Trauma & Emotional Dysregulation

by on November 7, 2025

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

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

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Episode Transcript

Dan: I think we’re just going to start with this simple question. How was your morning, Rachael?

Rachael: Man.Started out pretty good, but definitely took a nervous system, dysregulation, executive functioning overload detour.

Dan: So that’s what we’re going to talk about, but let’s just start with a little synopsis of your vagal nerve.

Rachael: What happened?

Dan: Yeah, what happened?

Rachael: Well, there’s a lot going on in the world, so I’m already on high alert just as a kind of baseline. Anyone who’s paying attention or has any kind of attunement toward vulnerable people or has experienced trauma and is witnessing other people in constant states of trauma, it’s just a hard time. So already I’m at a baseline of we’re doing our best to stay within the window of tolerance. But I went to IKEA to run a couple errands, returned some things. Long story short, I thought I was buying table place mats, but I was buying table runners, so I had six long table runners that I didn’t need, so I was taking them back to IKEA. I know. So already that was like, this is such a minor, ridiculous problem, but I’m doing my due diligence. And as I left IKEA, Michael had said, Hey, come by and pick me up on your way home. And I was trying to text him. I’m on my way, and the text wouldn’t go through. I did all the things you know how to do. Oh, it’s just the cellular data is having a hard time, or it’s flipping between public wifi and cellular data. It just kept not going through. Then I tried to call him and this little message came on that said, you have limited service right now due to an unpaid bill, which…

Dan: You are in arrears. You are irresponsible. You have not financially handled your life well, and now you’re going to pay for it.

Rachael: And immediately I’m feeling like, okay, I can’t… Michael’s at his counseling office, which has a little locked door between the lobby and the offices. I stopped by, I’m trying to figure out what could have happened. We have autopay set up. Certainly we’re not above the financial straits that a lot of people are feeling right now. So it wasn’t like outside of the realm of possibility that maybe we didn’t have enough in our account today for that autopay. So it wasn’t like, how dare you. It was actually how many people experience this on the regular, felt like a service you need to take care of all the other things you need to take care of gets cut without any warning. But I go to his office, I ring the bell. It’s actually in the middle of the counseling hour, so nobody comes. I drive back home, I’m driving in Philly, which means I’m driving on one way street. The street I need to turn on was blocked. It was kind of like at every turn, you just need a little mercy for your nervous system to get a minute. My executive functioning is certainly at this point, I’m like, okay, just take deep breaths. It’s not the end of the world. But I’m already thinking my daughter’s at preschool, our kids are at school. What if something happens and they can’t get ahold of me? What if something happens to Michael and I can’t get ahold of him? I’m trying to keep those kind of panic thoughts at bay. I finally park, I get home, I get inside. The WiFi’s not working. So I’m like, okay, this really is a thing. And so it has a prompt. When I tried to call Michael, I could call the carrier. I get through to someone, they’re like, you’re not on… like you’re listed as a person on this account, so you can’t do anything.

Dan: You don’t exist.

Rachael: So then I’m trying not to yell at the person who has nothing to do with this and is at the mercy of the same unjust systems of capitalism that we all are and that I get back in my car and I still haven’t at this point gotten to the executive functioning possibility that I could find a cafe with wifi. I just am like, I’m completely cut off. I can’t get ahold of anyone. I can’t tell Dan, I’m not going to be there to record the podcast. I can’t tell Michael I can’t pick you up or because I can’t get through to you. I go back to his office. It’s right at the end of the counseling hour. He comes walking out and then I’m like, don’t punish him. He doesn’t even know he’s had wifi. He doesn’t know the cell service is down. And then I got home three minutes before hopping on here. So in some ways… it’s a great time!

