scholarly publishing, she is also an advocate of open access and open science.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: I’ve put words to this before, Rachael, that I didn’t get through Algebra one, twice. I failed both times and my math ability rather, shall we say the nader of my intellectual capacity created a complication when I went and did my doctorate because I had done no math work up until I did graduate statistics. And let’s just say it was not pleasant for anyone in the universe. So research has always been one of those places where you go, I am in a foreign land. I don’t speak the language, I don’t know the morays, but I know it’s compelling and crucial. So we’ve got two extraordinary remarkable human beings who are part of the engagement of the Allender Center’s work and research. So I’m going to take a moment and just give the remarkable credentials for these two stunning people. Dave C. Wang, Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair of Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders, Associate Professor of Psychology and Spiritual Formation at Fuller Theological Seminary. David, it is such a delight to have you with us. I know you’re both a psychologist, a pastor, you have been the editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology. If I kept going, we would spend the majority of our time just going through your remarkable credentials. David, welcome.
David: Thank you. Great to be here, Dan.
Dan: And isn’t it true though, just as a side we could be spending the entire 45, 50 minutes on your remarkable credentials?
David: That would be a really boring 45 minutes.
Dan: Well, not, I mean at one level if all we did was just look at them, but we’ll be getting into the question of who are you? How did you do this kind of work? But before I do that, our own Danielle Zurinsky, who is the Research and Evaluation Manager for the Allender Center, who’s gosh, been involved with our facilitators, our certificate program, she has a PhD from the University of Liverpool, a master’s degree in health psychology from the University of Surrey. Do you understand Danielle, doctorates that come from that foreign country are some of the hardest to attain in the universe. It makes American PhDs look like grammar school. So…
Rachael: She’s like, yes, I do understand. Lived that reality.
Danielle: Well, I can’t compare. I can’t compare. I’ve only had the one experience, but I do feel as though I’ve earned it.
Dan: Oh my gosh, at least most of the people who I know, whether it’s in psychology or in theology, who’ve done their doctorates in England, describe it as a medieval torture. And the process by which a level of learning that I’m, again, I’m not trying to compare the two systems, but does require a level of both ingenuity and independence and the capacity to endure British sadism with a certain aplomb, again, inappropriate, but it’s the least in the ballpark.
Danielle: I would say with my program specifically, I’ve been really fortunate to work under professors that I hugely admire whose work still inspires me to this day. So I’ve been uniquely gifted with a really good support team while I was in my program.
Dan: I apologize already to the British systems for my inappropriate language. You were going to say, Rachael…
Rachael: I just before Dan, I’m not taking the interview from you, but I just before we jump in to getting more insight from these brilliant and playful colleagues of ours, I just want to name explicitly from the jump that one of the things we are most privileged by is that they are co-leading a research methodology, researching our Narrative Focused Trauma Care methodology, which is something we’ve been dreaming about for many years. And because of some of our own lack of capacity or even resistance to trying to find language and clarity and structure for what is this work that we’re doing with story work, we can talk about it, we can intuit it, but there’s something really powerful about understanding the real mechanisms at play and how we fit into a larger conversation. So just as we go, want to make sure our listeners have that insight in their purview, that we have been in the midst of some really good honoring, sometimes good wrestling around what is this methodology that we’re bringing into our labor here at the Allender Center and who are our partners and what do we bring to the conversation? So I will turn it back to you. Well, to our colleagues…
Dan: Let’s just say that again, these two human beings to me are both precious. Dave is, I’ll just say to you, Dave, you are one of the kindest men I have met in the context of this complicated world and this complicated field in terms of your ability to live out both the gospel and a thoughtful, in some sense of the word, a scientifically complex understanding of the human soul. So again, we’ll get into the category of research and the reason we want you listening is we live in a world right now where there is so much antipathy toward the so-called elitism of science, a kind of almost throw the sucker out because it complicates our life. Let’s just get back to the simplicity of the gospel. When the richness of research actually gives us so much more acuity to reading the glory of God. So we want you to have a feel for how these unique people work, think, how they got into the field, but also we’ll talk a little bit about what they’ve discovered about the Allender Center. But I just want to start with how did two remarkable human beings like you to get into the world of research?
Danielle: Yeah, Dave, do you want to go first?
