The Deep-Rooted Marriage

Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight

By: Dr. Dan B. Allender, Dr. Steve Call

Narrated by: Dr. Dan B. Allender, Dr. Steve Call, Becky Allender, Lisa Call

Read by the authors with Becky Allender and Lisa Call.

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.

©2025 Dr. Dan B. Allender, PLLC (P)2025 Thomas Nelson

Beautiful work of art!

I am 17 years a therapist and 11 years married and this is the best marriage book I’ve encountered.

Dr Allender and Dr Call, no doubt there will be countless marriages saved and restored due to your work shared in this beautifully bound work of art. Cheers to you! Thank you for sharing this part of your souls with the world. We will carry it with us into eternity!

The absolute truth of every word, and hope that it pours into every one who will read!

I have read a many books on marriage. With that being said I would say wholeheartedly, The Deep Rooted Marriage is the best one! I was so overtaken with the goodness of God as He has been teaching my husband and myself these principles all along and to read or “hear” it so eloquently explained renewed my faith in Christ, my faith in marriage and my faith in the beauty of every human believer who walks so bravely this path of becoming one flesh.

Great insights

I appreciate the vulnerability of the people who shared these insights, they give hope to us in our marriages.

Fantastic Work

A must-read for all couples. And the audio version is a wonderful listen with the authors and their spouses.

This is one I’ll return to again and again!

- Ivy

Uplifting

Loved this book. It gives me so much hope for joy after 32 years of not as much joy as we’d like

Amazing!

What a wonderful, rich and valuable book. I’m so glad to have read it and can’t wait to begin the companion guide!

Incredibly beautiful, healing, and hope-giving

Aside from the fact that the authors, especially Dr allender, are masters of the English language and unbelievably eloquent... the content of this book is astounding. Being the child of multiple broken marriages, and being about to marry for the first time myself, this book fills me with hope that there is indeed a path to be different. To last. The concept of not just trying to talk through issues, but acknowledging and honoring the trauma from your families of origin, which is the true root of the issues and may not be solvable but must be embraced, is a totally new concept to me and really feels like a powerful tool to build a marriage different from my family's. Thank you to the authors for sharing this incredible resource.

Insightful and practical.

Truthful and vulnerable presentation of the impact of the past story of our lives impacts the present dynamics of marriage.

Very Relatable

The authors openly speak about their pitfalls in communication throughout the course of their marriages which makes this book very relatable. The storytelling throughout is very engaging and the book has valuable insights to de-escalate conflict.

Long, fulfilling marriage, YES!

I liked hearing from people in long, growing marriages. It was refreshing to look honestly at the struggles and the great joys in marriages of 3+ decades.