“The Secure Soul” with Dr. Alison Cook

by on August 21, 2026

What do you do with the parts of yourself you’d rather not have?

Maybe you’ve learned to stay small, keep the peace, take care of everyone else, or work hard enough that you don’t have to pay much attention to what’s happening inside. Maybe you’re deeply aware of other people’s needs but have a harder time knowing what you need. Or maybe you’ve done a lot of personal work and still find that old wounds show up in familiar ways.

In this conversation, Dr. Alison Cook invites us to look at our inner lives with fresh eyes. She brings psychology, philosophy, and theology together to explore what it means to become more secure—not by getting rid of the difficult parts of ourselves, but by learning to tend to them with greater compassion and care.

Join Dan, Rachael, and Alison for a thoughtful conversation about the inner work of becoming more secure, the ways our past can shape how we relate to ourselves and others, and what it might look like to make room for the whole of who you are.

*This episode contains some explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Listener Resources:

About Our Guest:

Dr. Alison Cook is a therapist and host of the top-ranked The Best of You podcast.  Originally from Wyoming, Dr. Alison studied at Dartmouth College (BA), Denver Seminary (MA), and the University of Denver (PhD), where she specialized in integrating psychology and theology. Dr. Alison’s doctoral dissertation centered on the relationship between religion and prejudice. She is certified in Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) and is the author of the ECPA bestselling book The Best of You and coauthor of Boundaries for Your Soul, with nearly 100,000 copies sold–  based on the popular IFS therapy model.  Widely recognized as an expert at the intersection of faith and psychology, Dr. Alison empowers individuals to heal from past wounds, develop a strong sense of self, and forge healthy relationships. Connect with Dr. Alison at www.dralisoncook.com.

 

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: Rachael, a basic beginning question before we introduce our remarkable and profoundly gifted guest. How secure are you feeling today?

Rachael: It’s a great question. I was actually assessing death this morning and I actually was thinking I have some room for growth. I’ve got a good foundation, but I have some room for growth.

Dan: Well, I was tending to my six-year-old granddaughter a great deal yesterday, and at one point she looked at me and she said, “Papa, are you coming apart?” And I’m like, “What would give you that indication?” She said, “You’re a little more grumpy and irritable than normal, and usually that means you’re coming apart.” I just thought that was a brilliant gift. So I would say I have much room for improvement. And so this is one of those, I’ll just say at the very beginning, so frustrating beginnings because Dr. Alison Cook has a profoundly new and excellent book called The Secure Soul: Finding Inner Strength and Connection When Trust Doesn’t Come Easy. So first of all, I’ll introduce you in a moment, Alison, but just to say welcome. We are so grateful to have you with us.

Alison: This is amazing. Two people I admire so much in this world. It’s just such a treat to get to be with you this morning.

Dan: Well, it’s a gift for us to be with you. And again, your qualifications are so remarkable, and I do have a couple questions that are utterly irrelevant to what we’re doing. But you are a psychologist of religion, but also a profound and gifted therapist and an incredible writer. I’ve had the privilege of reading many of your books. The Best of You is one of those that just, a remarkable, sweet book. But this book, again, it’s one of those where you go, they’re all your children, but I am very fond of this new one.

Alison: That’s a good way to put it. Thank you. That’s very kind.

Dan: Well, okay. You live in Wyoming and you live in the mountains. So of course I have to ask, do you fly fish?

Alison: My husband is an avid fly fisherman. I say I go fishing with him, but that looks like sitting by the shore reading a book. He thinks it’s funny, but that is my form of fly fishing.

Dan: Can I urge you to allow the shadow side of you to move into the waters of redemption? Yeah.

Alison: Okay. Are you a fly fisherman?

Dan: I try to be. So, I’m a wannabe. Nonetheless. You did your dissertation at University of Denver in prejudice. So what I like to just start with is how did you move into the issue of prejudice? Anyone who focuses on something essentially dark is searching for something that they know exists somewhere within their own realm, maybe not their own soul, but at least I’m just curious how you got into prejudice and how that relates to this glorious new book.

Alison: Well, two reasons. So the first is more academic. I was at the University of Denver reading all this research on the psychology of religion, and there’s this huge body of research that essentially the summary is the more religious you are, the more prejudice you are.

Rachael: Wow.