David: Sure thing. Well, I never set out to become a researcher or even a psychologist for that matter. My first two vocations were actually in software engineering and in social work. And even to this day, I think fundamentally I’m still a pastor, first, a pastor at heart. Early on, several decades ago during my first stint as a college pastor, I unfortunately encountered a case of clergy sexual misconduct that just totally rocked my world. The community that I belong to, my faith. I know some people use the word deconstruction, and that’s certainly descriptive of what I was going through. And part of the reason why it was so disorienting was because I had been taught a particular kind of theory of change when it came to the Christian life. I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical, might you describe it as a fundamentalist church. And I was taught that all I needed to know was the word of God, and that alone was fully sufficient for everything related to life and godliness. Here I was confronted with this real life embodied circumstance where we had people who knew the word of God quite well and they were capable of doing horrible things and justifying it using the word of God. And early on in my faith formation, that experience bearing witness to that, it planted this seed in my heart, which turned out to be research question that I carried to this day. And that research question is, well, how do people change for the better or for the worse? And what processes do people follow? What are the means by which people become formed into the likeness of God and the likeness of Christ? And how do people heal and recover from emotional wounds? So this long journey led me into seminary. It led me into studying psychology, led me to doing trauma therapy, and it, it’s really anchored almost all of the work that I do up until this day.
Dan: Thank you. Thank you. And I think it’s so true for most of us, there was something of heartache that brought us into the kind of questions that don’t seem often to be invited to be thought about as a process in exploration versus simply an answer to be imbibed and therefore done. So I have been the recipient of, and we have been the recipient of your kind curiosity. Danielle?
Danielle: And Dan and I have had the unique privilege of being able to hear you give a sermon as well. And that was a fantastic sermon. So just to say we’ve been able to play with you in both fields. Yeah. For me, I initially wanted to be a clinician. I kind of knew that psychology was my path pretty early on. And all of the topics that excited me the most in undergrad were classes like abnormal psychology or psychobiology of women. And I remember a friend telling me that if I wanted to be a competitive applicant for graduate school, I would need to get involved in a research laboratory and have some of that experience on my resume. And so I did in undergrad, I joined a cognition laboratory because I really liked the professor and I did pretty well. By the time I graduated, I got a first author publication and I even got a department scholar of the year. And so I think given that it’s important to tell this side of the story too, I was inspired a couple years ago by Professor Johannes Haushofer, now who is now at Cornell who famously published his CV of Failures, if you’ve ever read this? And with these successes, and Dan so beautifully alluded to all of these career successes and noteworthy achievements and things like that. And I want to just also include, I applied to eight clinical PhD programs out of undergrad and got into exactly none of them. And I had to take a year to figure out what to even do with my life. And it was such a humbling and tough year in so many ways. And when someone has a PhD degree or some other successes career wise, I think it starts to look like everything must have come easily for them along the way. But I share that part of my story because I think the failures of others are often invisible, whereas the successes are much more visible. So hear me when I say it’s, I haven’t been an A plus student the whole way. But yeah, when I was deep in the work of trying to find out what my next step could be, I felt inspired to seek adventure abroad. I had some friends that did graduate school overseas, and I got into accepted, I got accepted into my master’s program, and I had a lot of curiosity about the mind-body connection from some of my classes and my own yoga practice at the time. And it seemed like a really good fit to study health psychology. And from there, I graduated and began my doctoral studies at the University of Liverpool where I focused on addiction, eating behavior and weight loss surgery outcomes. And even though doing research studies is often challenging and involves a lot of project management skills and problem solving, I really loved the work because I was able to work so directly with patients and people with lived experiences. And to hear their perspectives and being able to shed light on their underrepresented perspectives and experiences in my work was so valuable to me. And it remains a huge part of what keeps me connected to this work. And the full circle moment that I’m so excited to share is that when I was living in the UK, I started actually listening to your podcast. This was like in 2016, and it was what ultimately brought me to the Allender Center. I thought to myself, if ever a job opens up there, I’m going to apply no matter what it is. And I would walk each day from my flat to the university and hear you both dialogue about topics that just inspired such hope and inspiration in my heart. And it’s wild to me to actually be recording with you today.
Dan: I’m not going to cry, but I feel it. It’s just, it’s such a sweet gift to think about you walking and listening and playing such a crucial role for us. I think in some ways you’re opening up realms to the future that we as those who created this institution would never have had the vision, skills or capacity to take us. And so before we jump in, I just need, as we talk about the research that you have begun with the Allender Center, can you do on my behalf and perhaps our listeners, the difference between quantitative and qualitative research?
