Episode 32: A Well-Trained Wife
with Tia Levings
Amy is joined by author and anti-patriarchy activist Tia Levings to discuss her book A Well-Trained Wife, learning about life in a mega-church and how Christian fundamentalism is infiltrating our politics, plus unpacking the many complications that come from leaving a patriarchal community and faith.
Our Guest
Tia Levings
Tia Levings is a writer, creator, and content specialist. She shines light on the abuses of Christian fundamentalism to educate, validate, and empower those who feel smashed by the patriarchy to create something beautiful from pain, and because when she went through the hell of church-sanctioned violence, she felt alone, but wasn't. There are thousands of others out there. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy came out in August, 2024.
Amy Allebest: Have you ever been confronted by someone who claims that patriarchy is a thing of the past and that women are no longer oppressed? I have heard this claim many times from old men and young men, even from women in conservative circles and very liberal ones. When these conversations happen, I have sometimes wished that I had a book that I could recommend that shared a real life example of blatant patriarchy alive and well in the 21st century. And I've especially wished that I had known of a book that not only told someone's irrefutable life experience, but also showed how patriarchy was not a one-off bad experience, but a manifestation of a massive system that affects all of us. Well, listeners, I found the book! It's called A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings, and I am so excited to welcome Tia to the podcast today. Welcome, Tia!
Tia Levings is a writer, creator, and content specialist. She shines light on the abuses of Christian fundamentalism to educate, validate, and empower those who feel smashed by the patriarchy to create something beautiful from pain, and because when she went through the hell of church-sanctioned violence, she felt alone, but wasn't. There are thousands of others out there. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy came out in August, 2024, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Listeners, go out and buy this book, check it out from your library. This is a must-read from the Breaking Down Patriarchy library. Tia Levings, again, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk about this with you.
Tia Levings: Thank you for having me. This is a long needed connection, so I'm grateful for the opportunity.
AA: Me too. Well, I'd love to start out with a bit of a personal introduction. If you could tell listeners where you're from, your basic info, where you grew up, your family of origin, and then setting the stage for the topic that you write about in the book.
TL: Yeah, this is good because if you've read the book or are going to read the book, there's a little bit of overlap here, and I'll explain why that was important in memoir-craft to do. I started my first 10 years in the upper peninsula of Michigan, lived on a farm, was a little wild child, feral kid of the ‘80s. When I was 10, my parents decided to move to Jacksonville, Florida, which was a total and utter culture shock, which I think became really important to my formation. We joined a megachurch, which was a new thing in the mid-‘80s. They are just very large churches that want to be as big as they can possibly be. And in the next 10 years it would continue to grow, and we eventually had 20,000 people in our membership roll. It was very large, 11 city blocks in Jacksonville, Florida, and it was my world. I went there six out of seven days a week, and everyone I knew at my public high school also went to my church. I became very accustomed to living in a world within a world within a world and in plain sight without any walls. We didn't have to go to a jungle to be in a cult. We could just have our group think and never associate outside of our group. This is a theme that repeats over and over in my childhood until we get to today.
And I think it's really important for where we are today, because evangelical Christians– this was a Southern Baptist megachurch and our pastor was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So, it was very mainstream, ordinary, it looked like a good way to grow up for parents who were conscientious with their children. And they didn't really understand, because ideologies are not forthcoming with their goals, that we were becoming more fundamentalist and Christian nationalist as we went. We just thought we were being really patriotic and very devout. And there were groups in our church that were more devout than others, and that was okay because we were tolerant of that. And we weren't privy to their agenda to take over mainstream evangelical culture.
So there's this undercurrent of a wider world that's playing the whole time I'm growing up, and I think they're a really critical 50 years because they're the 50 years that parallel the Christian nationalist agenda that we are living the manifestation of today. We all live under Christian fundamentalism today because The Heritage Foundation and these used-to-be-fringe, right-wing, extreme groups are now in the top levels of government and deciding our laws. So, huge influences in our culture and governing and future and all of it. There in between, I had five kids. I used to homeschool. I was a trad wife in the ‘90s. We didn't call it that, we called it being a traditional wife and mother, and today I create content that translates those evangelical influences in our headlines and culture today. So, I’m more of a cultural translator for people who know we're being impacted by something religious, but they don't fully understand why or how. And in that way, our work is very similar because we're doing a lot of the same things to different audiences.
