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Emotional Abuse: When You Have All the Responsibility and None of the Freedom [Episode 49]

Emotional Abuse: When You Have All the Responsibility and None of the Freedom

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After abuse and abandonment in her childhood, Becky married a man who gave her all the responsibility and none of the freedom: working, homeschooling five kids, and supporting his selfishness. When she woke up, she realized the problem wasn’t her after all. But that was only the first step in getting out.

Listen to Becky’s incredible story of crawling to flying.

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Hi. This is Natalie Hoffman of Flyingfreenow.com, 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.

NATALIE: Welcome to Episode 49 of the Flying Free Podcast. Today we are kicking off something brand new for this year. Once a month I’m going to be interviewing a different survivor of abuse. We’re going to ask her questions like how she got into her abusive relationship, what are some of the ways that she coped (the strategies that she used), how she realized that she wanted to get out, what that process looked like for her, and what her life looks like now post-abuse.

This is sort of a miniature version of what we do inside of the Flying Free Sisterhood group where we have these full-fledged butterfly stories once a month. They can go into much more detail because we have more time to talk with them. We try to keep the podcast to thirty minutes, so we’ll try to condense their stories into a much shorter period of time. But you’ll be able to get a little bit of a taste of one of the things we do inside the Flying Free Sisterhood group. If you want more information about how to be part of that group, you can go to joinflyingfree.com and find out all about what that group involves, what it costs, and how it can change your life.

Without any further ado, let’s dig into our interview with Becky. Hi, Becky. Thank you so much for joining us here on the Flying Free Podcast.

BECKY: Hey, Natalie. Good to be with you.

NATALIE: We’re just going to dive right in with my questions. First, I’m wondering how you met your husband and if you noticed any red flags before you married him?

BECKY: I was eighteen, and I didn’t even know what a red flag was. I was raised in a very conservative, evangelical Christian home, homeschooled, and had a very abusive mother. I had already learned by the time I was eight to please everybody and that I didn’t have value — everyone else did. So I didn’t see the red flags. But looking back, there were so many red flags.

He was very deceptive. We worked at the same bank. He went in and looked at my bank account information. I was a big saver, and I worked three jobs. So I was saving because I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to pay for it up front. He knew that, and he aggressively sought me after that. He even lied. I was very naïve. I didn’t know what sex was. I mean, I did not know at all what it was at eighteen. He said, “No, I have two doctors that said I’m sterile,” but he got me pregnant the first time. So he knew what the hook was in how to get me. With abusive parents, they told me that was my bed and I had to lie in it. That’s how I met my abusive husband.

NATALIE: Wow. Right out of the gate, problems.

BECKY: The day we got married, I was three months pregnant.  We went to Gatlinburg and got married. Three hours after we got married (we were back at the hotel), he looked at me and said (I don’t want to say bad words on your show) some very vulgar words. He said, “I own you,”

and then proceeded to just rail on me. I knew from that moment on, life was going to be bad.

NATALIE: So what were some of the ways that he continued to abuse you throughout your marriage?

BECKY: His biggest one was gaslighting. Even though I had come from abuse… I courageously left home at eighteen with the shirt on my back and a Yugo, if anyone knows what that is. That is courage! So I was a fighter in some ways, but I think he knew to gain control… He was physically abusive, and he stopped after about seven years because he realized… He threw me down the concrete stairs when I was pregnant with our second child, and it put me into premature labor. Her bag tore, and I was on bedrest for six weeks to try to keep her from delivering.

NATALIE: Did you tell anybody how that happened?

BECKY: Oh gosh, no! No, no, no! You don’t tell what’s really going on. I had a conversation with a friend just yesterday about his neighbor, and he said, “They try to portray this wonderful marriage, but there is just something not right about it all.” I said, “I know what that is. That’s what I lived.” But I was too afraid — physically afraid — but also, I don’t think I wanted to deal with the reality because I had been trained my whole life that I didn’t have autonomy, that I didn’t have my own choices. So I had no choices. Even if I were to confront the fact that he was abusive, I couldn’t leave. I didn’t have that right. I was in a marriage, and marriage was basically slavery. That is what you are taught as an evangelical Christian. You have no rights. It’s all about him and his way of life.

