# The Unfolding > Essays and podcast conversations from therapists Ryan and Jennie Denney exploring psychology, relationships, faith, philosophy, family, and the lifelong process of becoming more integrated and fully alive. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### Ryan & Jennie Denney URL: https://theunfold.ing/about/ Last updated: 2026-06-30T20:51:14.000Z 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](https://denneyfamilytherapy.com/?ref=theunfold.ing). 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. ### Ryan Denney URL: https://theunfold.ing/ryan-denney/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T07:37:41.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### The Cost of Change URL: https://theunfold.ing/the-cost-of-change/ Last updated: 2026-10-04T05:07:44.000Z *Content note: This conversation touches on religious harm, leaving a faith community, and a family mental health crisis.* [Listen to the episode](https://share.transistor.fm/s/2bd6b873?ref=theunfold.ing) [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&ref=theunfold.ing) On a FaceTime call with Ryan's parents, Ryan mentioned a USC game. His dad said, "Oh, I didn't know you were a fan." Ryan has been a USC fan since he was eight. It was a throwaway line, and his dad didn't mean anything by it. But Ryan felt his smile dim, and he noticed it as it was happening. That small sting is where this conversation begins. Change always costs something, and a lot of what it costs is relational. Over the past several years, both of us have moved a long way from the faith we were raised in. For Ryan, it was a shift from searching for the one true story to asking how to live well when no one really knows. For Jennie, it came through years of being told *no*, *wait*, or *move over*, until she finally said, "I can't do church anymore." She was in her last semester of seminary, writing a capstone paper arguing that community was the missing element in spiritual formation, while we were walking away from ours. We didn't only leave a church. We moved into a different world from many of the people we love. Distance like that is rarely announced. It shows up in a forgotten detail, or in a question like "Who's the common denominator?" Not changing would have cost us something too. We would have kept our heads down, ignored the pain, and kept living within limits on who we were allowed to become. And change has opened things up. Jennie describes it as walking out of a slot canyon onto open plains. We see people and their stories differently now, with curiosity instead of an agenda. What we're still learning is how to stay close to people who are still where we used to be. We don't think the two worlds can be fully bridged. What we can do is notice when something hurts, ask why, and keep showing up as the people we want to be. Maybe that's what grief asks of us: not to forget what we've lost, but to make room for it in the life we're living now. > The healing and grief process, it's not forgetting they ever existed. It's integrating their lived life and their loss into your life. > > — Jennie ## Moments - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&ref=theunfold.ing) — A dimmed smile on a FaceTime call - [3:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=228s&ref=theunfold.ing) — "I don't think anyone knows, so now what?" - [9:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=593s&ref=theunfold.ing) — Writing about community while walking away from ours - [18:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=1098s&ref=theunfold.ing) — The difference between a pastor and a prophet - [21:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=1293s&ref=theunfold.ing) — "What should I do?" and what no one can promise us - [28:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=1713s&ref=theunfold.ing) — Out of the slot canyon, onto the open plains - [31:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=1878s&ref=theunfold.ing) — Staying close to people still inside the system - [35:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV%5FbpxhzhZ8&t=2150s&ref=theunfold.ing) — Grief as integration, not forgetting ## Questions to Sit With - What has a change in your life cost you, and what did it make possible? - What would it have cost you *not* to change? - Where do you feel distance from someone you love, and what might that distance be asking of you? - How has someone else's change landed on you? ## Keep Reading - [**Why are Questions so Threatening?**](https://theunfold.ing/why-are-questions-so-threatening/) — Episode 2, which this conversation keeps circling back to. - [**Lose the Script**](https://theunfold.ing/lose-the-script/) — Jennie on her dissertation defense, the UNFOLD Model, and the ordination question. - [**Whatever Purity Meant**](https://theunfold.ing/whatever-purity-meant/) --- *If something in this conversation stirred something in you, we'd love to hear about it. Reply to this email or leave a comment on the post. And if you know someone who is carrying the cost of their own change, consider passing this along.* #### Transcript \[00:00:00\] ****Jennie:** Episode three. ****Ryan:** Episode three. Very exciting again. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** So what are we talking about today? ****Jennie:** The cost of change. ****Ryan:** Cost of change? ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Yep. Yeah, we were talking with my parents last night and I mentioned something about the USC game, and my dad said, "Oh, I didn't know you were a fan." And I don't know if you noticed this on the call, but we could see our, our faces 'cause we're on FaceTime, and so I noticed it. My smile dimmed a little bit. It was interesting for me because I actually felt it in the moment, and that is, I think, evidence of change for... evidence of some sort of growth in the sense that I can notice the things that hurt or the things that bother me \[00:01:00\] a little more close to real time than I ever used to be able to do. It's like, "Why am I... Like, why did that hurt my feelings a little bit?" And I think I just kinda landed on the idea that, um, because we've been moving more and more apart in our own separate worlds for all these years now, uh, like I'm a little less known to my dad than I used to be, and it, it's not a condemnation of him at all. It's more just something that I found a little curious. I thought to myself, "I've been a USC fan since I was, like, eight years old." So that just got me thinking, and I think that's right along the lines of what we wanted to talk about today, just the idea of change always having some sort of cost. What comes up for you as I tell that little story? ****Jennie:** If change is happening, \[00:02:00\] it doesn't just affect us, it affects our relationships. This has been the first year we haven't really seen your parents more than twice in the year, and it sounds like it's only gonna be three times. And so due to how long we haven't really been seeing them, there hasn't been that kind of relationship that we used to have. That interaction with your dad kind of highlighted maybe the change that's happened in both of you that you haven't been a part of together. ****Ryan:** Exactly. That's really what I was thinking too, that there's, it's really just a change in circumstance and the presence, the proximity is more distant. So we've both changed over that time. A lot of our change was kind of gradual and slow. I think it just was a way, I don't know, like a little \[00:03:00\] picture of some of the ways that we've grown more distant from one another. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. It's kind of an interesting change for you because for as long as I've known you, it's always been, "How do I understand the world?" Like, "I don't understand. I'm trying to figure this out." And it's almost like there's been a shift for you from that to, "What's going on with me? How do I understand myself in this moment, and what's going on, and who do I wanna be right now?" ****Ryan:** Yeah. It has. It's been a really big shift for me. The, the shift really is, if I were to try to sum it up, that most of my life, I was looking for the answer. Like, the, the one true story of what's going on here. Like, who are we? What's the nature of the universe? Like, is this story of God and heaven, is that, like, the real \[00:04:00\] story? And several years ago, that changed. I realized what I kind of landed on was, I don't think anyone really knows. That's not really an answerable question from within the frame that I'm living in. There's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to stand outside of the experience of life and the world. I'm a part of it, and I'm shaped by it. And so that's been the big change. It's a conceptual change. Instead of looking for the right answer, it's been, "I don't think anyone knows, so now what?" How do I actually live here? How do I find meaning and purpose without just descending into nihilism, where nothing matters? That's been a major shift for me. ****Jennie:** So what has that cost you? W- what has that change, that shift cost you? ****Ryan:** It's cost me a lot actually. Some of the consequences of this \[00:05:00\] change for me have been really positive and others have been harder. Uh, on the harder side, I think it's probably been primarily relational. It's created more distance. So kind of where I was opening with that idea of the distance between me and my dad. It's like we're living more and more in different conceptual worlds, not just different states in the United States. It's not just a physical distance, it's a conceptual distance. And that continues to widen, I think. So we're kind of moving apart in that way, in some ways, not in all ways, but certainly in some. And that hasn't cost me relationship entirely with anyone in our family. It's not been a deal breaker, but it certainly opened up space or distance \[00:06:00\] relationally. So it's interesting to even think about it this way, right? Because my sort of conceptual shift, my sort of faith deconstruction preceded yours. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** But it also was simultaneous in some ways. Like yours, maybe we've, like you've ended up with some more stable conclusions a little bit more late than I have, or a little bit after me. But my change was affecting you, and your change w- and it, yeah, it's like this cyclical, iterative thing that's going on. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** What has, what have been some of the harder costs for you with some of this kind of big-picture change? ****Jennie:** I think for me, a lot of my journey, a lot of the cracks in my faith deconstruction had to do relationally. You know, just trying to find a place that we fit. And then almost like \[00:07:00\] trying to change or fix or reform the system from within. Like having these big ideas of, having, an intentional community, and we're gonna try and create this community and have a farm and trying to live off the land and- ****Ryan:** Yeah, like a demonstration plot almost. ****Jennie:** Yeah. Yeah. And that ended very painfully. And then, like thinking about, just... I know we were talking about this this morning about how ultimately I was the one that said, "I can't do church anymore." And you even went, I don't know for how much longer, without me. And then- ****Ryan:** Which is interesting because I was just saying, yeah, my, my sort of faith was very, very different by that point. It was like I don't, I don't really \[00:08:00\] buy this story anymore. But I still wanna participate in this relational world. So I was choosing to stay while you were kind of stepping away. Which is kind of interesting. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Anyway, continue on. ****Jennie:** Yeah. And, um, so it is interesting how we've kind of had more of a parallel journey. I think I kind of held on to the idea that I could maybe try and fix things, change things from within, and while at the same time trying to figure out how to operate in a world that I was constantly being told no or wait or move over. And so kind of the final moment \[00:09:00\] was just realizing I didn't have a place that I thought I had in the church that we were in. And I was just, "I'm, I'm, I'm done. I can't do it anymore." ****Ryan:** It was too painful? ****Jennie:** Yeah, it was too painful. Yeah. It was too... I didn't wanna be a part of something anymore that continued to push me aside and not, yeah, not invite me in. And so part of it was I was in my last semester of seminary, and so here I was after three years of seminary, toward the end, writing my final \[00:10:00\] capstone paper on the missing element in the spiritual formation movement was community. And here we were choosing to walk away from our community. And I don't know how much of that was... I mean, it was a choice, but it was also, feeling like I just didn't have a home anymore there. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting to look back on that time and think through, like part of the cost is the tuition. Uh, but for me, part of the cost was, "Okay, I'm gonna step away as well. I'm gonna leave this group of people where I've found somewhat of a place to exist with others." Um, and there were, \[00:11:00\] like, real meaningful relationships there for both of us. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Uh, it's also just thinking about the, some of the contingency, like the haphazardness of, of it all. Like, it was also in a time, like, the, the context was just post-COVID, where COVID really exposed a lot of divisions amongst people in, certainly not just our church, but churches all across the country and all over the world, really, and political divisions and all that kind of stuff. And so our church was no different, and that for me was one of the things that was difficult to see because I really was, I think, naive enough to think that we had found, a church that was a little bit different, like, this, um- ****Jennie:** We found the church. ****Ryan:** Yeah, like this church that was into spiritual formation \[00:12:00\] and, I thought, community. ****Jennie:** Well, if you think about the other stuff that was going on around that time, yes, there was COVID. Our church pretty much lost half its members. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** Our daughter was starting to have some pretty severe mental health issues. We didn't know what was going on. It wasn't just our church, but our families were really, on both sides, different, ended up on different ends of the political spectrum. So there were difficult conversations that happened on both sides. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** And yeah, I had a pretty awful experience with a spiritual director. Probably should have gone to therapy. Now I'm in therapy. But really stirred up a lot of, like, self-doubt and pain. Oh, and then I was passed up for a position at the church, and then I asked if I could have my name \[00:13:00\] put forward for being considered for ordination, and the priest refused to put my name forward. And so, I mean, there was just a lot going on at that time. Yeah. So you have this, all the past narratives and stories that we're raised in, which for me included, you know, being the daughter of a pastor, being a woman in, steeped in purity culture. You've got all the belief systems from like James Dobson on, on out, and, uh, you've got the, "No, you can't preach, or maybe you can preach if a man's on the stage," or... So it's all these, "You can, you can be here. Oh, no, but you have to be, you can only serve in the children's department. You can be director, but you can't be pastor." And so there were all these stipulations on who I could be. \[00:14:00\] And here I felt like we had finally found a place where all of those were taken apart, but they weren't. Yeah. And on top of that, I had just continued going on. Keep, keep moving. "Okay, we'll try this place. We'll try this place. We'll try this place." And then it just came to a point to where it wasn't just our family, it wasn't just our church. It was our daughter. It was, um, other, other things in our lives that just started crumbling, and I was like, "I can't do it." ****Ryan:** Yeah, the culture around us was changing significantly. Things were getting, in my mind, darker and much more conspiratorial, angrier. Um, that was very disorienting, wasn't it? ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So going back to the question, what was the cost of change? ****Ryan:** \[00:15:00\] Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** It was pretty significant, at least when it came to stepping away from the church and finally making that decision, but it was a lot of changes and choices and, um, that kinda built up to that. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Yeah. I like to think of that in terms of, um, I don't know, like complexity stuff, like homeostasis or whatever. Like, there are these stable states, almost, where things can change, but they're still... So if you think of a larger pattern, like the smaller things can change, but the larger pattern still remains. Uh, until it doesn't, and then that's like the tipping point kind of idea. ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** So things tend to settle in a groove, so to speak, until something destabilizes it enough \[00:16:00\] to cause a larger break. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** Yeah, then you just have to try and figure out how to stabilize back up, and sometimes it takes a while. ****Ryan:** Exactly. Yeah, I feel like that's what, um, a lot of people coming into therapy are in. It's these destabilizing changes that have happened, or maybe they're realizing that there's a cost also of not changing. There's a cost to, to staying in the system that is producing some of that stuff for us. What do you think would've been some of the cost of not changing in the environment you're describing? ****Jennie:** So I think the cost of not changing would have been continuing to just put my head down and ignore the pain I was feeling. \[00:17:00\] Um, just continuing to live in a system that put these very strong parameters on me. I wouldn't be a therapist. Maybe would have looked for another job at a different church as a secretary or something. I don't know. ****Ryan:** Or we could have gone to an Episcopal church or something like that. ****Jennie:** That's true. Could have gone to an Episcopal church, yeah. Or started our own. ****Ryan:** Yep. ****Jennie:** Which was definitely something we had thought about. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** But not something we ever would've followed through on. ****Ryan:** Yeah. That is true. That is true. ****Jennie:** Yeah. Hmm. ****Ryan:** It was never a great fit for me. I just wouldn't be- ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** I- I wouldn't be good in it. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Like, I'm too... Yeah, anyway, it probably wouldn't have gone very- ****Jennie:** You're too what? ****Ryan:** I remember sitting with, \[00:18:00\] with Todd one time tr- talking about, like, starting our own thing. And do you remember he said, I think he called out something in me pretty quickly, probably in one of our early meetings with him, and he said something to the effect of, "There's a big difference between a pastor and a prophet." ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** And, um, looking back, I think that was pretty insightful on his part. 'Cause if you think of what a prophet does, a prophet, in my mind anyway, just holds up a mirror to the community and... yeah. Well, the community at some, at some level, whatever scale you wanna think of it. But, um, it could just be within your local congregation or whatever. It could be in, in the broader society or something like that, but that's just all I think of when I think of the role of a prophet. I don't think of it as a fortune \[00:19:00\] teller or someone that's, like, got a direct line to God or something like that. It's just, here's a person that will call out contradictions as he or she sees them in, in the community, in the community of practice. I don't know, maybe it sounds weird to say that about myself, but that is kinda how I think of some of... It's one of the ways I make sense of all the resistance I encounter in life, uh, from authority figures. They don't ever seem to like me, and it took me a long time to understand why, and I think that is probably why. I just, I question, and I prod, and I say, like, "Oh, that sounds like a contradiction." And sometimes I say it sarcastically 'cause I don't have any power or any voice, so. ****Jennie:** Which is interesting 'cause that goes back to our other episode of why are questions so \[00:20:00\] threatening. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** And it's not, you don't do it to try and come off as threatening, but people, systems tend to receive questions as threatening. ****Ryan:** Yeah, I don't think it's anything about me. It's just, it's not about me at all. ****Jennie:** Right. ****Ryan:** Yeah, like we said, like, like you're calling out the questions make us look, and looking tends to bring about change. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And now we're saying there's a cost to that. ****Jennie:** Yeah. Yeah, so the, there's a cost to change. There's a cost to not change. Yeah. So what are the benefits to change? ****Ryan:** The benefits of change. Well, I think you mentioned one already. It opens up new possibilities. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Like, new horizons of possibility anyway. So you mentioned one of the costs of not changing might have been that you never would have become a therapist. \[00:21:00\] That you'd be different than you are right now. If you had chosen a different alternative back then, that would have closed off certain possibilities for the future. Um, which is, I think, this is a sidebar, but I think it's another reason change is a little bit scary for people, because we don't know if it's gonna be worth it or not. Because you don't, you can't know the outcome. It's not really deterministic. ****Jennie:** Well, and to follow that up is I can't tell you how many people come into the therapy room and share what's going on and then say, "What should I do?" ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** And I can't tell you what to do. Change is something, like, change is a choice, and a therapist, any person in your life, I mean, you have to be the one to do it. You have to make that choice. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Yeah, I think I would say, I'd probably push back on that a little bit. Like, \[00:22:00\] change can be a choice, but I would also say change is a constant. We're always changing. We live in a very dynamic world. And we're dynamic beings. It's, it's just sort of constant. And then some things arise to the level of consciousness where we make a, a conscious decision. ****Jennie:** Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I, I would agree with that. I guess some, some change. ****Ryan:** Yeah. But I think you're absolutely right. I, I have clients come in all the time that are looking for some degree of certainty. They want to be... They wanna feel better. They wanna feel more safe and secure and certain that if they make a certain choice, that it's gonna turn out the way that they want. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** And that's not anything anyone can give them. I mean, that's- ****Jennie:** Right. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** Right. ****Ryan:** And I certainly know that feeling. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. \[00:23:00\] ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** Yeah, I think that was one of the scariest things about leaving our church, was we didn't know what things were gonna look like. Yeah. We had no idea. I mean, on top of that, it was, uh, we didn't know if our daughter was going to live. We didn't know what we were gonna do about our, you know, financially. We, you know, there was just a lot we didn't know. We, we didn't know if we were still gonna have friends from our community. ****Ryan:** Yep. Yeah, it is difficult. