We're Ryan and Jennie Denney, associate marriage and family therapists, writers, parents of four, and the creators of The Unfolding.
We met as teenagers in Reno, Nevada when Jennie's family moved there to plant a church. Our families built that church together. Ryan's brother led the music, Ryan played in the band, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, we found each other.
Her dad, the senior pastor, didn't approve. He tried to get us to break up. We didn't. Not much later, at 23 and 20, we found out Jennie was pregnant. In the world we lived in, that was a scandal. We dropped out of school, got married, and got busy figuring out how to build a life together as husband and wife, as new parents, and with Ryan starting a career in software development (Thanks, Joe!).
That's where our story starts. Two people who didn't fit the script they were handed, trying to find their way toward something more honest. That was over twenty years ago. Since then we've tried a lot of things.
We spent years looking for a church community that felt like home. We moved to Dallas for a year and discovered the heat and insects were dealbreakers. In our thirties, we lived in intentional community with another family for a year. We raised chickens, goats, and a llama named dolly (Dali Lama, get it?). A couple years after that ended, we pulled our four kids out of school and spent two years traveling through Europe and India, living out of Airbnbs, getting closer as a family and exhausted in equal measure.
We've been optimists and cynics. We've found communities that felt like home and watched them fracture. We've held beliefs with conviction and had to set them down when they stopped being true to our experience.
Somewhere along the way we came across a line from Henri Nouwen that became a kind of mantra for us: the best thing we can do for others is create a safe place where they can find their own lonely way in the world. That posture toward people, and the honesty about the loneliness we all experiences along the way, gave both of us the language we needed to understand our vocation, and almost every major decision we've made since has been an attempt to become the kinds of people capable of offering that kind of presence.
Our story, like most people's, is complicated. The ruptures that have changed everything came in layers over the years. Just to name a few: patriarchy that closed a door on Jennie's ordination at a church we'd given ourselves to. COVID. A daughter's mental health crisis. A church split. Family relationships strained by politics and the kind of silence that masquerades as peace. Culture war noise that made it hard to think clearly about anything.
For Ryan, it was the accumulation of too many contradictions that couldn't be explained away — personal rejection, institutional hypocrisy, and structural injustice. It was years of trying in good faith to make the pieces fit, but the theological framework he'd built his life on stopped working. He went deeper into philosophy, history, psychology, and political thought, and slowly developed a new way of looking at things that helps him make sense of the world and his place in it.
For Jennie, the journey was about finding herself underneath the roles she'd been taught to perform. Her childhood didn't leave much room for questions. Learning to ask them, to trust her own experience, and to help others do the same has been its own kind of unfolding.
In 2021 we almost launched a podcast about all of this, but pulled the plug. It would have been coming from a place of anguish and anger, and we knew it. It wasn't time. We had work to do.
In many ways that work hasn't gotten easier. Staying present in the confusion, sitting in the pain without rushing toward distraction, resisting the pull toward totalizing stories that flatten human experience isn't easy. It costs something and it's real work. We're still doing it. Most days imperfectly. But we've stopped waiting until we have it figured out to show up.
So, we both went back to school to become marriage and family therapists. Today we practice in Southern California while Jennie completes her doctorate, researching faith deconstruction and identity transformation through a model she developed called UNFOLD. Ryan is building a mental health app, trying to figure out whether software can actually help people do this kind of work.
And now we're launching the podcast. We're not so disillusioned and angry anymore, but that's not because we've finally found the right answers. Instead we've learned to embrace the questions, and we often ask ourselves what kinds of people do we want to be?
We've come to believe that living well has less to do with certainty than with becoming the kinds of people who can stay curious, remain present, make room for nuance and complexity, and create a safe place where others can find their own lonely way in the world.
Our four kids, now ages 15 to 21, have lived most of this story alongside us. They are, in many ways, our best evidence that we've become those kinds of people.
We live in Mission Viejo, California, where we practice as therapists under the name Denney Family Therapy. Therapy is one place we try to live out that calling. The Unfolding is another. We hope our writing, our conversations, and our willingness to keep living the questions helps make your own journey a little less lonely.