But the main tactic he used was gaslighting because I think… In some ways he’s a smart man, and in other ways he is really stupid. He knew that he had to break down my confidence to control me. So I spent the first seventeen years completely confused all the time because I also would go to the church and… Now, my ex refused to work. We were married for twenty years, and for the last seventeen he refused to work. I would go to the church and the church would say, “Well, it’s because you have done something and you don’t deserve to be provided for. What are you doing wrong that is causing him to not work?” It was so much confusion. I always say I felt like I woke up in the middle of the ocean and spent the entire day struggling to get to shore only to wake up in the middle of the ocean again. That’s what my day-to-day felt like.

I had five kids in seven years, and I had no choices there. Even when the doctor said after baby three, “If she has another one, she’ll die,” I still was not allowed to choose whether or not to have children. By the grace of God, I am still alive. His main one was the gaslighting. He also, if anyone was around, would say positive things about me. But he never once in twenty years said, “I love you.” He never once in twenty years said, “I’m proud of you,” or “I appreciate you.” He would say things like, “You’re just damaged goods,” because I had been sexually molested as a child. That was his nickname for me — damaged goods. I might come out in a new dress for Sunday morning and ask if the dress looked okay. He’d say, “Well, it might look good on somebody who isn’t a cow.” It was just vulgar, and yet he portrayed this sophisticated man whose family comes from money in front of everyone else, but behind closed doors he was just nasty mean. He would get worse at times, because if I did something, like maybe I landed a new job or a new contract or one of the kids started reading and I was excited about it, that’s when he was worse. So I learned to not say anything. I learned to not communicate. I learned to not cry. I learned not to show emotion.

NATALIE: That leads me to my next question. What were some of the coping strategies that you used to get through those years?

BECKY: Probably denial would be number one, because really, denial is part not understanding it… Well, I don’t know. I always thought it was denial, but I’m starting to wonder. I didn’t know what I was denying. But I would put out of my mind what he was doing wrong. It was hard to juggle five kids, homeschooling, and providing every penny that he would go and spend. I would have enough money to pay the electric bill, and he would go spend every penny. Then I would have to figure out at the last minute how to pay the electric bill. He would get a credit card in my name and wrack up debt to the full limit of that card within a week. We almost lost our home one time because of the credit card debt he racked up. I had to refinance. I could never get ahead financially.

So part of it was that survival required an excessive amount of work, so I could not really focus on it. The other part was, what would I do if I did focus on it? I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t leave. Here I was making all the money. I was providing for myself. I was providing for the children. I did it all, yet I could not leave. We went to four churches over twenty years, and all four of them said the same thing: “You are just his property,” essentially. They didn’t say it that bluntly. They were nice Baptists and Presbyterians. But basically the Presbyterian worldview was Calvinistic, so “God ordained your life to be this way. You need to just be content.” The Baptists were more like, “You are just his property.”

NATALIE: Yeah. It’s the whole entire environment that you were in. It wasn’t like you were in a small fishbowl. You were, like you said, swimming in an ocean. Wherever you swam, you were in the same water.

BECKY: I remember one time finally having the guts to call his family. He has a sister who is a nice person. Our electricity was going to be cut off in the middle of winter, and I just could not find a way to pay the bill. We had like, three cents in the bank, and that was the standard norm. We never had two pennies to rub together. I remember clear as day where I was sitting when I made the call, how much I had cried out to God before. She just said, “We just don’t believe that we should get involved in other people’s marriages.” I thought, “Oh my word.”

Now, here’s the woman… His sister enabled him. He was thirty something and I was eighteen when we met, if that gives you any context to how bad this guy is. He didn’t work before I met him. When I met him at the bank, that was his first job and he was thirty-something years old, because his sister and his mother were always his enablers. His mother was just a horrid person. But anyway, to give you context. I wasn’t just fighting every side. I had no support. I didn’t have any family support. I have thirteen brothers and sisters from four marriages, if that tells you how crazy it was.