David: Sure. So I’m not a qualitative researcher, but my understanding of the differences between quantitative and qualitative is that quantitative research tends to be based out of data that we collect from larger samples. This could be survey data, this can be biological markers, behaviors, stuff that we can quantify and stuff that we can count, and quantitative research, statistical approaches to analyze this data. It’s about finding trends and patterns within these larger sets of data so we can extrapolate, again, trends and patterns within a large set of people. A qualitative research tends to be more centered, not on quantifiable data, but rather with through interviews and getting into people’s embodied life experiences. And the goal of qualitative research is not so much to look at these larger patterns because these larger patterns oftentimes will miss the particularities of an individual’s experience. So qualitative research is wonderful at getting into those particularities because that really brings out a lot of the richness of what people actually go through.
Dan: And am I right to say, Danielle, that’s the work that you have done, something of that qualitative, and why should that matter to our listeners?
Danielle: Yeah, we’ve done largely qualitative studies. We do have one quantitative study that’s going to be a couple years in the making just because with these kind of more numbers-based studies, you do need enough responses to start making some observations about trends and being able to generalize them. So that’ll be a few years in the making. But yes, we’ve sat with people who’ve completed the Story Workshop. We’ve sat with people who’ve gone through our NFTC Level I training and we’ve asked them questions about their experience and for why this is relevant to our folks listening. I know folks listening to the podcast come from all sorts of cities, states, countries. They’re part of different communities and they have vocations from probably just about every field. But one thing that brings us together is the deep desire to care for our own stories and the stories of others with kindness and integrity. And research helps us to identify what kind of care is actually helpful by designing studies that help us dive into the experiences for people who have been cared for. If we systematically explore insights that they share, we can adopt strategies and interventions that are supported by actual data. And stories are important. Obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, you know that’s true, but relying solely on intuition or anecdote can only take you so far.
Dan: It’s so important. I almost want you to go through that again, but I won’t. I won’t. But to capture the importance of that, what you’re saying is y’all have been faithful with what you’ve seen. You’ve been faithful at some level anecdotally to the process of what seems to be central for people’s transformation. But what you’re doing is in some sense going below the surface anecdote and starting to look at what are the root structures, what are the primary core nutrients that will help this beautiful plant grow even better? So in that sense, this is an agricultural process, amendments being put in and clarity as to now it’s a little too much nitrogen. You might want a little bit more of something else. So that’s crucial. You’re helping us refine goodness.
Rachael: And I know Dave, things that we’ve also talked about is, I would love to hear a little bit more about this, but it also provides a level of accountability that is a part of supporting the work and refining the work. Is there more you would say about that?
David: That’s right. And I think doing research and collecting data is one way to verify that something works. And we don’t have to just trust someone’s opinion on this. We can also have more or less neutral third party make observations and verify that it works. And it also opens up, as we talked about just now, the opportunity to explore and examine why something works. And I think of many instances when I’m working with clients in my therapy practice where I think I just landed this bomb that changed people for the better. And then we look back and we ask them, well, why did our time together facilitate healing? Had nothing to do with what I thought it actually contributed to, is totally something else. And research is a way for us to discover that kind of thing too. Sometimes we, as facilitators, we have an idea of what might be going on, but we don’t actually know what’s going on until we ask the person who’s in that process.
Dan: It’s really at one level, very humbling. It’s very humbling. It’s like, oh, can we just go with my theory? And again, not to undermine theory creates a context for exploration, but exploration not only illumens, therefore refines. But I love what you said, Rachael is it also provides an accountability that we can then grow what we’re attempting to do. So what have you found so far with the work that you have done? I mean, again, we’re at the beginning stages, but you both have done so much work already. And again, I know there’s more, but I’d love to hear and love for people to hear what things have you begun to see and discover?