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of times people choose not to change like that or make those big decisions to step away from a community or a relationship or something like that. Like imagine, I mean, we have clients that have struggled with the idea of leaving marriages, um, or trying to work through difficult \[00:24:00\] relationships with parents or friends or whatever, and sometimes the cost is high. And, or I mean, the cost is always high to think about stepping out of a, a relationship like that, but- ****Jennie:** Well, and I think some of the most painful comments I got were from people still within the system. ****Ryan:** What do you mean? ****Jennie:** I very specifically remember hearing comments like, uh, "You've never found a community, a church community that you fit in," like who's the common denominator there? Um, and comments like, "Well, you have to be plugged in somewhere, um, if you're gonna keep growing in the faith." Um, it's just like there's just this dogmatic belief within the system we were a part of that if you're not doing certain things, \[00:25:00\] you're, you're just wrong. Oh, uh, my favorite is, um, "No church is a perfect church, and a church is full of people, and people hurt people." Um, that's not the big C Church. I still have a lot of healing to do. Yeah. Um, I think there's something about when people are in that amount of pain, and then they're met with judgment or excuses or, um, attitudes of, "Well, maybe you're the problem, 'cause we couldn't be the problem," I think there's a sort of alienation that happens, and it's crushing. Or it can be crushing. And so where else is that person supposed to go? Yeah. \[00:26:00\] I mean, they can stay and, like, try and keep believing that maybe they're the problem. ****Ryan:** So that would be part of the cost of not changing would be conforming to that. But the benefit would be to try and stay in that sort of relational field. Um, but I think it also speaks to just the inherent, uh, threat of change. ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** Because what you're describing, I think, is not so much about you, it's about the people who are being affected by your change. ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** Because that is also true. That's part of the process of change is that it's not just individual change. Like, your decision to step away from the church and then to cease going to church altogether \[00:27:00\] for what- however many years it's been now, that then gets received as, like, input into other people's perspectives, and that, that somehow says something to them about themselves almost. Like, it's almost like you're condemning their perspective, even though you're not. It's just saying, like, "I'm stepping out of this. This no longer works for me." ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And they're kind of operating in a system that has... Like, it, there's no category for that other than you are a backslidden Christian or something like that. W- so you asked about kind of the, the benefits of change, and if, if I kind of follow that thread, one of the benefits that I've experienced through this, and I think you described this to... Like, you used this imagery a couple months ago. I think you were saying that you were feeling like people around you have \[00:28:00\] this idea that, um, there's no way... Well, you even just said it. There's no way to grow. Like, you can't grow or be healthy. You're gonna be some sort of nihilist, um, terrible person if you're not a Christian anymore. But you described it as not so much a closing, but more of an opening, like a freedom. And not a freedom from that perspective, but a freedom to open up the field. And you, you talked about, I think you used this imagery. Like, you felt like you were exiting sort of a canyon, like a slot canyon, and you could see the open horizon. Like, you're out on the plains, and there's this big vista of possibilities out in front of you, like an expansion. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. Yeah, I see people differently. And I see stories differently, it's not this agenda-driven, "I, I need to get to know this person so that \[00:29:00\] I can save their soul." It's, it's this... And I'm not saying everyone's like that. Oh, um- ****Ryan:** But that, I think you were saying that's kind of how you used to think, right? ****Jennie:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's more this, "I wanna get to know this person because I genuinely care about their story and where they came from and how they got here, and the choices and the pain and the, the beauty that brought them here." ****Ryan:** So I think that's why that mantra of ours works for us so well, 'cause I think we're both that way. And what I mean by the mantra is the, the idea that we wanna create a safe place for others to find their own lonely way in the world. 'Cause there's no agenda there, really. It's more, yeah, this is the world we live in. We've been shaped by it. All of us are shaped by it, and we didn't choose that. Actually, this is something I'm playing around with with my clients a \[00:30:00\] lot recently, is like the idea that understanding the backstory, understanding the worlds into which we're thrown, so to speak. And our personal histories and for some people, like significant traumas and things like that. But all the events of our lives really, like understanding all the context can be very helpful, and we can start to observe the effect that's had on our nervous system and our thinking and, and we can then start to see our patterns of reactivity and response, and then sort of open that space to then become more capable of choosing a different route, like a different, a different alternative. But one of the things I've been playing around with is that that's great. That's very, very helpful. But it's just explanatory. It's not, it doesn't, uh, it's not excusatory. I mean, it doesn't... Like, we still have to make choices. We're still responsible for the \[00:31:00\] things that we do and the people that we become within the possibility structures that the world, uh, provides. So you can't just become anything you want. Like, you're not able to change in all ways. There are constraints because we live in a world. ****Jennie:** So we've talked about the cost of change. We've talked about the cost of not change. Now, I think where I'm still trying to figure out, and where I still find I struggle is, and I think it would fall into the cost of change, is how do I, where I'm at, have a relationship with people who are still within the system I've come out of that feels \[00:32:00\] okay for me. And I think that's where I'm, where my big struggle is, is I'm over here and they're still over here, and I can't expect them to come over where I'm at. And so I still desire a closeness and a relationship with them, but there's a, a grief. ****Ryan:** Yeah. So, this is my perspective on it anyway. I think you're exactly right. Like, there's no way to go back to what it was. It's changed, and so there is a cost. And that cost for you, for me as well, has been pretty heavy relationally. Um, and even just our decision to move \[00:33:00\] here, like that's been... There's been huge benefits to that, 'cause it's opened up a whole bunch of possibilities for, uh, vocation and for our kids and all that, but there's been costs for all of us as well. Uh, but you're right, there's no way to bridge the two worlds entirely. Like, we have diverged from a conceptual world that's, uh, a pretty all-encompassing one, right? We, we came out of, um, a world that doesn't have a lot of space for people that aren't in that world, other than to do what you said, "Let's bring them into the fold." "Let's save them from eternal damnation," or whatever. I kind of think about it the way I think of the culture and just kind of democracy and what we're trying to do here is hold the tension of living in a pluralistic society. I guess the way I think of it is, \[00:34:00\] um, to try and show up as the person that you wanna be. ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** Um, and just continually meet people where they are. Next, continue to just create that safe place for others to find their own lonely way. And, uh, that's not for others to come into alignment with your way of looking at things. It's for them to find their own way and to be okay with that. But that's, that's the hard part. So then I think the, the move there is to continually monitor that, like we were talking about. That's kind of like what I was saying with my dad. Like, this trivial little throwaway line, "Oh, I didn't realize you were a fan." And then I notice, like, hey, that actually kind of hurt. Uh, why did that hurt? ****Jennie:** Mm. ****Ryan:** Not really because my dad doesn't remember that I was a fan since I was eight. Like, I d- who cares? It's not even a big deal. It's more just like, oh, that hurts because \[00:35:00\] there's a little more distance there than I was aware of. And so then you see that, and okay, what does that mean? Like, how am I gonna respond to that? Uh, and the more, the more practice I get at that, the easier it is for me to then see things differently, 'cause I can see it from his perspective a little more. And he didn't mean anything by it. And if we talked about it, I'm sure he would remember going to USC when we were down here to visit my brothers. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** But anyway, that's... I know that's not an answer. It's more of a process. I don't know about you, but this is the kind of thing I tell my clients all the time is, like, that's, that's the move, really. I don't, I mean, I don't have much else other than, like, you just keep trying. Keep showing up. ****Jennie:** It's interesting. It makes me think of, some of the trainings I've done in grief and loss and bereavement. If someone dies, the \[00:36:00\] healing and grief process, it's not forgetting they ever existed. It's integrating their lived life and their loss into your life. Yeah. So, what I hear you saying is learning to integrate that pain and that grief into your life. And yes, you may have lost part of the relationship by stepping out of the system. At the same time, recognizing that grief as it comes up and acknowledging it within myself, "Okay, why did this hurt?" Or first, "This hurt." Yeah. And maybe trying to recognize why did it hurt. And is it because I feel the loss and the distance? Or is it because I know the relationship will never be what I would like it to be? It has more to do with me than that person. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Yeah, I think that's \[00:37:00\] really good insight, and I think we were talking about this the other day also, the idea... Like, I asked you even, like, what stage of, if this is grief, what stage do you think you're, you're at? And I was making fun of myself 'cause I think it was a leading question. I think I even said, like, "I'm trying to get you to say you're in negotiation," or something like that. Yeah. And like you're trying to, uh, have it both ways and it, you just can't. It, it's different. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Yeah. The world that you stepped into is different. Yeah. I think integrating that is the right way to say it. I like that. The other thing I wanna say too is, uh, kinda related to your doctoral work, not that I wanna bring all that into the conversation right at the moment, but one of the ways I think that helps is it gives us some new language. So instead of just acceptance, it's locating: where am I right now, and then how am I gonna \[00:38:00\] respond? Like, how am I gonna choose to live? And that's the direction part. ****Jennie:** Right. ****Ryan:** And I think what we were saying the other day is it, it seems like you're, you keep kinda cycling back into the noise part of it. And which is probably confusing for people listening to this, but, uh, that's something we'll unpack shortly here. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Because you just got approved to bring your dissertation to the review board and can start your research very soon. That's exciting. ****Jennie:** I'm very excited. Yes. And then I feel like maybe I'll, it'll be a little more legitimate to bring it forward. Yeah. Even though a lot of what we've been talking about encompasses it. ****Ryan:** Oh, yeah, it's deeply embedded in all of this. It's- ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Yeah. I'm very excited. ****Jennie:** I'm excited too. Yeah. So the cost of change. ****Ryan:** What do you think? Think we got it? I think- Figured it out? \[00:39:00\] ****Jennie:** I think we got enough for this episode. ****Ryan:** Yeah? ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Well, we'll see what people think. ****Jennie:** Yeah, I guess so. ****Ryan:** Is anyone listening? ****Jennie:** Like, makes me think of like, "Hello, is anybody listening?" ****Ryan:** Pink Floyd song? ****Jennie:** Pink Floyd song. ****Ryan:** Is there anybody out there? ****Jennie:** Is anyone out there? ****Ryan:** Now that haunting song is in my head. ****Jennie:** Yeah. I love it. Hmm. ​ ### Lose the Script URL: https://theunfold.ing/lose-the-script/ Last updated: 2026-09-27T16:00:20.000Z I printed the script for my dissertation proposal defense, revised it, and then reprinted it. I knew what I wanted to say about my research. I knew why I had chosen to interview clinicians and why I thought this study mattered. But when I joined the virtual meeting and began reading, my voice shook, my neck heated up, and I could feel myself sweating through my shirt. I stumbled over a word and stopped to find the sentence again. I glanced at the screen and realized I needed to move to the next slide. Then I noticed I had skipped a section and tried, in real time, to decide whether I should go back. I could hear myself getting tangled up, but I kept returning to the pages. I had worked so hard to get the words just right. The project I was presenting is called the UNFOLD Model. It’s a proposed model for understanding experiences of faith deconstruction and reconstruction. For my dissertation, I’ll be asking clinicians who work with people navigating faith change what they make of it. This project is deeply personal. I have lived through faith deconstruction, and I’m still in the process of reconstruction myself. There’s something vulnerable about bringing a project that grew out of your own life before a committee that can tell you to move forward or ask you to stop and revise. I had spent years trying to put language to parts of that experience, and now I was sitting in front of my committee, struggling to read the language I had prepared. When I finished presenting, they began asking questions. They wanted to know why I had made certain choices and how I planned to carry out the research. I listened and answered. Without the script to follow, I could talk about the study I had spent so much time thinking through. Then they asked me to leave the virtual meeting while they talked. I had ten minutes to take some deep breaths and wonder what they would say when I came back. When they brought me back, they congratulated me. I had passed my proposal defense. I was shocked. Elated. A bit in disbelief. Relieved. I had been working toward that moment for so long, and for a minute I could hardly take it in. Then they gave me their feedback. “Lose the script,” my chair said. They knew I was nervous, but they had seen me present before. They knew I understood my research, and they could hear it when I answered their questions. Reading had tripped me up. “You are the expert in this. We know you know this,” one of my readers said. I believed that they meant it. What caught me off guard was how hard it was to believe it about myself. I’m not sure when I began to doubt my own thinking. I grew up hearing that women were supposed to submit to men. At the time, that was just part of how the world was explained to me. As I got older and began studying and working in ministry, I saw how those beliefs shaped what I could do. In one church, I could preach if a man stood on the stage with me. In another, I couldn’t be on the stage at all. I had spent years preparing for ministry, but whether I could speak still depended on the rules of the church I was in. As I was finishing seminary, I asked the priest at our church about ordination. He told me to call the diocese, so I did. The person I spoke with told me it was unusual for me to call on my own behalf. My priest needed to put my name forward to a discernment committee. That committee would meet with me for six to twelve months and help explore whether ordination was the right path for me. I wasn’t asking him to decide that I should be ordained. I wanted the chance to enter the process and ask the question with people who were there to help discern it. He would not put my name forward. I don’t know why he told me to make the call. I know I followed his direction, only to learn that I couldn’t even bring the question before the committee unless he put my name forward. I thought about that experience after my proposal defense. I had prepared for questions about my methods, and my committee had asked them. What I hadn’t prepared for was how it would feel to hear them say they trusted my thinking, especially when this work had begun with questions I had once struggled to ask aloud. Maybe that’s part of why I held so tightly to the script. I had written every word down because I wanted to present the work carefully and do it justice. When I stumbled, I kept looking to the pages to find the right way to speak about something I already knew by heart. I don’t think one conversation repairs years of learning to doubt yourself. I passed my proposal defense, and I am so happy and relieved about it. I left thinking about the difference between the people and organizations who taught me to question whether I could trust my voice and the people who heard it, even through my nerves, and encouraged me to use it. I’m still learning what it feels like to believe them. ### Whatever Purity Meant URL: https://theunfold.ing/whatever-purity-meant/ Last updated: 2026-09-20T16:00:19.000Z “My boyfriend and I had sex, and we don’t know what to do.” Her parents were missionaries. We were still in high school. I don’t remember where we were when she told me. I don’t remember the expression on her face or whether she asked me to keep it a secret. I wish I remembered what I said to her. I wish I knew whether I had offered her anything that felt like kindness. I do remember telling my parents. That was what you did with information that felt too heavy to hold by yourself. You handed it to someone with more authority than you and trusted that they would know what to do with it. I don’t remember my parents’ exact words, but I remember the message that landed in me. She had ruined her parents’ lives. If anyone found out, they might not be allowed to remain missionaries. Everything they had worked for could be taken away because of what their daughter had done. I don’t remember anyone asking whether she was okay. Maybe they did. That part is gone. What stayed was the understanding that one decision about her body could reach across the world and pull her parents home. Her body had the power to undo their lives, and the thought lodged somewhere inside me. There were other messages, too. Smaller ones. Ordinary enough that they didn’t feel frightening at the time. Cover your shoulders before you go into church. Pull your shirt up. Make sure nothing is showing. Don’t wear anything too low. Cover your belly. Make sure your pants aren’t too tight or your skirt or shorts too short. Don’t wear too much makeup. There were books like *Gift-Wrapped by God*, *I Kissed Dating Goodbye*, and *The Bride Wore White*. There were all the Christian romance novels I read, Janette Oke and others, where the good women waited and the good men chose them. There were purity balls, concerts, and sermons. Purity always seemed to end with someone being chosen. Impurity seemed to end with everyone finding out. For my sixteenth birthday, my dad took me to a fancy steakhouse. I don’t remember what I wore, but I remember the dimly lit room and how crowded the restaurant was. I was hungry and excited when the food arrived. Then my dad made fun of the way I was holding my knife. I tried to adjust my hands, suddenly aware of how awkward they looked and how obvious it was that I didn’t belong in a restaurant like that. Then he gave me a small silver ring with a heart on it. It was a promise ring. I would wear it as a sign that I planned to remain sexually pure until marriage, whatever that meant. I’m still not sure I know. One day, I would take it off and replace it with a wedding ring. My body would pass safely from my father’s protection into my husband’s keeping, still wrapped, still unopened, still worthy of being received. I slipped the ring onto my finger. I don’t remember anyone asking whether I wanted to make the promise. I don’t remember needing to be asked. By sixteen, the answer had already been placed inside me. Of course I would wait. Of course I would be good. Of course I would protect the people I loved from the shame of having a daughter who didn’t. I was old enough to make a promise about what I would do with my body for the rest of my unmarried life. A few minutes earlier, I hadn’t known how to hold a steak knife. I wore the ring home. I kept wearing it. I don’t think my dad intended it to frighten me. I think he believed he was giving me something beautiful. Maybe he wanted me to understand that I was valuable. Maybe he thought the ring would protect me from choices that could hurt me. For a long time, I tried to remember it only that way. But shame doesn’t always arrive sounding cruel. Sometimes it arrives in a velvet box. Sometimes it is handed to you across a table by someone who loves you. And sometimes, you slide it onto your own finger. The ring became part of my hand. It went everywhere my body went, a small circle of metal carrying the weight of God, my father, the church, and a future husband whose face I couldn’t yet imagine. I think again about my friend. I wonder how long she carried what had happened before she told me. I wonder whether she was afraid I would see her differently. I wonder what it cost her to trust me and how quickly I gave her story to someone else. There is another story underneath this one. I can feel it pressing against these words, asking to be told. It’s the reason I remember the ring. It’s the reason I still feel something tighten in me when I think about purity, confession, and the fear of disappointing the people whose love mattered most. It’s a story about what happened when everything I had been taught about bodies, family, shame, and reputation stopped being theoretical. I don’t feel free enough to tell it yet. I hope someday I will. ### Why are Questions so Threatening? URL: https://theunfold.ing/why-are-questions-so-threatening/ Last updated: 2026-09-13T19:09:55.000Z Why are questions so threatening? In this episode, Jennie and Ryan talk about the very different lessons we learned about questions growing up. Jennie learned early that questioning could mean challenging authority, and that doing so might come with a cost. Ryan grew up almost on the opposite side of that, encouraged to question things and slow to realize that other people might experience my questions as threatening. From there, we get into what questions can actually do. They make us look more closely at the stories, beliefs, relationships, and systems we inherited. And once we begin to really look, change becomes possible. That can be freeing, but it can also be deeply destabilizing. We talk about Jennie’s experience growing up in conservative evangelicalism, Ryan's history of questioning authority, the ways those patterns have shown up in our marriage, and why lasting change seems to require more than simply deciding to think or behave differently. Eventually we find ourselves asking what makes it possible to question and change without immediately becoming defensive or retreating into certainty. We come back to trust, curiosity, relationship, and the willingness to believe that another person might have something to teach us. Maybe part of learning to live the questions is becoming open to being changed by our encounters with other human beings. #### Transcript \[00:00:00\] ****Ryan:** So I think we landed on why are questions so threatening? What makes questions so threatening? ****Jennie:** Yes. 