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Dr. Alison Cook

• Website: drallisoncook.com
• Instagram: @dralisoncook
• Latest Book: The Secure Soul 

Before the books and the top-ranked podcast, there was a version of Alison Cook who looked like she had it together and felt like she didn’t. She describes that season with one word: divided. On the outside, someone who knew how to be a good Christian and perform in the world. On the inside, parts of her that were “hidden in the shadows, lost, unseen” — and, though she wouldn’t have said it then, invisible even to God.

The break came near the end of her doctorate, in her early thirties, in a sunlit apartment she loved. “I just remember feeling cold,” she says. A string of panic attacks arrived and forced the question her logical mind kept refusing: “My body was finally registering, something is not fine.” Her mind had a script — you love God, you have friends, there’s nothing wrong with you. Her body knew better.

That gap between what we say is fine and what we actually carry is where this whole conversation lives. Alison has spent more than twenty years in it. What follows is the language she’s built for the rest of us.

In This Conversation, Dr. Alison Cook Shares:

👉 Why “spiritually strong, emotionally struggling” describes so many faithful people

👉 What attachment wounds are, and the gap no relationship can fully close

👉 The two questions that build trust with yourself in conflict

👉 The controller and the shadow — how each hijacks a season of transition

👉 Why “a part of me is anxious” is more true, and more freeing, than “I’m anxious”

👉 What it means to be formed by what we return to under stress

👉 How churches run like teams — but called families — leave people disoriented

👉 What flourishing actually looks like: integration, not the absence of struggle

Spiritually Strong, Emotionally Struggling

Ask Alison who fills her practice and she has a phrase ready. “Spiritually strong, emotionally struggling,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m doing all the right things — I’m trying to love God, be a good spouse, parent my kids, be a good friend. And why do I feel so lonely, unseen, or empty inside?”

Her diagnosis of the cause is direct. We’re taught to tend our outer lives and to tend to God. “But we are not taught how to let God tend to us. And we are not taught how to tend to our own inner lives.” When something feels wrong, the trained instinct is to look outward — do something nice for someone else, fix the circumstance. Sometimes there’s wisdom in that. Often it skips the actual question: “What part of me is lonely? And maybe it has nothing to do with my current circumstances.”

Attachment Wounds and the Gap Only God Can Fill

Attachment, Alison explains, traces back to how present our parents were — not whether they fed and housed us, but whether they emotionally attuned to us. “A parent who just sees their baby… where the baby feels seen, held, soothed and heard.” We all carry wounds here, she says, because there’s no such thing as a perfect parent.

But she pushes past the usual conclusion. Most attachment conversations send us back to other people to get healed — a spouse, a cut-off, a repair with parents. Helpful, sometimes. Never enough. She reaches for psychotherapist Irv Yalom and his idea of isolation as an ultimate concern of every human being: “No one at the end of the day can fully understand what happens inside me.” That gap isn’t a tragedy to fix by finding the right person. It’s the space we take responsibility for — learning to be with our own parts, and inviting God into the places no human can reach. “Not just diagnose myself. We’re good at that.”

Two Questions: “Could It Be?” and “Is It Possible?”

It’s easy to spot patterns in other people. Recognizing them in ourselves is the harder work, and Alison offers two questions as the entry point: “Could it be possible there’s something in me here? That this isn’t all him or her, but there’s something in me also at work.”

She’s careful not to make it saccharine — sometimes the other person really is being a jerk, and boundaries are the answer. But when both people can ask the question, “that makes for a great relationship.” And she names the tell for when we’ve stopped asking: “I would never, he is always, she is always, they never. I know for a fact.” Certainty, she says, is a paradoxical yellow flag. “The more secure we are, the more we are able to say, I wonder, I’m curious. The less secure we are, the more we double down on, I know for sure you’re wrong.” Her bar for getting started is low on purpose: “The humility is 60% of the battle.”

The Controller and the Shadow

Ask how attachment shows up in transition and you get the heart of her framework. “Those in-between places are where so often these coping strategies show up.” There’s a controller part in all of us: “the one that wants certainty. I want to get this figured out. I don’t want to be in the messy middle.” It over-plans, over-analyzes, fills the schedule, defaults to all-or-nothing thinking — anything to reach the next place faster.

And there’s a shadow part, the one carrying the messier emotions, that can’t tolerate the uncertainty and either bolts or numbs: “the escape artist — let’s just get out before we’ve really run the process — or numbs, escapes, let’s just pretend everything is fine.” Neither leads anywhere good. “A healthy soul, an integrated soul, can hold the this is hard, and I don’t yet know what the next step is.”