Dan: It’s appropriate that we had planned talking about the intersection of abuse and affective emotional dysregulation. I think one of the things that we can begin with is to say that for those of us who have had any significant trauma in the early portions of our life, that one of the effects is some decrease of the hippocampus, which is part of the limbic system that helps regulate affect or helps regulate what’s happening in the amygdala. So that simple beginning point of trauma creates a certain degree of fundamental fragmentation that lasts over a significant period of time. And I’m not hoping that people hear a kind of fatalism and determinism like you are destined to always be struggling with affect. But I think it’s so helpful to begin with the reality that the 5-year-old, 6-year-old little Danny was not a good student, already began in the midst of the trauma of my father’s death in an accident having more to bear than some of the other students in my kindergarten, first, second grade. So already I was labeled as a difficult student and one that had periods of either, even though it’s not language in my grade card, but had periods of extremity. Either I’m looking out the window and practically nothing but a teacher tapping me on the shoulder, bringing me back to the class or reactive, angry meltdowns having to be sent into the, again, I was in school several thousand years ago, and so I was sent into the corner on a stool, often. And again, I don’t think that’s a good technique, but it was a way of creating some degree of regulation. So as we begin to talk about dysregulation, and I’m so sorry that your day began with that. I guess I want to begin with what do you know about your own dysregulation historically, not just in this current event?

Rachael: Yeah. Well, you mentioned the amygdala and the hippocampus, and I think it might be helpful to just put a few more words for folks. I mean, some people are like, yep, all in on this–understand how the nervous system works. But the amygdala is a part of our brain that is more reptilian and keeps us alive. And I’ve heard you say Dan before, we need the amygdala. It’s not just when we’re talking about trauma, it feels like, oh man, an overactive amygdala it can feel so disruptive. But when you’re driving down the road and someone swerves in front of you, you use this example, your amygdala is what helps you make a split second decision to survive. You’re not in the prefrontal cortex of reasoning and meaning making. And so I’ve often joked with so much kindness and compassion and tenderness that I have a very overactive and very ready amygdala and that my cells are kind of like little Reepicheep’s. If you’re familiar with CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, ready to fight at all times, on guard, everything’s a threat. And that’s played out not just in emotional reactivity. I would say when we’re talking about amygdala responses, we’re talking about that fight flight or freeze response that might be familiar to you. We’re talking about all the biochemicals that kind of activate us towards survival. Yeah, so that’s played out in my emotions. Certainly it’s played out in pretty profound and at times debilitating anxiety. And it’s played out in a lot of autoimmune response like allergies and asthma where your immune system is kind of like, everything’s a threat. We will inflame, we will respond. And so I think for me, it’s been a pretty holistic path to healing. And I have many memories throughout a lot of my childhood of feeling very dysregulated. That would never have been language I would’ve used. I was very afraid or I was anxious or I was kind of crazy in these moments where yeah, there was… I don’t have a lot of experience of dissociation like some people do in their trauma stories because of the nature of my story. Dissociation often came after the crisis and overwhelm when I needed comfort. That’s how I got comfort through dissociation. But in the midst of the overwhelm, pretty activated and just a lot of, I remember even in elementary school, I would’ve put words to, I feel afraid my tummy is turning. I feel scared to be away from my mom. I feel like there was just kind of always a hypervigilance to the world around me and feelings of unease that I couldn’t put words to. Now, I’ve talked before on the podcast, I was a long distance runner from fifth grade to my sophomore year of college. And I think that act of running that bilateral stimulation, the production of a lot of endorphins that could help me manage things and keep things contained. And then when I quit running in the middle of college, it was like… a can laugh because it was kind of my moment of this good Southern Baptist girl being told therapy is for really crazy people as if it’s a bad thing to be crazy. It was my moment of like, well, I’m officially crazy because my nervous system had no resources then to regulate like I had, and I didn’t know I needed help regulating. It’s like looking back with the tools and skills I have now, which I will have to look up her name, but I was just reading Hillary McBrides Holy Hurt, and she was, I think it’s Michelle Panchuk, she’s a philosopher, but she talks about how when religious or she’s speaking more to Christianity, but when religious entities don’t give people the resources and tools to understand their body, that that’s a form of hermeneutical injustice. And I’m like, there was a lot of hermeneutical injustice around making sense of how my body was responding. So for me, this relationship with our bodies and dysregulation feels so much more than just bodily or psychological. It’s also deeply spiritual because the ways in which people translated what was happening got really spiritualized. So not only was I maybe crazy, difficult, afraid, but I was also unfaithful because these realities were kind of spilling out. It was like if a cup was overflowing, they were very external, couldn’t necessarily hide them.