'Cause last episode, we talked about learning to live the questions And for at least me Questions have always been very threatening. ****Ryan:** Questions have been threatening for you? ****Jennie:** Yes. ****Ryan:** In what way? ****Jennie:** Well, I grew up in an environment where the general rule was they're just not allowed I was in Bible school. So here I am, 17 years old, and the teacher's teaching... He starts telling a story about babies thrown in dumpsters. It was just like a really weird situation. He's talking to a bunch of kids, and as he's sharing this story, one \[00:01:00\] of the kids stands up in the back of the room and asks him why he's telling this story, and it seems kind of off that he's doing that. And I very much remember turning around, looking at that guy who's standing up, questioning the professor in class, and I'm, "You can do that?" Like it was so absurd that someone could actually ask a question like that and interrupt the class. - What ****Ryan:** exactly was his question? ****Jennie:** The student's? His question was, "Why are you telling this story? It seems disrespectful. There's a lot of women in this class. , It never occurred to me that it was inappropriate for this guy to stand up. It was more like, in that context, especially at a Christian Bible school, "Wait a second, I \[00:02:00\] didn't even know someone could do this." ****Ryan:** So when you say, "I didn't know someone could do this," are you saying you didn't know it was okay to ask questions? Or more are you saying it wasn't okay for you ****Jennie:** to challenge authority? I think both. ****Ryan:** Both? Okay. ****Jennie:** Yeah. I think that I think those kinda went hand in hand. ' And it's interesting because in that story, for me, it was kinda like this you can question authority, but you can also, you can ask questions. I think for me, that moment is so profound for me is because questioning meant questioning authority. And that's not allowed at the root of it. ****Ryan:** So in your experience, kinda what ****Jennie:** you learned was there's not really a difference between the type of question. Any question was a challenge- Mm-hmm ... to authority. Yeah. And I don't, I don't know if that was ever intentionally given to me, That was the message I received. ****Ryan:** \[00:03:00\] Mm-hmm. So no one ever sat you down System ****Jennie:** or something like that Not that I recall Yeah Yeah That makes sense Mm-hmm. But that's where it's I don't think those sit-down conversations normally happen. , I don't think that's the norm. ****Ryan:** I know. I was saying that sarcastically. Yeah Of course no one's sitting down and said, "Never ask a question." ****Jennie:** Yeah. But I think that's really important to understand is most of us haven't had those conversations. It's these internal messages we got by observing, by watching, by listening, and then interpreting those in our own view ****Ryan:** Yeah. That kind of goes back to what we were saying last week about attachment and feeling safe. Mm-hmm. And kind of how you learn to look outside \[00:04:00\] yourself to monitor for safety. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Right. Um, that would kind of inform how you tend to interpret questions- Mm-hmm ... and either question or not. Right. How you ask your questions or ****Jennie:** field questions. Yeah, that makes sense. But let's turn it to you- Stick with me? ****Ryan:** Sure. ****Jennie:** Why? Um, I, I wanna hear, 'cause you grew up in a very different atmosphere when it came to questions so how were questions acceptable or not acceptable in your family of origin? ****Ryan:** Well, I think my perspective on this has shifted a little bit over the years, but I think by and large, I would say I grew up learning that not only that questions were okay, but probably that questions were encouraged. Um- \[00:05:00\] Mm-hmm Watching TV with my dad, for instance, and he would often ask us "What message do you think this commercial or this news segment, what do you think they're really trying to say here?" ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** So learning to read the subtext and That was often kind of there, question everything. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Question yourself, question... Eh, maybe not question yourself. I think it was more question, external authority- Mm-hmm ... is probably what we got. ****Jennie:** Which is still the opposite of what I got. Yeah, yeah. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Which explains a lot about why I've always butted heads with authority figures. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** But what is it about a question \[00:06:00\] that is inherently threatening to people or to systems? 'Cause it seems like that's the case. Mm-hmm. , So you learned just not to do it for your own sort of personal safety. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Was that... Would you say it that way? ****Jennie:** Absolutely. ****Ryan:** And I learned that it's just fine, and then slowly over years realized, "Mm, people don't like this. I should keep my questions to myself more often and like pick my spots." ****Jennie:** Yeah. Well, I think part of that comes in, you just have this genuine trust that someone's going to accept your question as a genuine question. ****Ryan:** Yeah, at face value. Yeah. That actually listen to the words and- ****Jennie:** Yeah, and not as a threat. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** Like, "Wait, you're questioning what I'm doing?" ****Ryan:** Right. Yeah, 'cause it seems to be if you question someone, either a personal attack or an attack on kind of \[00:07:00\] an institutional belief or something like that. Yeah. So I just find that curious, and in the spirit with the main idea of learning to live the questions, that brings up a whole host of other- Mm. challenges. And so if questions are inherently threatening, and I'm not even saying that necessarily they are. I don't know if we accept that premise or not. Mm. Um, but it seems ****Jennie:** to be the case. Well, I think it kinda goes to this comfort in certainty, and if you question someone, it might rock their certainty muscle or, whatever you wanna call it. It's like there's this stability in certainty, and a lot of people have this bubble they've created around the certainty facts that they've, built their lives upon. And if you start questioning that, there's \[00:08:00\] a genuine fear that that's gonna start to crumble. Mm. And that's what's so hard about the deconstruction process is if you start to notice things might be off or start to question, there's a real big possibility that things are really gonna start to crumble. ****Ryan:** Mm. Yeah, that's a good point. So just kind of the idea ****Jennie:** of change- Yeah ... ****Ryan:** in general ****Jennie:** Yeah, not too many people like change I think the questions where I have felt people tend to be a little more unreceptive to, are the ones that, seem to address the underlying belief systems, underlying political systems, And especially people who don't really know why or haven't really thought about, the \[00:09:00\] reasons, behind those belief systems. I think those are the groups that tend to be more threatened by those questions ****Ryan:** So part of the idea there Some are more or less benign. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** And others are more, what would you say, more destabilizing? ****Jennie:** Yeah, I like that word. Yeah. ****Ryan:** You've said that questioning in your experience growing up at least wasn't really All that acceptable. It was kind of frowned upon You got to learn Teach me how to be more and more comfortable with questions Mm-hmm Tell me a little bit about how you think you learned that. Like what, \[00:10:00\] what told you that questions weren't really okay? ****Jennie:** I don't know if anything in particular told me. I think it was the message I interpreted, and that I assumed, based off of watching other people ask questions and based off of, the consequences that I would see happen. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** When we were first married, I would get upset when you would ask me questions, and I think it was more like I would say something or state something, and you would be like, "Why?" "Why do you think that is?" Essentially, I took those responses from you as, "He thinks I'm stupid." ****Ryan:** Mm. ****Jennie:** And, I don't know at what point in our marriage, we had quite a few \[00:11:00\] conversations, and at some point, the message came across finally that you didn't think I was stupid. You were curious. You wanted to know, and sometimes you did play devil's advocate, but that was just something you learned to do. ****Ryan:** Yeah. I remember having those conversations lots of times. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm ****Ryan:** So the question that I often ask is, what do you mean? ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm ****Ryan:** Sometimes you would interpret that as , "What are you talking about?" Yeah. Don't be dumb. What are you talking about? Mm-hmm. Something like Not that I never do that. I do sometimes, but Most of the time I'm not doing that. Mm-hmm. So just kind of realizing our patterns, our learned kind of ways of interpretation and \[00:12:00\] assumption- Mm-hmm ... ****Jennie:** and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's been an interesting journey. Mm-hmm. I think part of that is trusting that you're not out to get me. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** And, I think that seems to be the underlying theme with questions, is this idea that if someone's asking me a question like, "What are you talking about?" They're out to get me. And so catching myself in that old mindset and being able to go, "Wait, no. He's not out to get me. He genuinely is curious about what do I mean?" So expand upon that- ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm ... ****Jennie:** has been, yeah, I think really helpful in our relationship. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember you telling me that you would do that mentally. Like you would just tell yourself- I've \[00:13:00\] always really appreciated that and respected, and kind of admired. Not kind of, I've admired how over the years softened to that and changed. And it's, I think, a really good example of how change happens, right? It's slow. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** But you're interrupting that cycle of sort of automatic response and reflexivity. Mm-hmm. So you have a reaction to whatever is sort of coded in the language of my question, which, is your nervous system's way of interpreting the world and keeping you safe Kind of teaching yourself by doing that repeatedly that, "No, this is different. It's safe here. We can engage this a little bit differently." Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** And ****Ryan:** I \[00:14:00\] think over the years, that really has changed a lot for you. Mm-hmm. You can more quickly get there sometimes even just reflexively take it as a question at face value. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Mm. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** What do you think about... Is that, does that sound right, that kind of process of change? ****Jennie:** Yeah. Yeah, I think it very much is right. I think that it's-- goes to show how, that kinda change is almost necessary in relationship. There's so many people that'll come into, the room and ask, "How, how do I, stop doing this?" People wanna stop right then and there, but change, that kind of innate change that... I mean, I think I was 35\. So you're talking like 35 years of seeing and interpreting conversations through this lens of \[00:15:00\] safety, that you're just starting to unravel and starting to pick away at. What I constantly go back to is it takes time, and it starts with noticing. And it might be noticing the aftermath of the reaction. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** And then learning to close that window between what happened and the reaction. So it takes time to get there, and then getting to a place to where you start to notice what's building up before the reaction. I would say for most people, it's not immediate. It can take days, months, years before you get to a place to where you catch yourself, be like, "Oh, wait, this is an old pattern." ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. " ****Jennie:** I am safe." And like, for me, "I am safe in this relationship." ****Ryan:** Yeah. " ****Jennie:** And he's not trying to get me. He genuinely is curious about me," and that totally reframes everything. It's like, "Oh, okay, this is \[00:16:00\] curiosity. This isn't I'm out to get you." ****Ryan:** Yeah. I remember sometimes being frustrated that- I told you you're safe. Like, why are you still- ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm ... ****Ryan:** saying that I think you're stupid? I don't think you're stupid. And so then I'd react Yeah, it took me a long time to realize what you're talking about. It's not-- the change is not gonna be immediate. It's a process, right? Mm-hmm. One of the things that's really helped me just in terms of thinking about all this stuff is what you're saying and what we've just described, this rewiring of your neural circuitry, so to speak- Mm-hmm is kind of what you're describing. But then also removing any sort of moral frame- Mm ... from the discussion entirely. For me at least, switching to thinking about the way I just framed it as sort of neurological \[00:17:00\] rewiring is very different than thinking of patterns of sinful behavior or whatever you wanna call it , That's something I've noticed that it takes a lot of the Good or bad out of it. It takes just the guilt and shame away from it, for me at least. Mm-hmm. And just allows it to be, and then I can, like you said, notice it more. I can take a closer look at it without recoiling in disgust at myself- Mm-hmm or something like that. And, and then make a more conscious decision about how do I wanna act, who do I wanna be in the world. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And I think also to kind of tie back into our general posture for this show and who we are as people, the idea of creating a safe space for others to find their own lonely way. That, to me, seems like a prerequisite \[00:18:00\] for the sort of change that you're describing- Mm-hmm But primarily, I think it's about relationship and- Mm-hmm ... uh, it's a hard one to describe for me because it's kind of a slow work of deep kinda healing relationship. Mm-hmm. So like I'm a nervous system inside a body- ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm ... ****Ryan:** inside a relationship, our relationship Inside a family and our families of origin, and you just keep branching out. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** And there's all these systems, and we exist within, , a religious worldview and whatever else, our political system. And then there's this historical context, so you get time into the mix and, We're not just isolated isolated individuals that can go change in a vacuum, so to \[00:19:00\] speak. Um, and change at any one of those levels affects all of it. And so change anywhere kind of by definition affects everything else, and I think that's a really important thing to consider. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** I think so much of what kind of pop culture therapy is about is individualistic change. , Just go change you and- ****Jennie:** Yeah ... ****Ryan:** and that's all that matters. But there's going to be some effect- ****Jennie:** Right ... ****Ryan:** on yourself and others, and then that comes back too. It, it reciprocates it's like this recursive change is what I mean to say. ****Jennie:** Questions have a tendency to create change. ****Ryan:** Yeah. They make us look. ****Jennie:** Yeah. And so here, if you start to ask questions and look at the belief system that you inherited or are living in, it creates \[00:20:00\] this sort of chaos ripple effect. And, so whether it be belief system or, thinking about political party that you're a part of, whether you get to know someone who is, of a different, religious background or, race, and you start to realize that maybe what I thought or what I believed about this particular person or particular group of people, maybe that's not really all true. Maybe there is a different story. Can be extremely threatening to the system, whether it be your immediate family system or extended family system on- ongoing. Mm. It seems like Maybe this goes to show how sheltered I am But thinking about, , growing up in a very \[00:21:00\] conservative evangelical home, You know, the idea was we're never gonna vote for anyone who's for abortion. So pro-life was save all the babies regardless of anything. I mean, I was probably 12 at an abortion clinic with the signs, and here I am 12 years old with a bunch of youth from my church, and I very vividly remember hearing a lady, she had her arm around another lady, and they were going into the abortion clinic. I remember hearing her go, "See, look at all these kids. They don't know your story." And It just goes to show that If we refuse to zoom out and hold the stories of people and refuse to listen to and hear what it is that this person is going through, who am I to-- \[00:22:00\] I mean, I, I don't know what this woman's story was. ****Ryan:** But what about the questioning? So why, as human beings, why do you think we're so resistant to looking at that, like to questioning it? So think about that from the perspective of that 12-year-old girl, you and your youth group people that you're with, and the leadership that brought you there. What would it cost to question that? ****Jennie:** Oh, it would cost... I mean, it would've cost my community. It would've cost-- I'm just now picturing all the, people listening to this who are so, caught up in their own belief system that abortion is bad at all costs. I mean, I'm just picturing- ****Ryan:** Are you afraid this is going to alienate \[00:23:00\] people by saying this stuff? ****Jennie:** I'm afraid this is gonna alienate people, and I also am afraid that this is going to-- people are gonna put me in this category, um- ****Ryan:** Of pro-choice? ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** That would be devastating, huh? Well, yeah, that's what we do. , We just flatten it down to you're good and you're bad. Yeah. And you're good and you're bad. And then we sort people with some kind of really distorted heuristic of who people are and what they are. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's interesting though, like you're thinking about that in real time almost wanting to censor yourself, um ****Jennie:** Going back to what you had said what's so hard about like asking questions and change, and I think I just go back to that certainty is that people are so \[00:24:00\] caught up in wanting to be certain, in everything. And if a question causes instability or a shaking of that certainty, there is gonna be change. I mean, we can refuse change. We can refuse to look. We can close our eyes. All that's a choice. We can choose to continue looking and asking questions, or we can choose to just stop. It's kind of what you were told to do ****Ryan:** That is true Are you handing me the ball? ****Jennie:** Yes. ****Ryan:** Okay. Um Yeah, I was more or less told to stop thinking about what I had been thinking about. And it's interesting, like you're bringing up certainty, \[00:25:00\] and I'm with you. I think you're exactly right. Like the 12-year-old girl Is part of a system of certainty. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And collectively you're there with your definite opinion, which in your minds is big T truth To tell other people how to live or how not to live or what to do or what not to do. Um, and I think, if I think about my sort of journey or quest for certainty I don't know. It just feels different to me than that, than wanting to tell other people what to do. I think for me, my sort of lifelong \[00:26:00\] quest for certainty was to try and Make sense, of the world I inherited The relational world, the intellectual world, the religious frame. The cosmology, all that stuff. I inherited a world of certainty that I never felt certain about. And so for most of my life, I was asking questions about The big picture frame of things. Does this actually make sense? And it wasn't really an intellectual project, it was more a, I guess more from an experiential standpoint. But then it would turn into, how does this fit? Um, \[00:27:00\] so I'd have these experiences, which I tend to call what the hell moments, that are almost glitches in the matrix or, when Jim Carrey gets to- ****Jennie:** Mm ****Ryan:** the edge of the dome that he's in, in The Truman Show or something like that, and they're like, "What is this? What is this thing?" "This doesn't make sense. How does this fit here?" ****Jennie:** Yeah. At what point- did you start to realize that asking questions might be unacceptable or might be threatening to people? Yeah, that's interesting I think too, because, you learned that intuitively as a kid. Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** I learned just the opposite. And what I, I think I've had to learn as an adult is that- questions or threatening people. People don't like it. And, um, I'm a slow \[00:28:00\] learner, I guess, because I've had a lot of, interpersonal challenges, I think because of it. And I've had so many people tell me what you've told me over the years, "You think I'm stupid." I'm like, "No, I don't. What are you talking about? I don't think you're stupid." Um, "I wouldn't be talking to you like this if I thought you were stupid, because I wouldn't really care what your response was. I just wouldn't ask the question if I thought you were stupid or incapable of thinking about these things." And I've always found that curious. Why do people get that from me? I don't get it. Mm-hmm. I think it goes back to that feeling of safety for people. And I think I just have this real naive sense of safety in the world. Mm-hmm. And so I'm, I always feel free to ask questions. I think that's, we've kind of gone in opposite directions in that. I've had to tone that \[00:29:00\] down, and my nervous system has learned more and more over the years that I should not ask the question. Mm-hmm. Where you've had to learn the opposite thing. ****Jennie:** But was there a moment, that you, or are there moments in your life that you can look back ****Ryan:** to that where you realized that, "Well, maybe-" Yeah ... "maybe this question isn't..." It's, it's funny 'cause y- earlier you were talking about speeding up that cycle of noticing. And, some of my examples I looked back on retrospectively, like 20 years in the- You're a little slower on that. Very, very much so. , So yes, there are lots and lots of those. It's all kind of tied up with some of those, what the hell moments. One that comes to mind is when I was a freshman in high school, actually it was the eight- the summer of my eighth grade year. I was going into football, and all my brothers played football, so I knew all the coaches and everything. And anyway, there was this thing that happened at the school, and the \[00:30:00\] head coach had fired one of the assistant coaches, and I didn't think it was right, and like I was pretty upset about it. And so I had started a petition to, it wasn't really a question, but it was a challenge to an authority figure. And, um- I did this in good faith from my perspective. I wasn't trying to be provocative or bring down the head coach. It wasn't intended to be a personal attack on him. It was more, bringing to light something that I thought was an injustice. That didn't go well at all. Like it kinda sunk my hopes for any sort of football career at... Not, not that I was ever gonna have a, a professional career in football, but just my high school experience of football was severely impacted due to that, due to my choice to \[00:31:00\] challenge the authority. And so that was one, I guess. Um- ****Jennie:** How did it take you looking back to kind of see that as a, "Ah, maybe questions aren't safe ****Ryan:** for everyone"? Well, it's so interesting the way that we spin this stuff in our minds and the stories that we weave around these things. And so for most of my adult life-- Well, even starting then, like in adolescence- Mm-hmm I started to take on this frame of reference that kind of viewed myself as the problem. Like I'm, I don't fit in this world that I was given. I don't really believe it very much. Like it just doesn't work that well for me. I tried to live into it, But then I sort of... I don't know, I just never fit. And so I did things. Some of my behavior was not great, \[00:32:00\] and so I just took on the role or the persona of, , the black sheep in the family. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** So I haven't really thought of that as questioning authority much until just the last, I wanna say, 10 years maybe. There was a conversation I had, with someone years ago, and she was hearing some of this and kinda gave me a different perspective. She just said, "Oh, you were the truth teller in your family." And I'd always thought of myself as a liar. But it was more like your behavior was telling the truth about the system that you were a part of, and that really reframed a lot for me. I'm still kinda wrestling with that all these years later. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. Isn't it interesting how talking with someone who's, , listening and knows you at that kind of a level \[00:33:00\] has such an incredible power to reframe- Mm-hmm ... ****Ryan:** years' ****Jennie:** worth of beliefs about ourselves? ****Ryan:** Yep. Yeah, it totally is. And then, and then it takes a long time. It's not like I'll ever be done with that. I'm going to Live with the 35 years of framing myself as the problem. Mm-hmm. I guess it wasn't that long because In early childhood, I didn't have that perspective at all. But then in early adolescence, like in middle school on, I started taking on this totally different perspective. And so that then became my personal frame of reference for a lot of years, and that doesn't ever go away. Mm-hmm. Like it's, uh, it's a part of me. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** It's a part of my nervous system, if we wanna keep framing things that way. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Uh, it's part of my story. And that's okay. It's just I'm gonna live in that forever. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Um, but it doesn't have to \[00:34:00\] totally define me. It's just something that is part of my history. Mm-hmm. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Yeah. So that's one example, I guess, would be the time I started a petition as a freshman in high school. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. I could've been a community organizer, I guess. ****Jennie:** Could've. ****Ryan:** Yeah. I took a very different road. Yeah. So the question for us, I think, comes from personal observation, - Yeah ... like anecdotal information that it's really not that safe to ask questions. It's- ****Jennie:** Yeah ... ****Ryan:** it's threatening to people. It's threatening to institutions and power structures to, to ask questions, because like you said, it tends to destabilize and lead to change, ****Jennie:** which ****Ryan:** I ****Jennie:** think ****Ryan:** throughout ****Jennie:** my \[00:35:00\] ****Ryan:** career, my adult life really, I've realized that people don't really like change, which is not a, profound insight of mine, but it's certainly something I've observed firsthand over the years. So if our premise is that, , questions are threatening because they make us look and honest looking leads to some sort of change ****Jennie:** And change destabilizes the system ****Ryan:** Yeah, the systems that we're a part of. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And that kind of scales up- ****Jennie:** Yeah ... ****Ryan:** from the individual to the family and so on out to societal stuff. ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** And so there's sort of this equilibrium that systems wanna find, and not so we're sort of, that's a thing, right? Um- How do we do this more safely, more openly? What \[00:36:00\] makes for an environment that's suitable for more openness to questions and openness to change? ****Jennie:** That is a good question ****Ryan:** Well, I feel like our marriage is an example of it. And so I'm, I'm not trying to say, , we have a perfect marriage, but we have changed a lot. We're both really high on openness to change- Mm-hmm or openness to new experience, ****Jennie:** mm. ****Ryan:** Both of us have, are very high on adaptability. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Mm-hmm. But that, so that's part of it, for sure. I think we're both open to change. Yeah. ****Jennie:** I think there's also, , a posture of curiosity for the other person. I think there's, , a underlying trust in the good intention of the other \[00:37:00\] person. I think there's a willingness to see the humanity in the other person as well. And, I think , if you go into a conversation with your defenses up, there's a immediately an automatic, , distrust of what the other person is, , coming in as. And I mean, given there's a whole bunch of reasons why one would do that. , I go into certain conversations already, understanding, "Okay, this person is not safe. They're, , untrustworthy and, , I just need to make sure I'm safe in this place right now." But it seems like , there's just a lack of relationships that people have where there's a genuine felt safety, , ability to trust the other person is out for their good and, , genuine respect. \[00:38:00\] And so I think that it's almost like fostering spaces of conversation that hold that kind of safety, respect, and honoring the other person's story- Mm-hmm is necessary. But it seems like there's so few of those. Now many of us thought that was in the church, but It's not really there. Um, I mean, unless you're going to believe A, B and C and not say one, two, three. ****Ryan:** Hmm. ****Jennie:** Um I think people are genuinely craving for spaces where they can ask questions and dig into who they are and what they believe and who they wanna be, people are genuinely looking for those \[00:39:00\] spaces, and they're so few and far between. ****Ryan:** Hmm. Yeah, I know that's been true for us. Trying to find those spaces in the church communities we've been a part of has been a real, I think for both of us, just painful, kind of lonely- ****Jennie:** Yeah ... ****Ryan:** well, I think as usual, we don't have all the answers. Uh- ****Jennie:** Sure have a lot of questions. ****Ryan:** Do have a lot of questions, and now we've learned that questions are threatening. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** Just kidding. I think we've both learned that a lot over- Yeah ... the years. But no, I think it's an important thing to keep considering the idea that... I know it is for me, just to keep thinking how can I create a safe space for others to find their own along the way and invite them into, I think like you said, a more of a posture of curiosity as \[00:40:00\] opposed to a system that hands them the answers and asks them to conform to it. ****Jennie:** I like that. And in the same way, not expect them to conform. ****Ryan:** Yeah. ****Jennie:** I feel like if there's this ulterior motive of expectation, like asking a question, expecting a certain answer, if we have this more of op- an open posture, we're able to accept what they have to say. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Yeah, I like that, But I also think it's one of the reasons we've had such a hard time finding a place to fit in the world, is because we both kinda do that, and not everyone's very comfortable with that. Mm. Like idea systems like a religion or a political movement or something like that have a definite, "Here's what matters in the world. Here's who you should be. Here's how you should \[00:41:00\] participate. Here are the things that are acceptable and not." And not that we don't have that, but it's not very rigid. It's very much like, ****Jennie:** hmm, ****Ryan:** there's a lot of ways of looking at all this stuff. And, uh, kind of like you opened with, your story of being 12 at the abortion clinic. You kind of frame that as, "We have the right answer. We have the way of looking at this. Here's the way of being, and you're outside of this, and therefore I'm gonna shout you down." ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Uh, as opposed to what you're saying now is, "You're right. I didn't know that person's story at all. I missed the human being there." Mm-hmm. "And I just was trying to impose my way of looking at things on another person." ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** But that then opens us up to- ****Jennie:** Ridicule. \[00:42:00\] ****Ryan:** Yeah, and the pigeonholing- Yeah ... you kind of described. Like, "Oh, you're pro-choice. You're morally unacceptable." ****Jennie:** Mm-hmm. ****Ryan:** Well, it's a lot more nuanced than that. ****Jennie:** Yeah. ****Ryan:** What about the humans here? Hmm. ****Jennie:** Exactly. Yeah. ****Ryan:** Hmm. I ****Jennie:** I know I have my own biases and my own ways of looking at things. But I think there's something about noticing the biases that come up when I'm talking with someone and opening up myself to maybe I have something to learn from this person. Mm-hmm. Or maybe this person really does have something to say, and being curious about their story. 'Cause really all of us have hard, beautiful stories. And I mean, and I'm, I'm a huge believer in, yeah, someone may have a \[00:43:00\] extremely hard story, but there's, there's glimpses of beauty in it. Mm-hmm. And it's so we aren't who we are today if it wasn't for our stories and the people in our lives and our families of origin. All of that makes us who we are today. ****Ryan:** Yeah, I love that. The idea of the posture of curiosity, the idea that everyone has something to teach me, something I can learn from and grow from. Mm-hmm. As opposed to, "I'm the authority here. I know what's right." Mm-hmm. "I know what's wrong. I know what matters." Yeah. And I'm open to being changed by- ****Jennie:** Mm ... ****Ryan:** the encounter with another human being. ****Jennie:** Oof. That's beautiful. I think that is the essence of what it means to create a safe place for someone to find their own lonely place. ****Ryan:** \[00:44:00\] Mm. Well, I guess we answered it. Way to go. ****Jennie:** Yeah, that's episode two. ****Ryan:** Yeah. Now no one will be threatened by questions ever again. We just answered that question once and for all. ****Jennie:** Yes. The only right way. ****Ryan:** That's right. Congratulations world, we fixed it. Yeah. ****Jennie:** Ah. Well, this was fun ****Ryan:** Yeah. Okay. Well, until next time. ****Jennie:** Until next time. --- Ryan and Jennie are marriage and family therapists in San Clemente, California. Learn more about their clinical work at Denney Family Therapy. [Learn more ](https://denneyfamilytherapy.com/?ref=theunfold.ing) ### The Man Against the Wall URL: https://theunfold.ing/the-man-against-the-wall/ Last updated: 2026-09-09T21:07:05.000Z His voice cracked, and tears began to stream down his face. We were sitting on the steps inside the elementary school where our youth group met on Wednesday nights. That night, one of our church elders stood in front of us to tell us our youth pastor had been "asked to leave". None of us were surprised. We had known something was happening for a while. I honestly don’t remember much now about why he was leaving or whether the decision itself was justified. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was handled badly. I don’t know. What I do remember is that enough pieces had made their way into enough homes that by the time the announcement became official, everyone had an opinion. This particular elder had been asked to deliver the news. I liked him. To my knowledge, most of us did. He was older than our parents, closer to a grandfather figure. A big guy with a loud booming voice. Funny. Warm. One of those adults who seemed genuinely comfortable around teenagers, and not in a creepy way, which is probably why he had spent so many years volunteering with us. He finished what he had been asked to say and, for a second, the room was quiet. Then someone spoke. Angrily. Why? How could they do this? This is wrong! Then someone else joined in. And someone else. Within moments, middle schoolers and high schoolers were yelling at him. The thing is, some of them were my friends. Kids who had heard pieces of conversations at home. Kids who knew fragments of what had happened. Kids who had inherited the outrage of the adults around them and arrived that night ready to defend someone they loved. The elder tried to answer. Then I watched his face change. Even as his voice cracked and the tears streamed down his face, they kept at it. I remember looking around the room, trying to understand what was happening. That was when I saw him. Our youth pastor. He was standing against the wall with his arms crossed against his chest, watching. I can still remember the expression on his face. He looked pleased. Maybe pleased isn’t even the right word. Satisfied. Justified. He seemed to be soaking in the scene unfolding before him. As though every accusation thrown at the elder proved something. As though the anger filling the room belonged to him and he was content to let a group of teenagers carry it. I remember feeling something turn in me because whatever had happened between the adults, whatever decisions had been made behind closed doors, this man standing in front of us was not the enemy. And these were children. We were children. We had been given just enough information to become furious and nowhere near enough information to understand what we were furious about. But no one stopped us. And the person who could have stopped it stood against the wall and watched. For years, I thought faith deconstruction began much later for me. With theology. With questions. With realizing certain beliefs no longer made sense. After trying again and again to find a community that would accept me. After the pain had accumulated to a certain point. But when I look back, I wonder if some of the earliest cracks were much earlier and quieter than that. Maybe they were moments when something I had been told was good suddenly didn’t look good anymore. When authority didn’t look wise. When loyalty didn’t look loving. When a room full of religious adults allowed children to carry a conflict that never belonged to them. I didn’t have language for any of that then. I only knew that I was sitting on the steps of an elementary school, watching children scream and yell at a grown man who was crying, while another grown man lounged against the wall and seemed to enjoy it. Something about that stayed with me. ### Learning to Live the Questions URL: https://theunfold.ing/podcast-episode-1-learning-to-live-the-questions/ Last updated: 2026-09-13T19:13:00.000Z What happens when certainty stops working? In our first episode of *On Unfolding*, we talk about the questions that have followed us through faith, marriage, parenting, therapy, and the slow work of becoming ourselves. For both of us, certainty once offered a kind of safety. But our relationships to it were very different. Jennie learned early to look outward toward authority and other people for answers. Ryan learned to question, but from inside a world he believed already possessed the most important answers. Over time, both of those ways of living became harder to sustain. This conversation moves through some of the experiences that changed us: Evangelical Christianity, faith deconstruction, attachment, Internal Family Systems, parenting, mental health, and the stories we inherit about ourselves and the world. At the center of it are a few questions we keep returning to. ## Questions We’re Living - What kind of person do I want to be? - Who am I becoming? - What am I responsible for? - Who are the safe people in my life? - What stories have shaped the way I understand myself? - What happens when the identity we were handed no longer fits? - How do we create space for the people we love to change? “Learning to live the questions” doesn’t mean refusing answers or endlessly generating new questions. For us, it means discovering a set of questions that can orient a life, then continuing to live inside them as we change. ## In This Conversation We talk about: - Rainer Maria Rilke and the phrase “live the questions” - growing up with certainty as a religious value - learning to trust ourselves - the relationship between obedience, safety, and authority - Ryan’s recurring “what the hell?” moments, from childhood faith to politics and deconstruction - the guiding questions that now orient our lives - attachment as a way of relating to ourselves and other people - Internal Family Systems and the idea that behavior can be adaptive rather than shameful - competing ways of interpreting the same experience - spiritual warfare, panic attacks, and the stories through which we make sense of the world - what happens when the identities we inherit are allowed to change - listening to our adult children without immediately defending ourselves - the stories parents tell about their children - loneliness, connection, and what it means to sit with someone in pain - what we hope *On Unfolding* can become --- ## Mentioned in This Episode **Rainer Maria Rilke, *Letters to a Young Poet*** The source of the invitation to “live the questions” that eventually became part of the name and orientation of this podcast. **Thomas Merton** Ryan first encountered Rilke’s idea through Merton’s writing and reflections. **Internal Family Systems (IFS)** A therapeutic framework that helps us think about the different parts of ourselves, adaptive behavior, and the possibility of approaching those parts with less shame. **Attachment theory** A framework we use in the conversation to think about trust, safety, relationships, and how we orient toward ourselves and others. --- ## About *On Unfolding* *On Unfolding: Learning to Live the Questions* is a conversation between Ryan and Jennie Denney about what it means to be human. We talk about therapy, faith and faith deconstruction, marriage, parenting, mental health, culture, books, identity, and the stories that shape us. We don’t expect to arrive at tidy answers. We’re more interested in the questions that remain alive. If this conversation resonates with you, subscribe to *On Unfolding* to receive new episodes and essays as we publish them. --- #### Transcript **The transcript below has been lightly edited for readability.* ****Ryan:** Episode one begins. ****Jennie:** First episode. ****Jennie:** We’re finally doing it. ****Ryan:** You excited? ****Jennie:** I’m excited. ****Ryan:** Nervous? ****Jennie:** A little nervous. How about you? ****Ryan:** Yeah, I’m a little nervous, but I am excited to get our thoughts out there. ****Jennie:** I feel like the topics of all of our different episodes are going to be very... ****Ryan:** All over the place? ****Jennie:** All over the place. ****Ryan:** That is probably true, knowing us. ****Jennie:** Living the questions. ****Ryan:** On Unfolding: Learning to Live the Questions. What does that mean? ****Jennie:** We’ve had a lot of conversations about this. I remember you reading something that talked about living the questions. Where did that come from again? ****Ryan:** That comes from Rilke. He’s this German poet, and I think I was introduced to him through Thomas Merton’s writing years ago. It’s from **Letters to a Young Poet*. This guy comes to him for advice through writing. They didn’t meet in person, but they’re corresponding, and one of the things Rilke encourages him to do is to learn to live the questions. I remember reading that and hearing Thomas Merton’s commentary around it and thinking it sounded really wise, but also like one of those annoying sort of koans that just stuck with me for a long time. It bothered me. What does it even mean to live the questions? Because I was searching for answers. I need to find the answer. What’s right? What’s true? What really matters? Over the years I’ve realized that learning to live the questions actually makes a lot of sense for me. What about for you? What does it mean to you? ****Jennie:** I remember you bringing it up, and I really liked it too. I just didn’t really know what it meant. I think we both grew up in homes that were very different, but there was this general idea that if you didn’t have certainty, you were lost or you didn’t have enough faith. Everything seemed to be viewed through certainty. Then someone at the church approached me and said, “Sometimes things are just a mystery.” That sparked something for me: maybe there really is no such thing as certainty. That’s where I started trying on the whole idea of living the question and thinking of uncertainty as not being so scary. I feel like that opened up a lot of relief for me. ****Ryan:** Tell me about your certainty. What did that look like for you at different times in your life? Certainty, Authority, and Safety ****Jennie:** For me, certainty was looking to leaders, whether they were political leaders, church leaders, or adults in my life who held some kind of authority. It was looking to other people for the answers. Part of my journey has been looking to myself and trusting that the answers are in here somewhere. And if there aren’t answers, it becomes: Am I okay with this? Am I okay with me? ****Ryan:** You just gestured to all of you. ****Jennie:** Exactly. I am all of me. ****Ryan:** That’s from **How to Train Your Dragon*. Remember that part? ****Jennie:** Vaguely. ****Ryan:** His dad’s like, “You just need to change this.” And he’s like, “You just gestured to all of me.” ****Jennie:** That’s right. Now I remember. ****Ryan:** So, learning to trust yourself. Tell me about early experiences with certainty and authority. Because what you’re describing is really about trust. ****Jennie:** I grew up in a home that was strongly influenced by James Dobson: raising your child to follow biblical principles, to obey authority, spare the rod, spoil the child. I learned pretty early on that to stay safe, I needed to obey. In order to be safe, I needed to turn away from myself and open up to the adults who were supposed to be the trusted people, the authority figures. It was about avoiding pain, but also about being safe. In a sense, it did keep me safe from other people. It kept me safe from feeling rejected. It kept me safe from being ostracized. It kept me safe from being pushed out of the community I was born in. ****Ryan:** That’s good insight. It makes me think of the IFS stuff in therapy, where you take on this role and these parts develop around it. Those are adaptive behaviors. When do you think that stuff stopped serving you? When did it stop working so well? ****Jennie:** In the evangelical church I grew up in, I would hear a lot about church hurt and people leaving because they were hurt. But it was always framed as: they weren’t right for the space, or they had a problem with leadership, or they didn’t want to follow God’s leading in this space. Those were the answers I was given. Some of the people who ended up leaving or being kicked out, I genuinely loved. So there were some questions there. I learned to watch a lot. Questions weren’t really allowed, so I kept them to myself. Then, as I got to know you more, in a sense I got to know myself more. Even early in our marriage, I remember saying all the time, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” At one point you looked at me and said, “Why do you keep saying that? It’s not your job to make sure I’m okay.” My whole life, I had learned to make sure other people were okay, and if they weren’t, to make them okay. It was a way to avoid someone being angry at me or to avoid punishment. I really do feel like, just out of luck, I ended up with someone who has given me the space to feel more and more safe. And in feeling more and more safe, the world has really opened up for me. I feel like I’m safe with myself. ****Ryan:** I love that. ****Jennie:** How about you? ****Ryan:** My relationship with certainty? ****Jennie:** Yes. Ryan’s “What the Hell?” Questions ****Ryan:** Where to begin? For me, it was a similar story growing up in the evangelical church. One of my earliest memories was standing in front of my parents’ bedroom door. They had this mirror hanging on the back of the door. I must have been five years old. I remember praying the same kind of sinner’s prayer over and over again, looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, “I don’t know if I did it right. I don’t know if I’m good enough, if I’m acceptable.” I think I was concerned about the eternal stuff I’d been told, making sure my soul was going to go to heaven when I died. It seems