Something shifts when you stop running from your story and start reading it. Not all at once, and not without cost, but there’s a moment when the past stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like something you can actually work with. That shift is what healing looks like in real life, and it’s more available to you than you might think.
For solo parents especially, there’s often a quiet hope that if you can just get stable, just get the kids through the week, just get a little further down the road, things will naturally feel lighter. And sometimes they do. But sometimes what’s underneath needs more than distance. It needs attention. The past that shapes us isn’t always a single dramatic event. It’s childhood wounds, formative losses, relationships that left a mark, and stories we absorbed long ago about who we are and what we deserve. Whatever yours holds, the people who do this work find something on the other side of it that’s worth every hard moment it took to get there.
In this episode, Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent and co-host, sit down with Dr. Dan Allender, a clinical psychologist, author, and one of the most respected voices in trauma, healing, and the power of personal story. Dr. Allender has spent decades helping people move from the posture of survival into lives of meaning and genuine freedom. His books, including The Wounded Heart, The Healing Path, and To Be Told, have guided thousands through the hard, honest work of facing what happened to them and reclaiming agency in their own narrative.
Together, the three explore what it actually means to make peace with your past, whatever that past holds. If you’ve ever known your story but couldn’t figure out why it still had so much power over you, carried shame that followed you no matter how far you ran from it, or wondered what to do with the anger and grief that show up uninvited in your parenting, this conversation goes there. Honestly and practically.
Key Insights from This Episode
- Ignoring the past doesn’t free you. It makes you reactive.
- Shame has to be faced, defied, and disarmed with kindness.
- Grief and anger belong together. Each one needs the other.
Ignoring the Past Doesn’t Free You. It Makes You Reactive.
Most of us, at some point, made a decision to just keep going. Whatever the hardest chapters of our story hold, we stabilized as best we could and then we got practical. We fed the kids, paid the bills, showed up. And we told ourselves that surviving was the same thing as healing.
The degree to which we ignore the past, Dr. Allender put it plainly, is the degree to which we disengage from the present. William Faulkner once wrote that the past is never dead, it’s not even past, meaning it doesn’t stay back there where we filed it. It travels with us. And what sounds like a literary observation turns out to be a neurological one. The unaddressed past doesn’t disappear; it shows up in your tone of voice with your child, in the way you flinch at certain words, in the tears that arrive at the wrong moment for no apparent reason.
After his divorce, Robert threw himself into productivity. He built something meaningful. He kept moving. And it worked, until he realized that staying busy was another word for staying numb. He’d outpaced the harder stuff, the grief he hadn’t sat with, the anger he hadn’t named, the patterns he’d carried in from long before the marriage ended. The inner work of actually tending to those things was still there, patient and waiting.
There’s also the particular fog of not even knowing what you don’t know. Before she began therapy, Elizabeth genuinely believed she was fine. The childhood abuse, the marriage, the divorce had all happened. She knew about it. What she didn’t know was that knowing about something and actually processing it, sitting with it, naming it, grieving it, understanding how it shaped the way she moves through the world, are entirely different things. And that her way of coping had been quietly harming the people around her for years.
The image that landed hardest in this conversation was a broken arm that healed wrong. You can adapt to it. You can function. But are you living the way you were designed to live? Going back isn’t punishment. It’s physical therapy for the soul, and just like PT, it requires returning to the place of injury before you can move forward with full strength.
The alternative is that the escape patterns we built in response to pain quietly become our operating system. We detach. We scroll. We stay just numb enough to keep the harder feelings at bay, and in doing so, we miss the present entirely.
Shame Has to Be Faced, Defied, and Disarmed with Kindness
Shame, as Dr. Allender framed it, is the primary weapon of harm. It follows you. And what makes it so effective is that it almost always carries some fragment of truth.
He told a story about his six-year-old granddaughter who was afraid of whatever might be under her bed. The easy response would have been to look for her, to reassure her, and send her to sleep. But that wouldn’t help her. So instead, he looked first, made enough noise to be convincing, and then told her she needed to join him. She resisted. She wrestled with it. And eventually, she crawled under the bed beside him.