Dan: Well, and if we can underscore almost all forms of dysregulation create on behalf of others, some degree of dysregulation, and there’s judgment, there is accusation instead of having a sense of I can be attuned. And that’s one of the things we’ll come back to. How do you get attuned to your own body when you’re dysregulated? Because being attuned requires a certain degree of quiet, a certain stance of listening. So a lot of this work has to happen before the dysregulation. That ability to be able to go with no judgment, with no accusation. I’m dysregulated, I am fragmenting right now. And how we begin that process of being able to go particularly we’ll come back to this term for those who have a history of abuse. There’s likely the extremity between some degree of activation, extremity of response that has met with a lot of judgment and therefore we’ve learned at some level not to care for but to hide and suppress. And then when you can’t, you know the byproduct will likely be some degree of relational fragmentation. I will not be seen as acceptable in a marriage, in a friendship, in a school setting, in a work setting. So we’ve got to know that in that extremity, we’re actually paralleling the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. The sympathetic system is what activates the fight flight. The parasympathetic is what creates the notion of rest and digest. That is the ability to come down and literally every breath you take is activation and rest and then back and forth. But what happens with emotional dysregulation as you put so well this morning, it’s a sense of spiral and then things get attached. It’s almost like a tornado where it isn’t just the wind now it’s the debris caught up in the swirling mass that begins to literally create its own damage. And so when we step back and begin to ask, well, what’s going on? We know that the vagal nerve that runs from the core of our brain, the Medulla Oblongata, I love that little, there’s certain words I just like saying, and that’s just a part of the brain that I go, oh, Medulla Oblongata, you need, and it runs from our brain down through our throat, down through our chest, through our heart, down into our stomach and to our visceral elements. And it’s the major highway of our capacity to regulate, to have rest. And when the vagal nerve is activated in that sense, we don’t have language, for many of us, but even more importantly, we don’t have structures that we have come to see as part of our spiritual discipline. Part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is in one sense, to care for the temple, to tend to the temple and to in one sense, not merely have knowledge, but also a capacity to honor what the body is bringing. So I love to hear what you’re thinking as you hear all that.

Rachael: Oh, I’m just once again thinking, man, this is just all information that would’ve been so helpful 30 years ago for me and my life. And I was thinking about how when we’re talking about abuse, whether that’s happening in a family system, in a relationship, or even on larger scale of systemic oppression, some of the injustice is that what we interpret is we are disordered. So our bodies are disordered when actually the vagus nerve in response to terror, in response to violation, in response to humiliation and unsafety is actually…

Dan: Doing its good job.

Rachael: …responding how it’s meant to. And so what does it look like to get to move toward that with mercy? And that’s what we’re talking about today is what tools and resources are available to us in the work of mercy? Well, we also know the work of justice to keep pursuing, bringing heaven to earth, so to speak, so that we’re not having to have constantly dysregulated nervous systems in response to terror or vulnerability. So I was just thinking about how different my posture to my own body would’ve been in some ways if the invitation to understand what was happening to my body was a perfectly reasonable and heartbreaking response to the stimulus of my world, that wouldn’t have taken away the suffering, so to speak. But I think it would’ve given me a deeper compassion and in some ways a righteous anger to be like, I’m going to give myself every good resource available so that even though suffering might persist, I don’t have to punish myself or heap on shame in this kind of ongoing work because I think I’ve been given a lot of tools and resources, and I still found myself today in that tornadic swirl that felt so familiar and the kind of invitation to heap on more burdens of shame, of contempt toward myself to act out in violence. And it makes me think about driving… A lot of what I was doing… all of this was playing out while I was driving. And you and I both know I have a relationship with driving. And it’s interesting because the more I’ve spent time with my stories…

Dan: Wait a relationship with driving,

Rachael: I have a relationship with driving.

Dan: You have a relationship with other drivers while you drive.

Rachael: I have a relationship with other drivers while I drive.

Dan: Which shall I just put words to so we can get cut to the chase?

Rachael: Sure.

Dan: Instead of provoking like a rage incident on the road, you preclude that by vocal intense interactions with evaluating other people’s judgment is one of the most entertaining experiences of my driving life to be as a passenger in the car, in particularly what comes to mind intercourse is when we were in Los Angeles, and I have the privilege, there are 18, I sit almost aisles, what’s the word? Lanes.18 lanes. It was totally fascinating, but it was clear that it’s like your rage, which really wasn’t rage, but was intense interactions was a form of finding regulation to manage what frankly, for anyone who doesn’t drive LA roads is a very anxiety producing experience. Is that a fair way of putting it?