AA: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I feel like we're cousins, a little bit, because I come from the Mormon tradition, so a lot of your experience feels familiar to me but there's different vocabulary and different things are emphasized than what I'm familiar with. But I really appreciate that title of a cultural translator. And I do have to say, too, and I'm sure you have these conversations all the time. Especially when we were living in the Bay Area in California and we were going through the 2016 and 2020 elections, especially 2016, when it took everybody by surprise, was just shocking, going, “Where did these people come from? I thought we resolved all this stuff a hundred years ago.” And I'm like, “Hello?” Oh my gosh, they live in a different world within a world within a world with no exposure to the way a lot of people in America live. And I do have to say, your book especially highlighted that, Tia, that it's not just some niche, tiny little offshoot of Christianity, which I think is some people's impression. It is huge, and now people are finally starting to see it. But we need cultural translators to point out what's happening.
“living in a world within a world within a world and in plain sight without any walls. ”
TL: During the first Trump administration, I really felt that rising hard. People wanted to box it away like some sort of fringe, on the side, extreme group, Ruby Ridge, that kind of thing. And I was like, absolutely not. We have been trained for decades to blend in with you so that we can take over, and these are overt sermons that happen every Sunday. This is like Generation Joshua. I was in Shiny Happy People, so that shared some of the actual plan and strategy to blend in. And mainstream America didn't realize when Lifeway Christian Bookstores is there and you've got these movements like True Love Waits and you have these adjacent sort of para-organizations that are bringing people into this end. I used to call my life the real-life prequel to The Handmaid's Tale, but literally everything I lived is here in our mainstream culture now. It’s chilling to be living the arc, but also predictable.
AA: Yeah, predictable for you, and I think that's why this is so important. Let's get into that arc. You gave us a really great introduction with a high-level, kind of bird's eye view of the phenomena, but this was personal for you. And as you point out, this was really important for me, too, to try to understand your parents and what they were perceiving was happening to their family. So, if you could walk us through that, what that felt like for your parents, what doctrines were you getting in church and then what was the community? What was the gender messaging in your own family like? Where were you starting to absorb these ideologies?
TL: It is such a patchwork quilt, and I think it's important to the woman that I am today. And I think listeners of the Gen X generation or upper millennial will totally understand it from the inside out. Younger listeners, maybe gain some compassion for the amount of information that they have available. This simply wasn't the case in the ‘80s and ‘90s. That's important context. The psychological growth and development of the field, the language that parents had available, the resources, the amount of information really has changed parenting and has changed culture. If we're looking at my parents as young 20-somethings in the early-mid-‘70s, I was born in ‘74, and they were in the Midwest, my parents are like a Karen Carpenter song of two young kids starting out and they're against the world, but they're together and they're gonna do these things. And I come from a family of makers and craftspeople, very hard-working people, everyone pitches in, and there's not really a lot of gender division as far as work goes or role goes. It's just if something needs to be done, someone does it.
That said, I think my mom in particular wanted a certain status to develop in our family. They were tired of financially scrapping, they wanted that life of ease that was being so promoted in the ‘80s. They wanted to attain financial stability, so we were always working on that. In the undercurrent of my personal family culture, we have a lot of scarcity mindset that they're trying to overcome. And all of that fed the decision to join this church. In Jacksonville, we had many, many opportunities. There are so many churches there. We could have picked something smaller, something more familiar. We gave a couple of those a shot, but the message in town very much was that if you wanted to be anybody, and if you especially wanted to keep your kids safe from adolescence and all the things that could go wrong, that you come down here. And again, remember that my parents were in their mid-twenties, they had two little girls, they'd just been financially devastated by losing their farm, 1,500 miles away from all of our family. There was this massive marketing engine on the other side reaching out to parents in Jacksonville to bring their youth to Jacksonville. The whole emphasis was on building this monstrous youth group, and we had a middle school department – we called it Junior High back then – of a thousand kids, and the high school was a thousand kids. The whole focus of the church was that the youth were the hope for the future, and that if you wanted to keep your kids safe, this is what you would do.
So I think my parents publicly and spiritually put a lot of faith and trust in that, but they were also really busy. Gen X kids didn't have a lot of supervision. It was more like, “This is your job, go to church six days a week. We have our job and we've done our best to put you in a safe place and we'll just trust it's going to work out.” And the youth pastors were, at that time, still doing some horrible things. I was hearing some horrible messages, some awful things that are in the book, and I wasn't necessarily telling my parents that part. Because at 13, 14 years old, you're old enough to figure out what's going to upset the people around you and what they want to hear. And I was starting to mold myself, for my own reasons, into a good girl who would obey every rule, who would get approval, feel safety and love, and fit in. So I have my own crisis happening, but it is not really involving my parents, because ‘80s parenting didn't really mix the generational lines that way. You figure it out.
AA: Yeah, for sure. I love the image of the patchwork quilt, that you're getting input from lots of different people, lots of different experiences. If you're willing to talk about it, Tia, I know from the book that one of the formative experiences that you had that affected the way you saw the world in a lot of different ways was an experience with sexual violence. Are you willing to talk about that as an influence on the way your psyche formed?
