Your Next Listen — Author Jen Hatmaker on Pulling the Thread (October 20, 2025)

Episode Overview

This episode of "Your Next Listen" features a deeply personal and honest conversation between Elise Lunen (host of "Pulling the Thread") and Jen Hatmaker, bestselling author and popular podcast host, celebrating the release of Jen’s new memoir, Awake. The discussion centers on the monumental changes in Jen’s life—including the dissolution of her marriage and break from the church—her navigation of public “canceling,” the complexities of truth-telling, integrity, and vulnerability, and ultimately, how one rebuilds a self and life in the aftermath of loss and transformation.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Choosing Integrity Over Career Amid “Canceling”

• [01:29, 16:32] Jen shares the moment she realized she had to choose between maintaining her career or her integrity, after taking public stands within the evangelical Christian world that clashed with its dominant ideology (including affirming LGBTQIA+ dignity).
  • Quote: “I was at that crossroads where I was either going to be able to hang on to my career as I knew it or my integrity, but not both… So I picked my integrity and then just decided, let's just see what's left when all this settles.” — Jen Hatmaker [01:29, 16:32]
• [14:48] Jen recounts the fallout: overnight, her books were pulled from shelves and she lost institutional footing.
  • Quote: “That was the cancellation. That was overnight cancellation…everything just evaporated, went up in smoke overnight.” — Jen Hatmaker [16:34]

2. Writing Through Betrayal: Compassion Without Exposure

• [04:23] Jen and Elise discuss how Jen handled writing about her painful divorce and family breakup, intentionally resisting the temptation to retaliate or overexpose in her memoir.
  • Quote: “When I'd finished it, I handed it out... I'm like, I want one response. Do you think this is generous enough? Do you think I have been fair? Do you think I have overexposed my family?” — Jen Hatmaker [04:23]
  • Quote: “It's a testament to your pain and betrayal that does not betray yourself and simultaneously is quite loving and kind to everyone involved.” — Elise Lunen [03:50]
• [06:55] Jen adds she deliberately omitted the “worst of his sins,” maintaining respect for her children and her ex-husband's privacy.
  • Quote: “I left out the worst of his sins. They are not in there. Did I overcorrect?… I feel like I said enough.” — Jen Hatmaker [06:55]

3. The Wounds and Humanity of Public Suffering

• [09:55] They explore why audiences are drawn to stories of personal collapse and truth-telling, not from voyeurism, but the safety and realness those stories signal.
  • Quote: “For me, when I am drawn to a painful story, it is because people's, their wounds somehow signal safety to me… That to me feels like something lower to the ground where we all actually live.” — Jen Hatmaker [09:55]

4. Shifting Faith, Leadership, and the Void of Community

• [17:53] Jen explains her gradual migration away from the institution of church, clarifying the difference between losing faith and losing trust in religious structures.

  • Quote: “I really started examining those structures and the way that those systems are patriarchal in nature… clever container to preserve a degree of white supremacy.” — Jen Hatmaker [21:47]
  • Quote: “I just don't know what my place inside an institution is anymore. It is so fragile and prone to human corruption and error, even in the best of times.” — Jen Hatmaker [24:45]

• [21:11] Elise remarks on Jen’s lifelong love of order and the necessity (and loss) of relying on patriarchal structures.

  • Quote: “You on every level recognized, oh, outsourcing this to patriarch, whether it's my husband or the church is not working.” — Elise Lunen [21:15]

5. Systems, Power, and the Pitfalls of Unexamined Leadership

• [26:17] The dangers of spiritual and organizational leadership without self-examination are dissected, with Jen and Elise referencing abusers in both Western and Eastern spiritual communities.
  • Quote: “Is when the leadership continues purposefully to lead an unexamined life.” — Jen Hatmaker [26:28]

6. Facing Fear and Breaking Old Patterns

• [28:59] Jen opens up about her crash course in sitting with fear and vulnerability following the collapse of her marriage—moving from avoidance strategies to embodied acceptance.