NATALIE: So there was a lot of dysfunction in your growing up life, too.

BECKY: Oh my gosh, yes. Part of it was that I could not ask for help because they were crazier than my actual husband. The other part was that their theological beliefs were, “You made your bed; you lie in it.”

NATALIE: So you grew up in this dysfunctional family. All your churches are basically dysfunctional because of their worldview about marriage. Then you are in this really abusive relationship. At what point did you come to realize, “This is not right, this is not of God, this whole package is just wrong, and I need to get out”?

BECKY: It happened at the beach. I remember it so clearly. We were at this beach cottage with the kids. There were like, six families who always went to the beach at the same time every year. We had one of the couples over playing cards, and my ex said he was tired and wanted to go to bed early. So he went into bed. I finished playing cards and I cleaned up the kitchen and did all the stuff you do before you go to bed. I walked into the bedroom to go to sleep and I wanted to put a reminder for something in his phone before I forgot, because my phone had died. So I opened his phone and pornography was playing.

I don’t know that I could ever adequately convey the magnitude of the watershed moment and the eyes opening. For seventeen years he had made me believe that I was the problem. He was constantly reminding me of where I came from. He would say things like, “You’re just like your mother,” even though my sole goal in life was to not be like her. He beat me down. Suddenly I thought, “It’s always been him!” It literally just shattered my whole world, not that I even cared that he was doing it. That’s what’s weird. I didn’t care that he was into porn.

Later I found out it was way more than that. It was unfaithfulness. He was an alcoholic the whole time and I didn’t even know. He was a very good closet alcoholic. He was into drugs. I later found out his pornography was the most extreme grossness there is. But none of that bothered me, because what I couldn’t comprehend was that it wasn’t me. “I’m not the problem here.”

So I turned around and thought, “Now we know what the problem is, so now we can fix it.” It was three years before I filed for divorce. I put in two and a half more years. I went back to the church and asked for help. They blamed me for it. They said, “Apparently you’re not servicing your husband well enough. That is the only reason men go outside the marriage is when the woman has not done her job.” I would say, Natalie, that the church wasn’t just bad marriage philosophy. They taught me from childhood that I had no autonomy because women were created to serve, were second, had to follow and could not lead, and things like that. Even when I had the moment of realizing it was him and not me, I still couldn’t make a move to get out. It took saying I would rather burn in hell than to live one more day like this. I kind of thought I might, and I was okay with that. It got that bad. Once he was exposed, he doubled down. He was way more abusive.

NATALIE: That’s what I’d like to get into next. What are some of the challenges that you faced when you tried to get out, and how did you overcome them?

BECKY: The biggest challenge was the church, because the church was not only… First, I was working at the time traveling seven months out of the year. The very last church we joined was Presbyterian, and I didn’t join it — he did. I only went there a couple of times a year because I would be traveling for work. I would normally take the kids with me. So of course, the only thing the church knew was what he told them, and he always made a point to set the stage at any church. Since he didn’t work, he would go have coffee with the pastors and the elders. He’d say things like, “Would you please pray for me? My wife is so abusive.” He would always set the stage so that even when I went to ask for help, it was a no-win situation.

So this church, Presbyterian, PCA, the pastor first blamed me for the pornography and the affairs. Then he required me to go to counseling with a nouthetic counselor who basically pulled out this big board and said, “Well, we know the problem is you. What we’re going to do is to find out what sins in your life has caused your husband to have to rely on pornography for his needs.” It only took about three to four months of that woman before… First, I got to a point of such low. My low had never been that low before. I had thought of suicide…

NATALIE: That’s satanic oppression. You were literally under satanic oppression.