Alison: And this was driving me crazy. I was like, why? How can this be true that the greater correlation with religion, you are more prejudice? And in my mind, if we look at the life of Jesus, the more we’re following Jesus, the more we’re engaged in really living like Jesus lived, we would be the most upholding of the poor, the most upholding of the marginalized, the most upholding of people who are different, of the stranger, of the… I was like, I’m going to by golly, prove that there’s something else going on here. And so that was the study that I designed, was to try to look at what else is going on there. And essentially I looked at it, there’s this concept in the psychology of religion called religious orientation. As you guys are probably familiar, how you orient to your religious beliefs. And there’s different ways of categorizing that is actually the deciding factor in that. And I used this idea of cognitive complexity, how much you can hold cognitive complexity. And so then when you tease that component out, you see different results. I could talk to you about this for hours.

Dan: And we won’t. We won’t. But having done a dissertation myself on dogmatism for the same reason and looking at the interplay of prejudice, dogmatism, and the importance of orientation. Exactly. So again, I don’t want to spend more than another precious moment just saying it really does help me get a sense of the kind of goodness that you bring to this reflection on what it means for us to, in one sense, through the category of attachment, but far beyond that, talk about what it means to have a soul that knows grounding and yet is able to bear complexity. So tell us a little more about this book and what you were wanting us to engage as you wrote this.

Alison: Well, I think it really does relate to that heart that I’ve always had, whether in the systems around us or in the system within us for the marginalized, for the impoverished. And so in the book, I’m looking at the parts of our own souls that we’ve dismissed, shamed, sidelined, rejected, that have felt dismissed by others and felt rejected by us. So there is that relationship of realizing, oh my goodness, I do this within my own self. You talked about the shadow part of us. I talk about the shadow, which I’m borrowing from great psychologists from long ago, from philosophers, also from scripture. But this idea that there are places in me and in all of us where we harbor a lot of these emotions and a lot of these feelings that we want to bury, that we want to dismiss, that we want to sideline. And kind of this idea that God in his kindness wants to reach every single corner of our soul, including the dark corners where we hide, including the forest where we get lost in our minds. That was a big one for me. And what does it look like to do that work in partnership with God, to really tend to every corner of our soul in partnership with God? The title of the book is The Secure Soul. You started off talking about security. As I’ve moved forward, here I am at having turned 50, parts of me are very confident. I write books. I have very insecure, a lot of insecurities. I wrestle with both all the time. And so the book isn’t how do you find that bravado and become that superhero you always wanted to be. It’s how do you do the ongoing work of, oh, there’s that scared part of me. There’s that part of me that can feel like it never belongs and bring that part of me into relationship with grounding and with love.

Rachael: One of the things I love about your book, and I think you brought just very tender vulnerability, which is it’s costly to bring our own stories into our desire to… We’re telling something we really believe is valuable to people, but to show them with our own story, what a gift that you’ve given us. And so I so appreciate the ways in which you’re mirroring for us, this is what this can look like. Let me show you what this process can look like. But one of the things I find so deeply compelling that you bring from the start is really linking attachment beyond our human relationships, even beyond our internal attachment to self to this sense that our first and primary and in some ways the root of all secure attachment as being God. And I think that’s something that can be missing in a lot of attachment language. It’s important to me in my work with spiritual abuse because I think so much of what’s wounded in spiritual abuse is the security of that attachment with God, which can be so devastating and disorienting. And I would just love to hear a little bit more what that’s been like for you to make that linkage between your worlds of theology and psychology that you inhabit.