TL: Yeah. And I will say that as far as sensitive issues go, if it's in the book, I've worked through it so well that we can talk about it. Part of the way I approached my memoir-craft was that I would not retraumatize myself retelling any of these stories. They are very well metabolized so that we can talk about them, because I feel that the ability to talk about it is very important to collective freedom. So, that assault is interesting to me because I wrote it in the book without realizing the severity of it in my life. It was a pivotal moment for me, I was 13 years old, but it wasn't until an editor read it and pointed to that as my first “assault” that I even called it that. And I had been divorced and was, well, 45 years old at that point in the writing process. But the scene in the book is that I had had a very hard time making friends, so I made a friend with somebody who was of the more rebellious, independent nature, and we got into some sexual experimentation with boys, and one of those boys assaulted me. It scared me so badly that I quickly repented and fit into the mold with all of the knee-jerk reaction, solo decision making of a 13-year-old who doesn't know what to do and has no language for what happened and was deeply ashamed. I felt like a lot of the warnings that I'd been told would happen had happened, and it was attributed to my sin and that I needed to repent.
So I internalized this, I suppressed it, and it really only came out in the manuscript because when you start putting scenes together for a book, you have to trace your decisions backwards. Why did I make this decision? How did I end up here? How did I end up here? And I kept unraveling backwards, and that's why, for example, my early childhood is mentioned in the book, because it turned out to be really important to how I broke free later. And I didn't know that until I went through the healing journey of writing. That's why I always tell people to write their stories, because the discoveries will surprise you. So, that assault happened and it really was a pivotal, inciting event in my journey to being the best little good girl I could be.
AA: Yeah. Because as you said, the lessons that you were taught at church was that obedience would keep you safe from some of those very things, right? So that made you retreat into the structure even more.
TL: It's never the boys' fault, it's never the system's fault. If you want to stay safe, you just need to obey better.
AA: Yeah, yeah. That leads us to your later teenage years and your courtship experiences. Can you talk about that in general, kind of the theory and practice of courtship in general, but then what that was like for you with your then-became-husband?
TL: Mm-hmm, yeah. The whole concept of courtship as we understand it today was just on the cusp of the fundamentalist families in our church. And I am just a little bit old enough to have dodged the worst of it, and again, I had the kind of parents who would not have done the model the way that it's prescribed just a few years later in books like Josh Harris's I Kissed Dating Goodbye, for example, that really laid out father courtship selection. So it was in the conversation around us. But the gist of courtship is that you are to remain a virgin and pure before marriage, and your father, your parents, because they know you better than you know yourself, will select a partner for you and they will guide you through this courtship and engagement process. And then you will be passed from your father to your new husband.
My version of that, as somebody who was getting kind of a diluted influence of it, was that my friends were in deeper, so I was getting their influence of what they wanted with their fathers, but also in my mind, I had clocked that the way you knew God's best for your life was that he would tell you, “I'm God's best for you and I want to marry you.” We didn't talk about chemistry or compatibility or what you need to really look for in a spouse. When we talked about that, like what you should look like in a future mate, it was always like “Godly behavior” and “will he pray with your family?” It has really nothing to do with two people becoming good partners and life mates, like we could talk about in psychology. Which blows my mind, because I think they just assumed that young people are horny and they like each other and so we need to get them married quickly before we have a bunch of unmarried babies, children born out of wedlock. So my whole goal was to just be a virgin on my wedding day, and I had to fight hard to do that because he wanted to have sex before we were married, but I made it. Not assault free, and not violation free, but the actual deed was successful. And then I was raped three times on my wedding night. It was not the reward they promised, and it didn't have the outcome that I had spent the last 10 years hearing would be so beautiful and sacred and holy. And then I was married and stuck, and that really changes everything for a Christian girl.
AA: How were you experiencing it at the time? Because as you tell this story, I thought you did such an amazing job really getting into your head when you were experiencing it so that we could feel that empathy and almost see things through your eyes, while also still having that later narrator with wisdom. But we really could feel things as you felt them. Could you get us into that a little?
TL: Yeah, I'm so glad. That's a writing reflection and a skill that writers can hone. I really wanted this to feel like the reader was with me in the moment and that I wasn't telling it from a higher evolved version of myself, which was controversial from a writing standpoint. A lot of memoir has that older, wiser voice that steps in, and my editor did ask for a little of that here and there. But in the early drafts and for the majority of the book, I wanted you to feel like you were in the scene with me and understand why I made the choices that I made. That part was important. I wanted you to not have more information than I had and feel those emotions that I felt. So I had to get really in my head in order to just write it and not self-edit, and not give myself more skill or discernment or experience. I'm a mom who's raised teenagers at this point, so it was very tempting to write my 19-year-old scenes from a mom's point of view and warn people. But my 19-year-old self did not have that, so I had to really get in my head and just dissociate as she dissociated and go where she went and tell people what it was like. Because everything I did in those scenes informed what happened the next morning or the next year. That is how it happened for me. And I think that has worked, that's the feedback, is that people feel like they were on that journey with me, and they understand now why somebody would stay in violence, why they would feel like they can't get out, and how it malforms your faith and the whole experience of being a Christian wife and mother when you're being abused and your church is saying that this is God's design for your life.
