Why You Keep Second-Guessing Yourself in Your Christian Marriage (And How to Stop) Emotional Abuse 101 | Part 4 [359]
Flying Free
Natalie Hoffman
5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when you're the only one trying in your marriage? When your partner seems indifferent, and you're the one praying, planning, reading, learning, bending, sacrificing only to be met with silence or worse, resistance?
In this episode, Natalie peels back the layers of emotional and spiritual exhaustion that come from being the only emotionally invested person in a relationship. With grace, clarity, and a no-nonsense look at reality, she answers a powerful listener question: “If I’m the only one caring, what’s the point of staying?”
🔑 Key Takeaways:
- One-sided effort isn’t love. If only one person is carrying the weight of emotional and relational labor, it’s not a partnership, it's a survival pattern.
- Control often disguises itself as passivity. Abusers don’t need to yell or hit to maintain power; many use silence, neglect, and apathy to keep you chasing connection.
- Spiritual bypassing keeps women trapped. Many Christian women are taught that leaving a cold or neglectful husband is rebellion against God. But that’s not what the Bible says, and it’s not what Jesus models.
- You can stop asking for crumbs. It’s okay to stop showing up for someone who consistently chooses not to show up for you.
- God isn’t asking you to abandon yourself. He's not honored by marriages that demand your silence, your sanity, or your soul. He's inviting you to freedom, not bondage.
🎙️ Watch the rest of this Emotional Abuse 101 series (as it comes out) HERE.
Get a free chapter of Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse by going to isitmebook.com
Episode quotes:
“If you’re the only one working on the relationship, you’re not in a relationship. You’re in a slow death sentence, and it’s okay to want to live.”
“Control isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a stone wall you beat your heart against, hoping it’ll soften.”
“You don’t need your partner to validate your pain for it to be real. It already is.”
“God doesn’t ask you to sacrifice your soul to prove your commitment.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.8 | Hey, beautiful butterflies. Before we get into our episode, I want to give you an important heads-up. |
| 0:06.2 | This past year, I've taken a few classes and courses related to advocacy for abuse victims. |
| 0:12.3 | I've also joined a couple of membership programs that were actually not related to abuse in any way. |
| 0:17.8 | One of the memberships I joined for about three months and then quit because there was |
| 0:22.7 | literally no follow-up or help, that costs around $60 a month. And the other membership I joined |
| 0:30.1 | that I'm still a part of and I absolutely love it because it offers so much value to me is about |
| 0:35.9 | $100 a month. One of the victim advocacy classes that I took |
| 0:40.6 | was about 90 minutes in length and cost over $250 for that class. And another one was eight hours |
| 0:48.6 | in length and cost over $500 for that class. Now for the past five years, I've kept the Flying Free program at $29 a month |
| 0:58.1 | or $290 for the entire year. And there are literally hundreds of hours of classes, coaching sessions, |
| 1:07.0 | and Q&As, plus other resources that will keep you learning and growing for a long time. |
| 1:14.0 | Plus, you get access to a private podcast and a private forum where you can interact with |
| 1:20.9 | hundreds of other Christian women and professional coaches. |
| 1:24.4 | Plus, our onboarding process is very clear, meticulous, and easy to walk through. Our support |
| 1:31.9 | is stellar. That is my commitment to our members. And honestly, I'm pretty proud of what we've |
| 1:38.3 | built together over the last nine years. But it's time to raise the price to better reflect the value. So starting January 1st, |
| 1:46.9 | the price is going up to $39 a month or $390 for a year. Not for our current members. No way. I |
| 1:56.3 | never raise prices for my current members. We still have a few founding members who are only paying |
| 2:03.6 | $120 a year for their membership. Why am I telling you this? Because if you've been on the fence |
| 2:10.7 | about joining, it's only fair for me to let you know that the prices are going up so that you can |
| 2:16.1 | get in before that happens. Because if you join |
| 2:19.5 | before January 1st, you get in on the lower price, the price we've had for the last five years, |
... |
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