Alison: Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. I think for me, two things happen. One, in all the attachment language, we tend to be looking at parents. How healthy was our childhood? And then also we tend to be looking at our partner, our intimate relationship, how well is. And the truth is I have really loving parents. They live down the street from me here in Wyoming. I had a very loving childhood. My dad is just a delight. He’s an Enneagram seven, a lot of joy. My mom is very sensitive. She’s deeply kind. And I arrived at adulthood with a lot of wounds. That was always very confusing to me because the narrative of my 20s was I had this perfect childhood. Now I could tease apart with you all of the ways. It was the ’80s. There was a lot of ’80s Christian parenting going on. We can just bracket that. A lot of focus on behaviors and not emotional attunement, a lot of strict rules. I talk about the movie Footloose, and my sister and I were like, ding, ding, ding. You can have these loving parents who are missing emotional cues. So that was part of it is truly who has that perfectly securely attached base? So that’s number one. And do I have to reject all of my childhood to also reckon with the fact that here I am with a fair amount of wounds? I couldn’t forge intimate relationships. I had some wounds going on. Two, I have a wonderful husband. I love my husband. And there is, and my favorite person to quote here is good old Yalom, who talks about that existential isolation every single one of us feels at the end of the day, no one can fully inhabit my inner world. And so there’s always a strand of I’m alone with this, even in the best relationships. People can take the edge off our loneliness a hundred percent. And also… and so I think for me, attachment language is so crucial. And the minute you begin to understand what it’s like for a little child, just your six-year-old granddaughter to be in the world and need that secure base from which to learn how to be safe and to go out into the world is so true. There’s so much truth in it. And also there’s always going to be a gap in our human ability to create that. So I was trying to write into, to honor the importance of attachment and also give us that cushion of divine love as sort of the ultimate source that we can tap into in that gap where there is still, even in great situations, there’s still from the very hard situations to even the situations where there hasn’t been the big “T” trauma, but there’s been a lot of the wounding and a lot of the little “t” traumas where we still need something beyond other humans.

Dan: Yeah. So well said. And yet as you describe what you saw in the suffering of your sister, and again, the benefit is I have the book, but our audience doesn’t. So just to describe a little bit of what you saw with your sister. And in that sense, with really remarkable parents, you’re still in the presence of a fallen world with utter power and cruelty in relationships with peers.

Alison: This is the Wild West. I grew up in a little town in Wyoming, very Friday Night Lights, though that didn’t exist back then. My sister had a history of being bullied. She was my older sister, but in her fourth grade, it was my second grade, the girls shunned her. She was essentially ostracized. She’s got a kind of a loud, we call it that tall poppy personality that stuck out in a little town. We weren’t athletes. I tried so hard to be an athlete. I never was. And so that was for me just that, oh, I didn’t fit into this culture. A lot of good in the culture. And also just to your point, harshness. Kids were mean to kids in my class. And I was sitting there, I tell the story of being in that, I have such profound memory of being in that second grade classroom, knowing the pain, taking it in, being a little baby empath before I knew what that was and not knowing what to do with it, not knowing what to do with that. And again, you have parents in the background, but again, this was before there was a lot of conversation about bullying. The ethos in our family was just be good, do the right thing, be a good person, love other people, and things will work out. And there’s some truth in that. And also that there’s not a lot of help in that when other kids are being pretty cruel and teachers are ignoring it and sometimes participating in it. So that was a lot to take in. And I learned two things at eight. One is don’t stick out because I see what happens when you do. So just stay invisible, stay quiet. That was kind of the trajectory of being a second, the younger child. And two, a lot of internalized guilt and confusion and shame around not being able to do anything. And sometimes feeling like I don’t know how to help the kid who’s getting hurt. So am I complicit in him? Am I part of it? I wouldn’t have been able to put those words on it back then, but I still carry that burden of what I didn’t do or what to do with the things I was picking up around me that I didn’t know what to do with. So yeah, that was my, it was sort of observing. It was that observer part of me that developed. Stay invisible and just stay out of the way because life is hard. People get hurt.

Rachael: Well, and you’re putting words to really vicarious trauma in some ways of when that meaning making or there’s not a witness to this kind of pain that you’re carrying, but you’re witnessing other people’s pain. And you put such good language to it where you say when you’re talking about this, where the gift of empathy became a wound. And I would imagine a lot of people who were sensitive souls and who were well attuned to other people that really speaks to a confusion we bear when we’re like, yeah, I’m witnessing something, I’m observing something, and I’m holding deep pain in the midst of that. There’s something I’m needing that I’m not getting that would maybe help me metabolize this, both what I’m witnessing and sensing and experiencing and the powerlessness that we have and what does agency look like? And I could relate to your sister’s story because we moved to a really small town in Oklahoma when I was in fifth grade and it was the same.

Alison: It’s painful.

Rachael: Yeah, being bullied because probably of envy.

Alison: You’re different.

Rachael: Yeah, you’re different whatever. And oh, I mean, it’s brutal to witness that happening and brutal to think that could happen to me if I make the wrong move.

