Enneagram and Marriage

This week, Christa welcomes Monika Kirkland (Type 1/4)m a Christian writer, host of the Inner Revival podcast, and a wife and mom of four. She and her husband, a worship pastor and her high school sweetheart, have served in ministry together for over a decade, her new book, Ever With You: Becoming Fully Awake to the God Who Is Near, was born out of a season when she was running on caffeine and cor...

Each of us struggles with various deep concerns, and in today’s mini episode, Christa walks us type by type through various breath prayers, one for each type. Take some time to pause, breathe, and join us in a collective prayer time as we place a hand on our hearts, release stress, and embrace the light and love of God. Calling on Matthew 11:28, we are all reminded that rest and refreshment, and b...

Although spiritual loves are collectively shared, in our individual walk with God we each have matters, too. Today, Christa breaks down several areas for you to assess your spiritual journey: service, collective church time, worship, and when it’s time to take a break to heal, rest, or recover. Take some time to sit with this episode so you can grow foundationally today!! Find more about your type...

This week Christa sits down with Kayla Craig, a former journalist, bestselling author, and spiritual director whose work blends contemplative faith with tenderness for the world God loves. Kayla shares the story of her mistyping, why wings and seasons of life can blur what drives us, and how her own growth has shaped the way she prays. Together they explore the practice at the heart of her new boo...

Encouragement is essential as you walk together through the emotional, spiritual, and physical ups and downs of your family story. Christa invites you on a journey of spiritual and psychological safety and connection-building as you learn to encourage and bear witness to one another's stories. Together you'll explore what it means to stay present to someone's story without rushing to fix or steer...

Many individuals and spouses have experienced or been exposed to materials, whether explicitly sexual or suggestive, that have caused wounds in our marriages. Today we bring an important topic Christians and non-believers alike may struggle with: shame and what to do with it, when it rears its ugly head in a marriage. Whether you're more likely to fight, freeze, or fawn, this episode helps you to...

Just as roots do their most important work underground, much of our spiritual growth happens in the places we'd rather not look, at the understory of our Enneagram type. Together we explore the shadows we hide from ourselves and how God meets us there with grace instead of shame. Today, Christa welcomes author Amy Wicks to open the pages of her new book, Wholehearted Enneagram: From Type to Transf...

Past family shadows affect us in ways we may never know, and today we talk to Phyllis Robertson as she walks us through the story of when you have surprises in your family story. Today we talk about how Phyllis (now married 32 years, 5-4 pairing) found out at age forty-four, and a past that included significant trauma, that Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson was her father. Her life changed dramaticall...

Friends, no where in the world is there a perfect spouse who is one hundred percent of the time securely attached, yet we all know secure attachment is what we ALL truly want. In this clarifying and practical episode, Christa walks you through every Enneagram type and ways they can move from the shadows of anxious and avoidant attachment to finding deeper security. It takes a bit of healthy risk,...

Most couples have deep desire for sensual and intimate love in the bedroom, and today we're looking at perhaps. the biggest shadow, your attachment shadows in the bedroom with best-selling author Dr. Laurie Watson, Ph. D, (2-9 pairing). We get to talk personality a bit here as Dr. Laurie learns about the Enneagram with us but the foremost (and fascinating) conversation here is about how to bring y...

To kick off a special Sexy September with Date Your Spouse and a whole collective of marriage voices, Christa reframes fading desire as something covered over rather than lost. Drawing on the dual control model of desire, she shows that most couples don't have a broken accelerator, they have a brake pressed to the floor by stress, resentment, routine, and feeling unseen, plus the hidden shadow lay...

Almost all of us carry a shadow around our own feelings, either we fear them, stuff them down, or let them flood a room until no one can hear each other anymore. In this warm and honest convo, Christa welcomes writer Bailey Gillespie to talk about the shadow of big emotions, and how to bring real containment and boundaries to our feelings without silencing them. Bailey and her husband navigate a r...

