Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Truth? with Dr. Monique Gadson

Most of us say we value the truth—until it unsettles us, costs us something, or asks us to change. Truth has a way of disrupting the stories we use to survive.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about on the podcast today. Dr. Monique Gadson joins Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen to explore why truth-telling feels so threatening—personally, relationally, and culturally. 

Drawing from systems theory, theology, and her lived experience, Dr. Gadson names anxiety as the central force that keeps us from truth. When we lack the capacity to tolerate the discomfort truth brings, we turn to projection, delusion, scapegoating, and certainty as coping mechanisms. What begins as an inability to regulate anxiety within families and relationships spills outward into institutions, churches, and society itself, resulting in polarization, blame, and a deep resistance to accountability.

The conversation presses especially hard on the role of Christians in this moment. Rather than leading the way in humility, repentance, and truth-bearing love, the church is often entangled in systems that suppress truth to protect power, purity narratives, or a false sense of goodness. 

Dr. Gadson speaks candidly about the cost of being a truth teller, particularly as a Black woman, and the reality of being scapegoated for disrupting dominant stories. Yet she also offers a grounded hope: freedom comes through differentiation, integrity, and the slow, courageous work of managing anxiety rather than projecting it onto others. Truth, she reminds us, is not about annihilating one another, but about creating the conditions where real relationship, responsibility, and repair are possible.

Ultimately, this episode invites us to ask not only what is true, but what does truth stir in us—and can we bear it? 

As Dan reflects, the truth both attracts and repels us—and our prayer may simply be, “I believe; help my unbelief.” 

This is a conversation for anyone longing to live with greater integrity, emotional maturity, and faithfulness in a world that increasingly struggles to tell—and receive—the truth.

About Our Guest:

Monique Gadson, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology and Listening Lab Director at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. Dr. Gadson is a licensed professional counselor, consulting therapist, educator, and podcast host. She received her B.S. in Business Management from The University of Alabama, her M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Troy State University, her M.S. in Spirituality and Counseling from Richmont Graduate University, and her Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Amridge University. Dr. Gadson hosts the podcast, “And The Church Said,” that discusses church and culture from a Christian counseling perspective, focusing on mental and emotional health and the church. She provides counseling and consulting services through her practice, Transforming Visions, LLC., concerning issues such as grief, trauma, anxiety, depression, marriage and family care, relationship challenges, questions of faith, and spiritual abuse. Her areas of professional and ministerial interest include premarital and pre-engagement education/counseling, individual development, effects of trauma on development, family-of-origin influences, relationships, marriage and family therapy and education, the intersection of theology and psychology, and the Church and mental health ministry.

Dr. Gadson served on the staff of a church for 16 years as the clinical mental health counselor. She also has served as an expert contributor to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs for a video-based training series for chaplain services, and as a consulting therapist for several churches and organizations. She has taught several courses in psychology, counseling, leadership development, legal and ethical professional development in marriage and family therapy, systematic evaluation and case management, and human development. Presentations at professional conferences include the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, and the American Association of Christian Counselors. Passionate about individual development and relationship education, considering these as means of discipleship, she believes the cornerstone for a healthy society is the love for one’s self and others fueled by a love of God.

Dr. Gadson is married and has two daughters. Her hobbies include Alabama football, writing spoken word pieces, reading, listening to great music, exercising, journaling, photography, scrapbooking, gardening, and hanging out with her family and friends. She loves long walks, preferably on the beach, sunsets and sunrises, and time outside enjoying nature.

About the Allender Center Podcast:

Episode Transcript

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. Dan and I are thrilled today to be joined by one of our colleagues at the Seattle School, Dr. Monique Gadson. She is a licensed professional counselor, a consulting therapist to churches and organizations, including the US Department of Veteran Affairs. She’s an educator, an author, and a podcast host. At the Seattle School, she currently serves as an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology and listening lab director and is passionate about development and relational education and actually considers these things as a means of discipleship. And one of the things I love the most about Dr. Gadson is that she is probably as much of a fanatical sports fan as I am myself and has lots of beautiful hobbies outside of sports as she spends time with her loved ones and her family. So Dr. Gadson, welcome today.

