Hi, this is Natalie Hoffman of Flying Free Now, and you're listening to the Flying Free

podcast, a support resource for women of faith, looking for hope and healing from hidden

emotional and spiritual abuse.

Welcome to episode 126 of the Flying Free Podcast. It has been nine years since I went to a local

Barnes and Noble with my belly full of baby, my arms full of computer, and my heart full of despair, and sat down with a cup of coffee and began to Google terms like passive aggressive husband, painful marriage, hitting a

wall in my marriage for two decades, and that kind of thing.

I had never heard the term emotional abuse before and I certainly didn't believe I was being abused.

Abuse was when your husband gave you black and blue eyes.

I had a husband who took care of his family, played with his kids, and brought home the bacon.

My husband was a faithful church-going man who would give the shirt off his back to anyone who

asked.

Abuse? That never crossed my mind.

I didn't find much that day other than a book about passive aggressive men

and a book called Who's Pushing Your Buttons by John Townsend and Henry Cloud,

a book which describes emotional abuse without calling at that.

But what happened that day was this.

I woke up my reticular activating system in my brain

and I started noticing things I had never noticed before,

or things I had noticed but hadn't allowed myself to think about

or focus on before.

You see, my brain had been very invested in believing what it had been programmed to believe

from the time I was a baby and that is this.

...