AA: Yeah, you really did nail it. That's exactly my experience as a reader. So, if you can tell us a little bit, just describe what it did feel like to you in your marriage with those conflicting feelings. How aware were you that what was happening to you was sexual assault, that it was rape? I think you weren't aware of that at the time.
TL: It wasn't. No, I had no language for that and I wouldn't have called it that because my mindset at the time was that to say that somebody raped you is mean to them. He's a nice guy and he's trying so hard. And my husband was earnest and passioned for God and very sorry when he caused pain, and I didn't have any perspective to realize that was a cycle and that there was mental illness at play and his own issues. And the impact of patriarchal teaching on men, you know, it toxifies them too. That's all language that we have in 2025, but we didn't have it in 1995. I did know that marriage could be hard, and we talked a lot about that openly. We talked about how suffering aligned you with Christ, and so I knew that it hurt and that I wasn't happy, and I thought, “Well, that's my life. Those are the cards that I drew. That's the bed that I made. I'm here and this is what I have now.” And because I had babies so quickly, divorce is not an option. Death is better than getting a divorce. Again, I'm kind of following what my parents did when they just made the best of a bad situation. That's really what I thought I was doing. It was like, “Okay, these are my lumps. What can I make with it?” And that resourcefulness is two sided. There's a good side to that for survival, but there's also an accommodating that happens and an accepting of what's unacceptable and a very unhappy life. I didn't expect to be happy because nothing in Christianity was saying that I was allowed to be happy on the earth, all my happiness would come in eternity. I just needed to hang in there through my earthful years, and store my pressures up.
AA: Yeah. And it seems like the solutions, when things weren't going well, were always blamed on your lack of obedience or your lack of submission, right?
TL: Exactly.
AA: It seemed like a vicious cycle, too, and that can lead you further and further and further into more fundamentalist ways.
TL: And it’s impossible. I'm imperfect. I was emotional, I was not handling things well. I have ADHD and I'm a little neuro-spicy that way, but we didn't have language for that. So when I was distractible or I would forget something, it was very easy for me to say, “Okay, I just need to keep getting better at this Christian wife stuff, and there are lots of books to help me and lots of mentors.” All the messaging was that if you're just a more pleasing wife, you can bless your husband, and if you bless your husband, then he won't hurt you. He'll feel more stable. I was immersed in all of that and it made sense to me.
AA: And let's talk a little bit more about the toxicity of patriarchy in men's lives. And specifically, I saw this so much with your husband, your ex-husband now. But that patriarchy and that way of thinking, of pushing it off to everybody else, really stunts them emotionally because they never have to confront their own demons. They don't have to do any internal work. They can always blame it on the women in their life and they don't have to learn how to regulate their own nervous systems or confront any of their own weaknesses, so they become really stunted and then sometimes really violent. Can you tell us, where was your husband getting his ideas about gender roles and sex and what he could expect from women, and also his ideas about eroticism? Because it seemed like there were some times that he was being influenced by factors that you didn't really know he was being influenced by.
TL: Oh sure. I almost want to give listeners a hug. These moments are usually epiphanies and connections, so I just want to hug you if you're having one, because it was right in front of me all the time. And this is very relevant right now, because John MacArthur has just died, and John MacArthur was a major primary voice of gender division, complementarianism, patriarchy, submission, staying in abuse. He validated slavery, he validated oppression, he swept abuse under the rug, and he was the big voice of Southern Baptist and evangelical denominations. So that's coming up in the current day conversation because he died this week. John Piper also believes that women should stay in abuse, and has spoken publicly on that before. My husband, who was very devout and very studious, was reading these men, and they all lead to other men, the same way I was reading bible study books and they were leading to other ladies. So we go down this chain, and I do have it mapped out in the book where we are changing churches because he's searching for the right church and the right answer, and every step is another step towards true faith and true Christianity. And the movement’s becoming more reformed at that time, again, largely through MacArthur's influence. Becoming more reformed after you've been Southern Baptist feels like going to college, because you're no longer just evangelizing to people to get them saved. Now you're diving deep into the word of God, and you are getting into these deeper tenets of what it really means to live a Christian life.
