New York Times bestselling author and Dallas-area resident Jennie Allen, whose latest book was published this week, has been teaching the Bible since she was 17. “I met Jesus, and I literally just fell in love with him,” she said. “I had to talk about it; I was annoying all my friends.”

Allen started a Bible study with girls from her high school, and they met in her family’s living room to study the Book of Revelation. “It sounded interesting to me as a 17-year-old. I didn’t know how complicated it was,” she said of the famously-difficult book.

Her reach has since grown considerably. She has an active social media presence, with over 175,000 followers on Facebook and over 400,000 on Instagram. She also founded and leads an annual conference for Christian women called IF: Gathering, which will hold its 10th edition Feb. 23-24 at Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena. Last year, the conference had 50,000 in-person and virtual attendees and its livestream was viewed over 600,000 times in 129 countries, Allen’s press team said.

Allen’s 2020 book Get Out Of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts has sold over 1 million copies and spent 36 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, according to her press team. Her new book Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It has made Amazon’s best-seller list. To promote the book, she appeared Thursday on the Today show.

Allen, 47, said her big break came in 2010, when she was offered a deal to write two books and seven Bible studies by a Christian publisher. “I had no platform whatsoever,” Allen said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

She has since written books on topics including mental health and faith. Her most recent one, she said, reflects a change in how she views emotions. It was informed by lessons she’s learned since the pandemic, when she met with a small group of friends and a counselor over Zoom. “We came together to carry each other’s heavy stuff,” she said.

The counselor helped Allen and her friends learn how to listen to one another’s feelings without shaming or judging emotions she said they’d otherwise see as “negative.” “They showed me that, when they spoke to my emotion with their emotion, instead of trying to fix me, I felt seen and safe and comforted,” Allen said of the group.

In her new book, she shares the lessons she learned, drawing on insights from the Bible and modern psychology. As she wrote, Allen read books from psychologists including Chip Dodd and Lisa Feldman Barrett.

In all her work, Allen said, she aims to share the “last 2%” of her life that even other vulnerable people might hold back. In Untangle Your Emotions, she talks about her husband’s experience with depression and her own anxiety around her children moving far from home. “I think why that’s embarrassing is it feels like a controlling, crazy mom,” she said of sharing her experience.

But it was important to do so, she said. “The Bible says ‘mourn with those who mourn,’ because our brain is meant to heal as we share the hard things.”

Part of her journey with emotions has involved shifting her perspective on parenting, Allen explained. “Once I got comfortable with ‘negative’ emotions, or uncomfortable emotions, I could sit with other people in them. My kids found me to be a much safer place.

“The most beautiful moments of parenting — for me, it’s been apologizing. And just saying I’d like to do this better, and I’m sorry that I didn’t.”

Allen hopes the thinking that transformed her parenting can help change the way the church teaches about emotions. “We don’t have a good theology of emotions,” she said. “We tend to make people feel guilty for being emotional or having emotions, when what a difficult emotion needs is comfort.”

Allen has a vision for the church that looks different. Citing Romans 8:1 — “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ” — she said it “means that we should be the safest place to struggle, to feel fear or anger or sadness. I do believe we have that potential.”

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Joy Ashford covers faith and religion in North Texas for The Dallas Morning News through a partnership with Report for America.