like a strange thought for a five-year-old. I don’t think that really dawned on me in the way I’m talking about it now until I was in my thirties. A lot of my life has been trying to make sure I am acceptable, I think to God, but also to other people, in my family and in the church. ****Jennie:** So at what point did you get to a place where you finally said, “What the hell? No one knows. I’m going to live the question now”? ****Ryan:** “What the hell?” is the common refrain throughout my life. That is the arc of my life, I guess: the constant questioning. For you, questions weren’t allowed, so you internalized them. Questions were fine in my environment. My dad encouraged it. But I really embodied this idea that my little sect, the little group I was a part of, had the answers. We were right about the most important questions in life. So I think that “what the hell?” refrain is an important way for me to understand the larger themes of my life. One example was when we were in Tijuana. We were on vacation in San Diego and took a day trip to Tijuana to buy bullwhips and firecrackers and all that important stuff, haggle with the Mexican vendors, and smuggle stuff across the border. Pretty awesome. ****Jennie:** Good Christian things to do. ****Ryan:** Yeah. I probably had twenty bucks or something. It was my first real encounter with poverty at that scale. I remember seeing this boy about my age selling Chiclets, and I immediately wanted to give him all my money. My dad told me not to. It was the first time I’d heard this kind of argument: for this kid’s own good, we can’t actually help him because that will teach his parents something they shouldn’t learn, which is that he’s more valuable to them selling Chiclets on the street when really he needs to be in school. I still don’t totally buy that argument. It still bothers me. I was maybe nine years old, thinking, “What are you talking about? This kid could use some money, and I’m going to go blow it on firecrackers.” Which I did. That was another kind of “what the hell?” Then I remember being in science class learning about evolution while I was in a church where we were young-earth creationists. We knew what was really true. This science stuff was bullcrap. And I’m thinking, “Really? What the hell is that about?” But I loved my family. I loved the people at my church. And I believed it. That jaundiced all of my thinking and learning. I had to find the right answer because I was part of this group, and we had the right answers. So I had to make sense of the rest of the world and fit it into that frame. ****Jennie:** At what point did it all come to a head and bust open? ****Ryan:** It’s hard to point to one instance because it’s kind of all of it. All those “what the hell?” moments built to a boiling point over the course of my life. A big one was 2015, when Donald Trump started making a serious run at the presidency. I remember watching one of the early Republican presidential debates. Everyone was on the stage, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted, all of them. Trump starts making up these nicknames, and everyone on the right at the time was saying, “What is this guy doing? He’s a joke. This can’t be real.” But then he starts gaining momentum. Slowly I see political figures, but more importantly people close to me, people around me, start to buy it and get behind the guy. What the hell is going on here? This is crazy. Around that time we left the country and ended up living in Europe for a couple of years. Brexit was going on. Trump was happening. Then QAnon. Then COVID. That whole time, I was deep in reading philosophy and history and psychology and trying to answer the question, “What the hell is going on here?” At that point, this Christian story I had curated wasn’t working anymore. It was falling apart. What really freed me up was the idea that no one has a secure grasp. No one has a corner on big-T Truth. So why am I spending all my effort looking for it? I’m not going to find it anyway. A big part of what helped me out of that was building my own philosophy of life. Guiding Questions ****Jennie:** We were talking about this the other day. Would you share some of the questions you’ve learned to ask yourself? As you’ve done that, you’ve done it out loud as our kids have grown, and now it’s like our whole family has started asking some of those questions about ourselves. If this episode is about learning to live the questions, what are some of the questions you’ve learned to live in? ****Ryan:** The big one is: What kind of person do I want to be? Maybe we should say it this way: learning to live the questions, at least for me, doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out, but it also doesn’t mean I’m constantly living in uncertainty. It’s not like I have to generate new questions every day. I feel like I’ve discovered some guiding questions that orient my life. One of them is simply: What kind of person do I want to be in the world? And I actually have an answer to that. I want to be the kind of person who creates a safe space for others to find their own lonely way in the world. What about you? What does learning to live the questions mean to you? What are some of your orienting questions? ****Jennie:** Definitely: What kind of person do I want to be in the world? That makes it my responsibility to ask: What am I reading? What am I doing? How am I acting? Why is this particular person or situation setting me off? What is behind my reaction? Earlier I talked about how I learned to turn outward to get wisdom and approval and advice from other people. Asking that question of myself creates this feeling of being more integrated, but also more responsible for my actions, my thoughts, and my words. It also helps me see other people and the way they treat people as part of the kind of person they are. If somebody hurts someone or says something nasty, that is the kind of person they are being. There is always repair. I think I tell almost every one of my clients that we can’t make other people change, but I wouldn’t be a therapist if I didn’t believe everyone was capable of change. But that responsibility lies with them. So: What kind of person do I want to be in the world? Who am I becoming? Who are the safe people in my life? And: What am I responsible for? That’s a big one that I’ll probably forever be working through. ****Ryan:** Can you elaborate on that? ****Jennie:** If I learned at a young age that it’s my responsibility to manage other people’s emotions, to manage other people’s views of who I am, then asking, “What am I responsible for?” allows me to take a step back and say, “No, I’m not responsible for their reactions or their emotions.” If I hurt someone’s feelings, I do believe it’s my responsibility to ask, “How did I hurt your feelings? What did I do?” and apologize for my role in it. That question has really freed me up to step away from the roles I adopted or lived into, including family-of-origin stuff and the roles I took on in the church community. ****Ryan:** That’s a very good question. What am I responsible for? And “Who are the safe people in my life?” is a question I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about. Which is interesting, thinking about the difference in our attachment styles. It actually makes sense. If I’m securely attached, the idea that others aren’t safe doesn’t come up for me too much. I know it’s true. I’ve experienced it. But it doesn’t play a major role in my thinking. Attachment and Trust ****Jennie:** I want to clear up a misconception that a lot of people have about attachment theory. When it comes to a securely attached individual versus anxious or avoidant attachment, you might be securely attached, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone be more hurt relationally than you. I think part of that is that you have this innate ability to trust other people and yourself, so you put yourself out there. Not everyone is like that. There are a lot of people with anxious or avoidant attachment who see that as scary or approach relationships more cautiously. I tend to come to relationships a little more reserved, cautious, and careful. At the same time, we’ve seen it in our relationship. When I feel you start to detach, I get a little scared. So I don’t know if there really is a healthiest version of attachment. ****Ryan:** Did you think I was saying I was healthier than other people? ****Jennie:** No. I just wanted to clear up the misconception. ****Ryan:** You’re saying the misconception is that there’s a hierarchy of health? ****Jennie:** Yes. I’ve heard people say securely attached people are the healthiest people. ****Ryan:** I’ve never said that. ****Jennie:** I know. Ryan has not said this, just for the record. But the more I work in the mental health field, the more it feels like attachment styles are ways we learn to live and exist in the world. Then it becomes our responsibility to understand what that means, what that attachment style offers us, and how we want to grow. ****Ryan:** That’s how I see it too. It’s like an orientation toward yourself and toward others. I tend to come at the world in a pretty open, vulnerable way, and I think that can come off as naivety sometimes. I’ve never thought of it in terms of health. I think of it more as: I tend to trust other people, and I tend to trust myself, sort of in equal measure. Probably others more than myself, to be honest. I think of anxious attachment as what you described earlier. You don’t necessarily look to yourself by default for the answers. You trust others. The avoidant style is kind of the opposite. You don’t really trust others, so you look inside and withdraw. ****Jennie:** I don’t know if there’s ever a full healing in that. ****Ryan:** That idea of earned secure attachment isn’t a scale of health. It’s still about how you relate to yourself and other people. Do you trust yourself? Do you trust others? And what you were describing earlier about our relationship, that posture of creating a safe space for each other to find our own lonely way, doesn’t create health on its own. But I see it as a way to connect with yourself and with other people in a way that’s more open and less guarded or scared. ****Jennie:** That makes sense. If we use the phrase faith deconstruction, part of my deconstruction has been learning, instead of living in this anxiously attached posture toward everything, to go inward and learn to trust myself. ****Ryan:** I think that’s a great way of looking at it. You’ve got inner resources you can draw on as you learn to trust yourself. IFS, Adaptive Behavior, and Shame ****Jennie:** There are a lot of threads in there. You’ve mentioned IFS a few times. Would you explain how that modality has helped you in your learning to live the questions? ****Ryan:** I’m kind of a framework guy. I like to have frames that can hold my thoughts. IFS is one that works for me intuitively. The idea is that a person is a complex system in their own right. The internal family, the Self, the exiles or wounded parts, and the protectors that emerge are all part of this ongoing, complex, evolving system. Complexity theory is super helpful for me in thinking about that. I’ve also done a lot of inner work that way, identifying different aspects of myself. The other big thing IFS has done for me is the idea that there are no bad parts. It’s right in line with this idea of adaptive behaviors in a complex system. It pulls some of the morality out of it and blunts a lot of the shame for me. Instead of seeing some of the things I did as a kid as shameful behavior, I can see them as adaptive behavior. I’m trying to live in a community of people, which we’re all trying to do, and I’m figuring out ways to be that feel safe and okay. ****Jennie:** I like that. ****Ryan:** It’s similar to what you were saying earlier. You had to figure out how to be. You were performing a role in your family because you wanted to stay safe. You didn’t sit down and intellectually decide to do that. It was learned behavior. Adaptive behavior. ****Jennie:** I like how that takes some of the shame away. ****Ryan:** It totally does for me. It reshapes my perspective. Another big thing that’s happened for me in the last decade is this idea that there isn’t one big-T objective truth that I can somehow possess. There are socially constructed views of the world. I live inside them, and I help create them. I have my own little ones too. And I can actually have quite a bit of control over the lenses I want to look through. A lot of that is choice and habit. The Stories We Live In ****Jennie:** We’ve talked a lot about the stories we’ve lived in. The story I grew up in had a lot to do with fear of demons and spiritual warfare and all that fun stuff. ****Ryan:** I guess I look at all those things as adaptive stories. A world of angels and demons and spiritual warfare is a story that emerged in a culture, and individual people live inside that story, including you. You lived in that frame of reference, that conceptual worldview. It shaped the way you saw things and the way you developed. So it isn’t “just a story.” It plays out in the real world. How do you make sense of those things now? ****Jennie:** I think I’m still trying to make sense of all of it. There have been a few times in my life when I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and couldn’t breathe. It felt like something was sitting on my chest. During those times, I genuinely felt like Satan was sitting on me trying to suffocate me. Now, when I look back, I think, “Oh, that was a panic attack.” ****Ryan:** Say what the antidote was for you. ****Jennie:** The antidote was to say the name of Jesus. It was very difficult for me to say it, but when I was finally able to say it, I felt relief. Now that I’ve learned more about mental health, the body, the nervous system, and panic attacks, I can see that this is a very common sign of a panic attack. Looking back over my life, those moments happened during times of extremely high stress. That was my body’s way of responding. But in the moment, it felt like a spiritual attack. ****Ryan:** And in that story, there’s a divine intervention through the name of Jesus that saves you from the spiritual or demonic attack. I find it really interesting to put those two ways of looking at the same experience side by side. My whole life has been spent trying to answer the question: Which one of these ways of looking at things is correct? Which one is true? But if you think about it differently, both frameworks can be helpful to the people who live inside them. I remember you telling me those stories and never quite knowing what to make of them because I haven’t really lived in a world of spirits. One frame around that experience is that there’s a real spiritual attack going on. Satan, or some demon, is literally sitting on your chest trying to suffocate you, and the name of Jesus has power to stop that. Another way of looking at it is that you’re having a panic attack, and your recitation of the name of Jesus is activating your parasympathetic nervous system and helping calm your body down. Anymore, I don’t care that much which of those stories is true. That’s where I’ve gotten to. No one really knows anyway. I can’t get outside all these systems and see the matrix for what it is or understand the ultimate nature of the universe. But that was always the question for me: What is the nature of the universe? What’s real in an ontological sense? What really matters eternally? Those are the questions I grew up inside. Over the last decade or so, I’ve largely abandoned that as an intellectual effort. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the end of that question. Ironically, I’m certain that no one can be certain about those things. I don’t want to throw anyone’s worldview off. I’m not trying to invalidate people’s perspectives. But the way I approach things does have the power to destabilize a worldview if you’re willing to look at it closely. ****Jennie:** For me, approaching life inquisitively is very new. I was raised in a world where questions weren’t allowed. Questions were dangerous and scary. ****Ryan:** So instead of learning to live the questions, it’s continuing to protect certainty. ****Jennie:** Yeah. At all costs. ****Ryan:** Some questions are worldview-upsetting. ****Jennie:** Especially when you’ve been handed your identity. “Nope. This is who you are. Don’t ask questions.” ****Ryan:** Everyone is handed an identity. We all are. The question is whether it’s allowed to change. There’s a difference between, “Here’s your identity. Don’t change it. Play this role for the rest of your life,” and simply recognizing that your identity is naturally handed to you because you grow up in this family, this church, this culture, and then you’re allowed to change. ****Jennie:** And there has been a cost for you in changing, even coming from a home that provided a secure attachment base. ****Ryan:** Definitely. There are real costs to change. That’s one of the things I think has been so beautiful about our marriage and the way our family has evolved. I feel like we have created for each other, and now for our kids, a safe place for self-exploration and change. I’m very grateful to you for doing that for me. And I’m really proud of what we’ve done together. Parenting, Repair, and Being Seen ****Jennie:** We’ve talked to our kids and said, “When you’re older and you’re going through your own ‘What the hell did Mom and Dad do? Why did they do that?’ please talk to us. “We want to be part of that conversation. We want to hear it and try to understand from your perspective.” Not to correct them, but to be part of their healing process. ****Ryan:** Because so often it becomes, “I hear you, and now I’m going to set the record straight. Here’s what really happened.” I’ve experienced both. There have been very defensive reactions, but I also remember one particular conversation with my parents. I was seven years old. My older brother Mark and I and a couple of family friends, who were all around eleven, decided to go to Target and steal a bunch of Micro Machines. Those tiny little die-cast cars and planes. We were walking out of Target with all these Micro Machines and got caught. There were four of us originally. One kid refused to do it. He basically said, “No, I’m not doing that. You guys are stupid. This is wrong.” But my brother, another kid, and I did it. We ended up sitting in the manager’s office at Target waiting for the cops. I was seven years old and strangely unconcerned, like, “Whatever. Who cares? Big deal.” My brother was almost scared straight by the experience. We ended up on work crew, and I was seven years old picking up trash. Years later, I was telling this story to my dad from this perspective of, “What the hell? What must the environment have been like for me to end up stealing Micro Machines from Target at seven years old and ending up on work crew?” At that point in my life I was asking, “Where were my parents? Why was I allowed to do all this stuff?” It seemed kind of negligent. But my dad chimed in. I don’t think he was trying to defend himself. He was trying to tell me who I really was. He got to something that was really core for me. At the time, I was thinking about our youngest son, Liam, at that age. His happy little loving self, singing and vibrant all the time. And I remember thinking, “That’s me. That’s how I was. What happened?” ****Jennie:** I’m crying for you, Ry. ****Ryan:** You’re going to make me cry. That’s not fair. We were sitting in my parents’ backyard, and my dad told me that when the judge sentenced us to work crew, he had asked that they not put us on the side of the highway. He was basically saying, “I agree there needs to be some punishment, but let’s not get crazy.” So we ended up at some public park. My dad asked me, “Do you remember what happened there?” I didn’t really. But after he told me the story, I went back and thought about it. I vaguely remember being really empathetic toward these kids. These were older kids, thirteen to seventeen, and I remember asking them what their stories were and befriending them. One girl didn’t have gloves, so I gave her mine. Someone else didn’t have lunch, so I shared my lunch. That just wasn’t, and still isn’t, a big deal to me. Yeah, whatever. Have some lunch. My dad told me this story, and it reframed so much for me. Instead of, “Here’s this little delinquent,” it became: I’m not sure why we stole those things, but even at work crew I showed up in a way that was still recognizably me. You were there when my dad told me that. What was your experience of hearing it? ****Jennie:** My experience was, “Of course that’s what you would do.” But watching you and your dad interact in that moment felt like a really healing process for you. You had been telling the story one way, and he gave you another angle of what he saw. You had believed for so long that you were a disappointment. ****Ryan:** And he saw me differently. He saw the real me. That was a really healing moment for me. My happy little Liam-like self had gotten lost somewhere along the way. ****Jennie:** I think that’s a glimpse of how parents can help their adult children reframe hard stories in a way that allows them to feel seen rather than dismissed. ****Ryan:** I don’t know that it’s something you can manualize. It was spontaneous. What came up for my dad wasn’t defensive. It was more like, “I think you’re seeing this wrong. I don’t think you’re seeing who you were.” Not every parent has that capacity all the time. But what about the posture behind it? Really listening with empathy and care for the other person. That seems more like the lesson. How can we help our adult children as they process their own childhood experiences? ****Jennie:** Our oldest is going to be twenty-two, so we’re still very early in the adult-children process. But I’ve also experienced being an adult child trying to do my own healing work. There’s a whole system I was raised in and still live in that has been affected by my change. It helped me become who I am, but I’ve also experienced a lot of hurt from it. What I want to offer our kids is this: In doing my own work and my own healing, I want to be open when our kids come to us and say, “It really hurt when you did this. Why did you do that?” Whatever posture they come to me with, I want to live into that question: What am I responsible for? In that moment, as the parent to my child, no matter what age they are, my responsibility is to hear and listen and have an open posture toward them. I want to listen to their hurt because that is their experience. It may not be my experience, but it is their experience. ****Ryan:** And their experience can also change. ****Jennie:** Yes. But in that moment, their experience is their reality. I’m not there to argue their reality. ****Ryan:** I think it’s fine to say, “That’s not how I remember it,” or, “That’s not what I experienced.” But the point is not to defend ourselves. It’s being willing, almost expecting, that our kids at different points in their lives will come to us with hard things. And we want to be willing to meet them where they are and continue that posture of creating a safe place for them to find their own lonely way. The Loud Stories and the Soft Stories ****Jennie:** A couple of years ago, our daughter came to me and said she had been such a terrible little girl. I stopped and asked, “What do you mean?” She said, “All I’ve ever heard you say about me are stories about how I would run out the Kohl’s door into the parking lot, or scream and yell, or have these huge temper tantrums.” I realized in that moment that those were the loud stories she was hearing. The softer stories got missed. I gave her a hug. I call her Bug, and I asked her, “Do you know where the name Bug came from?” She said no. I said, “It came from Snuggle Bug. You were always climbing into bed or onto the couch and snuggling with me. You were this big hugger.” It was almost like she was able to say, “Oh.” At the same time, I apologized that those were the stories she had heard about herself. I had to own that. “Okay, yeah. I’m sorry. That’s awful. I’m sorry that’s the message you heard.” That’s the posture I want to have with our kids. ****Ryan:** It wasn’t defensive. The reason we tell those stories is because they’re funny and cute to us. But when you realize she has built some view of herself out of them, you can say, “That is not who you are. That isn’t what we were trying to say about you.” ****Jennie:** I’ve read something about how many positive comments