Alison: Yeah. And then for me being the witnesser, that my mind, my memory is filled with all the conversations around my sister. And my sister and I have so many conversations about this now, the different roles, the different family roles that just are so glaring in our family between her and me that still play out to this day. But they really shape you. And I talk about in the book how to this day, if I am feeling confused or upset or sad, I will immediately check on someone else. Are you okay? I mean, I do it to my dogs all the time. Are you guys okay? And my kids started picking up. They’re like, I think you’re sad because you keep saying that the dog is sad. And I’m like, oh yeah. It’s because my whole story was observing other people. My situation is here is to stay invisible. And so I overlearned how to pick up on everybody else’s stuff. And then it’s almost like I’d run a movie projector projecting anything I’m feeling onto these people around me until people around me started to figure out that’s what I was doing to try to get my own needs out on the table.

Dan: You’ve not done a very good job of remaining invisible. How is that for your shadow? And I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about the interplay of what you refer to as the controller and the shadow. And particularly what I love is how you connect that to the notion of the shadow becoming, as that portion of us gets engaged in a different way in the face of kindness, how that shadow becomes one who sees and your use of the category of seer feels really profound.

Alison: Yeah, that’s been a profound journey for me. So the controller, we all have a part of us that is a controller. For me, it comes out as achievement. So that’s the visible side of me. It works really hard, gets a lot done, writes books, get it done. And it’s tied to the rescuer part of me. And I tell the story almost to the end of my doctoral work. I’m seeing clients every day. I’m leading groups. I’m writing papers. And that part of me just gets buried in the work and can exhaust me and not think about how the other parts of my soul feel about that. The shadow part of me, Dan, about visibility has a lot of mixed feelings. I can shame myself. I’m getting better. As I kind of trace in the book, I can second guess myself. But I have learned as that shadow part of me has evolved, whenever I’d feel resentment, because of course when you grow up as the invisible child, there’s also a part of you that’s a little resentful of the others around you getting the attention. You don’t admit that to yourself, but that would come out. And for me, that part of me came out against myself. You shouldn’t want attention. You’re not good enough. If you were like this, maybe then others would see you. So it primarily came out against myself and sometimes God. If God loved me then. And so what I’ve learned with that part of me when I noticed the shadowy emotions is it’s just a young, this one’s a little more adolescent, a young teenage part of me about 13, 14, right? That also needs love, that also needs love. And that has been life-changing for me.

Dan: Well, how do you engage her? How do you engage that and still remarkable 13-year-old?

Alison: Yeah. For me, it’s come with two things. First, just connecting to that all the way back. There’s a long tail back to 13, 14 where the pain and anger of feeling invisible. I used to swear, rage journal, swear in my journal. And I’ve never known what to do with that, but oh, that part of me, when I noticed that inner swearing, the inner swearing, the inner… Almost what I do is I recognize it. I talk about this in the book, recognize it. I put my hand on my heart. What do you need, my love? And I try to personify. That’s that young part of me that has felt so overlooked, so unseen, so sidelined. And it’s not that I’m validating the behavior, but I’m saying, and I imagine, imagine you have kids, you have grandkids. I imagine that young girl, and I do this in the book, going back and being with her in a room, rage journaling. Why did you make me like this, God? Ripping across the page. I imagine as a parent, what would I want to do? I would want to be with her. What you’re feeling. Tell me what you need. I’m here. And it’s kind of like a kid throwing a tantrum. I’m with you. I wouldn’t shame her. I wouldn’t push her aside. I’d say, I want to be here with you. I watch… I tell the story my husband was a widower when we met with young kids. And my daughter, she reached, she’s I guess technically my stepdaughter, but my daughter, she reached her teen years and they’re a very physical family and she would just beat her little fist on his chest. What does he do as a daddy? Just hold her. Take as long as you need. I’m here. That’s that secure base. And that’s what I’m learning to do for that part of me inwardly. Take as long as you need.

Dan: And the word personify to create that category of conversation, you obviously do that with your dogs. So I just want you to put more words to why that’s so important and why do most people feel like they’re crazy if they do that?

