Jennie Allen was trying to do what a lot of Christian adults do when someone admits they are falling apart: Say the right thing fast enough to make it stop.
It didn’t work.
Her daughter, then 20, had told her she was feeling “broken and defective.” Allen said she went into encouragement mode, trying to offer comfort and wisdom. Her daughter cut through it with one sentence.
“’You’re my mom, you have to say these things,’” Allen recalled.
That line exposed the real problem. Her daughter didn’t hear truth; She heard obligation. The story in her head had already won the argument.
Allen recognized the voice because she’d heard it in her own life, too.
“There’s a part of me that believes the same lie that I’m worthless and defective and broken,” she said.
That’s the message Allen keeps coming back to: Most people do not unravel because they are weak. They unravel because they are obeying a belief that has been running in the background for years. She calls it a “core lie,” something planted early that eventually stops sounding like a thought and starts sounding like identity.
It usually begins in childhood, she explains in her new book The Lie You Don’t Know You Believe, and it often forms in the gap between what happened and what you decided it meant about you. In other words, the circumstances might be real, but the conclusion might be skewed.
Allen said most people circle one of three messages: “I am worthless,” “I am helpless” or “I am unlovable.” One becomes the default lens, the thing you return to when you are stressed, criticized, rejected, lonely or out of control.
And it hides. It doesn’t always show up as self-loathing. It can show up as overachieving, people-pleasing, micromanaging or shutting down. It can look like drive and maturity. It can even look like being “low maintenance.”
“All of us kind of take on one of those personalities,” she said. “It starts to feel like it’s even just part of our personality.”
That is what makes it so hard to catch, she said: You think it is just who you are.
Allen ties the “worthless” lie to striving, to the constant sense you have to hit a mark to be safe. The “unlovable” lie often shows up as relentless approval-chasing — the fear that if you stop performing, you will be left behind. The “helpless” lie tends to show up as control or numbness, either gripping harder or checking out because effort feels pointless.
These are not random quirks, she explains. They are rehearsals. You don’t just believe a lie once; you practice it until it feels true.
That’s why adults can do the maddening thing: be faithful, stable, genuinely OK, then get knocked sideways by something that shouldn;t matter that much.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘why do I care about this?’” Allen said. “I’m a 49-year-old and I am secure and I love God. So why am I spinning out or insecure about this thing?”
Her answer is simple: The lie she believes is familiar, and often times, familiarity can feel like fact.
The solution is not to have simply one breakthrough moment of realization. Truthfully, there is rarely one moment where you figure it all out and never struggle again. Instead, Allen explains that consistency is key to overcoming the lie. She talks about returning, again and again, to what is true when the old story resurfaces.
“It’s a constant returning,” she said.
So what breaks the spell? Allen’s most practical move is also her most counterintuitive: say the lie out loud to someone safe. Don’t dramatize it or hype it up to be bigger than it needs to be. Simply expose it.
Allen gives a recent example of how naming her lie out loud took away its power over her life.
“With my friends recently, I just said, ‘I feel like in this situation, I’m feeling a lot of insecurity and it’s because I’m really living out of this lie that I’ve always believed,’” she said.
In her case, the trigger was pressure and expectations, the sense that performance equals value. She admitted she cared about outcomes even if she wishes she could ignore them.
“My last three books have hit the New York Times best-seller lists,” she said, “and I’m thinking about this book releasing wondering, ‘Am I going to care on that day?’ Heck yeah, I am going to care!”
Her friends didn’t validate her concern or preach at her, either. They gave her something better: a perspective that didn’t treat the lie like it deserved respect.
‘If you hit New York Times again, I’m not even gonna like you. That’s gonna be so annoying,” one friend joked.
Allen laughed. The moment loosened, and the lie shrank back to its real size.
“It was so freeing,” she said. “It deserves us to go, whatever. This isn’t that big a deal. The world is bigger.”
That is Allen’s point in the end: A lot of people are not spiraling because they are broken. They are spiraling because an old belief is narrating their life with unchecked authority.
Faith does not automatically rewrite that narration, but it helps. So does attention and community. But the ultimate weapon is returning to truth, repeating it over and over again until it becomes the default.
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