BECKY: And I remember… This was God intervening. Our neighbors, a couple who went to Barnes and Noble every Friday night for their date night, as a joke brought us a book that happened to be on the best-seller list at the time. It was called “The Sociopath Next Door.” My ex never read a book, ever. But I thought, “I wonder what that is? I’ll just read the first chapter.” It described my ex-husband to a tee. It had words like “narcissism” and “cluster B.” I didn’t know what that meant, so I started ordering books from Amazon about narcissism. I literally realized that was what I was living in.

I took the book to the counselor and said, “I think I’ve figured this out.” As clear as day she said, “Well, only a narcissist would say that their spouse was a narcissist.” I thought, “Oh my word!” That was the moment. I think it was somehow supernaturally God, because I was so low. I said, “This is not healthy for me. Let me write you a check and I will not be scheduling another appointment. But thank you for your time.” I was really sweet. I was still really sweet about everything. After I wrote her a check, she followed me to the door, which was weird. She had one door and then a secondary door. She followed me through the second door to the outside, to the lawn. She started screaming at me, “Have fun with your narcissism book.” Then she called me a foul word. I thought, “Oh my word, what is this woman?” I left there, and she immediately called the pastor and said, “She’s already filed for divorce,”  which I had not. The pastor called me, chewed me out, and called me all kinds of names.

But the church was the number one obstacle. They not only completely blamed me, even though it was factual that he had not worked for seventeen years, factual that he was a porn addict, factual that he had had affairs, factual that he had had children with other people — factual. Yet it was the subjective ideas of me being a woman as the reason. The pastor threatened me on several occasions. There is a recorded conversation between him and my ex where my ex tried to prove that he was in the right by posting it up on Facebook. (As I said, he’s a little smart, but kind of stupid.) In this audio, the pastor encourages him to harm me and the kids. The church financially supported him, and five years later they are still financially supporting him. He does not have to work because they pay for everything.

NATALIE: I just want to jump in here and say for the listeners that Becky let me listen to the audio of this pastor that she had recorded the conversation on the phone. It is unbelievable! This person is not a Christ-follower at all.

BECKY: And for anyone listening, it is Cornerstone Presbyterian in Franklin, Tennessee, and his name is Nate Shurden. If anyone is to go to that church, they need to know he is an abusive, vile, evil man.

NATALIE: He really is.

BECKY: What’s funny is that there was a running joke in the church about the fact that his wife never smiles. She’s under the same type of marriage that we’ve all experienced. I know for a fact that she has tried to get out at least once. Now she has to go see that counselor that I did.

NATALIE: Oh my word.

BECKY: I know. It’s just insidious. Anyway, my biggest obstacle was… In looking back through everything, my ex was cruel, ugly, nasty, and all the bad things. But it was nothing compared to what I had to deal with in the church.

NATALIE: Yes. It’s so sad. It’s the exact opposite of what you would expect. So you ended up getting divorced. How did life get harder, or did life get harder for you in any way after the divorce, and what were some of the negative things that happened because you got out? Or was it all good?

BECKY: It was both. It was good and bad. My ex broke into our home four different times, and I had to go to court. The police couldn’t arrest him because legally he was on the rental agreement. So I went to court to get ownership of the house so I could stop him from breaking in. He tried to burn the house down one time.

NATALIE: He’s a scary guy.

BECKY: Yeah. So I went to court, and what I say to many women is that is where I found justice. You cannot find it in a church, but you can find it in a courthouse. I remember vividly the judge looking, after eight hours of testimony, at my ex-husband and saying, “You have abused your wife and kids for twenty years, and it stops today.” I know conservative people think the government is bad and we can’t let them into our home. But the sheriffs, the police, the firefighters, the law enforcement, the social workers, the judges — all of those were the only time I have found goodness in life is through those people. The church is where I found damage and destruction. When people are quick to say, “You can’t trust the government,” I have a different perspective. It’s the only place that women are protected, in my experience.

NATALIE: Yes. I know there will be listeners that do have healthy churches who have been supportive. I think the percentage is pretty low. There will also be listeners who have run into real problems with the court as far as with custody of their kids and all of that kind of thing, because often in our culture today, the court plays against the women. It used to be the other way. It used to be that they favored the mothers and they disfavored the fathers. But now the tide has kind of turned on that.