Rachael: That’s very fair. And it’s interesting because I’ve been doing a lot of work around why do I have… why does traffic… and I think I could actually say I feel entrapped and I actually do have a lot of stories that involve being trapped in a car, feeling a lot of panic, and so I have so much compassion. But yeah, it is like if I can at least verbalize the stress I’m feeling, it does allow me to stay more grounded, which gets trickier when you have kids, especially a 3-year-old, that you’re trying to teach how to be kind and honoring and dignifying to other humans, and you’re just calling everyone a moron. And especially when we were just in Seattle recently, Michael was like, are you aware that you’ve been calling people a moron a lot and it’s actually causing me distress. It’s causing me dysregulation. And so I can laugh about it. It is like an idiosyncratic quirk about me, and it can be troubling at times. The amount of stress I’m feeling in my body and the amount of contempt I’m keeping at bay for other drivers that I perceive are trying to kill me is really what it feels like at my body. Your lack of driving efficiently is against me, and that’s pronounced in Seattle. If anyone has actually driven to the Pacific Northwest, it’s a whole thing in and of itself. Philly is like, I actually drive a grandma and actually most of the time I don’t drive, I let Michael drive because it’s the wild wild west out here and there’s no rules. And so you kind of have to drive a lot more assertive and safe and whatever, but I still feel the same dysregulation in my body. And so yeah, I don’t know where to go with that other than if you have any other vagus nerve regulating ideas, maybe I need to sing or hum. That might be… because Evie has been coming home from preschool and for an hour after preschool she’ll go, oh, just make this sound. And I’m like, oh, she’s relieving the stress of her body through a kind of humming or articulation of noise that’s relieving all this anxiety she’s had to hold from following rules and learning how to socialize and interact and share with other humans. So maybe I need to switch to a form of humming, but I would love to hear other ways…

Dan: Well when we get there. But this is to me why I keep coming back to Psalm 131, and it’s a pretty brief psalm, so I’m going to read it. “My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me, But I know how to calm and quiet myself. I’m like a ween child with its mother, like a ween child. I am content.” Now another verse and that is “Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore”. But that simple phrase in verse two, I know how to calm my soul, body, splagna. I know how to calm my amygdala. I know how to regulate my vagal nerve. Now of course, that’s not fully said in that Psalm, but we can understand a way of engagement that at least begins to say dysregulation is not manipulation. Dysregulation is not a cruel contempt for others trying to be in control. It is an effort to find a safe spot where we’re no longer in the position where our sympathetic system fight and flight, the amygdala is indeed in control in a way in which our parasympathetic system is no longer capable in the same way of regulation. So when we come back and to go particularly those with stories of physical, emotional, sexual abuse where we can put it in language we’ve addressed many other times, capital T trauma, if you don’t struggle with some degree of affective emotional dysregulation, it’s largely because you’ve so quieted your soul due to dysregulation, dissociation that you are probably, if I can put it in a way that sounds awful, you’re sort of dead inside. And that’s as big a problem, if not more. So when you’ve learned to cut off the affect that’s actually happening in you, yeah, you are more socially acceptable. You don’t just regulate others, you are probably valued for being so calm. But I do want to say there’s so much more to you, so much more that needs to be engaged. So if we can disrupt shame and contempt here, if we can begin to say, yeah, I’m not suggesting that people should just be dysregulated and everybody go, oh, we get it. You’ve got trauma, so you can just do whatever you want. Absolutely. Again, a straw person argument

Rachael: And why we have generational trauma. Like why we have ancestors with a lot of unhealed trauma that’s repeating and reenacting harm and being passed down. So I would hope no one is hearing us say that.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. So humming, let’s just start with that since you brought that up. The vagal nerve runs essentially kind of right by our ears and right through our throat. So just that alone that when you hum, you are activating the vagal nerve. And so Evie, brilliant as she is, has intuitively experienced what creates calm. She’s living out Psalm 131, and it may sound to those around her dysregulating, but humming… Now, some of us, and this is true because you’ve heard my voice before cacophonous, it’s a dark assault against beauty in the universe, but I can hum, and even my humming is calming, but you have a gorgeous voice. It’s part of the story of being captured and capturing your beloved Michael. Is your joint singing in the context…

Rachael: Our karaoke?