Monique: Thank you all for having me.

Dan: We are so thrilled to have you on. But before we jump into sort of the topic at hand, when I talk to students at the Seattle School about you, several of the things that they’ll say is, “This is a woman of incredible passion. She is brilliant. She is gifted. She disrupts us.” And I’m like, “In what way?” Well, she’s just not afraid to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth has bad breath. I mean, sometimes the truth is not exactly what we want. I love for you, Dr. Gadson, to ponder. We are living in a day in which as one individual without naming said, the truth is not about facts or about reason, but about what we agree to, which is one of the most incredible postmodern notions of truth telling and truth receiving. So in a day in which truth doesn’t feel like it has anything but a lot of holes in it as it sinks into the dark mud of certain administrations. Why? Why are we so committed to not engaging it?

Monique: I’ll tell you, I have thought about this on numerous occasions and from various perspectives, but I will just lean into what is my theoretical orientation and that at the intersection of my theological orientation. I believe that we do not know how to deal with the anxiety that is produced when truth is being told, because sometimes truth can be unsettling and sometimes it can create or generate within us an anxiety. And so we know that when anxiety increases, if we don’t have means by which we are able to manage that and cope with that, then usually the dysfunction is going to spill out from us into others or other areas. So I believe that one, we just have the inability to deal with the anxiety that is generated as a result of truth telling. And then I do believe more so from a theological perspective that there is the inability to deny one self. So I think about it as kind of this intrapersonal struggle between self-indulging versus self-denial. And we know that in order to be… scripture will tell us as a follower of Jesus, that we are to take up our cross and we are to deny ourselves. And I know people can kind of play around with the way that word deny is defined, but in the original language, it literally does mean to lose sight of one’s self, to lose sight of one’s interest. And if we want to think about it in that capacity, then we’re thinking that perhaps if we’re losing sight of one’s self, it’s for a greater good, it’s for a collective good. And so I just think that there is this inability to deal with that anxiety that is generated. And then there is this, I just will indulge myself, which scripture says that too, in the end times, we’re going to be lovers of self. And so I think that there is just this denial or this lack of self denial that is also spinning around.

Dan: Well, I couldn’t agree more, but in one sense, like watching … I could pick 10,000 examples, but many moons ago when politicians made mention that Ukraine had attacked Russia and I’m going, I think most of us remember many years ago watching the Russian troops make their way across the Ukraine border and you’re going, what’s going on here that something that has such facticity, such clarity, and yet for whatever malevolent purposes, the story is being literally turned from one portion of reality to another. So I’d love for you to, you don’t have to deal with that particular, but just as an example, when truth is being suppressed, you have that Romans 1:18, the truth being suppressed in unrighteousness, it feels like we’re living in a cultural moment where vast sums of truth are being suppressed. And yet when you call it into question, as I’ve done with friends and sometimes in other contexts, the response is not a matter of like, this is tragic and horrid, but more like, oh, well, I mean, that just happens all the time. So how is it that we’re speaking about truth in a way in which, as you put it, what’s the anxiety that keeps us from being able to see literally that two plus two equals four?

Monique: Yeah. The anxiety is generated from, when we think about it from systemic perspective. So I’m a marriage and family therapist by training, and so I tend to be more systemically influenced. So I’m thinking about systems and when we think about this, what’s happening in society, I study a lot about societal emotional process, and that’s basically just talking about what is the emotional processing that is happening in society. And when we’re talking in the language of systemic orientations, we are thinking about how is that being generated? How is that being transmitted? And so typically when we’re thinking from a family perspective, okay, a family systems perspective, we are saying that there is some inability to deal with anxiety within the relationships within the family system, that when we have this inability to deal with relationships in, let’s say, like the microcosms in which we live, then we will tend to try to diffuse that anxiety by then bringing in another or taking that anxiety and it spills out elsewhere. And so if we’re thinking about it in … Well, the way I’m thinking about it through that particular lens, the reason that we have this anxiety is that there is some inability to relate well. And so that could be between parents and children, it could be between spouses. And then if we want to think about what does that look like outside of that family system, well, then it can look like, okay, is there some inability for me to relate to colleagues on a job or me to relate with the teacher that’s teaching my children in the school system or me to be able to deal with the local politicians or whatever the case may be. So that’s the way we can look at how is it that this anxiety begins to transmit and it’s usually it starts and we want to kind of think about it in terms of like building blocks. We’re talking about somewhere there’s this inability to relate well. There’s this inability to deal with anxiety. And when we have been taught how to expand our capacity to deal with that anxiety, to learn various ways to deal with that more so interpersonally, if we’re talking interpersonally, it’s more of a way to regulate with someone else as opposed to projecting it out onto them. So when we don’t have that ability, we’re usually projecting it out. And so when we’re projecting it out, it begins to spread throughout society on whatever these different institutions that we’re thinking about societally speaking. And that is a way for us to think about how the anxiety levels are out here in our society with that inability to deal with.

