Marriage in the Midst of Difficult Seasons

by on November 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.

From everyday frustrations to the deep pain of seasons of loss, physical suffering, and ministry fatigue, Dan and Becky reflect honestly on how marriage can expose both our best and our most broken parts. 

If you’re wondering how to stay connected when life feels impossible—or how to find beauty and intimacy on the other side of pain—this episode is a gentle invitation to hope.

This episode engages the topic of some difficult topics, including pregnancy loss. Listener discretion is advised.

Related Resources:

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. Marriage can be challenging as a baseline, but when we’re in seasons of extremity, the toll on a marriage can sometimes be devastating. And when I’m thinking about extremity, really, that could mean so many different things depending on what you’re dealing with. It could mean the loss of a job or the loss of a loved one. It could mean a season of illness or raising small children or a spouse taking on a role that’s really demanding and requires different levels of taking on more. I mean, really when we’re talking about extremity, it’s a season where the demands on our life consistently exceed our capacity to meet them. So in many ways, trauma and places where we’re traumatized can put us in seasons of extremity. Even if on the outside looking in, we would say, well, that’s not that big of a deal. So I felt like it would be really important to have this conversation with people that I really respect and who have been in this for a long time, who have humor and humility, but also a lot of wisdom. Now, one of them is my regular co-host who today is in the seat of being interviewed, Dr. Dan Allender. And the other one is a really, actually like another co-host of the Allender Center podcast, Becky Allender. So welcome to you, my revered guests today.

Becky: Rachael, thank you so much. Great to be with you today.

Dan: Yeah, and I love having you be, shall we say fully in this seat, but I don’t know if I can fully comply because look, we begin talking about extremity. We know our culture is in the throes of not just extremity, but extremism, and that is part of the water that we swim in. And as we take into account the disruption of what we’ve named before, there has been an outpouring of hatred, just a dark day that we all live in. Then when we have things like our internet not working, or at least in this case that we’re sitting in our son’s house using his internet because it didn’t work… Elon Musk, you have failed me. Nonetheless, let’s just say there are always complications that feel like they take at least my level of maturity to the end.

Becky: You can do it, Dr. Allen. I know you’ve got it in you.

Dan: Ah, the goodness of playful and kind, mockery. We’ll come to that category soon.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, and I think another layer I would add is I remember at our rehearsal dinner, Chelle Stearns stood up and gave a really beautiful honoring speech. But in it she said to Michael and I, you’re both really intense people, and I think another layer of extremity is in some ways our intensity. When you have two very intense people doing life together, even without circumstances or seasons of extremity that can make a marriage feel somewhat extreme.

Dan: Now you’d be talking about yourself, right?

Rachael: Yes. And maybe other people in this podcast recording studio room. I’m guessing no one has ever said to the two of you, you may be a little intense.

Dan: What about you, Rebecca?

Becky: Yeah, I think I can match your intensity. How could I marry you and not? That would be a recipe for failure.

Dan: Again, go back to extremity and it’s such an important point that you’ve made at the beginning, and that is small matters can trigger so much more than what it seems actually connected to. And I think that moment of feeling like comfort, convenience, things that we live on with predictability, all of a sudden spiral out of what we would usually use the word control. And with that, often if there’s not some fairly immediate resolve where there is that addition of something interminable like it’s going to go on and we don’t see a way of returning to the center of how we live. Having those two factors, I think bring us to these deep, deep, deep hard questions that feel at times really just plain existential, am I going to make it? How am I going to make it? What’s going on? I don’t understand with all that it can get triggered by internet working headphones not working, and all of a sudden I’m feeling significantly out of control.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, and I would imagine, I mean, I know based on being your friends, but you have known many different types of seasons that would have put you in these waters of extremity. And what would you say, maybe you could give some narrative or some story around a particular season. It doesn’t have to be recent. It could be, but it doesn’t have to be where you were navigating some of those waters and yeah, what were some of the wounds that then either came up and were compounded or were exposed and revealed that in some ways can become, can become an opportunity for even deeper growth together, deeper intimacy if we have any understanding or awareness of what’s in the water?