“I didn’t expect to be happy because nothing in Christianity was saying that I was allowed to be happy ”
AA: One other question on this particular issue, too, was the role of pornography. And I thought this phrase that you used, “misplaced eroticism”, was so interesting. This is something that I'm still grappling with in, like, incel ideology, of how a man can on one hand, I think, feel genuine… you could call it love, or some sort of distorted form of love, but desire for a woman's companionship. If you think of him as, like, there's a child in there who really wants to be loved and wants to be accepted, right? But it gets warped. And then especially how that can turn into something really violent in pornography. And it seemed like that was something that the church– I don't know about encouragement to watch pornography, but maybe kind of turned a blind eye. Can you talk about the relationship of how that misplaced eroticism took shape?
TL: I'm glad we're talking about this, nobody brings this up in interviews. I think they actually create the drive for porn. And I know that that's like, “Oh my goodness.” You wouldn't think that churches who are fighting porn would also be causing porn, but the root is objectification of women. And modesty culture begins in infancy. We aren't telling men not to look at babies, we are covering our babies. From what my experience is with it, the church was systematically objectifying women and putting them into boxes and roles that they had to serve, and reducing them to body parts that were of use to the patriarchy, and porn takes that and amplifies it. And then when they find out that they're using their eyes to look at porn, then now they have this whole other cycle, this whole other industry of fighting porn, and it becomes this big distraction. What I find is that men who are psychologically healthy and don't objectify women don't have porn problems or violence problems or misogyny problems. So, I do think that it's another situation where they create the problem and then they try to offer the solution for the problem they created.
AA: Wow. It is just staring us in the face, but I don't think I've heard anyone articulate it so clearly. And you bring up in the book, was it Josh Duggar? Could you just mention that really quickly?
TL: Josh Duggar is the oldest Duggar child, and he was aggressively disciplined from infancy. When the Duggars got their TV show, 19 Kids and Counting, he had already been sent to a behavior camp for molesting his four girls, his sisters and two friends. They kept it all on the down low and hid it. And then through the course of the show, about 10 years passed, he gets married, he has a family, he's in numerous scandals including the Ashley Madison cheating scandal. And is eventually arrested for child torture porn, for which he is now serving time in prison. And it is relevant to my story because that's the IBLP, that's the Institute of Basic Life Principles, Bill Gothard's institution that my mentors were grooming me into, even though I never attended a conference. And when I saw the Duggars on TV, I recognized our cult on TV and thought, “Oh, how are they going to do this with cameras in the house?” And then I was in Shiny Happy People that exposed that. But my work became public when I heard people saying that Josh Duggar was a single bad apple, and that this is just an exception in this otherwise lovely family. And I was like, “Oh, hell no.” He's a product of the system and there are more of them than you could fathom. And if we don't start talking about it, this is going to slide right under the radar.
I'm a big believer that a lot of things slip by when people insist they're not possible. It's our cognitive dissonance that we have to check ourselves. If we are thinking something's not possible, we better hella pay attention to the evidence. Are people already saying it has happened? For example, Epstein's List is in the news right now. We have all the survivor accounts. We already know who's on that list because we have survivors saying who's on that list. And yet there's all this outcry for this. We have to know about the men, the men, the men. If you actually look at what's happened, you already have the information. But we don't want to see it. And I know so many people loved or enjoyed watching the car accident on the Duggar family. They thought they were weird, but they couldn't look away. And the temptation with the trad wife movement is to look at this and think it's sweet and innocent, and it's anything but. The only people who can say are the people who've lived it and come out of it. And there are just not very many of us that have done the work to not re-traumatize ourselves and also to be able to clarify exactly what it means to the average American. It means a lot right now. That’s why we have to talk about it.
AA: Yeah, thank you for doing that. And like you said, it's not a one-off, it's a product of the system.
Let's switch gears just a little bit. It's actually kind of a continuation of the story. You were often really isolated, and as you talked about a minute ago, your husband, as he was trying to find the “right” church, tried to isolate you on purpose and move you even farther and farther out from society. But you developed close friendships with two different groups of women, right? One was the church women, and you developed some role models and some older mothers that you were learning from, I guess, as we all do because we all need community, especially as we're raising our little kids. And then there was an online community. Can you talk about those two groups of women and how each one of them influenced you?
