You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan invites us into the deep waters of family of origin.

We know this is a complex and loaded category.

So first, Dan sets the groundwork by talking about genetics and attachment,

and the importance of recognizing that the past is very much at play in our

relationships today.

I'm so very grateful that I get the opportunity regularly to have what I'm so very grateful that I get the opportunity regularly to have what I consider to be very significant conversations about life with good friends and people whom I've just met.

And I was interacting with someone who was an acquaintance, someone whose spouse listens to the

Allender Center podcast.

And as I was having lunch with him, he said very distinctly, I feel like I'm fully

responsible for my life.

And no one is to blame for who I am or what I do other than me.

In some sense, it's a very honorable stance to take.

The problem is it's also very independent, defensive, and in some ways, isolated, in other words, profoundly self-centered in the very core presumption.

What I want to talk about really over the next four podcasts is the role of our family of origin,

on the shaping of who we are, how we relate, how we receive and engage others, how indeed we know God.

It is, in one sense, an assumption that our world and our relational world so often in our

most formative framework as children, as babies, shape in some ways some of the core infrastructure of

how we go about relating to the world. And as we consider this process, I hope in some ways,

it begins to disrupt certain presumptions and invite you to further own

your life, the effects of your own choices, but as well an understanding of how the life

and choices and suffering of others in your world has, in fact, shaped who you are today.

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