That, he said, is what facing shame looks like. You have to get under the bed.
But he didn’t stop there. Facing it is step one. Defying it is step two. He pushed back hard on the idea that the appropriate response to shame is simply accepting it or tolerating it. There has to be something in you, he said, that rises up and refuses to let it define you. Shame may carry a sliver of truth about your failures, but that truth does not mean you deserve the disaster. That leap is where evil operates, and it has to be met with defiance.
For Elizabeth, that landed personally. She’d spent years believing her abuse was her fault, that her divorce was her failure, that she’d made her bed and now had to lie in it. Hearing permission not just to face shame but to stand against it was a different kind of invitation than she’d received before.
The third move in this framework is kindness. Romans 2:4 puts it simply: it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. Not shame. Not punishment. Kindness. The parts of us that are broken, frightened, and lonely aren’t enemies to be destroyed. They’re the places that most need to be met with gentleness. Nothing disarms the power of shame like kindness. Defiance clears the ground. Kindness does the healing.
Grief and Anger Belong Together. Each One Needs the Other.
For many solo parents, anger feels like a problem to manage. Something to contain, apologize for, or quickly redirect. And grief can become its own trap, a kind of sorrow that spirals inward and takes up permanent residence.
Most of us have been taught, implicitly or otherwise, that healing means moving through the hard emotions and eventually arriving somewhere past them. You grieve, and then you’re done grieving. You get angry, and then you let it go. The idea that you might need to hold both at the same time, not as a temporary state but as the actual path through, isn’t something many of us have been handed.
That’s what this part of the conversation challenged. Anger and grief aren’t opposing emotions, and they aren’t sequential stages. They each carry something the other can’t, and when they travel together, something in you is finally able to move.
Anger by itself has a shelf life. When it isn’t paired with grief, it tends to keep you focused only on what was done to you. It circles. It hardens. And over time, it finds its way into your parenting, your relationships, the places you least want it to show up.
Grief alone has the opposite problem. Without anger to move it forward, it turns inward and stays there.
But when you carry both at once, something shifts. Grief softens you. It creates space to feel what was genuinely lost without having to minimize it or rush past it. Anger steadies your spine and keeps you from collapsing under the weight of that grief. One without the other either hardens you or drowns you. Together, they actually move you forward.
It took Elizabeth a while to get there too. For a long time she believed anger itself was the problem. What shifted was realizing that her anger was actually asking for something, asking for the kindness to say, of course you’re angry, and that’s not a character flaw, that’s an honest response to real harm.
What Dr. Allender made clear is that the work you do on your own story doesn’t just change you quietly on the inside. It changes how you show up for the people around you. There’s a kind of freedom that comes from having faced your own shame, your own anger, your own grief, where you can be present with someone else’s hard moment without flinching, without deflecting, without making it about you. That’s not a small thing. Especially as a parent. Especially now.
The Path Forward Is Already Under Your Feet
If you’ve read this far, something in this conversation probably landed somewhere. Maybe it named something you’ve been carrying quietly. Maybe it gave language to an experience you’ve been trying to describe for years. Maybe it just confirmed that the road you’re on, however slow and uncertain it feels, is the right one.
You don’t have to have it figured out to take the next step. You don’t have to be past the pain to start the work. Dr. Allender’s first practical suggestion was simple: pick up a pen. Not a keyboard. A pen. Write for five or ten minutes about something that triggered you. Not to solve it. Just to name it. That small act of naming is where new neural pathways start to form. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology.
The courage it takes to move toward healing when everything in you wants to stay numb isn’t the big, triumphant kind that gets celebrated. It’s the quiet, desperate kind. The kind that looks a lot like just getting up and going anyway. That kind of desperation-driven movement, as Dr. Allender framed it, is one of the most courageous things a person can do.
You don’t have to see the whole path. You just have to be willing to look under the bed.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Dr Dan Allender
- The Wounded Heart
- The Healing Path
- To Be Told
