> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://theunfold.ing/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Learning to Live the Questions - URL: https://theunfold.ing/podcast-episode-1-learning-to-live-the-questions/ - Published: 2026-08-31T04:59:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-13T19:13:00.000Z - Author: Ryan Denney - Tags: Podcast, #ep-1 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)