From Survival To Service: How Dallas Kohen Chose Life and Found Her Purpose

By Solomon Omondi

Content note: This article discusses domestic violence, sexual abuse, and threats of violence.

Dallas Kohen had spent years helping other people rebound from setbacks. Then she found herself having to rebuild her own life.

Image Source: Dallas Kohen, The Rebound Coach

Kohen had coached people through careers, relationships and difficult transitions, encouraging them to move forward when life did not go according to plan. But in January 2020, the lessons she had spent years sharing with others became intensely personal.

Kohen says she discovered that the man she had been married to for a decade, together with another woman, had been plotting her murder. The revelation confronted her with a choice between continuing to fight for a marriage she regarded as a sacred covenant and protecting her own life.

Reflecting on that period during a recent interview with Chynna Monroe, the Executive Director of The SpreadYourHeart Organization, Kohen described the moment when her priorities began to change.

Image Source: SPREAD THE SPACE Network

“I wanted safety more than I wanted marital restoration,” Kohen said. “I think that's the switch that happened.”

What followed was more than the end of a troubled marriage. She found herself rebuilding her identity, questioning long-held beliefs about faith and marriage, and seeing the work she had done for years in a new light.

For Kohen, that journey became about choosing life.

“I could let that tell me who I was,” she said, referring to what her former husband had planned for her, “or I could choose life.”

A Faith That Told Her to Keep Fighting

Kohen grew up believing marriage was for life. Raised in a Christian home, she watched her parents remain together throughout their lives, an example that stayed with her when her own marriage became difficult.

Her childhood was not without trauma. Kohen says she experienced sexual abuse, something she would later examine as she tried to understand the experiences and beliefs she carried into adulthood.

When Kohen eventually married, she carried her strong belief in commitment into the relationship. Even as problems emerged, she remained determined to make the marriage work.

People who became aware of what was happening sometimes encouraged her to leave. Rather than persuading her, Kohen recalled, those conversations could make her even more determined to stay.

“This is my marriage. This is my covenant,” she remembers thinking.

Part of the problem was that she did not initially see herself as someone experiencing abuse.

“I didn't categorize what was happening as abuse,” Kohen said.

She was also raising two young daughters and placed great value on keeping her family together. Faith, motherhood and marriage became intertwined with her determination to persevere.

At the same time, Kohen was building a professional identity around helping others. She had been a life coach since 2001, working at different times with college students, women and people pursuing personal and professional goals. She later moved into relationship and marriage coaching. The name The Rebound Coach came when another coach observed that Kohen's work was essentially about helping people “bounce back.”

Years later, she would have to put that idea to the test herself.

Image Source: Dallas Kohen Instagram

When The Rebound Coach Needed Help

The plot against Kohen's life brought years of turmoil to a breaking point. But even then, she did not suddenly have a plan for what the rest of her life would look like.

She still had children to care for, a professional life to maintain, and decisions to make while navigating an uncertain and frightening situation. Instead of trying to solve everything at once, Kohen said she learned to deal with what was immediately in front of her.

“You just take one step at a time,” she said.

For someone accustomed to being the person others turned to, that period also required something difficult: accepting help herself. It also changed the way she viewed other people.

Kohen describes her former self as highly self-reliant. She believed having life figured out was part of how she kept herself safe. She also acknowledges that she could be judgmental about people who made choices she believed she would never make.

Living through her own crisis complicated those assumptions.

“I have a more empathetic perspective,” she said. “I really don't know what's going on with them. And I might not have the right interpretation.”

Her understanding of faith and marriage changed as well.

For years, Kohen had viewed remaining married as part of honoring her commitment to God. Looking back, she says deeply held religious beliefs can make it difficult to recognize when commitment to a relationship comes at the expense of personal safety.

Today, her advice begins with confronting reality.

“Tell the truth,” she said, warning against holding onto an “ideology of love” rather than acknowledging what is happening.

Choosing life, then, was about more than surviving physical danger. It meant reconsidering beliefs that had helped define her, deciding what to carry forward, and rebuilding an identity outside the marriage.

When Survival Became Something She Could Share

One of the clearest links between Kohen's survival and her later service began with something relatively simple: writing down what was happening.

During the crisis, a psychologist encouraged her to create a chronological outline of events as a way of grounding herself in reality. What began as a way of processing a chaotic period eventually became the foundation for something larger.

“That outline and past journal entries became the outline for my book,” Kohen said.

The result was I Choose Life: Rewrite Your Love Story & Change Your Legacy. The book does not begin with the collapse of her marriage. Instead, Kohen looks further back at experiences that shaped how she learned to understand love and relationships. She describes the book as not only her story but also a workbook and journal designed to help readers examine their own.

Image Source: Dallas Kohen Facebook

Her professional materials similarly describe I Choose Life as drawing on her experiences with sexual abuse and a 10-year marriage that threatened her life, while inviting readers to think about the legacies they create through their own relationships.

In that way, something that began partly as a tool for Kohen to process her own experience became something she could offer to someone else.

The experience also gave a different meaning to a professional identity she already possessed.

As The Rebound Coach, Kohen today describes her work as helping people recover from difficult experiences and move toward the lives they want to build. Her work includes coaching, speaking, and strategy, particularly with entrepreneurs, ministry leaders, and individuals trying to turn vision into action.

But her own life taught her something important about rebounding: it does not necessarily mean recovering what was lost.

Even after everything that had happened, Kohen said her original hope was that her husband would heal and her family could remain together. For a long time, that was what a “good outcome” looked like to her.

Eventually, she came to understand the phrase differently.

“I did get a good outcome,” she said. “It was not what I originally envisioned.”

The distinction is central to the message she now shares with others. Moving forward does not always mean restoring life to what it was before the crisis. Sometimes it means accepting that the future will look different and deciding what to build from there.

Beyond Survival

Kohen's work has continued to evolve from recovery toward purpose and legacy.

Following the death of her father, she developed Celebration of Becoming, an initiative centered on preserving people's stories and encouraging them to reflect on who they have become and the legacy they want to leave behind.

That emphasis on giving new meaning to what has come before is also reflected in the upcoming I Choose Life Community Impact Gala, which will take place Oct. 10.

For Kohen, the date is anything but arbitrary. It is her wedding anniversary.

Instead of allowing the date to remain defined solely by a marriage that ended painfully, she decided to make it represent something else.

“It's important for me to make something meaningful,” Kohen said.

The gala is being organized in collaboration with The SpreadYourHeart Organization and is centered on empowering survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and abuse. Kohen said the event will also support the Sexual Integrity Project, reflecting her belief that healing communities involves not only supporting survivors but also addressing behaviors that contribute to harm.

She describes that broader work as “the other side of survival.” It is also an apt description of her own journey.

The I Choose Life Community Impact Gala — hosted by Dallas Kohen in partnership with SpreadYourHeart — takes place October 10. Learn more about the I Choose Life Community Impact Gala

If you or someone you know is experiencing any form of abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).

To learn more about Dallas, purchase her book, or book a coaching session, visit thereboundcoach.com.