Flying Free

Is abuse more widespread than ever before or are we more aware of it? Are churches listening to the cries of abused women? Is anything getting better? I’m joined by advocates Sarah McDugal, Ngina Otiende, and Gretchen Baskerville, and my former podcast sidekick Rachel Harden as we celebrate the 200th Flying Free podcast episode and discuss the incredible support and awareness that’s growing in the...

Would you play a card game with a cheater? Once maybe, right? Then, it’s a solid H-E-double-hockey-stick no.  What about for a month? A year? Five years? Twenty? Would you tell your daughter to play with a cheater? Your best friend? I’m gonna guess the answer is “abso-freaking-lutely not!” So why do we think we “owe” a husband who has shown himself to be abusive any more of our precious time? In t...

Learning about emotional and spiritual abuse is dangerous.  You start to see patterns in your marriage, your family, your friendships, your church…and your faith. You start to understand why God often doesn’t feel safe. Why you feel like a constant disappointment. A regular failure. A busted, broken, rejection-worthy woman.  You were taught that God is love… And that God wants (and demands) perfec...

I'd like to introduce you to my friend Myrtle. She's a backseat driver. The kind you can't ignore.  She's MY backseat driver. And yours. Myrtle thinks she's the help-iest thing ever.  She’s a big reason behind many of our behavior patterns. The places and ways we're stuck. Our self-sabotage. Myrtle is the explanation for a lot of our recurrent fears. She’s loud, proud, and she never shuts up. She...

I remember thinking that if I could just hit on the right inflection in my voice maybe or the correct tone or the perfect combination of words or the right attitude — you know, one of subservience and humility so as not to trigger his fragile ego and bring down his wrath — I’d finally get through. He’d finally get it. The wall would come crumbling down. Nope. When I finally filed for divorce, he s...

“Unless you forgive and come back to me, you’re disobeying God and the Bible!”  If I were your abusive husband, I’d say the same thing. Why? Cause then I’d get what I want. Woohoo! Isn’t that what the Bible is all about?  Oh, begging your pardon. I was basing my opinion off how I see most church leaders and many legalistic Christians approach the Bible.  Which means that if you’re looking for advi...

“You don’t know God,” the elder leaned forward and said to me. He knew I was preparing to divorce my emotionally abusive husband. My body began to tremble. My voice shook.  I realized later that he was right. His god was vindictive and cruel, like a mythological Zeus.  The God I know — deeply, intimately, since I was a child — is gentle and kind and leads me away from fear and control. That was th...

If marriage is for life, then the only way out is death. Right?  I’ve been asked that question, or a variation of it, many times. I used to wonder that question myself.  Marriage IS for life, but not in the way you’ve been told. It’s for the sake of bringing life TO you. And when it’s destroying you instead, THERE IS A WAY OUT.  But the very Bible verses written to bring protection to abused women...

“I’m going to be ninety-two next month, and I have waited my entire life for a book like this.”    A woman said this to Tiffany after she spoke to a Sunday School class about her book, “Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith.”   Many Christians are told their doubts are a sign they haven’t prayed or fasted enough. That their spiritual frustrations are an indication they’re backsli...

How do you feel about accountability? Like it, love it, want some more of it? Or maybe it’s like medicine to you — icky but necessary. Hold on to your booty, cause I’ve got an opinion on it too.  I think it’s a made-up practice that got a “virtue” sticker slapped on it. I think it arrests our development into emotional adulthood. In fact, I’d say accountability does more harm than good.  And it ca...

Surprise! Abusers never want the same thing as their victims. Why should divorce be any different? Shocking! Abusers never want their “property” to start acting like a person and hightail it out of Dodge (“Dodge” being the marriage. Okay, you get it.) Spoiler alert! You get to make your own decisions because you’re a grown woman. What? Yes, it’s true. Divorce isn’t a magic toilet that flushes all...

Imagine a mother who stares at her baby.. She won’t smile. Won’t look it in the eye. Doesn’t react when it holds its arms out to be held. Refuses to comfort it when it cries. The baby screams and sobs. The mother won’t move.  Now multiply that cruelty across each thousands of days. Switch the mother for a husband. Change the baby to a wife.  Other people may throw out the “But does he hit you?” st...