Alison: I think God gave us the gift of an amazing imagination. And it’s a way of getting out of my head and imagining. You can imagine being with a young girl with braces on her big teeth and permed hair and you feel that empathy for her. That’s such a different experience for me and for most of us than just, I think we’re very academic. We sometimes in our current world, we know our diagnoses. We can name our Enneagram type. We know what happened to us. But when we imagine, we transport ourself into the place of empathy. And that’s just been life-changing for me to be able to personify and imagine these younger versions of me that still live within me.

Rachael: Well, and I love how you frame memory. This is your words because they’re just so beautiful. “Memory is the trail that leads you back to the parts of your soul still in need of your care, not just the moment itself, but to the younger version of you who lived it.” And that connects with us in story work because in many ways it’s the way we’re trying to create a pathway, not the only path, a pathway of creating that context for someone to experience compassion and presence and attunement and grief and honor and all those things. And I just think your language around. Because our instinct is to exile these parts of us. You’re so right. They are marginalized. They’ve been marginalized and then we kind of join in that marginalization as a way to think we can stay safe. But you say this shadow part of your soul doesn’t need to be silenced or shamed. I just love this language. She needs to be shepherded. And that I think we so lack in imagination that God has wired us and made us in ways that we get to participate in that shepherding, even if we need help at times from other people to show us how to do that or mirror for us how to do that. But that we actually get to participate in that. And I can say for myself, oh my gosh, it’s been some of the most profound work in your framing of this is a part of building an inner secure base. Just resonates so deeply. Because if you had known young 20-something, Rachael, which is you talk about when these parts of us are unattended and they start to swing in this kind of polarization and get really divided, we’re kind of moving towards a breakdown. And I had a profound breakdown in my early 20s. And I mean, I was unhinged. I was amazing and beautiful and very high functioning and also unhinged. When I had my breakdown, I was like one of the phrases my mom would say. And I think again, it was the ’80s, it was the ’90s, we were Southern Baptist. Therapy was for crazy people. And I was like, well, call me crazy because I am getting on the crazy train with the crazy people because I think it’ll be better to get that help than to try to stay away from some label that feels scary. And so I just appreciate the ways that you’re helping us have imagination for what can this look like to show us. Here’s a way you could move.

Alison: And it is the story work that you all are doing. And you have to do it in community too. I’m zooming in on the inner part of it. But you’re right. When you talk about the shadowy parts of us, when you had them in your 20s, when you talked about it becoming this seer, that’s also the part of the healing is recognizing when there are those shadowy emotions, when there is the, for me, if it’s the resentment or the feeling invisible or unseen or whatever, there’s something there. There’s something there that needs to be a truth that needs to be told. And I think that memory, that memory that is that long trail that leads us back, that’s how that shadow becomes the seer. Something happened here, something that needs attention and there’s truth in that. So if you can kind of get through the noise of the emotion or the noise of what’s happening inside that you don’t love and remember that something happened here that needs witnessing just as we would with our own children, it does lead us back to the source, to the root where we can actually get the healing and the love and the repair that we need.

Dan: Well, and as you have, again, become more clear you are a seer. And that’s part of the power of your writing is that you are a very deeply insightful woman about the nature of the human heart and what happens, particularly from past to present. And almost the inevitability that it will be replicated, it will be responded to in the same way unless we disrupt something. So I’d just love to hear how have you been and where have you been disrupted to become the seer that you are?

Alison: Gosh, that’s a good question. I think there’s a paradox of, and I’m not sure if I’m answering the question about disruption, but there’s the paradox of in my life of a kind of wanting the visibility, going all the way back. My sister getting a lot of attention, often negative, but still attention, still getting attention. I tell her, I don’t tell this story often, but when I married into, again, my husband was a widower with two kids, the three of them had such a tight bond. And it took a while from an attachment perspective for me to find my proper place in that system. And I would tell my sister, I was like, you know what? I’ve recreated on some level our family dynamic. Because while the attention my sister got was negative, she and my parents, they were the show. They were the show the whole way through. And part of me always wanted to get in there. But on the other side of that is I developed this rich inner life. So the paradox of this book is you’re getting my rich inner life.

Rachael: That’s right.