it takes to counteract a negative one. ****Ryan:** It’s like a ten-to-one ratio, right? ****Jennie:** Something like six or ten positives to outweigh one negative. ****Ryan:** That always feels like pseudoscience to me. But it’s probably a good general principle. Don’t be a jerk. I blow that a lot. ****Jennie:** I do too. ****Ryan:** I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of you as a jerk. ****Jennie:** Maybe more in my head than outwardly. ****Ryan:** I sometimes say sarcastic things. ****Jennie:** Sometimes? ****Ryan:** I don’t know that it’s always sarcasm. I like irony. I like calling out contradictions that I find amusing. ****Jennie:** Yes, you do. ****Ryan:** Sarcasm is more personal. I don’t feel like I do that a lot. Sometimes I do, and I feel bad. Why We’re Doing This Podcast ****Ryan:** So we’ve been all over the place. It’s been a wide-ranging conversation. What do you want people to know about why we’re doing this? What is this podcast really about? ****Jennie:** I think you said it in the intro. Essentially, it’s a podcast about what it means to be human. That includes identity and asking questions like: Who do I want to be in the world? It includes talking about what it means to be a parent when your kid is going through mental health issues, when your kid is suicidal or self-harming. What it means to go through faith deconstruction, lose relationships, but also find yourself. What it means to have your family torn apart by politics and culture wars. What it looks like to observe the stories we live in, the stories about us, the family we grew up in, and the existential questions. ****Ryan:** So not a lot, huh? Maybe you should ask me the same question. ****Jennie:** When people come and listen, what do you hope for them? ****Ryan:** My hope for this, along with everything else we’re doing, comes back to this idea of creating a safe place for others to find their own lonely way in the world. That isn’t just a slogan for me. It gives language to how I think I’ve always tried to live my life. I think everyone wants to get rid of the lonely part. Why say “lonely way”? But to me, acknowledging the lonely part is part of having a realistic perspective on life. Life is always lonely to a degree. You and I have what I think of as an amazing marriage, but there are still moments of loneliness. There are times when we don’t connect. There are times when I don’t fully understand myself, when I’m alienated even from myself in some way. Sometimes life is lonely. That’s real and true. If we don’t acknowledge that, we set false expectations for ourselves. So finding our own lonely way in the world means finding some direction, some orientation in life. I don’t claim to have all the big answers. But we’ve thought about a lot of stuff and lived through a lot of stuff. I want to tell some of our personal story and think about questions that are still open for us, questions that are still alive, things that are still fraught and difficult in our lives. And then I want to talk about things like we did today. What about attachment? What comes up in the therapy room? How would you help somebody struggling with their adult kids? How would you sit with somebody whose teenager is self-harming? What would it look like to create a safe place for them to find their way through that? Those are the things I want to do here. And I like this format. It’s just the two of us talking, sharing stories, and inviting other people into the way we experience the world. I think there are people who need to hear some of the things we have to say, some of the invitation we have to offer, the place we have for them to find their way. ****Jennie:** I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve been going through something, especially when our daughter was going through her mental health struggles, and there were people who just came and sat with me through it. That’s where I’m at with this. My hope is that the topics we talk about and the things we share help people feel not so alone in their pain, their struggle, their journey, their story. Because it is lonely. I think about the first time our daughter was hospitalized. We went down into the basement of this institution to visit her, and I felt so alone while there were all these other parents presumably feeling the exact same way. ****Ryan:** That was a very surreal experience for me. Even the other night, hosting that group therapy session, the same story came up from one of the members at the exact same place. Being able to connect at that level, you don’t even have to say much. “I know what that felt like.” “How are you doing?” “I’m right here.” Just sitting there and holding that with somebody. You’re not totally alone in it. It doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t make it go away. But you’re holding it with somebody. ****Jennie:** Yeah. Thank you for listening. Hopefully we’ll have a lot more of these. --- Ryan and Jennie are marriage and family therapists in San Clemente, California. Learn more about their work at ****Denney Family Therapy**. [Learn more ](https://denneyfamilytherapy.com/?ref=theunfold.ing) ### One Wild Life URL: https://theunfold.ing/one-wild-life/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T05:02:01.000Z *What is it you plan to do with your one wild life?* The road seemed to go on forever. It wound through the back country, through vineyards and farms, past shacks and stretches of open land that kept appearing beyond the edge of the window. The windows were down. Warm air moved through everything. Through my hair. Through the car. Through the music. There was always somewhere else ahead. Another town. Another country. Another road. The lyrics were perfect for that time in our lives. There was something in those words that matched the movement of those years. Something expansive. Something reaching. Music that seemed made for open windows and unfamiliar roads and the strange freedom of not quite knowing what was coming next. *Brave the rise and fall...go on and feel it all, go on and feel it all.* We turned it up. The kids sang from the back. We sang from the front. Sometimes all six of us found the same words at the same time. Sometimes we didn’t. The road curved through another vineyard. Then a farm. Then a shack. Every so often, a woman stood alone along the side of the road in a short skirt and heels next to a plastic chair. I knew what that meant. I always would now. More road. More vines and more sky, on and on, until it was hard to tell one mile from the last. The music kept playing. *These are the days we've been given. What will you do with each of them?* I sang it loudly. Maybe we all did. The wind pulled the words out through the open windows. There are moments from those two years that I can barely remember now. Entire cities have blurred together. Airbnbs. Flights. Meals. The names of streets I once knew how to navigate. But I remember that road. I remember the feeling of going somewhere. Not arriving. Going. The hum beneath the tires. The landscape appearing and disappearing through the miles. The kids behind us. The music. The air. And every once in a while, something else passed through, too. The goats. The family we had lived with. The church. A flash. Then gone. A vineyard outside the window. A voice from the back seat. The next line of the song. Another flash. Something sad. Something I had loved. Something I had lost. Then the Spanish countryside again. I didn’t have to stop the car. I didn’t have to follow any of it. The road kept carrying us forward. So did the music. *What will you do with your one wild life...* The road stretched on. Vineyards. Farms. Shacks. Then her, again. Then nothing for miles, just us and the Spanish countryside going by, and the strange, beautiful fact that this was our life. And for those miles, I didn’t need to know what came next. The song played again. Or maybe another one did. That part I don’t remember. I remember the feeling. Windows down. Voices filling the car. The road winding and turning ahead of us. The world still enormous. Our stories still healing. Everything moving. Nothing asking to be solved. There was something healing about it. To let joy stay joy and freedom feel alive even when sadness brushed against it. To look out the window in awe without demanding that everything inside me be settled first. Years later, I would have Mary Oliver’s words tattooed across my back: *What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?* ### Thirteen URL: https://theunfold.ing/thirteen/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T22:39:57.000Z It happened so fast, and I barely had time to register what was happening. I had just walked out of the church office, past the book sales cart, and was crossing the reception area when he seemed to swoop in out of nowhere. His right arm wrapped around me and pulled me tight against his side. He was a respected elder in our church. He and his wife led music sometimes. I was in the youth group with his kids. I had been to his house. Of course, all of the elders at our church were respected. They were the spiritual ones. The models of character. The ones whose opinions mattered. The ones you listened to. The ones who were the bosses of my dad. And suddenly, one of them had his arm around me and was making me extremely uncomfortable. I looked down. At the floor. His shoes. The brown leather briefcase in his hand. Focusing on anything that might help me get away. My hands felt clammy. My heart beat harder. My breathing went shallow. I could smell his cologne. I could feel the heat of his body along my shoulder and the side of my arm. His minty breath moved across the top of my head when he spoke. He was telling me things he liked about me. My hair. My dress. My earrings... I remember my body going rigid. I remember trying to make myself smaller. I remember wondering how I could move without making it obvious that I wanted, more than anything, to get away. Because he was an elder. Because I was thirteen. Because even as every part of my body was telling me to get away, some other part of me was still trying to figure out how to do it politely. Then, somewhere through the pounding in my chest and the rushing in my ears, I heard him say it was my turn. I now needed to tell him five things I liked about him. What the fuck. I can say that now. I can look back at that scene and think, *What the fuck was that man doing?* Oh, I now know what he was doing... At thirteen, though, I didn’t think *what the fuck.* I thought: Briefcase. Shoes. Socks. My eyes scanned whatever I could see. Anything I could name. Anything that would get me to five. I don’t remember the last two things I said. I remember the urgency. Just get to five. Five meant finished. Five meant maybe he would let me go. And when I finally got there, I pulled myself out from under his arm and walked away as quickly as I could. Not running. But close. I don’t remember seeing him much after that. Maybe I did. What I remember is making sure I was never close enough for it to happen again. I knew that much. My body knew that much. Stay away from him. Looking back now, I want so badly to interrupt the scene. I want to walk into that reception area and see her standing there with her eyes on the floor, hands damp, heart pounding, trying to be good while every part of her is telling her to get away. And I want to scream: Make it awkward. Be rude. Fight. Yell. You don't owe him five things. You don’t owe him a smile. You don’t owe him politeness. This is not ok. Trust your body. Trust your instincts. He is a sick man. But she didn’t know any of that. She knew how to be respectful. She knew how to listen to adults. She knew not to cause a scene. She knew how to trust those who held spiritual authority over her. Most of all, she knew how to obey. She did not yet know that she was allowed to trust the panic rising in her body. And I think that is the part that stays with me. Not that I froze. Not that I named his briefcase and his shoes and his fucking socks. I was thirteen. What else was I supposed to do with a moment I hadn't been given language for? What stays with me is how much I already knew about being good and how little I knew about being safe. Those two things had been braided together for so long that I didn’t yet know they could come apart. I didn’t know that being a good girl could sometimes mean disappointing others. I didn’t know that respect could have limits. I didn’t know that an authority figure could be wrong and my body could be right. I didn’t know that fear did not require evidence before I was allowed to leave. I wish I could go back and find her there, just past the book cart, before his arm ever reached around her. I would take her hand and lead her across the reception area. And we would not stop for him. ### Weightless URL: https://theunfold.ing/weightless/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T22:39:45.000Z I came up gasping. One moment, I was fifty feet above the water, both hands wrapped tightly around the handle. The next, I was falling. I hadn't meant to let go. My hands had slipped almost as soon as my feet left the platform, and before I could understand what was happening, the water swallowed me whole. Then, just as quickly, it gave me back. I broke through the surface, shocked by how fast it had all happened. For a moment, I doggie paddled in place. I was okay. I had been swimming for as long as I could remember. Lessons from the time I was barely old enough to float. Years of competitive swimming. Water was familiar. I knew what to do. I turned toward the edge of the pool and began to swim. Except something was wrong. My arms pulled through the water, but my body barely moved. I kicked harder. Still, something tugged at me. My oversized T-shirt had filled with water. It billowed around me, heavy and swollen, dragging against every stroke. I pulled harder. From somewhere above me, the lifeguard yelled, "Get out of the pool!" "I'm trying!" I was embarrassed now. I could swim. I was a good swimmer. But the edge of the pool seemed impossibly far away. So I kept pulling. Dragging the shirt. Dragging myself. Until finally my hand found the wall. I don't remember taking the shirt off. I imagine I wrung it out, pulled the wet fabric away from my skin, and went on with the day. After all, I knew why I was wearing it. We all did. And once it dried, I wore it proudly. A badge of honor in a sea of skin. It's almost too easy to see the metaphor now: A girl falls into the water. She knows how to swim. She knows how to save herself. And still, she struggles beneath the weight of something she was told to wear for someone else's sake. But I didn't see it then. I loved that shirt. Or at least, I loved what wearing it said about me. I was modest. I was honoring God. I cared about the hearts and minds of my brothers in Christ. Their purity mattered to me, and somewhere along the way, I had learned that meant taking responsibility for what happened inside of them. Isn't that what we do with the messages we're given when we're young? We find ways to make sense of them. Some of us hear something that doesn't make sense and push against it. Some of us learn to conform because conformity keeps us safe. And some of us take the thing we've been handed and turn it into something we can be proud of. I think I did a little of all three. But with this, I chose pride. If modesty was good, I would be modest. If my body could cause someone to stumble, I would make damn sure I wasn't the reason they fell. So I learned to carry the responsibility myself. I pulled the shirt over my head. And when it became heavy, I kept swimming. It has taken me years to understand that the weight was never mine to carry. I cannot control what another person thinks when they look at me. I cannot control what they feel. I cannot control where their eyes linger or where they allow their minds to go. I can do those things for myself. But I cannot do that work for someone else. And perhaps that's what troubles me most when I look back now. Not simply that we girls were taught to cover ourselves, but what that teaching required us to believe about one another. I had to learn to see my body through someone else's imagined desire before I had even learned to see it as my own. And the boys around me were reduced, too. They became eyes that might wander. Minds that might lust. Bodies perpetually on the verge of losing control. We weren't allowed the complexity of being human beings encountering other human beings. We became temptation and tempted. Stumbling blocks and stumblers. Bodies to hide and bodies to protect from them. I don't want that responsibility anymore. I don't think it was ever mine. Sometimes I think about that girl in the pool, fighting her way toward the wall in a shirt full of water. I don't want to teach her how to swim harder. I want to tell her she can take the damn shirt off. It took me a long time to figure that out. And damn, it feels good to swim without it. ### Permission URL: https://theunfold.ing/permission/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T22:39:31.000Z She always ran. Across hills that rolled farther than I could see. The tall grass brushed against her calves as she laughed over her shoulder, daring me to keep up. I always did. The world she lived in felt impossibly large. There were horses that knew the way home before sunset. Creeks cold enough to numb bare feet. Summers that stretched forever. Dresses with deep pockets full of smooth stones and Queen Anne's lace. An old oak tree whose branches stretched wide enough to hold whispered conversations and impossible dreams. And just beyond the hill lived the neighbor. He never seemed surprised to find her. Sometimes she'd discover him working on a fence. Other days, he'd be waiting by the creek, skipping stones across the water. They'd wander dirt roads together, with nowhere they needed to be, talking about ordinary things that somehow felt important. Sometimes he'd stop mid-sentence and simply look at her, as though he'd forgotten what he was about to say. A breeze would catch the wisps of hair that had escaped from the ribbon at the back of her neck, and without a word, he'd brush them gently behind her ear. I remember wondering what it must feel like to be looked at that way. No one hurried her. No one asked her to make herself smaller. She laughed loudly. She cried honestly. She asked impossible questions. She climbed trees in long dresses. She walked barefoot on dirt roads. She wove lilac crowns and picked wildflowers to her content. She took up space as though the world had been made with her in mind. I loved that about her. Or maybe...I loved who I discovered when I was with her. Every afternoon, I found my way back to that meadow. I ran beside her. I fell in love when she fell in love. My heart raced when danger found her. My heart broke when hers did. I could feel the warmth of the afternoon sun and the cool creek around my ankles. Somewhere between those pages, the world grew quiet enough for me to breathe. For a little while, I forgot there was any other way to live. Then I'd hear my name. The spell would break. I'd close the cover, slide the bookmark between the pages, and watch the meadow fold itself shut. The horses. The creek. The neighbor. The grass. The flowers. The girl who laughed with her whole body. Gone. I stood up from my bed and slipped back into a different story. One where I knew how to make myself smaller. Not invisible. Just... smaller. Smaller emotions. Smaller opinions. Smaller needs. Small enough that I could move through the day without taking up too much space. That girl grew up. Became a mother herself. And one afternoon, watching one of my daughters express the kind of wholehearted emotion I used to only borrow from books, I heard a voice say, *"I would never let you act like that."* The words caught me off guard. Not because they were new, but because they were familiar. I realized I'd been carrying them for years. Another voice joined it. *"Just wait until she can read. You'll never see her."* I knew exactly what that meant. Because I had been that little girl. The one who kept finding herself inside stories. Only now I wonder if I misunderstood what those stories were giving me. Stories didn't simply give me somewhere to hide. They gave me somewhere to expand. Somewhere I could borrow courage. Borrow delight. Borrow curiosity. Borrow belonging. Somewhere I didn't have to shrink. Then I'd close the cover, hand all of those things back to her, and shrink myself until I fit inside my own life again. I've spent much of my adult life wondering why I felt more alive inside fictional stories than I did inside my own. Now I wonder if every character I loved was carrying a small piece of the life I wasn't yet convinced I was allowed to live. Maybe healing isn't becoming someone new. Maybe it's realizing I was never borrowing her life at all. Maybe I was catching glimpses of my own. And maybe, after all these years...I don't have to shrink anymore. I finally see her. I still love a good story. I just don't need one to give me permission to be me. ### Interpretation URL: https://theunfold.ing/interpretation/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T22:39:09.000Z The Zoom window disappeared, leaving only my reflection against the black screen. I just sat there. I blinked. *Why did you think you deserved that position?* I swallowed. *Who do you think you are?* My hands touched the keyboard. *You completely overestimated yourself.* I blinked again. *You're arrogant. You're not qualified. You're not ready. You haven't earned this. You're not enough. You aren't as gifted as you think. They made the right decision.* The sentences echoed louder now than they had a few moments before. Or maybe that wasn't exactly what she'd said. I couldn't tell anymore. I shifted in my chair. *You should know your place.* I looked away. *Don't make yourself so visible.* My breath caught. *You haven't earned that yet.* I went still. *You're too much.* I couldn't tell anymore which words had come from her...and which ones I'd been carrying for years. I stared at the black screen. The room was quiet again. My head rang. My legs felt stiff as I pushed myself out of the chair. I stood there for a moment, waiting for the floor to steady beneath me before making my way toward the stairs. One step. Then another. Each foot felt strangely heavy, as though I were walking through water. *Maybe she's right.* Another step. *Maybe I never should have applied.* Another. *Maybe everyone else saw something I couldn't.* I gripped the handrail. *Maybe this is why doors keep closing.* Another step. *Maybe I've mistaken ambition for calling.* I rounded the corner into the kitchen. The voices hadn't quieted. They pressed against the inside of my chest, each one demanding to be believed. Each one insisting it had always been true. By the time I reached the kitchen, I wasn't sure what had actually been said. I only knew what I had heard. "How was it?" I realized I didn't know how to answer. Instead*,* I heard myself ask, *"What are your spiritual direction appointments usually like?"* "What do you mean?" I took a breath. *"She asked me why I thought I deserved the position."* The words caught in my throat. *"I should have known the denomination's language before I ever applied."* I looked down at my hands. *"I'd overestimated myself."* The room was quiet. *"That they made the right decision."