Is There Still More To Your Story?

by on June 5, 2026

Is there still more to your story? It’s a question that can feel surprising, especially if you’ve spent years reflecting on your past, pursuing healing, or engaging your story. Yet in this conversation, Dr. Dan Allender, Rachael Clinton Chen, and Wendell Moss explore how story continues to reveal new insights about who we are, how we’ve been shaped, and how God is meeting us in the present.

You’ll get a glimpse into what story work actually looks like in a Story Workshop or Narrative Focused Trauma Care® training, and why returning to meaningful moments from our lives can open the door to greater compassion, deeper understanding, and unexpected freedom.

Whether you’re new to story engagement or have been doing this work for years, you’re invited to consider what might still be waiting for you in your story.

Related Resources:

About the Allender Center Podcast:

For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.

At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, click here. If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org

 

Episode Transcript:

Dan: We have on today one of our dearest friends and colleagues, near to be Dr. Wendell Moss, often whom we refer to as Bishop Moss. So it will be near to be Dr. Bishop Wendell Moss. Wendell, welcome. The framing of what we want to talk about is the nature of how story and the nature of how story becomes a way of not only how we connect with one another, but how we begin to get an understanding of who we are. So take us a little bit more Wendell into your engagement with story in and through this and particularly we want to talk about how your involvement in the Story Workshop has been one of the frames where I have seen so much of the impact of your life for good.

Wendell: Yeah. I think one of the things that, and I think even lately I have come to realize how much of my story work has been a big part of my identity work because I believe that as I’ve engaged my story, I’ve seen story work be the very part of my healing process because there’s been something about telling my story and actually as I’m telling my story, I’m letting my story inform who I am and who I am becoming. And I’m needing to engage my story in order to see how has my past made me who I am today. As we often talk about, how has it shaped who I am now? So to begin to pay attention to my story has been for me to be able to see who I’m becoming, but also to hear feedback from others. When they sing it back to me, that also has played a part in who I am becoming because I take their work. They’re joining me in my story work. They’re giving me feedback. They’re offering empathy. They’re offering it to me. They’re offering attention to those places that I’m blind to in my story. All of that has come to help me to understand and like, okay, this is who I am. So the story work has just been a catalyst so much for my healing process, but even more helped me to understand my identity with much more particularity.

Dan: One of the things I love that we do is we actually, whether it’s a Story Workshop or one of our Narrative Focused Trauma Care training, we actually ask people to write. Usually in the frame of 800 to a thousand words, take an episode, not an itinerary, not like tell us four or five stories, but take a particular story and begin to help us get context. What was the setting? Who are the people? What was the dialogue? And et cetera. And again, one of the things that I think is getting clearer and clearer with regard to research is that writing accesses a different part of our brain than our typing when we write in that way. And especially when we begin to actually put words to an experience, there’s always a sense of almost surprise this sentence showed up. And I may not even know it when I wrote it, but having somebody read it with me is at least what I’m hearing you say… Having access to other people reading, engaging, hearing our stories opens up a really different frame.

Wendell: And I think even understanding even more that when we do this kind of work, that it becomes collective. They’re now part of my story. But then I come to realize that, like you said, Dan, none of our stories are in isolation. There are characters, there are people, family, friends, other voices. So we come to understand that our stories are collective. And part of, I think what I love about Story Workshop is they get a chance to experience other people joining them collectively in the story and that being part of the healing process.