TL: Yeah. The first group, I call them in my content my “Gothard fundie mentors” because they were a Bill Gothard's group. We knew them as the special Christians or the super devout Christians in our church congregation because they dressed like they were in Little House on the Prairie, they didn't use birth control, and we knew that because they had enormous families, and they were respected because they were willing to be a little holier than everyone else. So when I was a young mom and I was very afraid of my baby crying through the night and setting my husband off even more, I turned to them for advice, which was very biblical. Titus 2 says to let the older women teach the younger to love their husbands. And I thought I was being extra obedient to humble myself and say, “Please teach me,” even though I knew a lot about infant care at that point. I had been a daycare worker and a nanny for several years and I didn't have any problems taking care of my newborn, but I had a lot of problems in understanding how I was going to control the uncontrollability of infant care and noise and just the things that happen when you're taking care of a small person. So I asked for that advice, and unbeknownst to me, they were looking for little acolytes that they could bring into their fundamentalist group. So we became their students, my husband and I. He was with the men and I was with the women, and this was about six to eight women in the nursing room. It seemed very innocent and warm and the kind of thing that a young mom would be very grateful for. It wasn't until years passed and I realized the things that they were teaching me are oppressive and unhappy and contributing to the abuse in my family. They were asking me to do things I wasn't comfortable doing, for example, blanket train and switch my babies, which is the practice of switching babies to make them stay on a blanket.
AA: Switching as in hitting, right?
TL: Yeah, using a rod, though we used glue sticks. And I didn't want to after– there's a major story in the book where my third baby has a heart defect and dies, and when I had gone through that experience in the hospital and the time away and everything, I couldn't go back to my mentors in the same way, because I knew that the kinds of things they were going to tell me I wasn't willing to do anymore. I was a changed person and I didn't understand how or why, I just knew I couldn't go backwards. But I still had this need for community and friendship. So it was conveniently the same year that the internet really took off. And I went to the internet and I looked for other homeschooling moms, and I found this group of other kinds of Christians. These were more secular Christians, these were self-educators. The homeschooling movement was starting to gain traction, but that didn't mean it was only Gothard homeschoolers. It was also people who wanted their kids to go to college really young or people who valued classical education, which was just beginning to rise because of Susan Wise Bauer's book, which is closely titled to mine but totally unintentionally, her book is called The Well-Trained Mind. That was going like wildfire through the homeschooling world.
So these forums popped up, and I got to participate in them and bond with people that I'm still friends with today. We formed this society called the Trapdoor Society. My friend Julie named it that for a theater reference. And we self-educated, and it's one of the most fun plot twists of my life. It's still my beating heart to learn and to study. I never got to go to college, so I feel like I'm living a college education in real time, and Trapdoor is a big piece of that.
AA: Yeah, that was so amazing. As those two parallel parts of your life were developing, I felt like there were two of the different parts of Tia. And this intellectual, which you clearly are innately, was given room to run, to be writing and to be exploring ideas with these very curious minds, with other like-minded women.
TL: But still really safe, you know? They were still in a Christian worldview, they were still home-educating their children. We were all living a very alternative lifestyle at a time where it was still very unusual to do that. And we were reading things like Jane Eyre, you know, so it wasn't like in-your-face feminism.
AA: Yeah, you're not reading The Feminine Mystique or something.
TL: Not yet!
AA: Yeah, haha. But in the meantime, you're also developing your skills as a writer by blogging about your trad wife lifestyle. Can you talk about that a little bit?
TL: Yeah. My brother-in-law, bless his heart, gave me a domain and my first website as a Christmas present one year. He's a web developer, and it changed my life. I have always been a writer, but I had not had an outlet to share it publicly. So I became what would be the equivalent of a trad wife influencer at the time, because I was blogging about our traditional lifestyle and homesteading and homeschooling, and it was called Living Deliberately. I had a knack for it and I had a knack for search engine optimization, which again, was vocabulary that was evolving. It took off. I had 80,000 hits a week, sometimes a day. It was a popular blog for a while in a whole network of popular blogs. A little era of the internet that was sweet.
AA: Yeah, and amazing. It really was allowing you to develop. And I do have to say too, Tia, on a personal level, just how much I related to this. I look back on some of my early blogging and I can see like, oh, she's such a good writer and she wants to be engaging with interesting ideas, but such a huge percentage of it was like faith affirming stories and just such religious language when I was a young mom, also. And I can see this persona that I was projecting into the world of this devout woman, but I also was trying to develop myself as an intellectual. And not to say that those two things are not compatible, because they are, and some people are able to flourish in all of the ways, but for me, because I know that I was struggling with a faith crisis personally, it kind of breaks my heart a little bit to watch that in my writing. You can see the tension that I'm starting to feel, and I felt that in your book so much, too. And you wrote that you eventually realized that balancing these two worlds wasn't possible, that that became impossible for you to have your fundamentalist Christian life and also the ideas and the pull toward independence, that that wasn't possible. Can you talk about that tipping point? What happened next in your life?