BECKY: Most women do not have ex’s who haven’t worked for seventeen years. I had so many solid facts. I didn’t have to prove emotional abuse.

NATALIE: Right. That’s the thing also that I wanted to bring out in this interview, is that your abusive ex was more overtly abusive.

BECKY: Very much.

NATALIE: Physically abusive, financially abusive — on every level he was abusive. A lot of the listeners here, most of their exes were like mine — very covert abuse, difficult to prove…

BECKY: Put on a good face.

NATALIE: Yes. Looks great on the outside. All abusers look pretty good on the outside until they are exposed.

BECKY: But I had facts instead of my feelings, and I know that played a big part.

NATALIE: Right. It wasn’t a “he said/she said.” You had actual proof.

BECKY: Right. But isn’t that great, Natalie, how God will look at each situation and bring exactly what you need? For me, I needed a justice system.

NATALIE: You did.

BECKY: For other women, they need a church that will become their justice system. I don’t want to say that I’m against all churches. I’m just saying that the ideology at its fundamental root that women are somehow less or number two really does play a big role in the lives of women across the board.

NATALIE: It does.

BECKY: But it got hard. In my work, I work in the homeschooling world. I was banned from all homeschool conventions because I’m a divorced woman. I lost a lot of customers because I could not publicly say — even to this day I don’t publicly say a whole lot to the homeschooling community — because they just cannot understand a husband trying to kill his wife and kids. They just cannot comprehend that.

NATALIE: So they choose not to believe it.

BECKY: Right. I still live in danger. He was in jail in 2019 again for doing things. It has not stopped. It stopped more than it ever has because of the court system and because of jail, but the downside is that I cannot share everything with homeschoolers, because most live in a worldview that says the woman must be in the wrong. “She a feminist.” Whatever. It never really gives room for the man to be an abuser, unfortunately.

NATALIE: So where are you at today? Do you want to tell the listeners a little bit about what your life looks like today? How many years ago was your divorce final?

BECKY: Yeah. It took about a year to finalize the divorce. Early on, a homicide detective met with me from the police department, because the police were at my house so often. He came in to see how I could help me protect myself better, like with security systems and all that. After hearing everything, he looked at me and said, “Ma’am, fifty percent of the women in your situation are dead before the divorce is final.” He said, “I’ve got a friend who’s a firearms instructor. You need a gun. You need to have a gun in multiple places in your home, and you need to have your children know how to use it.” That’s a scary idea.

The next day, less than twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in the parking lot of a firing range going in for my lessons to get a license and a gun. I had a really bad experience with a gun when I was a child, so I never wanted a gun in my home — not that I am anti-gun. I just had a bad experience. My mom used to point it at us and say, “I’ll kill you.” It was bad. So I didn’t want that in my home. Literally, I was in the parking lot crying and asking God, “I thought You promised that You would take care of me. Here I am. I am having to go get a gun. I’m having to do all this. It’s gotten this bad.” As clear as day I remember the Lord saying, “Becky, everything you have asked for is behind those doors. Just go in.” I really thought at the moment that meant protection and peace. Like, “Okay, Lord, if this is the way that you are going to protect me, okay. Fine.”

So I walked in and asked for the instructor, Leroy Ferris. He happened to be at the register, and he turned around and said, “That would be me.” He had the most southern drawl I have ever heard. The funniest part was that I got to the classroom and it was a one-on-one, because he wanted to get me completely up and going in one day and the kids the next day, because the homicide detective was his personal friend, and he called and explained the situation. The first thing I asked this firearms instructor… because I was super nervous. My ex was making notes on his phone and our phones were still synched through Apple. So I could see him, and he was making notes about how he would kill us, where he would put the body parts and all that. I looked at this guy who used to be in law enforcement and said, “If you were going to kill your wife, would you write it down?” I was trying to figure out how serious my ex was. Was this just him daydreaming? Narcissists tend to have a dream life. He just looked at me.