Becky: Well, I mean, there’s so many to choose from, and we didn’t really talk about this ahead of time, but I think I would like to use one yesterday with Dan’s shoulder, and he came back from the chiropractor who we’ve gone to for 15 years or even longer. We really, really respect him. We both have been treated by him. And Dan came home and said, Jerry said I could lose my arm with this.

Rachael: Oh my goodness.

Becky: So for about three hours, cause then you left. We weren’t together. I’m like, I guess we can do life without an arm. And I guess there’s prosthetics that you could wear. It’s not death. This is how I operated for a good three hours. Wow. We didn’t know that. We heard that there was some calcification around his shoulder replacement, and he’s been in pain for quite a while, but we never thought of losing an arm, meaning you’re going to go around with just one arm. And then I see Dan again. He’s been on the internet. He’s like, I think Jerry meant I might not have the use of my arm. I’m like, this is just life. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t fall on the floor. I’m like, Jesus, I guess if this is the plan, you are a God that can be trusted. Father, Holy Spirit, we can do this. We will have one another. You’ll be alive. So I think that we just do that stuff together, and I don’t know whose fault it is, but I want to say it’s yours.

Dan: Well, and the extremity of, did I mishear when I was talking with him? We had had a report from an x-ray that there is significant damage around where I had a full shoulder replacement. And as he’s using terms that I don’t know yet, I’m looking later obviously on the internet to see what I actually am having to face. He’s using a phrase, you could lose your arm. So the process of going, I was too much in trauma at that moment to even ask a basic question, what do you mean lose the use of or the actual arm?

Becky: And then I guess I’m so used to you and trauma and life together. It’s like, wow, okay, I’m going to double up on my yoga time.

Rachael: I actually think this example is very revelatory about how much extremity you’ve both had to navigate in your own personal lives as children and what you’ve known and survived in your marriage. Because there’s something about you don’t collapse in this moment. You both move toward a radical acceptance pretty quickly. I mean, Becky, within moments you are moving toward, alright, how will we survive this? It could be worse, Dan, you’re hearing you could lose your arm. There’s not room, there’s some freeze. But also then you go to the internet to get the information that you need. I actually think this is quite revelatory of how much you’ve had to survive.

Becky: It’s like, alright.

Dan: And I think about things like that. I recently had surgery, went through multiple returns to ER and to the doctor’s office to get a catheter to relieve the urinal agony, all that to say

Becky: Three weeks of that.

Dan: As we’re going through this, I’m amazed at what I consider to be the radical care and graciousness of my wife. I’m having to cart around a catheter and a bag and actually do a conference carrying it with…

Becky: That little yellow thing you could see through. Because sometimes it was not just yellow as red cause it’s healing and oh, well, this is how we travel.

Dan: Again, I don’t want to claim that we’re good at dealing with extremity, but I would say that there are elements to which we have seen the goodness of God and the land and the living. And yet it’s insane to be doing some of the things that we have done. Somebody asked, how are you doing this carting around your catheter? And I said, well, it’s better than when I had a kidney stone and I had to teach and I was on Demerol and they duct tape me to a chair. That was really very hard.

Becky: This just, that’s in a different city. I’m not sure how well you were on the airplane returning home. But yeah, there have been so many stories of Dan on the road, like something stuck in his eardrum as he’s on an airplane and can’t teach for a bit, but

Dan: Has to go through an ER. I know everybody, I think everybody’s got crazy stories, let’s just say that. But when you’re in the middle of extremity, like I was for the period of carting my catheter, the power of your care grounded me in a way that scripture, prayer, but your presence, your face, your kindness, just being willing to honor the amount of pain I was in, but also honoring me with a level of your pride on my behalf for handling it better than I normally have past, I don’t think its in the past. So it’s so odd to say that having somebody be with you in the middle of any level of calamity, I said to you at one point that I don’t have the capacity in this particular horror, my shoulder hurts, my body is seemingly breaking down. But your humor and kindness was a grounding that allowed me in some sense not to have to bear everything that I felt. So I think that was and is a huge issue. But also add, I’m drawn to extremity, I do create extremity. I find myself in the middle of it. And that has been a weight that you’ve had to bear.