* I kept going. Sentence after sentence. I wasn't trying to make a point. I was just trying to explain what had happened. "Jenn..." I stopped. The room was quiet. My words hung in the space between us. I heard them. Really heard them. The words hadn't changed. But something had. My chest loosened. Just enough to breathe. And for the first time...I considered that someone could speak with absolute confidence... ...and still be wrong about me. ### Commuting URL: https://theunfold.ing/commuting/ Last updated: 2026-07-28T00:25:38.000Z "There you are," she said, shortly after I walked through the door. She held my face in her hands and smiled at me. Her big brown eyes were full of love for the man she had been missing for several years. Right away I knew what she meant. It was just an ordinary day, really. I drove the hour and a half to work, did my thing, and drove back home. But when I walked through the door I was different somehow. I was more me. Lighter. Happier. Fuller. It was spring of 2011 and we were living in Wylie, TX, a suburb in the remote northeast corner of the Dallas metroplex. A place I had never heard of before we moved there. It's full of transplants from all over the country. Most of our neighbors moved there for job opportunities. We moved there to get away and start fresh. During that season I had become pretty angry and cynical. Much of it traced back to the churches I'd been part of my whole life, and, more accurately, to never feeling like I fit anywhere. I was always a sort of black sheep, the one on the outs, always backing the losers. People close to me kept getting pushed out. The one that hurt the most was my brother. Steve was the music pastor at our church. We played in the band together every week from the church's infancy at the YMCA. My whole weekend was filled with set up, tear down, band practice, sermons, services. Steve led on acoustic guitar and vocals, I played bass, and our brother Mark ran sound. Every week we did that. The church grew fast and built a new building. No more set up or tear down. Just the services. The thing we made together became a thing we attended. Fast forward a couple years and my brother was "called to an exciting new ministry opportunity" in San Diego. That last time we played together was the last time I ever played at that church. We finished the set and the three of us, Steve, Mark, and I, gathered in Steve's office and had a good cry. Fast forward several more years. Jennie is pregnant with our fourth child, and I'm relatively secure in my work as a software developer. But I'm not very happy. It's funny to say, because I've never been unhappy with my life as a husband or a dad. I love my wife and my kids more than anything, and my unhappiness never had anything to do with them. But we still attended that church periodically and I was growing more and more jaded. Eventually we left and spent several years at another church across town. The questions I'd always had about faith and life didn't find clean answers no matter where I looked. So I looked somewhere different. I got into libertarianism and, weirdly, deep into the Austrian school of economics. I became a self-proclaimed Anarcho-Capitalist. It's absurd when I step back and think of it, but it's also right where so many men my age were at the time. I grew up in a theo-con world and was finding respite in a paleo-con one. Bizarre. I was miserable and angry at the world. I didn't fit anywhere except with my wife and kids. So we moved to Texas almost on a whim. And this is where I shed the whole libertarian persona I had been trying on as a protective mask. The whole thing is so full of irony: I found my relief, found my sense of myself, in Dallas, TX, listening to Dallas Willard's *Divine Conspiracy* and attending a megachurch in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest suburbs on the planet. I took a job with a staff augmentation firm working at Verizon in Irving, which is not close to Wylie. The drive was an hour and a half most days, unless I wanted to pay the eight bucks for the privilege of taking the President George Bush Turnpike — named in honor of George H.W. Bush, who is, among other things, not an anarcho-capitalist. So I had a long drive each day. Funny enough, this is where I found myself again, on those long daily commutes through the sprawling Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. In college I had read *The Divine Conspiracy.* This was near the end of my second attempt to really be a good Christian. It didn't help me with that. It upended a lot of things for me. On those commutes I returned to it. I got an abridged version Willard narrated himself, which I pirated via BitTorrent. My theft didn't blunt his message. When I pressed play it was just me and Dallas driving through Dallas, and it felt holy somehow. Up until then, Christianity had mostly taught me to endure this life faithfully until the real one began. Willard kept insisting otherwise: this is the life, and it's going on right now. It's not about somewhere far away and in the future, but about my actual life now, and the person I'm becoming. As any self-respecting anti-establishment libertarian should, I had gotten into the doomsday-prepper movement. If I didn't have a family to feed, I probably would have had a shipping container full of food and supplies buried in the desert somewhere. But I did have a family, and not enough money to buy all the amazing stuff I wanted to bury for the inevitable collapse of society as I knew it. What I did have was some ammo reloading equipment. It's embarrassing to admit now. It's so much not who I am, but I tried it on for a while. I loaded my own ammo in my garage at night, drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, my wife and kids asleep inside the house. One day, probably a couple months into our year-long sojourn in Wylie, I was on the phone with Steve. There had been a shooting, and we were talking about what it would be like to be in such a horrible situation. I said something like, "I can't even imagine a scenario where I would actually shoot another human being." And just like that, the whole ammo-loading, gun-owning phase of my life was over. It was a revelation to me. I'm not someone who uses weapons. That's just not who I am. What was I playing at? And, more importantly, why? I sold the equipment not long after. The garage went back to being a garage. And I noticed the question didn't stop with the ammo press — if that wasn't me, what else had I been carrying around that wasn't? Not long after that, I came home from work one evening, and Jennie took my face in her hands and saw me. Saw the real me. "There you are. I've missed you." ### Undertone URL: https://theunfold.ing/undertone/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T15:12:48.000Z Not just words, but pauses. Not just expressions, but what they carry. Not just what is being said, but what is left unsaid. She learns early that meaning rarely lives in the sentence itself. The real meaning lives underneath it. Every conversation has two versions. The one everyone else hears and the one she's trying to decipher. She is fluent in subtext long before she has language to name it. She doesn't trust the words. She trusts the undertone. The sigh before her name. The voice that loses its warmth. The furrowed brow. The quicker-than-normal steps. The silence that lasts too long. The flash behind the eyes. The edge that feels too sharp. She doesn't ask what people mean. No. That wouldn't be allowed. It's hers to figure out. If disappointment paints a voice, she looks for the reason. If frustration sharpens the edges, she searches for her part in it. If the silence lingers, she fills in the blanks. It's her job to hear what people won't say. And she's good at it. Good enough to notice the slightest change. Good enough to know when something shifts. Good enough to believe there is always something underneath it. Something she's supposed to understand. Something she's supposed to do. Her phone lights up. A text. She reads it once. Then again. Not because she misses the words. Because she's listening for the tone. Looking for the sentence beneath the sentence. The meaning beneath the meaning. Trying to hear what wasn't said. Her chest tightens. She starts translating. I see her. She stops. I know her. I've known her my whole life. She's forty-two. ### What the Hell? URL: https://theunfold.ing/what-the-hell/ Last updated: 2026-07-14T21:28:21.000Z When I was around eight years old, my family took a day trip from San Diego to Tijuana, Mexico, to experience the thrill of haggling with poor Mexican shop owners over the price of firecrackers, bull whips, and ponchos — necessities, all, for American boys in the 1980s. The most vivid memory I have of that trip, though, is of a boy around my age selling Chiclets to the American tourists. This was my first encounter with poverty and I did not like it one bit. I immediately wanted to give him all of my money. I remember looking to my dad, asking if we could help, and being told no, and something about how giving him money would actually make things worse, because it would only encourage his parents to keep sending this little mendicant out to the market rather than to school where he needed to be. I didn't have words for what I felt standing there, but I know now what the question was: What the hell? I spent years trying to work my dad's answer into some larger whole, and from my vantage point today, I see that moment as the first of many like it. Grandpa casually expressing his conviction that women's suffrage was a mistake. What the hell? My parents telling me of their impending separation. What the hell? Our church essentially abandoning us over my parents' marital problems. What the hell? My dad scoffing at a news report because it relied on radiocarbon dating. What the hell? A desire to understand is one of the central themes of my life. I don't mean this the way a botanist or a biochemist wants to understand the physical world. I mean I have always wanted to understand the people who make up my small corner of it — individual people, yes, but also the groups they form: family, friends, church. I was given a frame of reference for making sense of all of it, and since my life was happy, and perhaps because of my temperament, I assumed the frame was sound. But the truth is, it never quite held up. The Chiclets boy never fit. Grandpa's take on women's suffrage never fit. The church that abandoned us never fit. And for most of my life, when something didn't fit, I drew the only conclusion available to a kid who trusted the people who handed him the frame: the problem must be me. Why couldn't I make it work? Why couldn't I just live inside the frame I'd been given, the way everyone around me seemed to? I was never able to articulate this though. I had to live my way through it. In the early 2010s I embarked on a third years-long attempt at being a good Christian. I read everything I could in the Christian spiritual formation vein, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster and the rest. I earned a master's degree in the subject in 2018\. That's how invested I was in finally getting myself to fit. In 2014 I started traveling internationally for work, and for the first time in my life I was regularly outside the frame looking in. I was in London and Northern Ireland during the Brexit referendum. I talked with Uber drivers who had fled Syria and Iran, ate in a Bangalore food court with colleagues whose futures hung on a visa program my country was debating ending, and felt something I'd never felt abroad before: embarrassment at how America was showing up in the world. The frame I'd been given had categories for all these people. But I wasn't meeting categories. I was meeting people, and they kept not fitting, the same way a boy selling Chiclets hadn't fit thirty years earlier. It is hard to see the frame while you're living inside it. And while I was out there getting my first real look at mine, the people who had built it began, publicly and all at once, to tear it apart. When Donald Trump was elected, and when my parents, brothers, and I stopped being able to talk politics, and when Colin Kaepernick was exiled, and when George Floyd was murdered and I was told all lives matter, and when people yelled at me for wearing a mask, and when my cousin stopped speaking to me, and when our church imploded and I saw that this church, the one I'd believed was so different, was no different at all, something changed for me. For the first time, the question changed. It wasn't *what's wrong with me?* anymore. It was *what the hell?* — aimed, finally, outward. My framework for understanding the world wasn't something I was failing to live up to. It was in pieces. It had collapsed all around me, and it took me forty years to look up from asking what was wrong with me. ### Yellow Tulips URL: https://theunfold.ing/yellow-tulips/ Last updated: 2026-07-09T20:27:56.000Z They were yellow tulip buds. Happy. Bright. Full of the promise of a warm spring after a brutal winter. I opened the door as she awkwardly handed the bundle to me. "I didn't know what to do, but I saw these and thought of you." The sky was blue behind her, the air warm, sweetened by the lemon blossoms. I felt the dam crack behind my eyes as I stood there at the door watching her shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I tried not to let it break all the way open. I was afraid it would wash away the numbness that was keeping me upright. "You see, my oldest son..." That's all she had to say, and I knew. I knew she knew. I learned the sound of the bathroom door as I lay awake each night listening for it to open and then close. Then I would start counting. One minute. Two. Three. Five. When it felt too long, I would get out of bed, open my door, and knock on hers to make sure she was still alive. Some nights I knocked. Some nights I listened. Some nights, I opened the door before I had time to talk myself out of it. I don't know how many nights I lived like that. I only know that, eventually, exhaustion became easier to carry than fear...and numbness overtook them both. When those tulips arrived, I was already flat on my back, screaming into the sky, what else you got? What else you got? And for the first time in what felt like a really long time...someone climbed down onto the ground with me. "I see how dark it is here. I'm with you." I watched those yellow tulips slowly open in their vase that week. Then I watched them wilt. Everything else is a blur. The flowers aren't. ### Trailer URL: https://theunfold.ing/trailer-2/ Last updated: 2026-09-09T21:12:01.000Z _No content available._ ### Welcome to The Unfolding URL: https://theunfold.ing/welcome/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T17:13:06.000Z _No content available._ ### What Kind of Person Do I Want to Be in the World? URL: https://theunfold.ing/what-kind-of-person-do-i-want-to-be/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T05:53:02.000Z What kind of person do I want to be in the world? It’s a question I keep returning to. I’ve asked it of my kids as they’ve navigated friendships and decisions about school and work. I ask it of my clients as they wrestle with big choices and relational messiness. And I ask it of myself, as a husband, a dad, a therapist, and a friend. And every so often, the world gives me an unexpected moment that shows me the answer far more honestly than my intentions do. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.” I’ve been sitting with that line lately. I used to read it as the usual Stoic advice to stay calm and detached. But lately I’m hearing something else in it, something deeper that I’d overlooked. It’s not about being detached from the world or staying unbothered and uninvolved. It’s about stepping into the world as the kind of person who can respond with something other than the anger, selfishness, mendacity, and corruption that surrounds us. Years ago, I was in Portland for work. At the end of the day I left my client’s office and was walking toward Powell’s Books while on a conference call. Across the street, a young woman came out of a building with a guy chasing right behind her, yelling. My colleague could hear the shouting and said, “Uh… what’s going on over there?” I told him to hang on and stepped off the curb. I didn’t have a plan, I just sort of moved toward the conflict in case things got ugly and the young woman needed some help. Then another guy came out of the building, jumped into the argument, and the two of them began pushing each other. Nobody noticed me approaching. Then the first kid grabbed his skateboard and swung it at the other guy’s head. Thankfully the second kid blocked it with his forearm. By this time I was right next to them. Instinctively I reached out and grabbed the skateboard, but I didn’t yank it out of his hands completely. As I wrestled it from him, he spun around, let go of the skateboard, and punched me square in the face. For a split second, I felt an old but familiar rage flare up, the one that used to get me into fights when I was younger. But just as quickly as the anger arose, it fell away and dissipated into nothing. It simply wasn’t in charge of my automatic response anymore. We stood there, face to face. Everything got quiet. He looked shocked, probably because he hadn’t planned on punching a random thirty-something guy in a backpack who materialized out of nowhere. He said something like, “Everyone’s ganging up on me!” I heard myself respond, “No one’s ganging up on you. Just stop punching people in the face.” He grabbed his skateboard and ran off. The girl thanked me. Then I walked back across the street and continued toward the bookstore. My colleague said, “Did… did you just get in a fight?” I had forgotten I was still on the call, and I said something like, “Not really, some kid just punched me and then ran off.” It was a funny story at work for a long time, but internally, something changed for me. In that moment I had shown up differently than I used to. And in a way, it reintroduced me to a part of myself I’d lost contact with, the part that existed before the masks, and roles, and stories I'd learned to perform. So when I return to that line about cultivating truth and justice without anger, I hear it differently. I don’t hear it as “never be angry”. I hear it as a warning about what happens when we *tend* to anger, when we feed it, rehearse it, and let it become a posture instead of a passing signal. I don’t think anger is bad. Anger tells the truth about harm, about threat, about injustice. It’s a signal worth listening to. But cultivated long enough, anger becomes something else. It becomes a posture, a way of being in the world. When frustration, anger, and cynicism become the pattern we default to, they reproduce the very harm we react against. More harm, more reactivity, more injustice. I’ve always loved the way Richard Rohr puts it: “We become what we hate.” Neither he, nor Marcus Aurelius are telling us to avoid anger. They’re telling us not to *practice* it, not to be filled with it. That day in Portland, my anger rose like it always had, but it didn’t guide or control me. Something deeper did. Compassion, maybe. Or clarity. Or a kind of moral muscle memory that had been strengthening in me over the years. Whatever it was, it helped me see the kid in front of me not as an enemy, but as a human being caught in his own mess of fear, confusion, and bad choices. I have no idea what was going on with him or with the other people involved. I don’t know anything about his life. But I knew in that moment that what he needed wasn’t to get punched in the face. That moment gave me a glimpse of who I was becoming, and the kind of person I can be in the world. But not every moment is like that. There are plenty of times I don’t show up the way I want to. I blow it. I lose my temper when someone cuts me off. I respond sarcastically to my wife. I’m short with my kids. Other times my anger flares at the world’s brokenness and then has nowhere to go. When that happens, when nothing changes, when nothing seems possible, the anger collapses inward. It turns into frustration, and then into a kind of numb resignation. The older I get, the more I see the vastness of the world’s brokenness, the corruption, the suffering, the injustice that stretches far beyond anything I can fix. And when I start believing that my actions don’t matter, that the systemic problems are beyond anything we can hope to change, that’s when the slide into numbness begins. It’s that inner voice that says, *What’s the point? Nothing will change.* When I notice that voice creeping in, I know I’ve lost the plot. I’ve forgotten that my choices do matter. They’re the one thing I actually have to offer. This is what each of us contributes in our own ways to the world we inhabit, to the systems we shape and are shaped by, to the stories we live in and pass on. This is where systems thinking, and the Me-We-The framework I wrote about recently helps me. The world is complicated, layered, interconnected in ways we rarely see. And in complex systems, small acts create ripples we can’t predict or measure. The Portland encounter didn’t change the world in any obvious way. But it changed something. It pressed pause in the middle of a violent moment. It shifted the emotional trajectory of three young people. And it shifted mine. I’ll probably never see that kid again. I’ll never know what that moment meant in his story. But actions don’t need visibility to have significance. This is my antidote to nihilism: my moral effort matters not because it changes everything, but because it changes something. And in a complex world, we rarely know what our actions set in motion. But I have to work to stay in that frame of mind. And it’s not just my own inner monologue that slides toward numbness. There’s also the cultural noise, the purity tests, the shifting orthodoxies, the quick turn from conversation to accusation that makes moral effort feel pointless, and even sort of dangerous. “You’re worried about climate change? But don’t you still drive a car and use plastics?” “You care about justice? You still buy things made unethically.” ”You have a different opinion about X? You’re obviously a horrible human being.” As if our imperfection invalidates our effort. As if change only counts when it’s pure and flawless. That’s not how complex systems work. And it’s not how human lives work either. We don’t get to stand outside the systems we inhabit. We’re embedded in them, shaped by them, participating in them, from family life to global economies. The structures we live inside weren’t designed in a single moment. They emerged over years through countless decisions, incentives, pressures, mistakes, and interactions. So of course our efforts aren’t pure. How could they be? We’re part of the very systems we’re trying to improve. But that doesn’t make the effort meaningless. If anything, it’s the reason our choices matter at all. They become part of the ongoing emergence of what comes next. We don’t have to be perfect to contribute to the good. We just have to participate. Day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice. And when we do, when we cultivate goodness instead of anger, we become a small but meaningful actor in whatever systems we’re part of. We tilt the world a fraction in the direction of truth and justice. We create the possibility of a different outcome for the people around us. We become, in ways we’ll never fully see, a source of steadiness in a chaotic world. I don’t tell the Portland story because I handled it perfectly, or because I imagine it changed some kid’s life. And I’m certainly not trying to say I’ve got it all figured out. I tell it because of what it revealed to me. I can take a small piece of the world’s pain, hold it for a moment, and transform it. I can interrupt a cycle instead of continuing it. I can create a pause in a situation that once would have gone very differently. And if I can do it once, I can do it again. Moment by moment. Choice by choice. In the end, that brings me back to the question I return to over and over again: What kind of person do I want to be in the world? For me, I have to keep reminding myself that the person I am, the way I show up, actually *does* something in the larger world. My presence matters. My choices have consequences. They influence, for better or for worse, the people and systems around me in ways that aren’t usually obvious. And maybe that’s what Marcus Aurelius was getting at. Not to be disengaged and unbothered about the world’s injustice, but to remember that even in an imperfect world, especially in an imperfect world, the way I choose to show up matters. It always matters. Even when the effects remain unseen. Even when the ripples never make their way back to me. Because in a complex, interconnected world, nothing is ever just personal. And every moment is another chance to ask myself: Who am I becoming? How do I want to show up? What kind of person do I want to be in the world? --- *Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer* *AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858* --- ### Me–We–The URL: https://theunfold.ing/me-we-the/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T05:53:13.000Z “All parenting is experimental,” my dad used to tell me. I didn’t fully understand it when I was younger, but it has become one of the truest things I know, not just about parenting, but about life. We’re all experimenting. Trying to figure it out as we go. And we’re not starting from scratch. Each of us shows up in the world within a particular context, a family, culture, historical context, and belief system. That’s our starting point. And most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to make sense of it. We’re flooded with meaning systems. Psychological theories. Family expectations. Religious narratives. Cultural myths. Personality assessments. Political ideologies. Philosophical frameworks. Instagram wisdom. Each one claims to tell us something important about who we are, how we should live, and what matters most. And some of them *do* help. Probably all of them help in some way. But taken all at once, they can leave us more fragmented than whole, like we’re holding a thousand puzzle pieces from a dozen different boxes, trying to make a picture we can actually live inside. That’s the space I found myself in years ago. And it’s the space I’ve watched many clients struggle to name. Eventually, I found myself reaching for a frame that could help me make sense of the contradictions I kept running into. I needed a way to sort through the noise, the pain, the beauty, and the confusion. I needed to be able to map the terrain of my life in a way that made sense to me. I call that frame Me–We–The. The earliest seed of this idea came years ago, walking through London on a work trip. I was listening to Richard Rohr describe his “cosmic egg” of meaning: *my story, our story, other stories, the story.