Rachael: Well, and I’m thinking about when we talk about writing or even what you’re saying, Dan, we bring details when we write that we might be aware of, but we haven’t had an opportunity to connect the dots and do that meaning making work. And story work in our context is meaning making work with the help, the compassionate, courageous help of others. And mostly at the Story Workshop, we’re working with childhood stories. We’re revisiting the past and how that’s still showing up in the present and shaping who we are. And I’m thinking particularly about a story I’ve brought to many Story Workshops, have gotten to iterate many times in engagement. And when I first brought that story, the way I wrote the story and the way I felt toward that seven-year-old in the story, I brought it because it was a story that brought me a lot of shame. It’s a place I felt like I still had a lot of contempt for myself and where I had a lot of confusion about why I was the way that I was. Because as kids, we can be really great observers, but not always have the luxury of being good interpreters. Why? Because we’re trying to maintain connection to primary care providers, even if that connection is really insecure. So I brought a story where I was bearing a lot of terror and panic that at least in my reading of it and my memory of it and then how other people interpreted back to me at that time what made me look crazy. It didn’t match reality. Why was I having this panic in this particular moment and why did I feel so alone and why did I feel so much shame? And over many iterations of receiving care in the story, it was a phrase or two that I wrote that someone said, wait a minute. Why this detail right here kind of bears some intentionality of harm that’s not just about you being crazy. Or this detail right here shows there was a lot of awareness of you by care providers and you’re kind of saying, “Oh, they were too busy. They were too…” But this detail says, no, they actually saw you really well. So why are they either looking away in your distress or maybe enjoying your distress? And so I think you’re absolutely right. There’s something about writing stories, especially ones that we know have shaped who we are and that are part of us trying to make sense of who we are and how we came to be this way and the loosening of the contempt for me, the invitation toward more honor towards that seven-year-old, deeper compassion and grief and understanding about what she was suffering and who in some ways was responsible or bears some of the responsibility has allowed me to just in some ways radically welcome that part of me with a lot more compassion and understanding, especially for the moments in my 30s and now my 40s when that familiar sense of panic and terror that often feels like, What’s wrong with you? You’re ridiculous. You’re crazy. I have more pause. I have more space. I have an opportunity to understand myself differently and have more compassion in moments that obviously my nervous system is still working out even though there’s been so much healing and so much more integration. And to me, like you’re saying, Wendell, because other people were a part of engaging that story with me, it’s not just my own compassion I’m calling on in those moments. It’s like the borrowed memories and deposits of compassion of the faces of many people who have held this story with me and in some ways gotten to be what I think of as the hands and feet and face of God in the real when we need to know someone actually can suffer with us moments that we can’t bear our own face and not look away. And that kind of gift of generosity of being with in places where we just bear a lot of trauma in the particularity of story I’m with you Wendell has deeply shaped my sense of identity and also my sense of God’s identity and like who God is and how God sees me and what’s a possibility for me.

Dan: It’s sweet. Again, something in my heart just again wants to say it is so this is not new stuff and probably not even new stuff for folks listening to us who have listened for a while, but there’s something in the naming of parts of us that are not welcomed, that now have been received in some sense by others maybe prior to ourselves, but in their receiving and welcoming, there’s a part of us that can join others and their faces to be able to bless parts of us that we still hold at least with some degree of judgment. And again, I’m sensing that I don’t know if people can see ever our faces just by our voices, but that sense of, oh my gosh, Wendell, watching the joy you have for Rachael and knowing as well, it’s echoing for you. If I can put it this way, what have you seen welcomed about the young parts of you through the process of engaging stories?

Wendell: I just realizing that it took others invitation, even sometimes for me, it took their invitation for me to welcome certain parts of me. They welcomed it before I did. And I needed them to help me to welcome. And in particular, the places where I’m really, really tender was a big part of me that I needed to welcome the big part of me that felt like it was so dishonored and that it was not to be welcome because there was a lot of accusation attached to my tenderness. It’s what my abuser attached to, but to have to recognize that yet my tenderness was used and yet my tenderness, and this is why I needed others to help me to be able to walk on the back is that my tenderness is also how I love really, really well. It’s how I love hard. And so my tenderness and even my playfulness, I had to realize that it’s okay to be playful and to welcome that part of Bam Bam who loves to be playful and at the same time, it’s also connected to how he loves well. But what Bam Bam would also shift and show you in different ways that where he really cares about you, he’ll put his arm around you.