Becky: Yeah. Well, I haven’t known you to be anything but that, so that’s good, you didn’t change on me. And I think growing up with parents from the Great Depression, they had to shovel coal in the morning as a child or be in an orphanage. Yeah, I am a pretty tough little girl cause that’s how they raised all of our generation, I feel like they just had to be tough.

Rachael: Well, and you have cultivated this kind of gritty kindness and gritty humor over long seasons. And I’m wondering maybe because I just had my sixth wedding anniversary and we’re coming out of our own season of certain kinds of extremity. I mean we were married for four months. I moved across the country, became a stepmom. We were married for four months before the pandemic hit… to be in your first year of marriage, be doing all day life together every day, and a massive kind of terrifying disruption while trying to educate children who are now home for school. We had a baby, we now have a 3-year-old. Michael completed a PhD program in the past six years. And I mean certainly there’s more stuff there, but I feel like, yeah, I guess I find myself curious. Do you remember seasons where in some ways the extremity did feel like, are we going to make it, can we make it through this? And how did you, because it’s so easy to turn to contempt because part of what’s happening in any kind of extremity is we’re moving into our fight, flight, or freeze style of relating the ways in which we’ve coped. So Becky, when you say, yeah, I have some grit, my parents we’re raised in the Great Depression, there’s some part of me that can just rise to the occasion and why not? That’s a way you’ve survived your world. Dan, your extremity is a way you’ve survived your world. And I think when we have moments where maybe the extremity is hitting us both in some ways, we can’t find ourselves to be able to be a steady presence for the other, it’s so easy to turn toward contempt because it’s like Michael and I laugh, he was actually, because his PhD is in marriage and family therapy, which is always fun when you’re like, well, what would you tell a client who was presenting in this situation? And he was drawing me his little emotionally focused therapy… I think it’s Sue Johnson. And he was like, yeah, because when you feel under stress and extremity, you present as angry. Even if that anger is actually connected to grief or connected to fear, it’s like you get angry. And he was like, which triggers my fear and shame response. So I go underground and I get avoidant, which increases. Then you feel disgusting and your shame gets triggered, which increases your anger, which then increases my avoidance. And we get in this kind of extreme cycle of not only are the circumstances triggering now in the way we’re responding to them, we’re triggering each other and we have found, yeah, the one way we can disrupt that one simple way is like, alright, what are the stories that have shaped you? What are the stories that have shaped me? Can we actually even in a moment of hilarity pause and be like, wow, we’re just triggering the crap out of each other. We have to find some way to ally together because we’ve got to navigate something bigger. And I’m just wondering if a moment comes to mind maybe early in your marriage or in the middle part of the past few years where you found you actually had to come to a new way of being together in order to make it through to the other side. And what did that look like? What did you learn? What did it invite?

Becky: Boy, that’s a hard one. At the moment, my mind’s racing. Do you have something that comes to mind right away?

Dan: I have about 20.

Becky: Well, I mean…

Dan: I can give you a menu. And honestly, I started thinking about how we failed to engage. I failed to engage during the number of miscarriages. I thought about what it was like when you began working with trafficked girls on the streets of Seattle and what it did in our sexuality, what it did in the context of your own sense of heartache with regard to what men were doing. But also I was the man who happened to be sharing a bed with you. And so the reality of we’ve had periods that we have not done well and there has been a distance or disengagement. I’m thrilled to be able to say we’ve always eventually come back. But there have been some rough periods, certainly starting what was initially called Mars Hill Grad School. There were multiple betrayals friendships that we lost, days, weeks, months, where we thought the school would collapse. So I mean…

Becky: Going to bed at night, I remember one night, well, with the waiting for something from the state of Washington and we went to bed not knowing if the school would be existing when we awakened.