TL: Yes. There’s so much more about this even since writing the book, because it was a big part of the second book that's coming out next May. So, indoctrination interferes with child development, and the indoctrination that I was under taught us to split ourselves. We had our lost self and then we had a saved self. We had a good self and a bad self. They talk about this all the time. Your sin nature and your higher nature, and you want to feed the good wolf and starve the bad wolf. You learn to bifurcate from a very young age and put the best presentation of yourself forward to be safe and accepted and have belonging and love. And you're going to use the right lingo, you're going to behave the same way, you're going to fall into the uniformity. So much of this experience is learning to dress right, talk right, modulate your voice, perform what it means to be a good Christian girl. And if that's not the truth of where you are all of the time, which it's not, I know you have a war inside of yourself and that war is a temporary condition. You can't sustain it or you'll break. And I think that's what happened.
These two groups, this line I was trying to walk, they're mutually exclusive. I couldn't continue to grow as Tia and be in this world, and I couldn't sustain the world, let alone bring real Tia and let her grow there. So I was at a life or death moment, for me, before we even get to the hostage situation. Because I was willing to quit. I was breaking under the weight of that. I could not live in some realms and die in others, and I knew I was going to have to kill part of myself off. It's like a death of the psyche that you just can't sustain. Your form can't and your mind can't. The definition of a nervous breakdown, right? I mean, I was right on the cusp of it and I couldn't take it. And parallel to that, I was getting excommunicated for my writing about Mary, of all things, and not putting my writing in my husband's name. And my husband's mental illness was ramping up and he was having his own psychotic break, so the instability all came to this giant head. That's what makes the memoir feel like a novel, in that there's this climax that not everybody gets in their life, I think. But mine definitely did come together that way.
AA: Yeah. And I won't have you tell that part of the story because listeners should buy the book and find out what happens. As you say, it’s almost hard to believe that it was your real life because it was such an amazingly crafted story. And that is also partly your skill as a writer, because the way you set it up and then the way it goes was really amazing to read. But without kind of giving away some of those events, I'd love you to talk about some things that did finally enable you to get out, because you were in this very dangerous situation. I'd love for you to talk about what enabled you to get out and then how you healed afterward, because the whole end of the book is this incredibly inspiring journey afterward. And you are, just like talking to you now, this incredibly wise and grounded person that it's amazing that you've been through everything that you have. So as we wrap up our conversation, I'd love to know the epilogue and how you've healed afterwards.
TL: When I left, it was catastrophic and complete. There was absolutely no going back. We all knew it. That’s a sudden severance of your life. You don't get to have an extended divorce like where you're thinking about it and weighing and getting counsel. None of that was true for me. It was an immediate shock into a new environment in a lot of ways, which paralleled the experience I'd had as a child with an immediate shock in a new environment and my nervous system, which I didn't know that language, but my nervous system was definitely feeling that parallel. I had four kids who'd also been through all of that trauma. They were 10 and younger. My baby was two when we left and my oldest was 10. And yeah, it's a both/and. I had to put my life back together, build a sense of self, heal, and at the same time, all of the tools and resources for that were being popularized and developed. Religious trauma wasn’t a language that was available in 2007, but just about 18 months to two years later would be. Inner child work, trauma therapy, complex PTSD, TDMDR, some of the modalities that I've done, parts work, internal family systems, all of these things have come into being through my recovery. And all I did at the beginning was decide, “You've got a second chance. You're going to take it by the horns. You're going to commit to yourself. This is not going to be your whole life.” I could not fathom the idea that that 13 years got to be my whole story, and that would be all I did with my life. I was only 33 years old and I wanted my life back, and so I knew I wasn't going to get my children's babyhood or my twenties or anything like that back, but I knew there was more ahead than all that had been. I knew that I had a lot ahead of me if I could learn how to do it.
I did fall into a second high-control marriage, but it wasn't abusive in the same way. It looked very benevolent, and so I got to learn about benevolent patriarchy firsthand, which has also been useful to me in my work. That husband asked to be dismissed when I sold my book, because he did not want to be married to a writer. He liked me better when I was subservient and quiet and sweet and devout, and I wasn't by the end of my healing journey. I was independent and self-developed and actualized, and patriarchs don't really know how to cooperate – co-operate, the co- part – with that kind of independence. So a lot of life change has started to happen from 2022, when I sold the book and also got divorced, to today.
And the second book, which I can't tell you the title of because we haven't revealed it yet, but it's coming out next May, and it's a self-help book for navigating the journey of survival and finding hope again after religious trauma. It's not memoir, it's self-help on how I navigated that so that other people can, because it's overwhelming to come out into the world and be unsure of who to trust and unsure of what to try and what works and doesn't. And everything's expensive. There are some tragedies in my healing story. I didn't get to be a healed mom while my kids were growing up. I wish that I could go back even eight years and know the words 'emotional regulation', that would've been helpful. If I'd had medication for panic attacks, that would've been really helpful. It’s hard to raise four children in a high-control marriage, a second marriage, and that's a grief, you know? But grief work has also been really important to healing, and admitting complicity and carrying it and giving back and turning around to help other survivors is all part of the healing process. So it's ongoing. I don't think deconstruction or trauma healing are things that are ever finished. I think it'll be true of me for the rest of my life, and that's why I have made it my endeavor. It is my day job, it is my calling, it is the focus of my whole work. Because even though the tragedy that I lived through is not going to be my whole life, probably the material that they gave me is a lifetime of material.