* It's a layered model of expanding awareness from the personal, to the tribal, to the global, to the transcendent. It was a framework that assumed a kind of mystical unity at the center of all things, something universal and true that holds everything else together. That idea stayed with me. But over time, it's morphed. I've never rejected it outright, but life pushed me to reimagine it. Where Rohr sees a deep, underlying harmony at the heart of meaning, I’ve come to see things a little differently. I'm not confident in any single, totalizing “The Story,” but I do think there is shared human ache for one. We humans seem to have an innate need to make sense of things. In my frame, the “The” isn’t a final truth, it’s a placeholder for all the meaning systems we inherit, challenge, and create. It’s theology, yes, but also ideology, myth, history, science, cosmology, culture. The “We” in my frame holds what Rohr might call *our story* and *other stories*, all the collective, communal, and cultural forces that shape us. I grew up in a world that offered big answers about who we are, what matters, what’s true, and what happens when we die. It was a powerful story, and in many ways a beautiful one. But it demanded total allegiance. It had little room for questioning. And it made the *The* story central. I lived there for a long time. *M*e was incidental. *We* was conditional. *The* was everything. And yet, from a young age, I kept running into things that didn’t quite fit: scientific explanations, philosophical doubts, lived contradictions, relational ruptures. These weren’t always dramatic revelations. More often than not, they were small disruptions or contradictions that stuck with me. Dissonance that I couldn't seem to resolve. I’ve come to call these *“What the hell?”* moments. Not because they destroyed everything all at once, but because they made me stop and look around. They made me wonder if something deeper wasn’t quite right. For many years, I tried to manage the tension, to fold those moments into the story I’d inherited, to patch the holes without dismantling the frame. But over time, the contradictions piled up. The structure started to strain. And eventually, it couldn’t hold. The story didn’t collapse in a single moment, but it did begin to unravel. What replaced it wasn’t certainty. But I began to rebuild something. Piece by piece. The Me–We–The frame grew out of that process. It's not a totalizing theory that offers answers. It's more like a *lens*. Something I don’t look *at*, but *through* to try to make sense of my life, my work, my relationships, and my place in the world. To understand the frame, it helps to see each layer for what it is. ### **Me** The inner world: body, story, memory, emotion, personality. The way we come to know ourselves, and sometimes avoid ourselves. Therapy often starts here: *What hurts? What’s stuck? What’s surfacing?* But even the most personal pain is rarely personal alone. ### **We** The relational layer: family, friends, culture, church, community, society. Where we learn how to love, how to hide, how to perform, how to survive. Even the most inward-looking work is shaped by this layer. We carry others inside us. And we’re shaped by the roles we’ve played, willingly or not. ### **The** The big-picture layer: meaning systems, metanarratives, philosophies, histories, religions, cultural myths, -isms of all kinds. The stories we inherit about what the world *is*, what people *are*, and what *matters most*. Sometimes they hold us together. Usually we don't look at them very closely. Sometimes they fall apart. Either way, we’re in them—always. Me–We–The isn’t linear. It’s not a developmental model or a hierarchy. It’s more like a zoom lens. You can zoom in on one layer of experience, then pull back and see how it connects to the others. A personal struggle (*Me*) might stem from a relational rupture (*We*) or a fragmented worldview (*The*). Sometimes all three. They’re not stages either. And they’re not separate or seperable. They’re interdependent. Emergent. This is part of why I’m drawn to complexity theory. In complex systems (whether in biology, software, or social life) nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in relation to everything else. That’s how this frame works. It doesn’t resolve the complexity. But it offers a way to hold it, name it, and stay oriented within it. Me-We-The has helped me make sense of my own story, the unmaking and remaking of belief, the dynamics of marriage and parenting, the work of therapy and writing and meaning-making. It shapes how I try to help my clients observe their lives. It influences how I approach relationships and questions about the world. It’s even influencing the shape of the software I’m building. I don’t pretend to have the whole picture. Maybe there is a map for being human, some deeper pattern or masterplan that ties it all together. But if there is, I haven’t seen it, and I feel like I've looked pretty hard for it. We may not choose the world we’re born into, but we are responsible for the person we become within it. That’s both the burden and the gift of being human. And it’s the reason I keep coming back to Me-We-The. It doesn't explain everything, but it helps me live more honestly inside the questions. This blog is one way I’ll keep expanding this lens. Some essays will focus more on the *Me* (identity, parts, healing, embodiment), some on the *We* (family, communication, culture), and others on the *The* (belief, history, metaphysics, myth). But all of it will live within this frame in one way or another. We all need a place to stand. This is one of mine. And if it helps you find your own, I’m glad. --- *Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer* *AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858* --- ### The Pattern of Change URL: https://theunfold.ing/the-pattern-of-change/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T05:53:25.000Z Every life begins inside a story, a place that tells us what matters and why. That’s what I tried to capture in [*A Place to Stand*](https://theunfold.ing/a-place-to-stand/), the way we all start by inheriting meaning before we ever learn to make it our own. For me, that inherited meaning came through the goodness of my parents’ faith. In the world of my childhood, certainty was the weather. Some days it thundered, loud, bright, and sure of itself, but at home it was softer, more like a clear morning after the rain. My parents made the stormy skies look calm. Their faith was steady and kind, and through them the whole system seemed gentle. They were good people, and I wanted to be good in the way they were. At church, certainty could sound sharp and dividing. People drew lines around who belonged, who measured up, and who didn’t. But in my parents, I saw something worth wanting, a way of life that promised coherence and purpose. So I tried to believe as they believed. I thought that if I could just understand the truth the way they did, everything in me would settle and my real life would finally begin. It didn’t. No matter how much I prayed, read, or performed the right moves, I never felt what they seemed to feel. Their confidence only deepened my doubt. I decided the problem must be me, I had some defect of faith or character. If I could only think better, believe harder, find the missing piece, I’d be good. That search became a pattern in my life. In high school I tried to fit the mold, but became the black sheep in my family (at least in my own mind.) In my twenties I returned to church, eager to start again. I built a new story to live inside, but it eventually cracked. I stayed anyway, pretending for a while, growing cynical and sarcastic, reading my way through “post-modern” Christian writers who seemed to offer a more generous faith. I left and moved across the country. My wife wanted to try church again, and somehow we landed in a Dallas megachurch. I remember thinking, *I’m going to hate this place.* But I didn’t. It felt good, familiar in a way I hadn’t expected. I found another story to inhabit, and for nearly a decade it held. During the pandemic, the clouds began to form again. The same sky that once felt open grew heavy. Politics fractured communities I loved; people I respected spoke with a contempt that shocked me. The certainty that once looked like good weather turned stormy again. Everything that had held me together began to shift. In [another essay](https://theunfold.ing/the-posture-of-presence/), I wrote about the posture that makes healing possible, how curiosity opens space between people. That same posture matters inside us, too. When an old story collapses, what saves us isn’t a new answer; it’s the posture we bring to our own uncertainty. It’s the willingness to keep walking through the storm. Looking back, I can see the pattern repeating: identification giving way to disillusionment, disillusionment to deconstruction, deconstruction to a fragile kind of integration. Each time through breaks something open, then teaches me how to live with what remains. I used to think these periods of disillusionment were failures, but maybe they're something else. Maybe this is the mind’s way of shedding what no longer fits, a strange attractor pulling me toward an honesty I couldn’t yet enter into. It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus, the thought experiment that asks whether a ship whose planks have all been replaced is still the same ship. Biologically, we live that paradox. Nearly every part of us renews itself over time, and yet the sense of self remains. Every seven years our bodies are almost entirely new, yet somehow we remain ourselves. What continues isn’t the raw material but the pattern, the way the parts stay in relationship even as they change. Maybe that’s what identity really is: a pattern in motion. We keep replacing parts of ourselves but we have continuity. And the continuity comes not from what stays the same, but from how the pieces keep relating. Maybe we’re more like weather patterns than sculptures, more like verbs than nouns. We’re constantly changing, but still recognizably ourselves. I see my parents differently now. Their faith still colors the light I see by, but in a new way. As a child, I thought I needed to become what they were. Now I see that what shaped me most wasn’t their certainty, but their love, and their quiet trust that life was meaningful even when it was hard to explain. That trust is still in me, only now it rests on something different, not on certainty, but on the realization that change is part of what makes life meaningful. Each piece I’ve written lately has circled around the same question from a different angle: what remains when the ground shifts beneath our feet and everything seems to fall apart? Sometimes it’s the meaning we inherit ([*A Place to Stand*](https://theunfold.ing/a-place-to-stand/)). Sometimes it’s the way we meet one another ([*The Posture of Presence*](https://theunfold.ing/the-posture-of-presence/)). And sometimes it’s the slow, private work of learning to live within our own unfolding. I never did find the grand, coherent story I was searching for. But I’m learning to live inside the questions instead of demanding answers. Every season replaces the last, and somehow the pattern holds. Maybe that’s all a self ever is—a story still unfolding, held together by the willingness to keep becoming. --- *Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer* *AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858* --- ### The Posture of Presence URL: https://theunfold.ing/the-posture-of-presence/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T05:53:51.000Z We often hear that being present is what matters most, that if we could just sit with someone, really sit with them, empathy would grow. There may be some truth in that, but it’s not the whole story. Presence alone doesn’t always heal. I’ve seen presence open hearts, but I’ve also seen it deepen contempt. What makes the difference isn’t presence alone—it’s *posture.* In therapy, I’ve learned that simply showing up or telling one’s story isn’t what brings healing. There’s a common idea that if we just “dig up the past,” the truth will set us free. But that’s not how it works. Unearthing what’s buried can just as easily reopen wounds if it’s done without care. Telling the story isn’t enough; healing begins when the story is met with a different posture, one of curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to see what else might be true. The same principle applies outside of the therapy room too. We can be physically near and emotionally far. We can listen to words and miss the person speaking them. What changes everything is the *posture* we bring into the space between us. Posture is the shape of our attention, the stance of the mind and heart. We can hold ourselves toward others with tension and certainty, already convinced we know who they are and what they’ll say. Or we can hold ourselves with openness, aware of how little we know, willing to be surprised. It’s a subtle shift, but it changes the atmosphere entirely. Sometimes, when I’m working with a client, I’ll invite them to notice how attention actually works. We sit quietly for a moment, breathing. Then I’ll ask them to listen, not for anything in particular, just to *what’s already there.* And slowly, sounds begin to appear: the hum of the air conditioner, the faint drone of traffic, a bird somewhere outside, an airplane passing overhead. None of those sounds are within our control. They simply exist. What we *do* have control over is what we choose to pay attention to. When we shift our attention intentionally–when we notice the sound of our own breathing, or the texture of the chair beneath us—the whole field of experience changes. This shift from unconscious reaction to intentional awareness is a change in posture. The same is true in our relationships. We can’t control what others bring into the room, but we can choose how we attend to them. We can let our awareness soften and widen, to hold them with curiosity rather than judgment. That’s what a posture of curiosity feels like; it’s open, alert, but not grasping. The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist writes that the kind of attention we give the world changes the world we perceive. In other words, attention isn’t passive, it’s creative. The way we attend gives shape to what is real for us. When our posture is open (curious, receptive, relational), the world appears alive with connection. When it’s closed (defended, grasping, certain), the world shrinks into caricatures. In therapy, I sit with people whose beliefs and choices I sometimes struggle to understand. But my work isn’t to argue or correct, it’s to listen. And without fail, when I listen with curiosity, the caricature falls away and a human being appears. It’s the same dynamic that plays out everywhere else. Online, at work, in politics, even at home, we’re pulled toward certainty, because certainty feels safe. But as I wrote in [*A Place to Stand*](https://theunfold.ing/a-place-to-stand/), it’s certainty rather than confusion that gets us stuck. Curiosity loosens that grip. It makes space for something new to emerge. It’s easy to forget that attention is something we can choose. But we live in a world that profits when we don’t. We live inside an economy built to capture and commodify our attention. Every swipe, ping, and headline competes for it, shaping not only what we think but how we think. We give away this precious, limited resource to trivial and often malignant content online. McGilchrist might say we’ve become entranced by one mode of attention: the narrow, grasping kind that wants to control and categorize. The other, the one that listens and relates, has grown faint. It’s no wonder we struggle to see one another clearly. The online world flattens people into opinions and performances. It amplifies outrage and obscures nuance and complexity. And with misinformation, deepfakes, and AI-generated images flooding our feeds, it’s increasingly hard to tell what’s real. In that confusion, certainty becomes a kind of refuge. But what we need isn’t more certainty, it’s a different posture, one that stays curious even when reality feels unstable. In therapy, healing begins when someone experiences another person’s full, undivided attention and care. What if we brought that same quality of attention into our shared life, to our families, our communities, even our disagreements? We can’t control the noise. But we can control our posture. We can choose to meet one another with curiosity instead of certainty. Maybe empathy begins there, in the way we hold ourselves toward each other and toward the world. --- *Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer* *AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858* --- ### A Place to Stand URL: https://theunfold.ing/a-place-to-stand/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T05:54:04.000Z We all need a place to stand. Somewhere solid enough to hold up under the stress of life. For some, it’s *faith*. For others, it’s *family*, or *work*. For most of us, it’s a shifting mixture of all three. As a therapist, I’ve come to see that every person who sits across from me is, in one way or another, searching for a place to stand. Some feel the ground is starting to give way under their feet–a tragedy has rocked their family, a relationship has fractured, a core belief is coming apart at the seams. Others have never had a solid place to stand to begin with. Beneath whatever brings them to therapy, there’s almost always a deeper question: *What really matters? Where do I stand in the world?* Humans seem to have an innate need for meaning, and I don’t mean some philosophical abstraction, but something lived, something tangible. We want our lives to matter. We want our choices to add up to something. Even when we stop believing in grand *religious* or *political* or *technological* narratives, we don’t stop needing a story to live by, a place to stand in the world. A sense of meaning is the ground beneath our feet. Without it, we’re adrift. But that ground isn’t fixed; it shifts as we move through life. The question isn’t whether we stand somewhere, but where exactly that is, and how consciously. For most of us, meaning begins as something given. We inherit it from our families, communities, and our cultures and traditions. We’re taught what is *good*, what’s *true*, who is *safe*, and who is not to be trusted. That inheritance can be a beautiful thing. It gives us a place to stand in the world, a story of belonging, moral clarity, and hope. It can also be confining, especially when life leads us in directions that no longer fit the story we were given. At some point, many people realize their inherited stories need to be tested, sometimes even remade. It’s not a betrayal to do this, but a part of growth. The meaning that once held us needs to become meaning we can *hold for ourselves*. When inherited stories lose some of their hold, many of us try to build new ones. We pour ourselves into a career, or into an identity, or some ideology that seems to promise a sense of coherence. We set goals, chase success, and craft versions of ourselves that look meaningful from the outside. This isn’t a shallow sort of meaning-making, it’s creative and often very necessary, but it can become fragile–even a trap. If our place in the world, our sense of meaning and purpose, hinges on achievement or recognition, we can find ourselves in a difficult place with more questions than answers. When the job goes away after a scandal, *who am I now?* When the kids grow up and the marriage ends, *who am I now?* *Where do I fit in the world when my world has been turned upside down?* Or maybe there is no scandal and the job doesn’t end. Maybe we’ve made the millions and everything looks perfect on paper. And yet, there’s still something that feels so ... empty. *Is this all there is? What does it matter?* We may have just lost the sense of why we were building something in the first place. There’s another kind of meaning that emerges. It doesn’t arrive by effort so much as through attention, and it usually comes after some sort of constructed meaning has given way. We’re not usually looking for it either. Maybe you’ve had this feeling before, that even in the pain and the loss something feels more alive in you. It’s a paradox and a cliché at the same time. *The best way out is always through.[1](#footnote-1)* Meaning discovered in this way isn’t really an answer to anything. It’s more of a *presence*, a sort of *peace* that shows up when we stop resisting long enough to notice what remains: *connection, love, beauty, life*. It’s the awareness that even when the story collapses and we find ourselves adrift with no place to stand, something deeper in us–call it love, or awareness, or spirit–still responds to life. Over time, our footing shifts. The meaning that held us at twenty may not hold us at forty. Parenthood, illness, loss, and the slow passing of years changes the questions we ask. This is often the hardest thing to accept–that the ground itself moves. But it’s the most normal thing in the world. It doesn’t have to be seen as a bad thing. I think this is something like what Rilke meant when he wrote, *“live the questions now.”*[2](#footnote-2) It’s certainty–not confusion–that gets us stuck. In therapy, I picture this process as a *spiral* rather than a line. We circle back to old questions, but we’re no longer seeing things from the same vantage point. We’ve shifted positions and are standing in a different place. So the questions we ask have changed, and the meaning we derive is different. The goal isn’t to arrive at the “right” answer once and for all, but to stay awake to how meaning unfolds through the life we’re actually living. When I sit with someone whose sense of meaning and purpose has collapsed, my role isn’t to supply a new one. It’s to help them notice what remains–the fragments of connection, creativity, or faith that still contain life for them. We can trace the outlines of what once held meaning, what still does, and what might come next. I don’t believe there’s one true place to stand that works for everyone. But I do believe each of us can cultivate a sense of groundedness–a place to stand that feels *real*, and *chosen*, and *connected* to something larger than ourselves. That might be love, or family, or faith, or service. There are lots of good options. It might simply be a conviction that, even in uncertainty, life is still worth showing up for. Maybe that’s the real work of meaning-making: to stand where we are in all the mess and beauty, all the joys and pains of life, and let that be enough. We don’t need to find the perfect place to stand, but maybe we should learn to pay attention to the ground we’re standing on now, right here, in the only life we have. --- *Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer* *AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858* --- 1. Robert Frost, *A Servant to Servants, (1915).* [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.") 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, *Letters to a Young Poet*, letter 4 (1903). [↩](#footnote-anchor-2 "Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.")