Dan: I’ve given a menu.

Becky: Yeah. Well, I think just recently in this training that you were teaching for trauma, what is it? Training? What’s TICT stand for honey? Trauma Informed Coupled Therapy. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t until then that I really understood that a lot of the reasons why you would yell a lot as a child, as a teenager, at your mother was to keep her away. I didn’t know that was the ground that you grew up in the soil that caused you to be someone that would raise your voice. Thankfully, both my parents raised their voices. So you weren’t that scary to me. But it wasn’t pleasant. But then, I don’t know. I mean, we’re still finding things out. Who knew that was your mother? That this was a pattern?

Dan: Yeah, I think that I was teaching, and again, it’s sad to say that as I’m teaching Becky’s learning things about me. But no, I had named that by being enraged. My mother and I would scream at one another to a point where there would be this moment where my mother could come down from her rage and just literally become more human. But it required the intensity of my fighting, she fighting, going back and forth. And so in so many ways, I was trained to engage in that level of extremity and rage because it was what calmed her finally, after basically a brawl, a verbal brawl. And in that it was a light bulb that felt, honestly felt surprising to me. You didn’t know that? And again,

Becky: I never really saw that happen between you and your mom. That wasn’t enacted for me to understand. So yeah, I mean we’re still finding things out, right?

Dan: Yeah. Well, and I think part of that is when you have lived in some degree of trauma, as you put early on, Rachael, trauma is another word for you’re living in some degree of extremity. And then the patterns by which you have learned to survive. I mean, as you put it well back then, your parents raged when you say their voices were raised. Yeah. Well, that’s a lovely euphemism for raging.

Becky: I would not yell back. Those were the rules. I knew that, but I did have the freedom to yell back at you pretty much from the get-go.

Dan: Well, thank God.

Becky: But yeah, worked well.

Dan: In that process in so many ways. I was experiencing something comparable to what I experienced with my mom. We would rage and then there would be this break and then we would come. But as I brought up several issues like the miscarriages, there was a level of your own heartache, your own physical change, the reality of what your body was going through that I didn’t understand, but I also knew that I was somehow not engaging, well. I think that was a period in which we were in the middle of extremity and didn’t have language, didn’t have understanding, at least I didn’t as to how to care and engage for you.

Becky: And I do think that that was because you were so afraid. And I know at one point you were gone for eight days. I was babysitting. I was really, really had a bad cold, very bad cold. And you were upset with me on the phone. And your colleague said to you after you hung up, which you told me about later, is like what you’re saying is only because you don’t know what to do with how little you can help her right now. So actually that’s what you’re feeling, but you’re not conveying that. And I felt guilty for being sick actually. So I think fear, it presents itself in ways that we don’t name as “I’m afraid”.

Dan: I think even the whole issue of having a misunderstanding of the chiropractor’s statement of you’re going to lose your arm, again, I look at that and I go, one sentence would’ve clarified.

Rachael: I’m going to lose my arm?? Or having a reaction of “what?!” where he can kind of be like, oh wait, okay, let me rephrase that.

Becky: And then you come and tell me. And I’m like, I guess I would just fold up your sleeves and sew them up.

Rachael: Well, it’s like there’s something really beautiful about the sense of, okay, together we’ll find a way through. We will find a way through this. And there’s something so tragic that something that actually is quite extreme would be a pretty life altering reality kind of landed in a, of course, this new suffering. Of course there’s more suffering. And I think to me, that speaks a lot to what you’ll have known in your life together of suffering. And I know you put a lot of words to this in Deep Rooted Marriage. And I know together in your marriage work, part of what you’re hoping to do is equip people in their marriages to not only survive these seasons of profound suffering, right? Because really extremity is when we find ourselves in seasons of suffering, but to also flourish in a new way for there to be some kind of beauty that comes out of the ashes. And I guess obviously between the two of you and your communities, there was a lot of resourcing. But were there ever moments where you had to actually look outside of what you could offer each other to come to a new understanding or a deeper roots that you were developing together? And what did that look like?