Rachael: Well and it just feels like there’s so much at stake then. Like everywhere, right? When you put it that way, it’s like, well, there’s a lot at stake in your family, in your primary relationships, there’s a lot at stake in how you navigate the world. And I think for those of us who identify as followers of Jesus, there’s a lot at stake about… you know Dan, you talked about odorous stench, you said truth telling can have bad breath. And it makes me think about Paul’s language of this aroma of life or the stench of death, depending on how you have the capacity to take it in. And I have a lot of sadness because I feel like as followers of Jesus, we should be the first in line to bear the truth, even if it means undergoing a kind of really severe grace. When I think about accountability, when you actually let yourself feel the harm you’ve caused another and undergo that kind of sense of like, “This doesn’t have to define you, but there is some labor ahead.” We should be the first in line to be able to say, “We want to be people of truth, even if that truth is costly, even if it means we have to change, even if it means we have to grieve or we have to deny ourselves something.” And it feels like at least, and maybe this has been true in many iterations of being human, but it feels like today, at least the more popular image of a Christian is someone who’s delusional, like someone who’s so resistant to the truth. And maybe I’m thinking more about the ways Christian nationalism, especially white Christian nationalism is ruling the day. It’s like we’re seeing this collision of systems that literally cannot bear even an ounce of truth. So it’s like created an alternative delusional reality. And Dan, I feel like some of the conversations I’m having with people I love dearly, I am bumping up against a kind of delusion that is underneath the surface saying to me, “I cannot bear the truth that you’re bringing. I’m like so far down this road, I cannot bear it. I don’t have any capacity to bear it, therefore I’m going to double down and you’re now a threat to me. ” And we talk about this a lot in these offices of these kind of priestly, prophetic, kingly offices of Jesus and how the prophet, the truth, the one who’s like, “We can bear the truth, we have more, we can do this, ” is so often exiled. And so yeah, I don’t know, Dr. Gadson, I know I just talked a lot, I apologize, but it just does feel like there’s so much at stake. And I would love to hear from you in your work with churches and students and clients, what are some of those things that are at stake if we can’t grow to be people capable of not only bearing the truth, but telling the truth?

Monique: We’re here, society has collapsed in my estimate, the extreme polarization, the demand for certainty, which I think is part of what you’re talking about is where I will lean more into the delusion because there I can control the narrative. I can be certain that what I am saying is, is, as opposed to having to really think about what reality is. And it may cost me to have to do that, look at the person in the mirror, it may cost me to have to take a responsibility that I can no longer blame others, which would be characteristic of a society that is in a state. It is going to be characteristic of blaming and not taking responsibility. It is characteristic of impatience. It is characteristic of short-term solutions. We’ve already named the polarization. So these things are indicative of a society that is in a regressive state. And so, I mean, we don’t have to look too far. I mean, we’ve already kind of named all of those things just as we are talking about being in conversations with one another. So I think that if we don’t stop and understand that how far things have gotten now, where do we go from collapse?

Dan: Yeah.

Monique: Where do we go?

