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

This week, our Family of Origin series turns to the heavy, heartbreaking category of triangulation.

Dan and his wife, Becky Allender, look back on their own families and the history of their marriage

to help us unpack how these dynamics continue playing out decades later.

The last several weeks we've been thinking about family of origin and the cost and the necessity to engage that difficult matter.

And what I brought up the last time is the need to look at something called triangulation.

It's the nature of what happens in any family when there is a failure of

love between a husband and wife, when there is not delight, where there's not honor, where there's

not the capacity to repair rupture. In other words, where there's not attachment structures

between a husband and a wife,

there will come to be a relationship between a parent and a child where that child replaces

something of the intimacy needs of that parent spouse who's now using that child for levels of intimacy that were intended only for one's relationship with one's spouse.

But before we step into that, I want to read a passage out of Genesis chapter 37 that puts words to the reality of what comes with triangulation.

And this is the story about Joseph.

Now, Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons

because he had been born to him in his old age,

and he made a richly ornamented robe for him.

When his brother saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him

and could not speak a kind word to him.

If you know that story, it's one of the longest stories in the scripture,

a story of the brother's envy and violence, selling Joseph into slavery and

in slavery, a long history with Potiphar, Potiphar's wife, eventually with the Pharaoh,

...