Becky: Well, absolutely. It had to be not within the community some of the time that wouldn’t feel safe. I do remember reaching out to someone who was a coach in North Carolina, and she gave me this vision, this picture of our lives that really helped me understand a bit more clearly the dance that we’ve had to do so much given your work. And she said, Becky, you’re hospitable. You love well, but it’s like the hallways of your home have people with crutches and arms in slings and there’s a wheelchair. And it helped me see that, yeah, maybe there could be a break of having to carry so much of the sorrow. Maybe I don’t have to invite everyone into my heart because that was my heart, but it was lopsided. It wasn’t the normal marriage to have so many casualties, more or less in the hallways of our house. That was where we walked. And that gave me some courage to maybe set some boundaries for myself in a way I hadn’t before.

Dan: And again, it will sound way, way, way too academic, but I think for both of us, the process of individuation, like Becky being able to go, yes, you’re calling and ministry is to a deeply broken community. And I’m part of it and I want to engage it, but I also can say no. And I think that has been for both of us, one of the hardest words to learn, to be able to go, no, I’m not able, not willing, or I don’t desire. And even that just saying, I just wrote this morning a email to a publisher asking me to endorse a book. And I’m like, I can’t do it. And then I thought, no, you could do it. You really could, but I don’t want to do it. And that feels dangerous given both of our lives and having you make decisions, you can go do this, but I’m not coming with you. Those kind of decisions become such that though at the moment, they feel very exposing. And I think that’s true for virtually all, any level of extremity, there’s something that feels exposed. And in that I also find it very emptying, like something that I have used or done that gives a sense of goodness and meaning all of a sudden now is being exposed and challenged and I’m feeling very empty. But I think the thing that I again come back to is that Becky’s always had a presence of invitation. Even in the midst of some of our darkest fights and moments, there has been a face that says, I’m willing to have you come back. I want you to come back. I want to be with you. And that kind of invitation, I don’t know how to say any better than me, that’s what scripture is putting words to with that phrase, it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. And I think that has been particularly my failures with regard to the multiple miscarriages as we now go through with good friends who are 20, 30 years younger when they’re going through a miscarriage, it always brings us back to the reality of our failure, my failure. The central reality of that was some of the deepest wounds you’ve known as a woman. And yet those places were so deeply failed on my part. So even being able to return to heartache, that’s 20, 30, 40 years ago. And yet to be able to do so with that invitation of there’s something here that it’s like an offer, an offer of repair, an offer of being able to grieve together and yet be able to move forward and more intimacy together.

Becky: And I would say part of that is looking back and realizing, well, I really didn’t know how to ask for help because I had been raised to be tough. Dan was always a hard worker. Our culture wasn’t aware of miscarrying as much. And so the fact that you were teaching and I didn’t want to bother you was just the way it was. And I think, again, as you look back at those times, so you have grace for not only yourself, but your spouse was, well, that was really so sad. And there is still repair that happens with so many other issues too that, well, that was more or less who I was then, oh, if I could do this now better. So I think we have a lot of forgiveness that we can offer continually as we look back at our failures.

Dan: Well, if extremity exposes, it’s going to expose the best of us and the worst of us. That which is broken and that which is very beautiful. And being able, and again, this is why I say it often, perhaps to the point that our audience tires of hearing it, but this is where we live out death and resurrection. To be able to grieve and yet to be able to trust that somehow our calling is to live out what I think was one of the central things I learned in seminary, 1 Corinthians chapter 15, the chapter on the resurrection where Paul, because of the resurrection, is able to evil and to mock it in the presence of death, being able to say, where’s your sting? Where’s your victory of death? And again, with no mitigation, no minimization of the horror of death, the loss of an arm, the loss of friendships, the loss of a child you’re anticipating, yet being able to come into that grief with something of at least the defiant laughter of being able to say, I didn’t know that you were thinking about altering my shirts to handle… but I’m like, of course you did, because we’re too cheap to buy a new shirt.

