Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick
Jul 27, 2026 · 28 min · 9 segments
Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The…
Dan AllenderGuest
Michael John CusickHostYou've devoted over 40 years now as a minister, as a psychologist, and as a theologian to really working with writing and teaching about how people change and transformation.
And at the end of our conversation, I want to get a little bit more into how you've evolved in your thinking to include inner healing and warfare and things like that.
But would it be fair to say that most of your career has been around the area of sexual brokenness and the soul?
I think that in one sense, The more particular way of putting it certainly has been sexual abuse.
But I noted right from the beginning that evil seemed to delight in bringing about harm to our sense of what it means to be a man or a woman.
And so in that sense, sexuality has always been I think the primary means, not the exclusive, but the primary means that evil uses to distort, to damage, to in many ways degrade the nature of what it means to be made in the image of God.
So if that's accurate, then sexual brokenness needs to be seen in the larger purview of what it means to engage God as human, to engage others as human.
And though you've worked with sexual abuse, especially in your practice and in your teaching, and in fact, the very first time I met you was at a sexual abuse seminar in, gosh, 1989, when I began to enter into my own story.
But you also talk about, because I've heard you say this dozens of times, that we're all sexually broken.
You don't have to have experienced incest or molestation or other kinds of sexual violations to be among the sexually broken.
Now, how deviant? severe that struggle will be, there's always going to be an element to which our inner and outer world struggles with the reality of conformity to his righteousness.
I mean, we know from research currently that that when sexual images of any sort are put before male or female, the brain lights up in a way that it lights up for nothing else.
It doesn't light up for the return of your dearest friend that you haven't seen for years.
You've devoted over 40 years now as a minister, as a psychologist, and as a theologian to really working with writing and teaching about how people change and transformation.
And at the end of our conversation, I want to get a little bit more into how you've evolved in your thinking to include inner healing and warfare and things like that.
But would it be fair to say that most of your career has been around the area of sexual brokenness and the soul?
I think that in one sense, The more particular way of putting it certainly has been sexual abuse.
But I noted right from the beginning that evil seemed to delight in bringing about harm to our sense of what it means to be a man or a woman.
And so in that sense, sexuality has always been I think the primary means, not the exclusive, but the primary means that evil uses to distort, to damage, to in many ways degrade the nature of what it means to be made in the image of God.
So if that's accurate, then sexual brokenness needs to be seen in the larger purview of what it means to engage God as human, to engage others as human.
And though you've worked with sexual abuse, especially in your practice and in your teaching, and in fact, the very first time I met you was at a sexual abuse seminar in, gosh, 1989, when I began to enter into my own story.
But you also talk about, because I've heard you say this dozens of times, that we're all sexually broken.
You don't have to have experienced incest or molestation or other kinds of sexual violations to be among the sexually broken.
Now, how deviant? severe that struggle will be, there's always going to be an element to which our inner and outer world struggles with the reality of conformity to his righteousness.
I mean, we know from research currently that that when sexual images of any sort are put before male or female, the brain lights up in a way that it lights up for nothing else.
It doesn't light up for the return of your dearest friend that you haven't seen for years.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