Danielle: Yeah, and there’s more discovery ahead. Dave and I are currently charting the course for our next steps. But so far we’ve researched the Story Workshop. There was an event that happened in August 2024, and we’re currently taking interviews and collecting survey responses for another study focused on the level one training experience. And so we’re in the middle of it, we’re in the messy middle. There’s lots of ideas. We’re exploring themes, we’re looking at the relationships between the themes. And so what I’ll share today are some preliminary key takeaways we found from spending time with this data. These are emerging themes. They might necessarily translate to what will ultimately include in the paper, but I’d love to just share our top line summary as it were. So focusing on the Story Workshop experience, the small group is a key part of the experience. So this event brings together a group of people that come together in a small group to tell a story of something that hurt them and to have that story engaged by their facilitators and by their group members. And in this group, people are coming together to witness one another and to offer their insights and also to feel understood and heard in their own story. And there are some key things that happen in that small group that we’ve learned about from sitting with these folks who participated in our study. So one of them is that the facilitator creates a safe space and a key part of that is that they begin the time by reading their own story. And we’ve had people describe their experience of this as when someone lets their armor down first, it allows you to feel safe and it helps put the other group members at ease showing them what they can expect when it comes time for them to read their story. And another part of creating the safety of that space is that the facilitator offers care for the storyteller in their story. They are for you. They’re participating in this event because they’re for you. They want to get into your story and to be present with you. And importantly, as a facilitator, they also create the containment for the group. They give parameters, they give guidelines, and they use their skillset to make sure everyone is heard and has enough time with sharing their story. And they guide the people in the group about how to engage and give feedback so the group can stay on track to engage one another in a curious, respectful and kind way. So that’s part of creating the safe space that the facilitator is largely responsible for. Another key takeaway that we’ve seen in the data is the witnessing that happens in a small group is impactful as well. This is people hearing your story and you hearing other people’s stories. And several people have shared with me that in feeling compassion and care so easily for other stories, it becomes obvious that it’s harder to access that same care for their own story, and that invites the opportunity to grow more self-compassionate. Another theme, I’ve only got a couple more. There’s a lot I can share, but a couple more. Another key takeaway is connection. When people are listening, grieving with you, becoming angry on your behalf, some folks in the study shared that they felt less alone in their story. Seeing people get angry on your behalf and helps you to make sense of what happened much more than someone telling you like, oh, it wasn’t your fault, or I’m so sorry. And these people in your group are willing to step into your story with you and grieve with you. And most of the people I spoke with said they felt seen and connected to the other members of their group. Sometimes people had similar stories and sometimes they were from completely different ages, different genders belonging to different communities. And when you get a group of people together, you’re going to have all sorts of dynamics because people are complicated, messy human beings. But with the facilitator creating that containment, people are able to get through moments where maybe they were misunderstood and move towards repair and restoring connection with one another. And just thinking about how often that exact skill is modeled or even experienced moving through that repair and restoration, that can sometimes be something that people don’t experience very often in other parts of their lives. Right?
Dan: Absolutely. Yeah.
Danielle: And that relational trust, it builds relational trust. It’s so important when sharing your stories. And the last kind of takeaway, I know we could go so many places with all these topics. The last kind of key takeaway I’ll share and we can interact with it is vulnerability. We know that connection isn’t possible without some degree of vulnerability, and this is one of the most integrated parts of the story workshop experience. From what I’ve been able to observe, like teachers such as yourselves, Rachael and Dan and Wendell as another teacher at the Story Workshop, you all share stories of things that have happened in your own lives as you’re introducing the people attending the event to concepts and frameworks. And the facilitator, as I said before, begins the group time with a vulnerable offering of their own story with the group and then this together with hearing other stories in the group. This gives courage to many of the people I spoke with to be vulnerable themselves. And what happens is the group gets a chance to be a safe place, to be honest, authentic, and gives people a chance to be seen for who they really are.
Dan: Again, that’s such sweet news. It’s what we would hope for. But again, to have something of the clarification of how those elements work. Dave, I’m curious as to what you hear in all that Danielle just put words to.
David: How I make sense of all the rich results that Danielle just mentioned, is that perhaps on a meta level what’s healing about these workshops is that they help us learn how to be in better touch with our own humanity as well as the humanity of others. My favorite definition of a trauma comes from Robert Stolorow, and he says that trauma is what happens when intense emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held. And for these Story Workshops to provide that context where someone’s story can be held not just by one individual therapist, but by a whole group of other people who have experienced profound hurts as well. And it’s about providing that scaffolding to help people build capacity to bear witness to somebody else’s story, to bear witness to somebody else’s pain. And eventually this gets internalized in the form of self-compassion and other rich constructs. But ultimately, we learn how to hold our own story because I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us, the way we talk to ourselves, we’re kind of an ass to ourselves. And when we have that embodied experience where I share my story and the people around us don’t act like an ass and we start realizing, oh, maybe that means that I can be human too. Among speaking more as a pastor, what I’ve seen among a lot of religious communities is that we don’t bear witness. Instead, we analyze, we make judgements, we over spiritualize, we explain, we fix, we do anything but bear witness and hold pain. So this is stuff that we never had a chance to learn how to do, and it’s never too late.