Rachael: I also love the like, and I’ll just start doing more yoga because I’m going to have to lift more things. Like it’s so beautifully generous and also so deeply connected to wounds as well. And I think that this is where the laughter and the sorrow of the healing process comes into play. And you both offered Michael and I, very generous wisdom as we, so part of what’s happened in this season is Michael has completed his PhD work, and Evie started preschool after a long season of very spotty childcare help while we were both working full time. And there was because we were very much in a certain kind of circumstantial extremity of survival mode, and we are pretty good friends. So even in the survival mode, we feel pretty connected. We laugh a lot, but survival necessitates a kind of treading water that doesn’t actually, you don’t have the luxury of like, oh, we need a lot of time and space to process this thing or to work towards repair in a deeper way. You kind of have to keep moving. And when you come to an end of a season of extremity, there is this feeling of like, oh, we’re going to have space and time. And it’s like, oh, let’s just run with it. And you were so gracious and generous to say, hey, the extraction period of warfare or coming out of seasons of crisis can be some of the most vulnerable. At first, I was like, sure, you’re tired. It’s kind of like when a limb has been asleep and it starts coming awake. If you try to move it too much, it’s kind of dangerous. You can’t really feel it. And I was thinking about that, but there’s also probably a lot of debris that’s come in the wake of survival that needs to be tended to. And that takes intentionality, that takes slowing down. And I’ve been really grateful in this season for that wisdom. I mean, in part because for the most part, we’re both just incredibly exhausted. It’s like all the exhaustion is catching up and we have to, we don’t have any choice but to move slow, and there’s more space and time for some of the aches and pains to actually be felt and tended to. And that has something that I know you guys have cultivated over a long season, and I think are also learning in deeper newer ways. I mean, your marriage actually gives me a lot of hope. It’s scary in that sense of wait, you’re still learning stories about each other. There’s never going to be an end of having to be curious about how did you come to be this way? Or There’s never going to be an end to the exposure or there’s never going to be an end to that sense of you’re still having to learn, but the fact that you’re still learning actually feels incredibly hopeful to me that there’s more. There’s more laughter. There is probably more grieving to be had even from seasons long past. But there’s something about that. I don’t know if you feel hopeful by that, but there’s something about that that actually to me says, oh, similar to any healing journey, there will be more. There will be more.

Becky: Yeah, I do feel hopeful. And yeah, it would be boring, I guess if we didn’t continue to resurrect what our thinking was or because yesterday we actually got in bed and took a nap because

Rachael: The whole potential of losing an arm really took it out of you. Those three hours were more like 12 days, right?

Becky: That’s right.

Dan: Well, and knowing, actually later today I get a CT scan and then another week after that I meet with an orthopedist to begin to look at what’s to be done with a shoulder that’s not working. And with the surgeon that I met with initially who said, if this problem ends up being this, it’s catastrophic. So when my chiropractor said, yes, it’s catastrophic indeed, if you do have this particular degeneration in your shoulder, it is catastrophic. And that’s when he added the phrase, and you may lose your arm. So at that juncture, all I know is I’ve got to get home. I’ve somehow just got to get home because I need a face to be able to ground me. And again, I go back and go, look, one sentence would clarify it, but to honor the level of being traumatized at that context, to be able then to go, we’re dealing with it and taking a nap in the day, versus why don’t you just check out what the internet might say, even though it’s not always the trustworthy source, but to be able to go, oh yeah, it’s catastrophic. That means likely more surgery and some degeneration that may never be able to restore my arm to the same capacity that is had in the past. So all that,

Becky: I’m glad we’re going to have this right arm.

