Reclaiming Faith, Hope, and Love after Spiritual Abuse
The Allender Center Podcast
The Allender Center
4.7 • 648 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Faith, hope, and love are beautiful words—but for many of us, they don't feel simple or safe. When they've been wielded to control, silence, or shame, these core concepts can carry weight, confusion, and even fear. In the wake of spiritual abuse, what once promised life can feel distorted or out of reach.
Today, Dan and Rachael step tenderly and courageously into what it means to reclaim faith, hope, and love after harm.
Rather than treating faith as certainty, hope as optimism, or love as obedience, they reframe these virtues as deeply human, relational realities: faith as trust, hope as imagination for a future shaped by goodness, and love as a force grounded in honor, freedom, and delight.
Together, they name how spiritual abuse exploits fear and shame to protect power—fracturing our ability to trust ourselves, others, and even God.
Healing doesn't begin with forcing a set of dogmatic beliefs, but with safety: learning to listen to our bodies, recover discernment, and engage relationships where difference and nuance are welcomed.
This conversation is for anyone longing to rediscover a faith that makes room for personhood, courage, and love that does not demand fear in return.
=====
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.
Stream each episode, plus find transcripts, additional resources, and more at:
To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, visit:
https://theallendercenter.org/2025/11/podcast-support/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Spiritual abuse leaves profound wounds. |
| 0:11.0 | It shapes how you trust, how you connect with others, and how you perceive yourself and the world around you. |
| 0:17.0 | At the Allender Center, we are committed to creating spaces where your stories of religious |
| 0:22.2 | harm can not only be heard and understood, but met with the kind of care that leads towards healing. |
| 0:28.2 | I'm Rachel Clinton Chen, and I wanted to personally extend an invitation for you to join me |
| 0:33.5 | for the upcoming story workshop for spiritual abuse and healing. This story workshop was designed |
| 0:39.1 | in response to the countless emails and DMs we've received, expressing a need for more resources |
| 0:44.5 | to navigate past spiritual abuse. Whether the spiritual abuse is rooted in your family of origin, a church |
| 0:50.8 | setting, or a youth or campus ministry, this story workshop is designed to guide you through your stories of harm. |
| 0:57.9 | Our hope is that over this transformative three-day experience, you'll not only find strength in a support of community that truly understands, |
| 1:06.3 | but also learn to reconnect with yourself and rediscover the goodness of God. |
| 1:11.4 | If you're ready to reclaim your story, your sense of self, and your faith, |
| 1:16.1 | I invite you to join us for the next story workshop for spiritual abuse and healing. |
| 1:20.6 | You can find dates and details at the allender center.org slash workshops. |
| 2:04.6 | Thank you. Allender Center.org slash workshops. Marriage is the meeting of two very different stories. In some ways, two very different worlds. |
| 2:08.6 | Every one of us carries some degree of loss and heartache and shame into our marriages. |
| 2:14.6 | And those stories shape how we love, how we protect ourselves, and how we show up in our most |
| 2:22.4 | intimate relationships. |
| 2:24.8 | I'm Dan Allender, and Becky and I want to invite you to join us, along with Steve and Lisa |
| 2:30.5 | call for the Allender Center Marriage Conference happening February 6 and 7th in the |
| 2:36.9 | year of our Lord 2026. It's a time to explore how conflict, how struggles can actually be the |
| 2:46.1 | context to imagine your marriage becoming a place of even greater delight and goodness and life. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Allender Center, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Allender Center and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.