Dan: Yes. Yeah. But what I’m saying is do you sing and do you sing when you’re dysregulated? Right there is one of the calming, even if you are not in a context where you can hum or you can sing music, calming music is going to activate the vagal nerve. That’s at least a central category. And again, you have Ephesians 5 where we’re talking about singing spiritual songs, hymns, and it’s in contrast to don’t be addicted to wine. So right there, Paul was speaking about the reality of you can numb out through alcohol, you can use alcohol to lower in so many ways your sympathetic system, but you don’t need to do that if you allow yourself to begin the process humming, singing and bringing back something of beauty in the context of our own spiritual walk. Thoughts?

Rachael: Yeah, I mean, where my thoughts went is again, how many different cultures have chance and songs and spirituals and rituals around music that before we ever had a scientific language of trauma were wisdom and experiences being passed down that are just a part of us being human and being human in community. I know Abby Wong Heffter before when she’s talked about attachment and nervous system regulation, she mentioned that Psalm 23 in Hebrew would have been sung enchanted in community. And that there’s even something about, I just feel like something that some of us are familiar with, but maybe some things we’ve lost as well. So I just think it’s fascinating how and beautiful to me that some of the tools available to us don’t require access to capital, don’t require can happen just within our body. So I love humming and and I knew intuitively when Evie was making this sound for about 45 minutes on and off, I just kept saying to her, does that feel comforting? Does that feel soothing? And she was like, and then just keep on with what she was doing.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And as you put it, the experience of being able to bless by naming it on her behalf is not only calling attention, but calling attention in a way that honors you have found ways to tend to your body. Now, let me bring a couple other examples. We have what is called the mammalian dive response. Ever heard of that before?

Rachael: Maybe like a mammal, like a mammal diving?

Dan: Well, mammals have limbic systems. Limbic systems need care. And one of the things that happens when you go underwater, particularly cold water, is a whole bunch of things that begin to occur that without boring our audience being able to say that the brainstem begins to orchestrate a response that holds a sympathetic and parasympathetic system together in a new way. So taking cold water and splashing it on your face, if you’ve got the time you didn’t today, take a cold shower, cold plunging, even if it sounds like a form of medieval torture, are ways to regulate. Now, I bought many years ago, like $125 plastic, really nothing more than container. And Wednesdays would be the day that I see my clients. There are Mondays and Tuesdays where I’m in meetings, and I know that even though I love what I get to do, I need a certain level of regulation before I bring my body into engagement with my beloved. And so two minutes of cold plunging, even though every time I do it, I hate myself at least for the first 30 seconds, but it begins to change the capacity of how our body comes to regulation. And so humming, cold, massage of your neck on both sides, because that’s generally where the vagal nerve is running. So tending to your throat, literally putting heat on your throat begins to move. And there are pressure points that you can find that begins to change. But it comes back to Psalm 131. I know how to regulate myself when I’m in the middle of a kind of dysregulation. Again, that’s my adaptation of that passage. But the fact of being able to go, gosh, given my daily life and given the nature of my own sense of extremity moving between reactive and dissociative structures, it helps me not excuse, but understand why I spent so many years misusing alcohol and drugs. Why the process of trying to come to an engagement with the truth of my past and the abuse and somehow learning how to engage the complexities of relationship set me up, again, I’m fully responsible, but set me up to utilize addictive structures to be a self-soothing, self-regulating, self-medicating process. So the more I think what we’re underscoring is the more we understand what’s happening, the more we forsake and defiantly stand against every judgment that’s been made about us and then begin the process of saying it is my body and I am response-able to engage even though it doesn’t work quickly. And we also know breathing what’s often called trauma breathing four count at least in, four count hold, four count release. And for many people that trauma breathing actually activates the sympathetic system. It actually makes them more anxious. So for many, the process will require in doing things that will help regulate, actually it increases a sense of it’s not working well. A lot of these things don’t work the moment you put cold water on the moment you take an ice pack and put it on the back of your neck, but the body is the body. And it isn’t a question of will it work? It’s certain to work because that’s the reflex structure God has created in the body. So even the process can be anxiety producing.

