In this episode I’m answering a pressing question Christian women in difficult marriages ask: how do you find a church that will actually support you instead of silence you?

Because not all churches are created equal, and the difference between a safe church and a harmful one can change everything for a woman trying to find her footing. I’ll break down exactly what to look for, what to ask, and what red flags to run from.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• There's a question you can ask a pastor before ever setting foot in a pew that will tell you almost everything you need to know about whether that church is safe.
• What a church puts on its website (and what it leaves off) reveals far more than you might think about how they actually treat abuse survivors.
• One word in a pastor's answer about couples counseling is a dealbreaker. Do you know what it is?
• The church's leadership page can disqualify them before you ever walk through the door.
• There's a theology that sounds biblical and even beautiful to some women, but I make a case that it's actually setting the stage for harm.

Get Today’s Free Resource:

📒 Take a free Emotional Abuse Assessment by going to emotionalabusequiz.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

In this episode, I sit down with my real-life friend Jessica, a pastor's wife whose story intersects with mine: her husband was a pastor at the very church that excommunicated me. What started as a conversation about her story turned into one of the most layered, honest episodes I think we've ever recorded.

Jessica spent decades being told her emotions were idols, her feelings weren't facts, and her needs were sin problems she needed to repent of. In this conversation, she shares what it took to finally see through that, what the long road out of a high-control religious marriage actually looks like, and why freedom sometimes takes many years to arrive even after the divorce papers are signed.

Questions we cover:

• What does it actually take to leave when your abuser is also your pastor husband?
• Why do so many women choose the familiar over the safe?
• Is codependency just a fancy way to blame the victim?
• What does it look like when someone uses scripture as a weapon?
• What does a pastor's wife do when she can't tell anyone the truth?
• What actually happens when you let yourself grieve?
• What does it take to actually push yourself out?

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🧐 Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote a book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage. Get a free chapter by going to isitmebook.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

This is part four of the High Functioning Christian Women in Destructive Marriages series, and today we talk about a concept that ties the whole series together: sovereignty.

Synonyms for sovereignty include: freedom, autonomy, and independence.

If you've spent years managing everyone's needs, shrinking your own, and building an identity around your capacity to give without limit, this episode will challenge a misunderstood theology that was never meant for women who are already pouring out from an empty cup.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• There's a critical difference between two things that look almost identical from the outside, and which one you're living in changes everything about how you understand your marriage.
• The "die to self" command you've been handed your whole life? It may have been written for the exact opposite kind of person from you.
• Why does even asking yourself "what do I need?" feel like a threat to your survival, not just a little uncomfortable?
• What Jesus actually modeled about rest, limits, and saying no might completely reframe what you think faithful living looks like.
• The one question you could ask yourself in the mirror every single morning that could quietly begin to change everything.

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🧐 Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote a book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage. Get a free chapter by going to isitmebook.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

This is Part Three of our series on high-functioning Christian women in destructive marriages. You are the woman people call when something complicated needs solving. You read rooms, spot patterns, and get it right. And yet in this one area of your life, you have been told that your judgment, specifically, cannot be trusted.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the very perceptiveness that makes you exceptional everywhere else has been deliberately turned off in your marriage
• What is actually happening when religious systems tell you to wait, and who is really benefiting from your patience
• How to tell the difference between genuine knowing and fear, and which one you have most likely been carrying all these years
• What "blind adherence" has to do with faith, and why the real version of faith might look completely different than what you have been taught
• The one question that changes everything when someone tells you to wait a little longer

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🎁 I want to give you a free gift. It’s the audio version of my book, All the Scary Little Gods. It’s a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming. You can listen to it FREE by going to scarylittlegods.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

This is Part Two of my series on high-functioning Christian women in destructive marriages. In Part One, we explored how the very qualities that make these women extraordinary are the same ones that make them exceptionally vulnerable. Today we're going deeper into one of the most specific and targeted of those qualities: empathy.