Dan: Well, Dave, over several conversations, one January so ago when you joined us to do some of the work of forming and thinking about how to move in this, you brought up some of the work you have done in other places on ambiguity. And what you’ve discovered there I think has a lot to do with how we hold our own and other people’s suffering. We want often a kind of black and white world. This is right, this is wrong, but there’s much gray, and I’d love for you to put words to that. And then Danielle, love for you if there’s other categories you’ve seen with regard to how we hold ambiguity, where that takes you.
David: Yeah, sure thing. So we published a few empirical studies from quantitative data and quantitative analysis. A lot of my research focuses not only on trauma, but on spiritual formation and spiritual maturity and questions like, well, what are those ingredients that actually cultivate spiritual maturity over time? And we discovered that one unexpected ingredient is this notion of ambiguity tolerance. This was at least within the psychological literature, the closest thing we can find to holding the mystery of Christ, holding the mystery of the embodied life. And we find that there’s something about having a capacity to just not know. And we’re probably still not going to like it, but we’re not going to go, we’re not going to spiral downhill because of it, but we can hold it, we can tolerate it. And there’s something about that embodied capacity that actually is directly and indirectly tied to spiritual maturity and Christ’s likeness. So some of the really fun findings that are possible through quantitative research.
Rachael: I don’t want to take us off track because Danielle, I want to make space for you. But what that makes me think of is in my undergrad, probably my oldest and wisest professor, I mean I think he was 75, he was like delaying retirement. He loved teaching so much. He was my Greek professor, Dr. Roark. He had us in Greek class. We were looking at the passage in Hebrews that talks about losing your salvation, which for Southern Baptist was like, what? And I remember he showed us the 15 different ways you could make meaning of that. And we were waiting. It was like, well, he’s going to tell us the right one. He’s going to tell us which one we’re supposed to believe because our whole spiritual formation was really, this is how and what you believe, and this is how and what you know belong. And I remember this day so specifically we were like, all right, Dr. Roark, what’s the right answer? And he was like, I don’t know. And I remember looking around the classroom at all these 19 year olds, we were all gasping and it was kind of like, oh, he’s lying. This is a joke. He’s going to bring it. And him just saying, so much of our faith is holding things in tension that the very attempt to try to resolve the tension, actually the whole thing falls. And ultimately there’s probably a way that these truths, the way people are interpreting need to come together. So he said, what do I do? I stand firm on the promises of God that there’s nothing that could separate me from the love of God, but I take seriously and heed the warning that there are ways I trouble the Spirit to the point of possible separation. And it’s like there was something about that moment that’s always stayed with me. And I absolutely believe story work has invited me to hold that tension in my own story in those places where I want to come to a kind of resolve that makes I can find a kind of meaning and truth that I can stand on. And I have found so much of not only emotional maturity, but spiritual maturity has been coming to the places where I have a greater capacity to bear attention. And we see this even when Paul uses this language of in community, rejoice with those who rejoice and grieve with those who grieve. And I have found that to be one of the most challenging complexities and ambiguity of being an adult, right? You come into adulthood and you just keep waiting for that season when all the people you love or in a church community, everyone will kind of just be in a season of rejoicing together or be in a season of mourning together and how to hold these places of tension. So as someone who doesn’t often get as much access to the research, ambiguity tolerance is something I’m going to take with me and hold onto.
Dan: Danielle, what have you discovered about that or other domains about what’s required for the human heart to grow?