Dan: Well, the reality of when you use Bam Bam, that’s the younger part of you that was, again, others don’t have this picture, but there’s a picture of you as I would say a three to five year old boy on a big wheel coming driveway incline, mad, joy, reckless hell-bent. And yet again, to name that you were and will be just almost an incomprehensibly tender, tender man. And in the past, as we’ve had another podcast, the abuser read that tender wildness and used that to access a violation of your body. And again, I think for all three of us, we have stories of shame, stories where we were exposed that where there was violence or some degree of harm and the natural response of the human condition is we take a judgment and in some sense the unseen world is working to capitalize on that proclivity to judge ourselves in the midst of a moment of shame. And there, oh my God, it’s just I don’t think we can ever have enough podcasts on this to say we get locked. We get locked into a room that we learn to make livable. It’s got a decent seat and maybe a window and enough context to get a little air in, but for the most part it’s a prison. And there’s something about the nature of a Trinitarian God who loves relationship, who’s going to disrupt something of that structure of judgment in a episodic context, a story to bring a judgment. And you both have named the reality of what happens when those judgments begin to get loosened and all of a sudden you’re really gaining a kind of interpretive accuracy to be able to see the harm that was done, but also now the capacity to be able to hold grief and anger in a different way. Is that what you’ve seen for both of you as you’ve done Story Workshops, NFTC? Again, what’s the cost for people to engage that as you have seen that as facilitators?

Wendell: Well, I know for me, grief was very difficult for me because in some ways grief from my story almost meant kind of a selfish pity and almost like to grieve was almost connected to feeling sorry for yourself, as a male. So grief, there’s no room for it. It’s almost considered even some theological circles, almost naval gazing. And so when it came to how I engaged story, it impacted it because grief was hard to give because even what was ingrained in me was, okay, now they’re feeling hard for themselves, so I need to stop them from feeling sorry for themselves. But I think once I was able to actually begin to grieve for my parts, that was my shift to being able to now even impact how I engage story as a facilitator and being involved in a group because to have grief for Bam Bam and to have tears and to realize that it actually took more courage to actually have grief. And that was what was new. It actually took courage and strength to allow myself to grieve. And those are often talked about as the antithesis of each other, especially in male circles. So to be able to do that, well, now I now have the strength to bear somebody else’s grief. And even as a priest, Rachael, as we talked about the other day, I’m now able to be a good priest and even invite people to have the courage to grieve. So I think that’s how it’s been for me to be able to do it myself has impacted how I’m able to help others.

Rachael: When you’re saying that, what I think about is how often if we’re not in the presence of people willing to suffer with us, I think it’s Peter Levine who says trauma is not what happens to us. It’s what’s left in the absence. It’s like what we’re left with in the absence of an empathetic witness when harm comes, like if we don’t have someone to help us be with us to make meaning, to acknowledge the pain. And it makes me think about how many of us would say, oh yeah, I’ve done story work. I’ve brought stories to people and they’ve acknowledged how courageous I am and different things. And it’s like, yeah, those things are true. Someone could bring you a painful story or I’ve brought painful stories and someone could say, “Wow, you were so courageous.” And that’s true. But if someone names that without a willingness to get close to what that cost me to have to be that courageous, if they’re not willing to suffer something of the agony, then that blessing actually feels really anemic because it’s like, yeah, and I’m resentful that I’m courageous and I’m still acting out of this kind of courage that actually keeps me my heart from goodness, keeps me from the kind of relationships I long for because I have to just be really brave and vulnerability is too scary. I actually need the people to get closer to the harm, to let my heart soften, to not have to be so powering through. And so when you say, “What does it cost?” I think it’s that vulnerability. It costs that vulnerability of getting close to parts of us that have really known harm and had to grow coping mechanisms of survival that once we get into adulthood don’t work as well anymore or they become counterproductive. So it also brings in many ways we talk about repentance and we reframe it, especially for those of us raised in context where repentance was maybe more weaponized or seen as just change your moral behavior, stop sinning. It’s like telling a toddler, stop crying. As if their little bodies are just crying to be manipulative and not responding to stimulus and to overwhelm and to pain or fear or some other big emotion that brings tears. And so I think that vulnerability to let people near places again where we actually have a lot of shame and a lot of contempt and to be invited to change or to maybe have a different possibility to let hope grow a little bit more, to let longing have more of a voice, those are disruptive things because we are not isolated individuals, we’re people who exist in relationship. And when we change, we disrupt a lot of the systems that we’re in and how people expect us and the mythology of the stories that are told. I could give an example for me that particular story felt really connected to ways I … Oh, Rachael, she was just so fearful. She was so paranoid as a little kid, and they’re told us funny stories. And I remember, Dan, when we started doing story work, when I came to the Seattle School and you had opportunity to engage one of my stories and we were in leaning into the work with the Allender Center and you said something along the lines of, “Are you ready to make a slight meaning shift?” Because I would say, “Oh, I’m just a really anxious person. I’m just a really anxious person,” as if this was a personality trait that was a given about me. It’s just like, “Well, I’m just getting anxious. Just God made me more anxious.” And you said, are you ready to make a shift based on the stories that you’ve let us hold, that you’re not just merely an anxious person, you’re someone who has survived a lot of terror. And I think that’s part of the gift and cost of story work because that led to a kind of honesty that had relational implications, how I had had my own idolatry of keeping people in a certain kind of … They could maintain their place in my life without any kind of need for them to repent. If I could just embody, if I could take in all of the failure of love, if I could take in all the brokenness, I’m just an anxious person. It’s kind of giving back to other people things that’s their work to work out and that’s scary.