  • Quote: “My fear wasn't the problem… it's your resistance to it… stop resisting. What if you just went ahead and let it flow through, come and go?” — Jen Hatmaker [29:24]

• [33:43] Discussion of how core personality types (Enneagram) mask or organize around fear, and how all strategies ultimately orbit it.

  • Quote: “Fear is the baseline reality for all of us… all can be boiled down to core strategies for avoiding fear.” — Elise Lunen [34:21]

• [37:53] Jen reflects on how losing every structure forced her to rebuild from nothing, noting the universality of this “cliché” experience for so many women.

  • Quote: “All of your strategies just pulled away from you. Security blanket gone.” — Elise Lunen [37:28]
  • Quote: “My story is not special. And I think that's what makes it important. This is not unusual. It's not an outlier.” — Jen Hatmaker [39:20]

7. Financial Awakening and Taking Ownership

• [42:15] Jen recounts the financial naiveté she’d accepted in her marriage and the journey to self-sufficiency, learning from scratch to manage her own money.
  • Quote: “I didn't know how much money I made in a year. I couldn't have even gotten close to it. …That turned out to be catastrophic.” — Jen Hatmaker [42:15]
  • “Now, five years down the road, God, I am so good with money. …I am so careful. I am thoughtful. And I've just been telling myself a story that a lot of that was beyond me. …It's actually not cute at all.” — Jen Hatmaker [44:45]

Notable Quotes and Moments

• Choosing Integrity:
  “I was at that crossroads where I was either going to be able to hang on to my career as I knew it or my integrity, but not both.” — Jen Hatmaker [01:29]

• Writing With Generosity:
  “Do you think this is generous enough? Do you think I have been fair? Do you think I have overexposed my family?” — Jen Hatmaker [04:23]

• On the Safety of Vulnerability:
  “Their wounds somehow signal safety to me… feels like somewhere lower to the ground, where we all live.” — Jen Hatmaker [09:55]

• Leaders Must Do Their Shadow Work:
  “Is when the leadership continues purposefully to lead an unexamined life.” — Jen Hatmaker [26:28]

• Facing Fear Directly:
  “It's not the fear. It's your resistance to it.” — Jen Hatmaker [29:24]

• Universality of Loss:
  “My story is not special. And I think that's what makes it important… It feels frankly so ubiquitous in so many ways.” — Jen Hatmaker [39:20]

Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Theme | |---------------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 01:29 | Jen discusses choosing integrity over career | | 04:23 | Handling betrayal with compassion in memoir | | 09:55 | Why we're drawn to stories of collapse/humanity | | 16:34 | On being "canceled" and losing book deals | | 17:53 | Gradual departure from church and faith structure | | 21:11 | Patriarchy, rules, and loss of outsourced leadership | | 26:17 | Impact of unexamined leadership in spiritual communities | | 29:24 | Therapeutic breakthroughs on resisting fear | | 34:21 | Enneagram, universal baseline of fear | | 37:53 | Losing structures, the cliche universality of divorce | | 42:15 | Recovering financial literacy and self-trust |

Tone and Style

The tone is candid, self-aware, compassionate, and often humorous—with both Jen and Elise punctuating hard truths and painful recollections with wry jokes and a sense of solidarity. Their rapport is warm, supportive, and intellectually vibrant, with both participants bringing both personal vulnerability and cultural critique to the topics discussed.

Summary for New Listeners

Even if you haven’t experienced Jen’s exact circumstances, this episode is a touchstone for anyone navigating disillusionment, betrayal, reinvention, or the tension between truth-telling and compassion. Jen Hatmaker’s journey—told in her own words—offers not just a blueprint for finding oneself after loss, but also a challenge to resist living someone else’s script or hiding wounds in “hidden corners.” If you value stories of resilience, grace under fire, and the complicated business of being human, this episode and Jen Hatmaker’s memoir will resonate deeply.