Food, Sex, and Shame, Part 2
The Allender Center Podcast
The Allender Center
4.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In part two of this conversation, Dan and Rachael continue their exploration by addressing the profound link between shame, food, and sex.
Shame is often leveraged by evil around our core needs for nourishment and intimacy to isolate and create deeper wounds, making it difficult to engage these areas with openness.
Dan emphasizes, "Knowing your story’s vulnerability to how you have been harmed, but also how you've used food and sex," is crucial.
Rather than allowing shame to silence or control us, Dan and Rachael encourage listeners to confront it with boldness. While shame may never fully disappear, we can engage it—not with harshness or self-destruction, but with a fierce kindness and courageous defiance.
Rachael shares: “The Spirit is often inviting me in the disruption of shame, not to power up and go toward fight, flight or freeze as a way to disrupt shame, but to move toward tenderness, to move toward grief, to move toward a kind of righteous anger that leads to a ‘hell no.’”
Ultimately, the work of dismantling shame happens within a community of care. Dan reminds us that true healing takes place in a "playground of kindness"—a space where we are seen, known, and deeply loved.
Please note that this episode contains discussions of sexual development, sex, body image, and disordered eating, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm Dr. Dan Allender. |
| 0:08.7 | And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen. |
| 0:10.5 | We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world. |
| 0:14.7 | And restoration for the heart. |
| 0:17.2 | Thank you for joining us. |
| 0:18.5 | Let's get this conversation started. |
| 0:30.0 | Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. You know, we've named some difficult things as we enter into this conversation about sexuality and eating, and the interplay |
| 0:43.0 | with shame and contempt. So just to let people know we're coming back into that, is it a trigger |
| 0:49.7 | warning? Probably a little, But I have another warning. |
| 0:55.3 | And that is, my head is full of something I will not name other than it rhymes with the word not. |
| 1:06.6 | And, you know, like, you know, most of us have labored when we don't feel well. |
| 1:14.7 | And, you know, but I think having the opportunity to disrupt shame and contempt, |
| 1:21.9 | it's like I would really want to have a little bit more of a less congested voice, let alone head. |
| 1:32.8 | But yet, let's muddle into this conversation. And you were saying that you could feel somewhat |
| 1:42.7 | better as well. Yeah. Just levels of fragmentation that you just don't quite want to have, |
| 1:49.6 | but also I feel fiercely committed to disrupting shame. |
| 1:54.2 | And it feels like if there was something worth fighting for today |
| 1:57.6 | in the midst of unwellness and fragmentation, |
| 2:03.3 | disrupting shame is certainly one of those things. Well, and I hadn't planned on starting with this, but there is something |
| 2:10.1 | really important about that notion of ferocity, and maybe even more so the word defiance. We'll talk about how we think we can dismantle something of the |
| 2:25.0 | nuclear power of shame and therefore contempt. But just to begin with that, and that is this |
... |
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