Dan: And you’re not going to have to do any work on my shirts.

Rachael: It’s, it’s very endearing as much as it is. I am also truly sorry that you’re having to kind of navigate this and

Dan: Well, and again, this is where maybe we don’t do it well, maybe this is not what Paul meant, but I do think that whole stance of going, we will mock death. We will stand before it and be able to say, where’s your sting? Now, it doesn’t take away, our lives would radically change, and we’ll likely radically change if the degeneration is permanent and can’t be treated other than by a form of surgery. But all that, being able to laugh and to be able to hold grief together without having to, in one sense, turn your face away. And so that’s that frame of we can handle extremity if we’ve got one person who can hold our tears, who will never give in to pity, but be able to hold the fact that the issue of character here… Who do you want to become in the face of the traumatizing extremity that you are facing? We have difference that we won’t go into detail but have just gone through a living hell, the loss of their beloved daughter-in-law and then illness that indeed we know may be a form of one of the most severe forms of Parkinson’s plus other debilitating illness along with that. And we have watched Dave and Meg hold each other, weep with one another, celebrate life with one another. And there is that sense of all of us, particularly our age, face the reality of death in a far more realistic realm because you have friends who are indeed passing from this life into another. So with that, having the ability to, in one sense, keep coming back, keep coming back to one another’s face, becomes the basis of being able to say, yeah, there will be a day and a day of such extremity that one of us will no longer be here. And in that one has to say it has to be the face of God, even through community, that somehow gives you enough courage to defy the despair that feels inevitable when you are caught in the throes of the kind of extremity that feels interminable. So all that, again, to keep coming back to it is your kindness that has enabled me to laugh. And again, I didn’t know about the shirts, but the next time I put a shirt on, it’s just going to be like, don’t you touch it, don’t you start working on that until we know what’s happening.

Becky: Yeah. No, it is kindness. It is love. It is just feeling for the other and not pitying, but we can do this together as a couple.

Rachael: Becky, I’m curious. I mean, we’re about to bring things to a close, but Dan has mentioned a number of times the kindness of your face, the kindness of your presence. And I’m wondering what you would say about Dan, what does he bring to you knowing that certainly profound kindness, but I wonder if there’s some particularity about what you experienced from Dan that has kind of helped you come back too.

Becky: Oh, I would say ditto. It’s Dan’s kindness. It’s his assurance, we’re going to do this. It’s going to be okay. Of course, he’s so empathetic, and I’ve known as you probably do too, and Michael as well, to have a therapist be a spouse is fabulous almost all the time. Fabulous. And so I am so grateful.

Dan: I was actually really surprised that she said that, which is lovely. I just remember early on in my initial becomings she said, I’m not your client and I’m not paying you.

Becky: Well, I guess we’ve weathered a lot of decades together to have changed that tone.

Rachael: Well, I also, I’ve witnessed your, Dan, I hear you saying the individuation and the differentiation, the finding our voices, finding our no, as much as our yeses can be a profound act of kindness. I’m borrowing that because as a mom of a very ferocious three-year-old that I’m having to find my voice in the presence of as well and still feel like I’m bringing love, I’m like, yeah, okay. Not enmeshment a capacity…. We’re not going to enmesh. I mean, literally in the car ride today, she was telling Michael and I, we couldn’t talk to each other. And we were like, what’s distressing you? And she was like, I’m not distressed. I’m mad. And it was like, okay, that’s a good word. So I just, again, I want to say thank you for your vulnerability, for your candor, and for your ministry, that this could easily be a season where you go, you know what? We’ve given enough and that you’ve said, we want to invest deeply with the time that we have in marriages. It means a lot to me, and I know it means a lot to many. And so thank you for in many ways, letting your marriage and the body together be a living sacrifice for many of us. And may that kindness that you’re giving just be returned tenfold, that you’ll get to just taste a lot of goodness in what you’re pouring out. But I want to say thank you.

Dan: Thank you, Rachael.