Later I asked him, “What did you think of that?” He said, “Man, I thought you were a crazy woman.” But that man became my husband about a year and a half later. He was everything I had prayed for seventeen years for. I literally had a list. “God, please make my husband this, this, and this.” It was everything I had prayed for. So things got considerably better. We’ve had some rough spots. We hid the fact that we got married because we knew how dangerous my ex was. Sure enough, when he found out, he texted me that he was going to kill me. We called the sheriff’s department and had them sit at the end of our street. They kind of questioned every car coming through for that day, and they caught him. They put his butt in jail. I feel like I could write a Lifetime movie.

NATALIE: Seriously.

BECKY: How crazy this is! But we’re at a much better place. I think the thing I am most appreciative of is my kids, though. My kids have never had a good father. Four of my five kids, the four youngest, call Leroy “dad.” My son, who just enlisted and is now in the army as a tank driver, when he was in basic, he wrote more letters to Leroy than he did to me. And Leroy wrote him a letter every day. He said, “I only got through basic because of Leroy’s letters.” He was here for Christmas break for his leave, and he spent more time with Leroy than he did with me. I was okay with that, because that is all I have asked for since the kids were… That they would have a father. Two of my daughters just adore him as their father. They write letters to him as a dad. Our youngest wants to become a firearms instructor because of Leroy. So there was a lot of bad, but I’m young. I’m in my forties — yes, that’s young. I’ve got forty more years to live. So yes, this abuser took twenty, but I’ve got forty more. I’m a lot smarter, and I’ve got my autonomy.

NATALIE: That’s right! That’s amazing. What is one thing you feel you’ve learned through this whole process that you wish you could go back and tell your younger self? What would it be?

BECKY: Probably, in some way, help me see as a younger person that I had autonomy and that I was valued as a human being. Just because I’m a woman, that isn’t taken away. And that I can make my own decisions. I watch my daughters. One is finishing up her degree for psychology and going into law school, the other one has a very successful career already. Both make their own decisions. They are both married. They are everything I have ever wanted to be, so I cannot be happier. But I wish I would have known. Part of that would have been to stay away from the conservative church movement. You don’t need church to have Jesus, but for me, the church was the most negatively impacting thing in my life. I would have been out of my abusive marriage way earlier had it not been for the church.

NATALIE: Yep. That’s good stuff. If you were to talk to someone, a younger friend who is thinking about leaving for good… There are a lot of listeners who are in that place. They are wondering, “What should I do? Should I stay? I know I can’t make it work, but should I stay and just survive, or should I leave?”

BECKY: I would say, if there are no children involved, get out. Just get out. Every day that you are remaining is a day that your abuser is stealing from you, and you only have one life to live. If there are children, you need to research the laws and see what’s going to happen. I think it is a grace of God that I did not divorce until the kids were mostly grown, because I eventually found child pornography on his laptop (which went to the FBI, by the way). Had I divorced earlier and he had the kids 50% of the time, I don’t know what he would have done with them. So I think if you have kids, there’s a bigger question there.

If he’s like some of the ladies’ husbands, a covert narcissist, find out if it will be better to stay and deal with it until the kids are raised. Then as soon as those kids are raised, get out! Don’t waste one more minute, because he’s never going to change. Then, if you are going to stay in… I have to say, the last three years of my bad marriage, I was slowly learning to put down boundaries as I understood narcissism and all that. I think that helped a little bit.

NATALIE: That’s good. Becky, this was amazing! There are so many good things in here that I think are going to be helpful for people, even if they are in an emotionally abusive relationship. If you are listening and think, “This doesn’t really apply to me because my husband isn’t threatening to kill me, my husband doesn’t swear at me, my husband doesn’t hit me or threaten to hit me, my husband does really nice things and works very hard, he brings in a paycheck and supports and is faithful” —- all of this stuff still applies. Emotional abuse is just as insidious as all this other stuff. Becky has one of the more extreme examples. We are going to be interviewing some more survivors coming up here this next year in 2020. They will be coming from all kinds of different abusive backgrounds. You will get to hear lots of different angles on this. But I’m glad that we started with you, Becky, because I think there are people going through severe abuse and they don’t want to say anything.