Alison: Which is probably the most visible I’ve been, but the richness of the inner life that developed having been kind of having this both by nature and by nurture, a constellation of being someone who spends a lot of time in my own heart and in my own soul and in my own mind and finding a lot of self there. There’s a lot of safety in my own inner world and there has been all the way throughout. I hidden books. I stayed in school. I say to people, me staying in school as long as I did and getting a joint PhD and a master’s degree and all the things, that was my escape hatch. That was safety for me. Man, that was the best place I could be. That’s way safer than other people. So there was a salve in that and also that wasn’t enough. I want to be in relationship. I want to be with people. So I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but I think that has been sort of the paradox of both the wounding and the gifting of my own story.

Dan: Well, it’s the interplay that I read in the book and read in your other writing, what you put words to with regard to can we hold complexity? And in that complexity, can we look at the harm we endured and there be grief and intersecting with anger, but grief and anger, but as well seeing something of the redemptive arc and being able to bless that. And that’s such a remarkable gift that you’re inviting all of us to in terms of how do we care for that inner world with both grief and anger, but also aware of that framework at the end of Genesis 50, you meant it for evil and God meant it for good. And there’s no explanation. This is how it happens, but holding the complexity of this is really shitty and it’s also incredibly beautiful. Can we hold all that?

Alison: Yes, exactly. Exactly. It is the reality into which God’s healing begins to work. And I’m so grateful for that. I’m grateful.

Rachael: Well, and I think the language you bring to some of that healing work as you develop more of a secure inner secure base and a secure soul really is more of a movement towards discernment that can stay present with complex and even conflicting emotions or threatening emotions and a capacity for forgiveness, which I hear you, Dan, putting some words to in some ways, what it looks like to have that self-compassion that doesn’t minimize the truth. And you bring some really vulnerable and painful, but deeply honoring stories about encountering maybe more older, younger parts of you and that hiding in academia and some of the relational costs of that and what it looks like to not. That part of love is not just like, oh, I’m so sorry you were hurting, but to also hold the invitation to we’re meant for more and there can be grief and that we didn’t know or we didn’t have capacity in that moment for the more.

Alison: Yeah. To me, that’s a question I get so often from different people of kind of that feeling of regret. And it’s a complex thing and there’s so many one-off answers to it. Well, just let go and move on. And for me, I tell a story. There was a moment of recognizing in my late-30s when I was kind of being grafted into this new family that I was in love with, I loved. It’s been the biggest gift of God in my life and recognizing, oh, I’m getting close to where I won’t be able to have children biologically. And suddenly it was that moment that I began to look back at some of the decisions I’d made through my 20s. And again, you can blame people around you. And listen, there were external factors. This book, I’m focusing on the inner, of course. Would it have been nice… My daughter’s 24 right now and I’m having a lot of conversations with her that no one had with me at 24. So there’s definitely, you can look at the absence of parenting, you can look at systemic issues, you can look at a lot of things. And also the reality is for me, there were parts of me that made choices and that controller part of me took over. And for me, it was important to have a process with her, that 25, 26, 27-year-old version of me, to work through a process of inner self-forgiveness. And that honestly, it took the sting out of it. And it’s what’s allowed me to lean into the life that I have that I’m so grateful for and hold the reality of what I didn’t have. The paradox of that and the beauty of that is my family holds complexity. And early on, this was harder. Now it’s just part of our family system. We’ve all incorporated it. But early on, my husband holding the complexity of, I love you. I love this family we’re forming and I have feelings of grief and loss over my wife who passed away. My kids fully embracing me and also always holding a space for their mom. Me embracing fully my kids would not trade them for the world. And what would it have been like to give birth? I don’t know. So as a family, we began to do that work of integrating, of holding space for all things. That takes a lot of inner work, a lot of security in each person. And my husband and I having the privilege of walking our kids through the security that it takes, that we’re okay with them holding a lot of different things. So we’ve kind of had both myself individually and as a family, a lot of practice at this. And there’s so much freedom in that. There’s such a richness of life in that that I’m so grateful for.

Dan: Again, you’ve underscored the reality that all of us bear in our non-glorified state struggles and insecurities that will be there literally until we are face-to-face with Jesus. And the other side to that is growing security actually opens the door to a new level of insecurity. And that is what you refer to as risk. And so, I mean, at least in many people that I’ve worked with, I kind of forget that the growing security is meant to actually make you somewhat miserable. And that misery is the misery of taking on, growing into, taking risks and stepping into realms that now expose actually new levels of insecurity that indeed the redemptive process is meant to capture. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about what you know risk is involved.

