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

This week, Dan is joined by Kathy Lurzel and yours truly, Rachel Clinton.

We discuss the importance of community in the healing process and reflect upon ways in which community has benefited

past semester tribe participants in our Healing the Wounded Heart online course. We take time to review

three specific groups of people who would benefit from this kind of collective experience and

outline what participants gain as a result of hearing other stories and letting their

own stories be known.

I have the pleasure of being with two dear friends and colleagues, Kathy Lurzel, Rachel

Clinton.

We're going to talk about why it's necessary to be involved with a community, really a collective, that you walk through not only the significant

parts of your life, but uniquely the things that bear great heartache and shame, uniquely

the issue of sexual abuse, why you need a community to engage those issues. And Kathy and Rachel, thank you for joining me.

It's a pleasure. So how would you answer that question?

Well, first of all, the work of healing, especially with regard to the harm of abuse, is really, it's a labor of love, and it takes a lot of courage,

and it takes a lot of fortitude. So to try to do it by yourself, I think you can get places,

but to know you're not alone and to have the encouragement of a group of people who have similar

stories or something of a shared experience or who are

at least like invested in the work provides like fresh wind in your sales. And I think if we're to

believe that evil works to use abuse, I think one of the main places it works is in isolation.

And the idea that if by being isolated, then you can feel more crazy, you feel more dirty,

you feel more shame. And evil can continue to say,

if people knew you would be alone, you would experience such harm, such shame, such condemnation.

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