Recovery Week Reflections

The Allender Center Podcast

The Allender Center

Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Christianity

4.7 • 647 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode engages the topic of abuse, particularly sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

Dr. Dan Allender and Linda Royster, LCMHC—two of the leaders of our Recovery Week experiences—come together to reflect on the heart and history of this sacred work.

Dan shares about the origins of Recovery Week in 1988, a gathering that began with a bold hope: that healing is possible for those carrying the wounds of childhood sexual abuse. Linda offers her own story of first encountering The Wounded Heart and the ways it opened her to the possibility of transformation.

Together, they invite us into a deeper understanding of what it means to hold both the personal and the collective—acknowledging that no one suffers in isolation, but always within systems and contexts that shape our stories. Linda speaks to the profound intersections of racial trauma and sexual abuse, and the complex layers of shame that can silence and fragment survivors.

Recovery Weeks create a space to move toward those particularities of the harm you've experienced—where you may want to freeze, minimize, or look away—and to take the courageous step of naming what is true. The goal is not to erase or resolve shame, but to walk through it, opening the way for transformation.

This conversation is an honoring of the decades of work poured into Recovery Weeks, and a heartfelt invitation: to those who come, your presence is already a profound act of courage. Our hope is that you might encounter a deeper healing that makes way for new life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Recovery Week is sacred space with the Allender Center, a place where hidden stories of past sexual abuse are spoken, where shame begins to lift, and where true change takes root.
0:16.0	But for many who long to come, the barrier isn't courage, it's cost. That's why we created the Recovery
0:23.5	Week Scholarship Fund. Your gift, whether it's $50, $100, or whatever is meaningful to you,
0:31.1	can remove that barrier and open the door for someone to begin their journey of healing.
0:36.6	So today we're asking two things.
0:39.9	Would you pause and pray for those preparing to step into their stories? And if you're able,
0:45.6	would you give? Go to the Allendercenter.org forward slash RW to donate. Thank you for making the beginning of deep healing and change possible for someone else. Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.
1:18.8	I'm Dr. Dan Allender.
1:20.3	And I'm Rachel Clinton-Cenn.
1:22.1	We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.
1:26.3	And restoration for the heart.
1:28.8	Thank you for joining us.
1:30.1	Let's get this conversation started.
1:44.0	Much of the work of the Allender Center has been built on, based on, sexual abuse, and addressing those issues in the community of God, but inviting people to engage something of what their story holds with regard to sexual abuse.
2:05.1	And certainly one of the most important weeks of my life every year for the last 34 years
2:14.1	has been doing a recovery week for men who have been abused and women who have been abused.
2:21.6	And one of my deepest, sweetest allies doing this work has been Linda Royster.
2:32.3	So Linda, welcome to talking about Recovery Week,
2:37.1	sexual abuse, the intersection of racial harm and the reality of what it's like to engage
2:47.0	the stories of those who bear, oh, so much heart-breaking shame.
2:54.1	So welcome, Linda, to add, you are the Strategic Alliance Manager, which I never know
3:00.6	what titles mean, but I love it.
	...

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