Rachael: That’s really helpful to hear. So keep going. That’s really helpful to hear.

Dan: But again, this is why you do need left brain processes, not just right brain regulation. You need to know I’m feeling anxious every time I do trauma breathing. I’ve used it with countless people, I’ve done it on my own, and I’d say the first two minutes, I’m just totally miserable.

Rachael: That’s why I’m saying it’s really helpful to hear because no one’s ever said that to me before. And you’re supposed to be really good at breathing if you work in trauma and you’ve been healing. And I feel like I’m still, for example, in my mindfulness breathing class, it was like, oh yeah, I’ve been working on breathing for 20 years and I still am like, this is not working. I feel worse. I can’t slow down. And so it’s actually, I’m just kind of feeling a little bit embarrassed that I’m confessing out loud. Yeah, anytime someone’s like, do this box breathing, I do this thing. Or when my spiritual director is inviting me to breathe, I’m like, oh, here we go. It’s going to feel like I’m going to feel actually more anxious, but I’m actually going to try to present as though it’s working because it’s supposed to be working.

Dan: Yes. Yeah. So again, to underscore that, and again, let me change the category for a moment, for you to give up calling people morons in the driving process. It is something that honors what you want on behalf of your daughter because some of our self-regulation is not going to honor who and what we want to be on behalf of others. But on the other hand, if you stop narrating the experience of being in the car, I think you’re developing on behalf of Evie and your children. They have a good chance of being brilliant standup comics in the future.

Rachael: I mean, what is funny is that one of my most common phrases when I’m driving and narrating is choose life. Choose life, person. And actually when Evie started mimicking driving, when she first could use language, all she would say is “Go people, go people”. She would put her hands up on a steering wheel and just be like, “go people”. And Michael and I would laugh so much because it was like, well, that’s what she thinks of driving is you just hold the steering wheel and you shout go people, and at least it’s not go morons. So I did feel like we were giving somewhere.

Dan: Well and again to know that when we begin to allow the parasympathetic system to come back online, the reason that first couple minutes feels more anxious is it’s the body saying, if I rest here, the tiger’s going to catch up. I’m going to get eaten. And so that ability to again, left brain comprehend, I’m going to breathe, but I’m going to be miserable. And two minutes in, it’s like again, the cold plunge, the first 30 seconds, if you’ve ever done it, unless you are a pure sadist, you’re going to be going, why do I hate myself? Why have I done this to myself? But that mammalian dive response is built into the body to begin to change heart rate, to actually produce more oxygen in our blood. It begins to change the trigeminal nerve that sense, it basically structures to the brainstem saying, it’s okay. We can begin underwater to begin to come back. And in that, I keep coming back to Psalm 131. This is not taught as part of our spirituality. It’s not taught as spiritual discipline. Again, so much of prayer is meant to be an engagement with our heart before God. In other words, there are times where if you look at the Psalms of lament and complaint, it is the acknowledgement of dysregulation. But in that, there’s often even toward the end of the Psalm, except for Psalm 88, a movement toward… and trust in the Lord O Israel put your hope in him now and forever. So in the interplay, we can go back and forth between the sympathetic parasympathetic system and to be able to go. There are certain moments where I’m thinking of a recent moment where Becky and I were driving in Seattle. This is just say, I love Seattle. I’m a Seattleite, but it is the most passive aggressive portion of the country and it shows itself in the driving. As a motorcyclist, I know the person who just put their signal on should be moving over into my lane, but they don’t. But right when I’m near, they’re going to move. That’s passive aggressive. I’ve done what’s right. I put my signal on, but it’s erratic as to when you’re going to move. I’d rather a person just cut me off. And so when I rode my motorcycle in other cities, knowing something of the character of the city helps the creation of regulation. So knowing our world, knowing our body, knowing what God wants, and that is to tend to good care in a way without judgment and honoring the gift of being able to be a very vocal driver and to know it’s a beautiful thing. I am kind of sad that I haven’t ridden with you for…

Rachael: Go people. Choose life.

Dan: That’s a good ending. This is indeed choosing life.