Dan: It’s huge scary. I mean, I don’t think we can actually maybe use the word just merely scary. There’s a philosopher by the name of Thomas Kuhn, K-U-H-N, whose book I can’t remember, but his writing, his writing is on paradigm shifts. And what he underscored is a paradigm isn’t just a kind of template that we have to look at reality or to look at a person or a political process or whatever. These are, and I wish I had enough of his writing in my body to be able to say, but what I came from reading decades and decades ago was a paradigm shift is literally an upheaval that throws your life into a radical shift and it’s why a paradigm shift is so infrequent. We make minor adaptations, maybe a little move here or there, but when you begin to have a paradigm shift like you had, Rachael, and I think in so many ways the paradigm shift where you Wendell with regard to kind of a hatred of the tenderness that you saw as the basis not only of abuse, but of a sense of weakness, of something of a vulnerability that set you up for mockery and harm and you begin to go, what we’re doing with regard to engagement of story is it isn’t subtle at all. It is inviting people to a paradigm shift that will bring incredible freedom, but freedom that disrupts other relationships, disrupts systems that we’re part of and again, not trying to warn people, but warning this is really life giving.

Wendell: Well, there’s something to, I mean, even back somewhere, as facilitators and Rachael, even as you talked about cost, as a facilitator, I know that when you’re thinking about coming to us to workshop, as a facilitator, I get to invite you to in some ways come closer to those moments. Then we talk about 50,000, 40,000 feet and inviting people more and more into the particulars of the story. And as a facilitator, inviting people to get closer to those moments of harm rather than forget them or kind of put them aside, which is often what we’re taught in churches or whatever, forget about your past, but for us to invite people to those moments, to those places of harm and to be able to look, for me to be able to look at those very moments and again, allow grief to come and allow others to sit with me in those moments and Rachael, like you said, and that’s costly, right?That costs a lot to have to look at and see what’s … Well, I don’t want to so quickly blessed, but actually feel like this cost that little boy a lot. But then to begin to go, to be able to honor that cost and then you talk about the paradigm shift, right? For me to begin to experience and honor those places kind of is the beginning to begin to go, okay, I’m now honoring, opening the door to grief. And so just shifting how I’m even handling my story and even how I will handle other people. And as a facilitator, I’m inviting you to step into those moments with a desire to see if you’re willing to further honor your story. While honoring there’s been contempt, but how can we help you to step into those places and take a look at that little boy though?

Rachael: Well, and it makes me think maybe it would be helpful to talk a little bit more about, Dan, you mentioned the cost but also unto life. Because yeah, there’s a cost and there’s also so much goodness that comes when we allow our story to be held with honor to be engaged with more honesty. So what would we say is some of the life, even if it’s disruptive, that comes from these paradigm shifts that we make in the presence of good care?

Dan: Well, Becky and I were walking and this is probably about six months ago and it was a less than pleasant interaction and I was intensifying the conflict.

Rachael: Shocking.