Alison: You just said that so well that you just hit me with this book coming out. The complexity, right? There’s enough security and safety that I feel like I can write a more personal book. And also it’s exposing, I’m aware, I’m not naive that you’re exposing yourself to more risk. And so it is, again, that paradox of there’s more safety, there’s more security. And so I can take more steps, be more vulnerable, be more open, and expose yourself to risk. We’re never immune to that. I maybe have more skills to address it. I have more security from which to look at the risk, but I’m still aware of it. Parts of me are still kind of with their eyes real big going, oh my goodness, we’re walking into something. That’s still there. And I have more of an ability. How I would put it is I can more quickly. I talk about the return to love movement in the book. I can more quickly, almost immediately right there, “And even here I am loved. And even here I am loved.” And I’ve built that trust with myself. You can build that trust with yourself. So when your granddaughter says, “You’re getting cranky.” Instead of the inner shaming voice, there’s more of a, “My golly, I am getting more cranky,” because there’s that inner trust that you build. It’s not that the risk isn’t still there. It’s not that the vulnerability and the tenderness. I think you’re right. I think it’s there even more. I think we care even more. We just maybe have more capacity to tolerate it.

Rachael: Well, I had a sweet moment with my daughter recently because she’s about to turn four. And so she’s starting to be more aware of emotions that linger and need. So we just got back from visiting my family. She’s very attached to my mom, Nona. And this was the first time in leaving that it was like she had this refrain of, “I don’t want to say goodbye to Nona.” It was just like, I mean, she’s still bringing it. We’re a week out. I don’t want to say goodbye to Nona. And so we’re also having a lot of construction in our house because we had mold remediation. It’s a whole long story, but things have been chaotic and we’ve been in and out of Airbnbs and all over the place. And I was very dysregulated the other day, which is not totally abnormal because my dysrelation is very external. It just comes out and my husband’s is very internal. So same level of intensity, just different ways of expressing it. And she just said, “Mom, why are you being so mean?” And I said, “Oh, that’s…” And I have grown some tools as a mom because that’s so terrifying when you know about attachment for your kid to say you’re being mean because I want to move toward like, “Oh no.” Gaslighting her almost like, “Oh no, I’m not mean.”

Alison: Yes.

Rachael: But instead I was just like, “You’re working on learning to breathe when you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Mom still has to work on that because sometimes there’s stress.” And she was sitting next to me and then she just said, “And sometimes you’re sad because you don’t want to say goodbye to Nona.” And I was like, “Yes. And sometimes you’re sad because you got to say goodbye to people you love.” And she just cried. And I just felt like here we are in this very messy mode.

Alison: That’s messy.

Rachael: It’s not what I imagined secure attachment parenting would look like. I imagined I would just come from this grounded place of always getting it right. And I think in some ways what I hear you inviting us to is a more radical welcome and honesty that these parts, they will grow more secure and yet they remain with us as parts that are a constant invitation to turn back towards welcome, towards compassion.

Alison: And hopefully more quickly toward repair. I mean, what a beautiful moment. I was super cranky. I was super cranky with my husband the other night. And it was so funny because I though about the book and I went into the other room and I was like, “I am loved even here, even in my crankiness.” And then you so much more quickly get to the humor or get to the. Yeah, but it’s still messy. And I love that. I love that picture. You still get to the repair.

Dan: Well, I think in so many ways you both have described how I would most summarize the book. It is a welcome. And to the one that we are meant to dine with and the one who we will dine with, but who’s also so deeply engaging each and every moment of us passing through the shadow and beginning to disrupt the controllers, we begin to find our way back to him and to, in one sense, acknowledge he’s never left us. So the goodness of what you have offered us, Alison, I just say this is for Becky and I, what we tried to do is find a book that starts our fall. And this is the book that we have decided for the late August, shall we say, entry into the world of this beautiful book. It’s one of those books that will create conversation between you and whomever you’re in relationship with and open the door to the kind of confirmation every one of us needs as we begin the fall. So I’m so grateful. Thank you. The book is launching and being birthed right as most of us start into a so-called new year. We thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this labor.

Alison: Thank you both so much. So grateful.