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

This week, Dan launches a new series exploring the work and impact of our signature training certificate,

a year-long program that guides individuals through engagement with their own stories of harm and trauma,

for the sake of learning to

offer healing and restoration in the stories of others. I wanted to talk a bit about the experience

of working in the Allender Center Certificate Program training in trauma and abuse.

The work that we've done over these last four or five years is to invite people into an

engagement with trauma.

And trauma is the unexpected and profound shattering of our sense of normalcy.

It comes with any significant injury or violation, any kind of deep-hearted insult that erodes not only a sense of normalcy, but in some ways erodes our sense of future.

And therefore, it brings a significant disruption to our sense of self.

And trauma, trauma is a reality that many would actually view as very rare. A few unfortunate people

suffer this kind of intrusion. But we actually think it's a much more regular experience.

And in that, whether it be through the experience of death or a spouse discovers that

her beloved has had an affair, it can include loss of a job or financial security,

illnesses, divorce, the discovery of a child's addiction, or just any deep experience

of betrayal, those realities are not something that only the professional class of therapist or helper is intended to engage, really the

front line of engagement with these matters has to do with the believing community, being

able to walk alongside of others to invite them into a process in which life is reconfigured,

re-aligned, in many ways, reformed. The nature of trauma is that it just dysregulates our body first.

It heightens immense stress by chemicals that overload our system.

And if it's for a fairly short period of time, the body can come back to a form of homeostasis.

...