First Progress, Then Regress, Now What?
Focus on the Family Marriage Podcast
Focus on the Family
4.5 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Does it feel like you're making progress as a couple, only to take a few steps back? Krista and David Dunham talk to Jim Daly on how they faced this very scenario with her eating disorder. Plus, the Smalley's share how to evaluate if you're getting better at persevering through challenges as a couple.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Your marriage can be healed. |
| 0:03.3 | A hope restored marriage intensive from focus on the family can transform you and your spouse's relationship in just a few days. |
| 0:12.4 | We'll go to this thing, but this is it. |
| 0:14.7 | If this doesn't work, we're done. |
| 0:16.3 | What we have now, it's way more than we ever had before and that I ever even dreamed of in the marriage. |
| 0:23.6 | Discover more at hoperestored.com. That's hope restored.com. |
| 0:28.6 | Well, I think most of us who've been married a while have been at a spot where we feel like, |
| 0:40.0 | yeah, things are finally improving. We're making some headway here on these issues that have |
| 0:43.8 | been dogging us as a couple and we haven't been able to hit a breakthrough. But there we are. |
| 0:48.0 | And oh, no, now it's two steps back. And whatever progress we made on, you know, connecting. |
| 0:55.1 | Just it's elusive. |
| 0:56.7 | I'm John Fuller, joined by Dr. Greg and Aaron Smalley. |
| 0:59.8 | They lead our marriage department here at Focus. |
| 1:01.9 | And we're going to turn now to a conversation that focus on the family president |
| 1:05.8 | Jim Daly had with David and Krista Dunham on his show. |
| 1:10.1 | The Dunham's faced this kind of a scenario as Krista had an eating disorder and there was progress and then, boy, there were some steps backward. |
| 1:18.6 | Krista, you mentioned in the book, it felt like at this point it was three steps forward, two steps back. |
| 1:24.6 | I think that is true of most recovery of any nature. But you can get discouraged in that. |
| 1:31.1 | So how did you keep the momentum going to continue to gain ground even when sometimes you were |
| 1:38.5 | losing ground? There's points that I think I really have no idea how I did that, but I do know, like, |
| 1:46.2 | the Holy Spirit was definitely in that with me. And there was just really, I think, a mixture of |
| 1:53.7 | having people from the church close by. There's, I didn't stop reading my Bible and a lot of prayer. |
... |
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