Amy Byrd, a well-loved guest of the Flying Free Podcast, is back again to tell us the story behind her newest book, The Hope in Our Scars. It’s not a pretty present of a book, wrapped in neat paper and topped with a bow. It’s real, it’s raw, and it’s full of beauty, and that’s exactly what this conversation is as well.

Amy went through some unfathomable spiritual abuse and says, “That's what led me to write The Hope in Our Scars because I did find Christ intimately present with me through this.” We hope you’ll be able to find hope and Christ in this conversation, too.

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Go listen to my first interview with Amy, “We Need a Sexual Reformation in the Church.”
• I highly encourage you to check out Amy’s incredible books, including The Hope in Our Scars, The Sexual Reformation, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Why Can’t We Be Friends?, No Little Women, Theological Fitness, and Housewife Theologian.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

Have you ever gotten a toxic text from a friend, a family member—maybe your spouse? The women in our Flying Free Kaleidoscope have the opportunity to post the toxic texts they receive so that we can help them process, and I came across one I just couldn’t wrap my brain around, it was so incredibly full of toxicity and falsities.

So today’s episode is breaking down this particular abusive text that one of my members received, and honestly, it can actually be quite interesting once you get the hang of it. Come parse through this toxic texter's false beliefs and see how I would respond if I were the one getting this text.

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Read one of my favorite books, Forgiveness After Trauma, and listen in on an interview I did with the author, Susannah Griffith.
• Check out the article I mentioned by Christy Hemphill, “How Things Go Wrong with Metaphorical Reasoning in Ephesians 5.”
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Flying Free is my private online education community designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this community.
• Flying Higher is our educational community for divorced Christian women.

Have you ever wondered, “Am I really being emotionally abused? Is it considered emotional abuse if my spouse is lying to me? Gaslighting me? Ignoring me? What are the kinds of mistreatments we can actually call ABUSE?

My friend, this is a question I’ve been answering for other women for almost a decade now. This is my my life’s work. My passion. Let me help guide you just a little bit in today’s episode as we do a deep-dive on emotional abuse: what it is, how it destroys lives, and what we can do about it.

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

• 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: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

Many years ago I paid $150 an hour for counseling. If you do the math, that comes down to $25 for every ten minutes of her time. Yes. I was paying $25 for someone else to listen to me for ten minutes.

I would tell her what new horrors I had experienced the week before, and then she would validate and empathize with me, and then I would go home.

That’s expensive. $25 is a lot of money to pay for someone to listen to your troubles. And was it moving the dial in my life? Was it worth that $25 for those ten minutes that I was purchasing to change my life, to get me moving forward? Was I getting unstuck? Was I learning new things?

After a year of seeing her for an hour every other week, because I couldn't afford to go every single week, I had spent $3,600 and I was still in the same place that I had been a year before.

The only difference is that I had $3,600 less in my bank account.

Can anyone else relate to this madness?

I recently had a conversation with a group of Christian women about something that didn’t cost them $75 or $100 or $150 an hour but that has changed the entire trajectory of their lives.

Today you get to listen in on that conversation.

I hated that I wasted so much money on something that not only got me nowhere but that set me back in my healing. I determined to help women in my shoes in a different way, and it would only cost them $29. Not for a few minutes. But for 438,000 minutes (that’s one entire month) of having five coaches, including me, not only listen to you, but actually HELP you in your specific life with your specific circumstances.

438,000 minutes of access to powerful classes that will educate, train, and equip you to take the next best step in your life.

438,000 minutes of daily support whenever you need it to help you transform your thinking and change your life.

Would that be worth it to you? I asked these women to share with you today why they think it’s more than worth it. Why it’s so worth it that they have been members for years.

One said, “I actually still go to counseling and my counseling is 100% covered by insurance. So for me, my counseling is free, but I still feel like Flying Free coaching helps me more than my counseling sessions do.”

I asked her why. Listen to find out!

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Wanna hear more about the money I wasted on trying to get help? Read my newest book, All the Scary Little Gods. It’s a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

Books are like buses. When you open up a book, it will take you to a new place. It will take you on a new adventure. Sometimes the book will take you on a journey of the imagination to a new country or a science fiction place.

Sometimes the book will take you on a path of learning you've never explored before, and that path will lead you down other paths, and then those paths will lead you down even more paths, and you will be able to meander through information that delights your mind and opens you up to new ideas and ways of looking at the world.

Books shape the way we think, feel, and show up in the world. They can even influence who we hang out with, who we agree or disagree with, and how we approach those agreements or disagreements.

Books are important. They have just as much influence over us as people do because they are written by people with bias, people with their own programming, people with their own lived experience or lack thereof.

Charlie Jones once wrote “Remember, you are the same today as you will be in five years, except for two things: the people you meet and the books you read. Choose both carefully.”

When it comes to books about deconstruction, I’ve found some to be life-giving and hope-saturated, and I’ve found others to be depressing and hopeless. In today’s episode, I talk about some of the books that have changed my life and my relationship with God.

For the better!

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Books on books on books:

1. Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith by Tiffany Yecke Brooks (and the podcast interview I did with her)
2. Holy Ghosted: Spiritual Anxiety and Religious Trauma and the Language of Abuse by Tiffany Yecke Brooks (and the podcast interview I did with her)
3. All the Scary Little Gods by Yours Truly
4. Faith Beyond Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It by Brian McLaren
5. A Spiritual Evolution by John McMurray
6. Love Wins by Rob Bell
7. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church - a memoir by the late Rachel Held Evans
8. The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs by Peter Enns
9. The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It by Peter Enns
10. How the Bible Actually Works by Peter Enns
11. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr
12. Attached to God by Krispin Mayfield (and the podcast interview I did with him)
13. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening By Diana Butler Bass

• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

We read an incredible book in our book club that is a part of Flying Higher, my program for divorced Christian women. This book healed me in ways I didn’t expect, and I think the women in our book club would say the same.

Our discussion on this book was so powerful that I just had to let you all listen to a portion of it, so that is what today’s episode is all about!

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Check out the book we spent this whole episode talking about: The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

“Do I have C-PTSD? Surely not—it’s not like I was a prisoner of war or something.”

If you’re a victim of emotional abuse, you very well could have C-PTSD. In today’s episode, I want to introduce you to C-PTSD, how emotional and spiritual abuse can cause C-PTSD, what the symptoms are, and some practical ways that you can move forward and heal if you determine that you do have C-PTSD. I also want to debunk the theory that many emotional abusers have that their victims have Borderline Personality Disorder. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Read the article I mentioned about complementarianism versus egalitarianism.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.

I’ve been busy doing all the things recently, so I wanted to give you all the inside scoop on what I’ve been up to. This includes going to an intense Personality Hacker conference, running a twelve-week coaching intensive, and helping women in the private forum (which is a part of the Flying Free program - we’d love to have you join us!) with some parenting quandaries.

Read the show notes and/or ask Natalie a question here

Related Resources:

• Check out the Personality Hacker website and their podcast. Episodes 243 and 244 are the ones I mention in today’s episode, “Making Peace With Your Parents” parts 1 and 2.
• My newest book, All the Scary Little Gods, is a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming.
• Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote another book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
• Flying Free is my online membership program designed for Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages. Whether you want to stay in your marriage or leave, we want to equip and support you through this program.
• Flying Higher is my online membership program for divorced Christian women. Come rebuild your life after divorce with women just like you.