The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight

What if you could experience a marriage that is not just good, but truly life-giving? Therapists Dan Allender and Steve Call show how deeper intimacy can bring more healing and delight.

Every relationship has its highs and lows, but we often don't know what to do with our "lows," or how we ended up there. What is creating friction, exacerbating our pain, and standing in the way of intimacy?

More often than not, it is the stories of our past drifting into the present. But if we are willing to look at them closely, we will be able to write a new story for the future.

With more than seventy years of therapeutic experience combined, Dan Allender and Steve Call demonstrate how God is inviting you and your partner to a wild faith journey with the hope of transformation. With personal stories, key psychological insights, and practical advice, The Deep-Rooted Marriage will help you:

• Address past trauma, giving you greater courage and compassion to engage your present struggles.
• Disrupt cycles of conflict based on shame, judgment, and resentment.
• Create safety when feeling threatened and offer attunement, empathy, and honor toward differences.
• Adopt humility, honesty, kindness, curiosity, defiance against what divides, and intention to bless.
• Learn practices that cultivate emotional intimacy, generating new goodness between you and beyond you.

Marriage is not about merely getting along or resolving conflict through compromise. It reveals who you are and invites you to who you can become. Marriage offers a space for you to experience what you are made for—honor and delight. And it is the ground from which redemption is meant to grow, where, together, you can reflect God's image more and experience a taste of heaven.

Dr. Dan Allender is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy. After receiving his master of divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, Dan earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Michigan State University. Dan previously served on faculty at the Biblical Counseling Department of Grace Theological Seminary (1983-1989) and Colorado Christian University (1989-1997). In 1997, Dan and a cadre of others founded the Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. Dan served as president of the Seattle School from 2002-2009. In 2011, The Allender Center was founded to cultivate healing and train leaders and mental health professionals to courageously engage others’ stories of harm. Dan continues to serve as professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School.

Dr. Steve Call is a clinical psychologist specializing in marriage counseling.  He is also the author of Reconnect: Tools and Insights for Cultivating Meaningful Connection in Your Marriage. Over his twenty years of working with couples, he has gained significant insight into what contributes to a married couple’s distress. His writing and his professional therapeutic work offer expert guidance to couples seeking reconnection and meaningful connection. His work with couples provides insight, awareness and understanding so that helpful change can occur. Steve also teaches master’s level counseling students at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology in Seattle, Washington.