Dan: I certainly know that when we attempt to tell truth, and I almost would prefer that word truth than the truth, because I’m not claiming I have the truth, but in my reading of the scripture, my reading of my own life and others, I simply know that when I’m standing in some degree of conflict or at least a different view from the person whom I’m having an interaction with, and that could be a client, could be a neighbor, it could be a family member. It feels like the threat turns me into someone who is not just their enemy, but someone who needs to be destroyed as sort of a scapegoat. So just to take it into, again, your own world and experience, how do you engage being scapegoated as you are known and so deeply appreciated as a presence in the school that disrupts people about Jesus, disrupts people about the realities of the right and the left. So you do get scapegoated. How is life?

Monique: This is why I love football.

Rachael: Yeah, Dan, see, we need a playground to work these things out.

Dan: You mean while watching other people suffer on your behalf?

Monique: Sure. If that’s the way we look at it. Yes. Okay. It’s not entertaining, but okay. No, but yeah, you’re absolutely right. That is the cost. That is the cost to being a truth teller. It is the cost to be the one to say, “Let’s not go with a quick fix. We already know that this is not going to work.” Can we find ways to name the anxieties that we are feeling? What are we feeling threatened by? Why do we have to annihilate one another? When people look at me, even we can talk about particular lived experience as a Black woman. What about me threatens you that you feel the need to have to annihilate me? What keeps us from being able to say, “We can disagree and we can still be in relationship with one another.” No, we might not be best buddies or we may be best buddies. Who knows? But what about me, my being, my living is such a threat to you that you feel that you must annihilate me. So when we have to think about the role of being scapegoated, well, for me, and because I do experience that quite frequently, it is for me having to think about, in order for that to not become a personal problem, then I am thinking about it as, what is this person so anxious about? What is the threat? What are you afraid of losing? And whatever that is, how and why does that need to be projected onto you? So when we’re talking about this role of scapegoating, I mean, it’s not for the faint of heart, for sure, because it requires more times than not the ability to be able to just stand flat footed and to then take what is not ours and hand it back to who it really belongs to. So then when you’re talking about this inability to do that, then it’s going to be the push in the pull and that’s fine. If that’s going to be your relational dynamic style, that’s fine. And also, I’m not going to take responsibility for what is not mine. It is yours, but when we are talking about being the scapegoat, good gracious there, I mean, there’s zillions of examples that I can give you of how that looks and how that does play out in … I’m speaking from my own personal life, but how to deal with it, the cost of it… I mean, the cost of it is great. The cost of it is great. We talk about even just being in the institution there, in the school, to have to say that the way that we have thought about psychology or even theology for that matter, in some ways that involve a dominant population’s thought ain’t necessarily true for everybody. And then here we go with the clutch the pearls. It’s kind of like, how dare you even, how dare you tap up against my delusion? So we say, I’ve heard growing up in the Black church all my life, my dad was a pastor, my uncle was a pastor, my granddaddy was a pastor, first cousins that are pastors. So I’m deep into that kind of tradition. But in the Black church growing up, there was a saying, either say amen or ouch. And so amen, we can agree with. Amen. Yep, you’re telling the truth. Ouch is like, oh, I’m being convicted of something. And if I don’t know how to tap into that grace of God to recognize that his grace is sufficient, it is sufficient enough for me to even tell the truth on myself. I can confess like, “Lord, I have fallen short of your glory and I can confess that. And your word tells me that you will forgive me. You will even cleanse me if I even ask that.” But somewhere we must not believe that because we feel as though we have to present this whitewashed, like I’m already pure and whiter than snow. And if that’s the case, then I mean, the whole gospel is in vain. So I’m thinking that if someone is not willing to stand and to gently and sometimes maybe not so gently kind of push back and say, “This is not the truth, these are the results that we are seeing. If we are going to continue to think along these lines and live in this particular way, is that the trajectory you want to stay on? ” And if so, then all right, let’s think about what this might look like. But when people don’t want to deal with that possible outcome, it gets concerning for me. And I want to go back to the church just for one minute here, because Rachael, to your point, if anybody ought to be leading the charge, it ought to lead the church in today’s time. So now we have to think about some things when we talk about even some of the work I’ve done with churches over time, is that we have to start talking about what has been filtrated in the church system that now impedes our ability to speak truth and or to confront when truth is being twisted. So there’s a lot at stake. I mean, there is a lot of … I’ve already said, I claim we’ve already collapsed as a society. It is scary for me to think what it looks like beyond that. I have images of what that looks like. And so for me, it’s worth being scapegoated if one person can catch a glimpse, we are suppressing truth and I need to find ways to understand what it rubs up against in me. I need to find ways to deal with the anxiety that it generates in me. I need to find ways to relate better to my fellow neighbor because if not, we are going to cease to exist.