Dan: No, it’s my character. So I’m provoking her, she’s responding angrily and at one point she goes, “This is so enjoyable for you, isn’t it?” And I heard it because it was coming from not a kind of like, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? ” It was more like, “You’re enjoying this.” And the words came this quickly, “that’s how I always came to a point of resolve with my mom,” And I don’t know where that sentence came from. And she’s like, “What?” I mean, this is in our 48th or 49th year of marriage, and she’s like, “What did you just say?” And I said, “I always had to intensify things to get to a point where there was something of an explosion and then there could be for her, a sense of resolve or peace once we came to that climactic moment of intensity.” And literally there were tears and she said, “That explains the last five decades.” And I’m like, “Oh.” She said, “I wish I had known that part of your story.” And I’m like, “I’ve never said that before?” And I’m going, “I don’t think I’ve ever said that to myself.” And so how it came out in a sentence, but again, after so much story work, so to say it isn’t excuse-making, it’s connection, it’s the ability to hold some of the irascible portions of who we may be in relationship with others, not again, excusing or justifying, but also coming to this narrative understanding that can hold, oh, now I know when you’re provoking, you’re actually looking for intimacy. You’re looking for not just a resolve of the problem, but for connection. And I’m like, gosh, you would think the two of us would have that, pretty clear? Nah, took only 48, 49 years to be able to come to that moment. But I think of all the story work God has enabled us to do with one another with others. And yet there’s always, from my standpoint, it’s not infinite because we’re not, but it feels like an infinite amount of new things to learn about each other that gives you a deepend connection, a deepend grief and holding of one another with far greater, back to these keywords, attunement, ability to hold, contain, but therefore understand how to make sweeter repair than just, I’m sorry, I do that a lot. Please forgive me. Now it’s embedded in a story, not just behavior. And now there’s I think been at least with a number more times I have provoked my wife’s ability to be able to go, you just want to fight? And I’m like, yeah, yeah. Well, I’m not getting in the ring. Okay, well then I’m going to have to engage.

Wendell: Well, and then what’s also interesting is that one, I really appreciate you sharing because it also says that, Dan, how long you’ve been doing this work and you’re still coming to realize parts of this that are playing out and it’s taken Becky to help. But it also shows that this work or this story work is so much influenced by context, right? Because you all know this as two married folks, because context of marriage brings certain parts of our stories, certain relationships, right? Yeah. So there’s some about our story work there, our story work being brought forth by various kinds of relationships. Those various casual relationships bring forth certain parts of my story. And to me, that’s just amazing. That part’s my story that only my marriage is brought out. Well, there are parts of my story that only my relationship with Rachael could bring out. There’s some stories that only my best friends and my friends can bring out. So it’s just so interesting how dynamic story work is.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, we’re such a tapestry of stories. I think for people who are maybe thinking about wanting to do more intentional story work to alleviate that pressure that you have to find the story that unlocks the key to it all because we’re such a tapestry. And I have found the spirit to be very generous and gracious in bringing certain stories. And yes, Wendell, whether that’s through context or relationships that I’m in or a certain season that I’m in where there’s an invitation toward, there’s more healing for you here in this contained place that has implications for all the things, but it’s okay to pull on this thread for a little bit and it’s okay that I’m actually not pulling on other threads in this season because there’s a time and a place for that. And sometimes it can feel like we just long for healing and we long for care and it can feel we put too much pressure on ourselves or we expect one engagement with a story is enough. And I think I mentioned the one story I started with, there’s still more for me in that story. And our stories are worth tending to with a lot of intentionality and time. And it’s hard because healing is far less linear than we want it to be. And I love your story, Dan, even as I can hold some of the heartache of almost 50 years of marriage, this very, I would say one of the most core realities of this relational dynamic of how you’ve been shaped still has that mystery of where does it still have power? Where does it still come? Where does it still show up? And when we can acknowledge that, yeah, we’re in a healing journey and there’s more for us, it helps alleviate that sense of like, how have I not gotten this yet? Or what’s wrong with me? Or why am I back here at this core place that I already have awareness about? It’s because it’s not just about understanding our stories. It’s about in some ways entering them and letting healing come in a more holistic way, not just in our understanding, but in our nervous system, in our relationships. And that’s certainly going to take time.