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

This week, Dan continues sharing about his upcoming book, Healing the Wounded Heart,

a 25-year retrospective about everything he has learned working with sexually abused men and women.

Dan addresses the intent of evil to create orphans,

widows, and strangers, and what it looks like to join our broken parts to the wholeness and goodness

of God. What I'd like to consider in our second podcast on the new book, Healing, the Wounded Heart,

what I want to capture is at least a few of the distinctives and then settle in to the major

work that I would hope a reader would engage. The book really is intended to address so many of the

issues that either I was not fully aware of or simply did not have enough experience to address

in the way that I would have wished to have done in the original wounded heart.

One example is, though I have always believed that we are up against the Kingdom of Darkness

and that evil has had a deep joy in bringing about and utilizing the harm of sexual abuse. I don't think I was

as clear about its insidious work of aligning our hearts, unwittingly, usually, with its own

labor. In other words, as evil is out to betray and to create

powerlessness and this bottom structure of ambivalence and shame, I was so clear about those

categories, but linking them to the fact that evil works through

betrayal to ruin innocence. I'm much clearer about evil's design to turn our hearts against

goodness, our own goodness, others' goodness, the goodness of God, and to see that evil

is working through the process of grooming, aligning your heart in many ways through the

biochemical process of bonding or oxytocin. That's a concept that, even if it was available in the late 80s,

early 90s, we are so much clearer about the role of attachment and the role of how the human

heart deeply bonds to anyone who offers attunement, a kind of I can read you, and I can provide a kind of

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