BECKY: Right. I want to say too, that even if it’s not as severe, my ex didn’t always hit me. All this kind of gradually came about over twenty years. I will tell you one thing we all share in common: When someone is emotionally and psychologically abusing you, you don’t enjoy the day. Period. You have one life to live. I remember someone telling me that. In fact, it’s my good husband. He’s got a great perspective on life. He looked at me and said, “Becky, we only have one life. This is it. This is our only opportunity.” The church doesn’t necessarily tell you that. If someone could shake you and say, “You’ve got one opportunity. What are you going to do with it?” it really brings it into perspective. I don’t want to live one more day feeling like I am worthless and nothing and that I am not loved.

NATALIE: I think the church would argue and say, “Well, we’re living for eternity.” But I would argue back and say, “Yes, that’s true. But that’s not exclusive. It doesn’t mean we just ignore the life God has given to us on this earth.”

BECKY: Then I would come back with, “So you think Corrie Ten Boom should have stayed in a concentration camp?”

NATALIE: Right, exactly! She would have been slaughtered. If she would have stayed and not gotten out when they let her get out, they sent everybody else to the gas chambers after that. So she barely escaped with her life. Then she would have gone into eternity. Again, sometimes I think the way Christians tend to think is not even common sense. I think we must apply some common sense to our lives.

BECKY: I agree. I think it’s always great if you can get away from it for a while to do your own thinking.

NATALIE: Exactly.

BECKY: I appreciate what you do, Natalie. You’re a great woman.

NATALIE: Thank you. I wish I could tell them all the amazing things you do, but I can’t because we don’t want to expose you too much here.

BECKY: Thank you.

NATALIE: Becky is an amazing, absolutely incredible human being. I want to be like Becky when I grow up — let’s just put it that way. I’m grateful for you taking some of your time — I know you’re a busy person — to share your life with our listeners. That’s it.

BECKY: Thank you, Natalie.

NATALIE: That was amazing! I absolutely love that woman! This episode of the Flying Free Podcast was sponsored by the Flying Free Sisterhood Community which offers courses, expert workshops, live coaching, and more for women of faith seeking hope and healing from emotionally and spiritually abusive relationships and communities. You can find out more at joinflyingfree.com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, fly free!

Thank you for sharing so much wisdom and light and life for those who have been beaten down by abusers. I have been to several counselors and I have found this podcast to be so helpful in many ways. I appreciate all the stories.
Flying Free Podcast Review on Apple Podcasts

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Flying Free Sisterhood

An online coaching, education, and support community for women of faith in destructive relationships.

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The Comments

  • Avatar
    Kary
    January 19, 2020

    Amazing podcast!!!

  • Avatar
    Jimmie
    January 15, 2020

    Becky, I understand! I, too, decided going to hell was better than staying married. Your story is amazing. You are a STRONG woman, and I am so happy you are in a good place now. Your crazy ex could not destroy you!

  • Avatar
    AJ
    January 15, 2020

    Becky you are amazing! Thank you for sharing your story so well! You are an incredible speaker and I am just thrilled for you- that God has blessed you with a wonderful man and that you are truly Flying Free! The years the locusts ate have been restored, above and beyond! You sound healed in your voice, and that just makes my heart happy!
    God bless you sweet sister!

  • Avatar
    VENICE LISTON
    January 15, 2020

    Oh my gosh this podcast was amazing what a incredible testimony .. Would love to see this in a book I dont know how she got through all that God Bless Becky may the rest of her life be so very blessed thank you for sharing .

    Venice

  • Avatar
    Unhappily Ever After
    January 15, 2020

    Wow! Wow! Absolutely amazing!
    I would love to give that lady a big hug. She’s an inspiration to us all.

    And I love this initiative of interviewing abuse survivors. I look forward to reading some covert abuse stories – about marriages to men who looked really good on the outside. Thank you, Natalie and Becky