We're deep in our month on shadow work, and this one gets personal. Your shadow is the part of you that you'd rather not look at, the old reactions, fears, and wounds running beneath the surface, formed long before you ever met your spouse. And here's the catch: what we won't look at, we tend to act out, usually on the person closest to us. In this episode Christa explores how your shadow shows up...

Addiction rarely stays in one person, it touches the whole family, and it casts a long shadow over marriages, parents, children, and homes. As we continue our month on shadow work, Christa welcomes Caroline Beidler, author, speaker, and Managing Editor of Recovery.com, for an honest and hopeful conversation about loving someone in recovery, with a non-shaming yet healthy boundaried stance as neede...

Serving is beautiful, but there's a shadow side to it, the point where selflessness turns into self-erasure and a person, more often a woman, slowly disappears inside their own marriage or role. In this episode, Christa gently names coercive control, the slow stripping away of a person's freedom, voice, and even their grip on reality, and how it can hide behind spiritual words and show up alongsid...

Here in this (free) subscriber series episode, Christa goes deeper into how self-erasure takes root for each of the nine types in this subscriber episode released for our entire audience. For a lot of women, it started early, praised for being easy, agreeable, and self-sacrificing, until saying no felt impossible. That's not always humility. Sometimes it's a wound wearing the costume of virtue. Sh...

So many this 2026 are bone-tired, pouring themselves out for everyone around them until there is nothing left, and then feeling guilty for having no energy left for the inner work they know matters, especially if they're going to have anything to bring to their spouse or familiy. In this warm and honest conversation, Christa welcomes Amy Wicks to talk about the conference she has created just for...

As we have named what our spouses cannot carry for us, now we turn the corner to the best gift your marriage never knew it needed, and it is not a date night or a new technique, it is a full you. If your spouse cannot give you your worth, your aliveness, or your sense of purpose, then where do these things actually come from? Christa explores the needs that do not disappear when we stop asking our...

When the kids need everything, there is often very little left over for the marriage, and yet if our family is going to make it, fighting for it is your work to do. To this end, Christa welcomes Abbey Howe, theater graduate, beloved Enneagram voice, and the mind behind memes that have made so many of us laugh and feel seen on IG and YouTube, for a real talk about marriage in the thick of the paren...

As we're talking about all month, every marriage has gaps and seasons where connection runs thin or a need goes unspoken for too long. As you're learning to healthily differentiate, don't move so far away that you lose sight of the connections you DO need to have. Find where your healthy and unhealthy gaps are right here and make the healthiest move for you and your family as we learn together in...

⁠⁠⁠This is a special and tender episode to close our month on what our spouses can and cannot carry for us, because some things, like grief, are simply too heavy for any one person to hold alone. Christa welcomes the award-winning writer and podcaster Clarissa Moll, who produces and moderates Christianity Today's flagship news podcast, The Bulletin, and who has become one of the most trusted voice...

So much of what we hand our spouse to fix is really our own inner work in disguise. In this episode, Christa turns to two of the most useful words the Enneagram gives us: your vice and your virtue. Your vice is the emotional pattern that runs the show under stress, the overused survival strategy of your type, and your virtue is the higher quality that naturally emerges as you heal and grow. We'll...

Christa welcomes the beloved Beatrice Chestnut, one of the most respected voices in the Enneagram world, for a rich conversation on the three centers of intelligence, the body, the heart, and the head, and how each one shapes the way we love, fight, and connect in relationships. So much of what we wrongly ask our spouse to carry comes from the parts of ourselves we have not yet done our own work o...

This week Christa welcomes Linda Hannigan, 3 (3-1 pairing), an Enneagram and Marriage certified coach, gifted orator, and truth teller whose candor and artistry make her a joy to learn from. Together they continue the August question of what our spouses can and cannot carry for us, and where our deeper needs actually belong. Linda brings her signature honesty, willing to talk openly about the stre...

So many of us have handed our spouse a job description they were never meant to fill, to notice our every need, validate our worth, provide our purpose, and keep us feeling seen, alive, and whole. And when they fall short, we feel unnoticed, disappointed, and we start to wonder if something is wrong with the marriage. In this opening series episode, Christa asks a different question: what if the p...