“I feel like a massive failure as a Christian and a mom. Like a puppet—and he’s pulling the strings.”   Too many women finally muster up the courage to leave their abusive husbands and face an even more painful betrayal: Their exes turn their own children against them. Lying, manipulating, bribing, even using threats in order to get the kids on their side.    It’s sickening. And it can feel like t...

For women escaping emotionally abusive husbands, divorce often feels like a scarlet “A” on their chest. Or “D.” They wonder if they’ll be marked for life.  And worse, they fear how their kids will suffer the consequences.  First, because they lived in a home of chaos and pain and trauma. Second, because they’ll have to face the assumptions and judgment of other people. A “broken” family. A single-...

“I don’t think I’ll ever heal from this,” she said. “You expect harm from people who only harm you. From him. Not the ones who know you, who grew up with you, who you went to church with.”  Do you know the pain of rejection by your family, friends, and church? I do. I’ve lost entire nights of sleep swimming in that pain. It’s mind-numbing. Excruciating.  A listener told me that after being rejecte...

As terrible as being married to an abuser is, there’s something worse. It’s getting free from your abuser, then getting remarried to another one.  For a lot of survivors, that’s their worst fear.  Can they trust themselves to identify red flags when they were taught to dismiss them for so long? Will they be able to see past the BS if a potential suitor is slick and smooth but a turd of a guy under...

Bonus episode (because this is important!) With Tina Swithin' s permission, I am sharing an article she wrote on her website here about why it's imperative that we do not use the word "alienation" in our court cases. Please head over to her article, Please Stop Saying Alienation , to access the links mentioned in this podcast episode. If you are a Christian woman who thinks you may be in an emotio...

Is there poison in your home? No, I don’t mean rat poison or toxic chemicals or asbestos. It’s words. On pages. In a book. One that’s given as a wedding gift. When times are tough. When you’re desperate. When you’ve run out of ideas and options to help your marriage and somebody gives you 336 pages of “hope.” The poison is the answer ringing from every page of this book. You were, as Debi Pearl pu...

Life after abuse can feel like you’re just spinning your wheels. You struggle with the same things. The same thoughts. The same downward spirals. Over and over and over.   Flying Free is all about breaking out of harmful cycles, in and after abusive relationships. If you want to see this in action, Amie is a poster child for life beyond abuse: healing, thriving, and constantly growing.    Our disc...

“I’ve got to share this with as many people as possible.” That’s what I decided when Amie showed me her thought work from Flying Higher.  What the heck is “thought work”? Well, I’ll answer your question with a question. How often do you have the same thoughts? You know, the crappy ones. “Nothing will ever change. If I could just get him to see how much he’s hurting me. I have to wait for God to mo...

“I would keep the peace or create peace at any cost. And a lot of the time, the cost was myself.” Amie searched for love her entire life. But all she found were unsafe people. And all she learned was that love demanded everything and gave nothing but pain in return.  Despite this, Amie is a poster child for what’s possible after a life of abuse . She’s flourished in Flying Free and Flying Higher,...

What do love, hate, and pain have in common? Believe it or not: Being super ticked off. Anger. I’m serious as a heart attack. Anger stems from either love, hate, or pain. Which means there are some pretty legitimate and useful reasons to be mad. As well as some that are just nasty or unhelpful.  So if you’ve been taught that anger is ungodly, wrong, or always a sign of bitterness, I suggest two th...

“Don’t try and church it up.”  Ever heard that piece of advice? It hits the crux of this episode right in the nethers: biblical manhood and biblical womanhood.  Author Aimee Bird offered a more refined and relevant version: “Just because you put the word ‘biblical’ in front of it doesn’t make it so. It’s not an adjective.” If you’re listening to this podcast, I’d bet my milk money you've heard the...

Did you know some people used to use the Bible to support slavery? They would tell slaves that it was God’s will. Want to guess who those people were?   Huge surprise: slave owners. It can be terrifying to have someone throw the book—the literal Bible—at you. But you know the saying “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?” Well, in this case, “Where there’s confusion, there’s crap.” The kind of crap p...

Do you wonder how he did it? How your abuser tricked you and blindfolded your church? How he just keeps coming out on top, despite all the evidence pointing to what a sick, twisted, evil person he is? Abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It always involves the community. In this case: the church. Wade Mullen staked his Ph. D. on the study of the hidden tactics of abuse, especially spiritual abuse wit...