Dan: Becky and I were listening to the whole book of 1st John on a walk. And when you’re listening, I don’t find the ability to tap into the words, the syntax as I do when I read. So we came away with just several core thoughts, like if you don’t love, the truth is not in you, the light is not in you. And coming back in multiple chapters to if you hate your brother, the light, the truth is not in you. And so I go back to this simple category that the truth is meant to set you free, but the price of suppressing truth in unrighteousness is this profound loss of energy, which is what happens when you project, when you create delusions, project your rage, you find an enemy and a particular group or community and in the alignment against, and you find confederation with those who hold that delusion, it feels like community, but you know those communities divide deeply and radically as soon as the enemy shifts and changes. So I’m back to that simple question of how free do you feel in the context of being a scapegoat, in the context of being a woman of such profound faith, yet also commitment to such categories of justice in a world in which you particularly as a Black woman have had so much projection, so many delusions focused against you. How do you keep your heart free?

Monique: So I think that this is a beautiful place, I will say, where the theology and the psychology do overlap is in that ability, we say it through the psychological language of being able to differentiate. I am not necessarily so anxious that I feel I have to conform to group pressure, togetherness, which is what does happen in society as you’re talking about kind of forming those communities, right? And we use that language so much today now that I think we have that inability to think about the nuance that every group that is together, yes, can be a community, but maybe not necessarily a community doing good, but that’s a whole different conversation. But that ability to be able to differentiate and to recognize that if I have to stand alone, then to conform to group togetherness pressure because of the inability to tolerate the anxiety, like, no, that’s quite okay. And that has just come from just years of experience, years of therapy and years I do believe of following Jesus. And so where I was talking about that being the psychological language and then the theological language, which I think this is where it opens, where I see the true work of integration taking place is when we renew our minds, we are transformed and we don’t conform to the world. And so I think that verse in and of itself is an instruction for us to break away. It is to break away from a mindset that is going to cause us to conform to these worldly ideals, these worldly philosophies, these worldly delusions, even for that matter. However we need to term it, I do believe that that is a way that we are being instructed, invited to pull away from that. And when we have that ability to be able to differentiate ourselves, and again, if we are looking to be the follower of Jesus, then that in and of itself, back to that denial of self and not indulging ourself is going, that process involves us differentiating. It involves us not kind of collapsing into the group togetherness pressure. So I think for me, that’s what I fall back on. I meditate on that. I try to live that and practice that. And when we’re talking about with students, that’s what we’re talking about, the work of how are you all going to be able to help clients that will sit in front of you to differentiate if you can’t recognize in yourself your inability or lack of differentiator and whatever the that looks like. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for people who some people may not be followers of Jesus and that’s fine. But I’m just saying, can you identify what it means to differentiate and do you have that ability to be able to lead others to do that? And if not, then at best, at worse, I guess sorry, but we look at it. It’s scary for me because then I see where therapy/psychology is complicit in … It will be complicit in perpetuating this regressive state.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, and it makes me think about … I’m thinking about the word integrity and thinking about it less around moral integrity, which yes, it’s there, but that when we’re thinking in psychological terms, that sense of wholeness and really theological terms. Wholeness, being made whole. And that means embracing a lot of complexity. Differentiation is less … I think about … I do a lot of work in spiritual abuse. And one of the things that’s really powerful about understanding something that is more of a collective form of abuse is that you also have to deal with your own complicity.

Monique: Absolutely.