Danielle: Yeah, so it’s interesting. We talk about ambiguity tolerance, and that would be something that we might identify later on in the analysis. Right now we’re in the looking at things in very, very detailed type phase. But I love what you’re describing about how when you’re introduced a concept, you get some insight. You can identify where it’s active in your life, you can identify where that’s a movement your own heart needs to make. And just having these concepts and getting this language can sometimes be the light bulb moment that you need to take the next step in your story. And that ties into what we are learning from this study is that people find the teaching time to be insightful, especially where new ideas are introduced. And quite a few folks who attended the Story Workshop were already familiar with some of the concepts because they might’ve listened to the podcast, they might’ve attended a workshop, they might’ve read your books, Dan, or engaged with some of our online offerings or what have you. There might be some degree of familiarity. But being at the workshop and having this language when you talk about vows or agreements, that was particularly impactful for people. But just in general, being able to have language for naming the unknown grips that particular events and parts of story have had on one’s life and doing it in a theologically rich space, the connections to scripture and the story of God were helpful for several people I spoke to as well with one person describing their experiences now being able to look at Bible verses in a new way. And that ties to insight, right? And we’ve talked about the small group experience so far, and together with the teaching times, all these experience helped people who attended the story workshop to gain some insight into their own story. People described it as getting a new sense of clarity, particularly after the second time their story was engaged. And that second story engagement is really important because in these groups you have one round of everybody reading their story out loud and having that story engaged with. And then that same story is shared again. And that second engagement allows people to go deeper, to pull out more from the words that were shared and gain a greater understanding of what happened and how it impacted them. That insight, one person described it as having a light bulb moment when that second engagement was happening. And another person described it as surprising, but profoundly powerful. And I think it’s really helpful to describe what people took away from that experience. And kind of tying it back to the wider literature, thinking about the theological goal, richness of that event. Integrating faith when teaching about concepts in the psychological world is an approach that does have support in the wider literature. So we got to locate what we’re doing within the field as well and research into other forms of teaching. It’s called psychoeducation in some spaces such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you’re a therapist, you’re teaching your client about CBT. Research into other forms like that offer that faith adapted psychotherapy protocols can be just as or even more effective than the usual CBT protocols. These are supported by studies by Lim et al. 2014 study in Anderson et al. 2015 study. So it’s great to see that when we’re taking faith into this teaching space where we’re introducing people into new concepts that are grounded in the psychology literature, it’s additive or at least just as effective.
Dan: Well, and in one sense, it gives grounding to enter into the place where there isn’t grounding. In one sense, you’ve got a foundation to enter into the water, and there is ambiguity, but there’s also clarity. And to be able to hold to both, not to in one sense, obscure clarity because you’re just full of nothing but doubt. On the other hand, those who have faith but still will not enter into the reality that we all struggle with. That question of is God good? So that, I love that. I love what you have put words to Danielle in terms of there is insight and clarity, but also the realm to be able to allow that to migrate into the deeper questions that we often are not, shall we say, allowed or honored for asking. So before we end, I just want to hear, to me, it’s so exciting. Where’s this taking us? Where’s it going to go? When are we going to arrive?
Danielle: For me personally, I feel inspired by the movement of taking healing from the individual into the collective. And this is something we talk about in our training programs, the importance of course of pursuing your own healing, but also tuning into the sense of calling that people feel towards engaging in caring for other stories. We’re not just in this work towards an individual model of healing, but rather in a communal, all of creation model of healing. And that’s one of the ways that I understand the kingdom of heaven being both in the now and the not yet. Individual healing to me feels like the now where there are changes we experience in our personal lives where we grow, we forgive, we practice a little more self-compassion, and then not yet is where these personal transformations start to move outward and contribute to the broader collective healing.
Rachael: I love that
Danielle: You know moving towards wholeness means engaging with others, healing communal wounds, and working towards justice and unity. And together this individual and collective healing are something we can experience and co-create in part today, while anticipating a fuller more complete realization in the future.
Dan: Sweet. And David, as one who’s, shall we say, you have more than dabbled your toes in our world, but nonetheless, you swim in a lot of worlds. What do you see with regard to the Allender Center and what this research is taking us to?
David: Yeah, there is quite a lot of research that talk looks into religion and emotional wellbeing, religion and healing. And I think what this vast literature is pointing to is that religion can be both helpful as well as not so helpful in some cases, harmful towards one’s healing journey. And so for me, I feel like the fruit of this research is more of a pursuing a reconstructive vision. So it’s one thing for me to deconstruct and critique and go, these are the unhelpful ways that Christians or faith is brought in. But then I think the more important and more difficult question to answer is, well, without throwing the baby out with the bath water, I mean, how can we lean on our faith in ways that are helpful, that doesn’t retraumatize but actually supports recovery and thriving? And how do we, as Danielle mentioned earlier, how do we do this not just individually, but collectively as well.
Dan: Before we end, let me just see if I can name it in this way. You both have eyes, a taste, a sensitivity to the particular. Is that not true? You enter into the complexity of reality and what reality brings is that honoring and accurate?
Danielle: Aspirational. I really hope so. Yeah.
David: Yeah.
Dan: Well, but I think so more so than I do. But what I’d also say is that both of you, in that kind of deep entry into the particularity of reality also have a capacity to synthesize, to hold things in the complexity, but yet the synthesis into the whole. True.
David: Yeah.
Dan: It’s a remarkable interplay. It’s what I think good therapy does. It’s also what remarkable, remarkable research does. Thank you. Thank you both.