Her practical move is counterintuitive: in a transition, make a plan — but not a plan for the outcome. “The plan is for how you are going to discern wisely during the transition.” Give it a timeframe so you know it isn’t forever. Schedule the discernment — a weekly session, a monthly check-in, a daily anchor — so the controller has something meaningful to do instead of trying to force an exit.

“A Part of Me Is Anxious”

The shift that changed her life is a small grammatical one with enormous weight. Not “I’m anxious,” but “a part of me is anxious.” Evan connected it to Internal Family Systems and his earlier conversation with Michael Shahan; Alison connected it to something older — Paul writing “I do the thing I do not want to do,” David saying “I have weaned my soul like a child within me.”

“Just that little bit of distance is that reminder of — it’s not all of who I am. And it never is all of who I am.” The person convinced they can’t get out of bed still, somehow, got to work: “Some part of me has gotten me to work.” Naming the part brings the thinking brain back online and the nervous system down. “This isn’t all of who I am. I am more than this.” From there, she says, comes access to creativity, playfulness, lightness — and the plan-making part of us gets honored too, without being allowed to run the whole show.

Formed by What We Return To

Evan raised a line from her podcast: we’re formed more by what we return to than by what we believe. Alison rooted it in the body. “That baby understands love through being held, through being seen… far sooner than it understands the words, I love you, or the words, God loves you.” Which is why so many people say the same thing in her office: “I know God loves me, but I don’t feel God’s love.”

Her response reframes the whole problem. That’s not a faith failure to muscle through — it’s a wound to get curious about. “I wonder what part of me doesn’t really know God’s love.” The first line of her new book is “a part of me doesn’t like God very much,” and instead of arguing with it, she traces it — the ill-fitting clothes, the boring service, the be quiet at church that taught a young body what God’s presence supposedly felt like. Then she returns. “Can God meet me even here?” Even the honest prayer, “God, I’m kind of mad at you,” becomes connection. “Anything I’m feeling… is a bid for connection.”

Family vs. Team

The exchange most directly aimed at anyone who’s served in ministry started with a reel of Evan’s that reached half a million people: the body of Christ is a family, but most churches organize their staff and volunteers like a team — and families don’t tie belonging to performance, while teams do.

Alison’s first read was structural: “the way that corporate capitalistic principles have infiltrated church culture.” She didn’t argue for no standards — a family can still name when someone isn’t doing their share. But when belonging bleeds into something transactional, “that gets really dicey for people, in a community that is supposed to run by different terms.” Her instinct is to look upstream at the goal. “If the goal of a church is productivity and numbers and growth, that’s going to ripple into how we treat the members of the family.” Evan’s point wasn’t that teams are wrong — it was that clarity protects people. Naming plainly that a ministry functions like a team to serve the family of Christ can spare people the disillusionment that hits when belonging and performance quietly get tangled.

Flourishing Is Integration

His last question: what does flourishing mean to her now? “Integration is the word that comes to mind.” Not the absence of the controller or the shadow — “the ability to recognize and meet God in those.” And it starts inward before it ever reaches anyone else. “Flourishing to me starts with that inner work of me being so seen by myself and by God that I have that security to show up that way with everybody else.”

For the Person in Transition:

📌 Your body may be telling the truth your mind keeps overriding. Listen to it.

📌 In transition, don’t plan the outcome — plan how you’ll discern. Give it a timeframe so you know it isn’t forever.

📌 Catch the controller (over-planning, all-or-nothing) and the shadow (fleeing, numbing) before they make the decision for you.

📌 Trade “I’m anxious” for “a part of me is anxious.” That distance is where choice comes back.

📌 The honest prayer you don’t want to pray is still a prayer. Bring it anyway.

Questions Worth Asking:

• Where in my life am I “spiritually strong, emotionally struggling” — doing the right things and still feeling empty?
• In this hard situation, could it be that something in me is at work here too?
• When I’m stressed, what do I actually return to — and what has it been forming in me?
• What part of me doesn’t quite feel God’s love, and where might that go back to?

Want to Connect with Dr. Alison Cook:

🌐 drallisoncook.com — including the free two-minute Family Roles Quiz at drallisoncook.com/quiz

📱 Instagram: @dralisoncook

📚 The Secure Soul — thesecuresoulbook.com