Rachael: If you’ve been in a spiritually abusive system, then likely you have perpetrated that kind of harm against others because it’s like the nature of the beast. You become an evangelist of these ideals and you don’t want to be scapegoated. So you make sure to keep the people in line and don’t be associated with someone who might be scapegoated. That’s a very simplistic language around it. But there’s something about … I think Resmaa Menakem uses this in My Grandmother’s Hands, this notion of clean pain is about choosing integrity over fear. And yeah, I know for myself, to be able to tolerate the anxiety you’re putting words to in bearing the truth, one of the core things I had to renew my mind around, get clarity around and find a kind of ground, solid ground, was like, I wasn’t all good. Which sounds like such a novel thing, but I’m coming from White supremacy, which is like, you’re good and you’re pure. I’m in a family system where I just so badly needed … I so desperately needed to be good and helpful in order to really feel like I could survive. So to grow a resilience, to feel in my nervous system, clean pain, right? To actually integrate things that were true, that two things could be true at the same time.

Monique: Absolutely.

Rachael: I was beloved and really beautiful and good and I was broken and sometimes harmed people. And a lot of times in my attempts to be good, I was harming people. So I just think that that aspect of growing in our integrity is going to, I think absolutely it’s we’re going to have to confront our demand for certainty because integrity actually oftentimes makes things a lot more complex. And like you said, it’s a slow work. It’s a relational work. It’s a reparative work that you can’t really rush through. And that’s hard. And I would love to know how you help students or even how you help communities. Growing a capacity for societal emotional health or even just personal emotional health takes time, but there’s such an urgency of the now because things have collapsed. So how do we bear that tension of this is intentional discipleship, transformational work, and there is such an urgency. And what do we do with that?

Monique: Yeah, there is an urgency. And also we have to be careful because that urgency will influence us to react emotional. And what we’re trying to move away from is that emotional reactivity, right? The anxiety that we’ve been talking about. And so I don’t necessarily subscribe to let’s be anxiety free because there’s a lot going on.

Rachael: That’s good because I never arrived there, so I’m glad we don’t have to be anxiety free.

Monique: I’m not. I’m not there either. And I don’t even think in … I mean, if anything, sometimes the differentiating can produce an anxiety because you are thinking like, okay, here I go. I’m not going to succumb to the group togetherness pressure. So that means I’m going to be on the outside. And as it has already been discussed, that means I’m going to be scapegoated and to what degree. So it is going to create an anxiety. But back to what I was saying about being able to name that, especially when I was talking about when people look at me and there is this need to annihilate, what are you projecting onto me? So I subscribe to being able to start right there with the anxiety. I truly believe that starting with the emotional reactivity is the way in. If it says in the scriptures that we can fellowship in the suffering. Suffering, most people, if they are suffering, they feel some sort of way. And so if it’s, I’m tired of this or I’m anxious about this or I’m sad about whatever it is, we can start right there. So can we just start with: we are anxious? Can we name what is creating this anxiety in us? And if we can really be truthful with ourselves to be able to name that and then be able to think about how to not project that out on somebody else to the point of, now I need to annihilate you. So if we can use the emotion, yes, we’re going to react, but if we can find ways to cope, if we can find ways to contain that particular emotion, to name it, to be able to then talk about why it is existing and can we manage it, not eliminate it, not ignore it, not deny it, but can we manage it? And I think that if we can get to a place that we can manage it, that in and of itself is regulation. That is emotional regulation. And once we can get there, then hopefully with this renewed mind or with maybe with the desire to have more of an openness to renewing our minds, then we can talk about what causes me to relate to you in ways that are not helpful. What causes me to relate to you in ways that create issues within our society? If we can just embrace that grace that God has for us, if we can understand, to your point, I’ve been broken before. I understand that. I know it’s been the grace of God that has kept me. And how does that look for me to extend that to other people?

Dan: Yes. It’s always why I’ve loved that passage where the man says regarding Jesus’ invitation to heal his deeply troubled son, I believe, help my unbelief. And another way of saying that is I love the truth and I don’t. And the ability to hold the reality that if you are a truth teller, you know, as you put it so well that there’s something in us that’s not fond of the truth, yet we know the truth will set us and others free. So holding the ambivalence, but with the framework of the humility of asking, help, help, help. Thank you so much for joining us.

Rachael: Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Gadson.

Monique: Thank you all for having me. It’s been a joy.