If you've ever felt like your compassion is working against you, like the more you understand him, the more stuck you become, this episode will show you exactly what's happening underneath that cycle. And it will start to give you a way out.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Why does understanding his pain seem to pull you closer to danger instead of toward safety? The answer will reframe everything you thought you knew about your own compassion.
• There's a biological metaphor in this episode that explains precisely how your God-given empathy gets hijacked, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
• What does a "scapegoat" have to do with your marriage? Natalie unpacks a family systems concept that might explain why you always end up holding everyone else's chaos.
• There's a trap that was specifically designed to make every exit feel impossible. Natalie names it, and then shows you the crack in the wall.
• What's the difference between empathy and enabling, and why does that distinction change everything about how you move forward? The answer might surprise you.

Get Today’s Free Resource:

📒 Take a free Emotional Abuse Assessment by going to emotionalabusequiz.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

So many capable, gifted Christian women are living a double life that is impressive in public, but diminished in private, and they don't even have words for what's happening to them. This episode will change that.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• There's a specific kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being sad, and it's far more common among high-functioning Christian women
• The reason you can run a business, lead a ministry, and hold everything together but still feel like no one actually knows you
• Why the very things people praise you for might be the things that are slowly killing you
• What's really happening in your body when you live this way, and why it's not a spiritual problem

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🧐 I wrote a book just for high functioning Christian women called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage. Get a free chapter by going to isitmebook.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

This is one of my favorite interviews! Today I’m talking with my friend, Dr. Tiffany Yecke Brooks, author of Gaslighted by God, Holy Ghosted, and her brand-new book, To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith After Deconstruction.

If you've walked through the painful process of deconstructing the toxic theology you inherited, this conversation is going to knock your socks off.

Drawing from Dante's Inferno (I know, right?!), classical literature, and deep theological study, Tiffany shows you how to create a new spiritual lexicon that actually reflects the heart of God.

(Listen to find out what that even is!)

This isn't about burning it all down. It's about holding up each piece to the light and deciding: Does this stay or go?

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• The one thing fundamentalism can't tolerate (and why that's actually your doorway to freedom)
• What Dante's Inferno has to do with your faith journey, and why the final line matters so much
• The Greek word that completely reframes what forgiveness actually means
• Why the images you were given for God might be keeping you stuck in an outdated script
• What happens when you stop trying to be perfect and start focusing on being good

Resources mentioned:

📰 Tiffany’s Substack Newsletter (but only if you like to laugh - otherwise stay away)

📚 Her new book: To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith After Deconstruction.

🎧 Her OTHER interviews with me (all AMAZEBALLS):

1. Confronting Religious Trauma
2. Overcoming Spiritual Anxiety

👹 The book Dr. Brooks copy-edited for me AND that is a perfect illustration of what her book Holy Ghosted is talking about: All the Scary Little Gods

🆓 And hey - listen to my book FREE by going to scarylittlegods.com!

Tiffany Yecke Brooks is the lead or contributing writer on more than two dozen books, including multiple New York Times bestsellers. She is the coauthor of Fear Is a Choice: Tackling Life’s Challenges With Dignity, Faith, and Determination (with NFL running back James Conner), Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstance (with Paralympic gold-medalist Mallory Weggemann), and the narrative nonfiction historical thriller Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (with historian Claire Bellerjeau). Her newest book, To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith After Deconstruction, was released in March 2026 by Eerdmans. She has also published articles in peer-reviewed journals and the Smithsonian. Tiffany holds a PhD from Florida State University, where her dissertation covered, in part, cultural adaptations of stories from the book of Genesis, and an MA from the University of Bristol in the UK, where her thesis examined cultural influences and literary techniques in the Gospel of Luke. A popular speaker for student groups, faith conferences, and academic lectureships, Tiffany has taught literature and writing at Abilene Christian University, McMurry University, and the University of South Carolina – Beaufort.

What happens when seeing your ex derails all your progress? And why do your friends think he's such a great guy when you know the truth?

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Why seeing your ex after months can feel like all your progress disappeared (it didn't)
• What trauma bonding actually does to your memory of the relationship
• Why emotionally abusive people seem so great to everyone else
• The false equivalency that keeps people from believing abuse survivors
• How to know if you're lonely for him or for something else entirely

🎁 I want to give you a free gift. It’s the audio version of my book, All the Scary Little Gods. It’s a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming. You can listen to it FREE by going to scarylittlegods.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.