I wish that I could go back even eight years and know the words 'emotional regulation'
“ I wish that I could go back even eight years and know the words ‘emotional regulation’”
AA: Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. I love that glass-half-full way to frame that. It's great. I do have to say, too, something that was palpable the whole time I read the book was how much you love your children, like your fierce love and protection of your children. How much you actually did trust your instincts. And going back to the blanket training, I didn't have any exposure to that, but the sleep training, and when the book mentioned Gary Ezzo, I was like, “Is that the Baby Wise guy?” Everybody was reading On Becoming Baby Wise when I was having my first child, and I tried it and sobbed, bawled my eyes out on the couch with pillows over my head while I let my baby scream. And by the time I had my second child, I just couldn't do it. But I bring that up for two reasons, and now this is a tangent, but how these ideologies really do make their way into mainstream American culture. I had no idea that Gary Ezzo was associated with–
TL: That’s such an important portal. Because he had a secular version of his book that he sold in Barnes and Noble, and he had the Christian version that we studied on Sunday nights. So here you have the perfect example of material that was rising in churches that were becoming more authoritarian and patriarchal. Gary Ezzo is assigning manipulation to newborns and this horrible sin nature to newborns. He's an easy entry point to Michael Pearl, who's talking about the sin nature of newborns and James Dobson's most extreme stuff, too. So you have that whole end of it. But then he thought he had a market in the mainstream for sleep training, so they would come out with these series of books, Baby Wise and Child Wise, they even have a Teen Wise, and they have all the spiritual references stripped out of them. They’re presented as this scientific, psychologically vetted resource for parents, and it's none of those things. It's bogus and it's bunk and babies have died from it. And eventually he lost his publisher and he lost all of that footing in that respect that he'd had. But the trail had been done. There are broken mothers and broken newborns. I did the same thing, you know, the story’s in the book, but it was a terrible heartbreak. And my son doesn't hold it against me, but now knowing what I know about attachment parenting and attachment wounds, sometimes knowledge increases the grief. I knew that was happening but I didn't have vocabulary for it at the time. It was breaking my heart nonetheless, and now I know why. Now I have language and power to combat it, and thankfully my grandchildren aren’t being raised that way, and that's been something to redeem.
AA: Yeah. And I brought that up also because I felt that so much in the book, how much you loved your children so fiercely, would do anything for them, and that you did trust your intuition a lot, actually, and protected them. It could have been so much worse, but your motherly wisdom and intuition knew better. And not to diminish the grief, for sure, but there is something really powerful, I think, about processing that with your kids as they're older. Because all of us, including them, will make mistakes and do the best with the information we have at the moment. And to be able to say, “We're all on this journey together. When we know better, we do better.” And that process of repair, I think, is actually a really beautiful model in families, too.
TL: I have so much hope from it. Right now we're seeing a resurgence of the same patriarchal parenting, the same top-down trad things. The difference is, you just said it, the information we had at the time. We truly didn't have counter-information in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We absolutely do now. We have more information on science, research, testimonials, memoirs, firsthand accounts than ever before in history. So today's parents, when they're presented with information, I hope you say, “Are there survivors from this? What are the outcomes?” Because there is a trail where you can find out how it worked for someone. Listen to that wisdom, because that is exactly what we didn’t have, and this is how we advance and learn from our mistakes so that each generation truly does do better than the ones that came before it.
AA: Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm sad that the hour has passed already. This has been such an enlightening and wonderful conversation. I'm wondering if we can, as we wrap up, have you share with listeners any action items that would be applicable, maybe for those who are listening who are currently religious and those who are not. What would some action items be?
TL: Yeah, so number one is always listen to the discordant in your system. If you feel a defense mechanism rising to protect a viewpoint or an experience, if you feel a nudge that something's a little off, you don't have to know why right away. Just trust that you're feeling that. You do have computers now, so go ahead and tack “survivor” on the end of any suggestion someone gives you, or “outcome”, and find out what those other things are. Also, I think right now it's really important to read books, not just nonfiction books that inform you, but read for pleasure, read for joy. Read broadly, read bravely. And the other one is to be happy. Patriarchy and fundamentalism hate joy. They are killjoys, literally. They will ruin and regulate literally everything, from what you watch to what you do to what you wear. Everything has to be uniform and the same. Go ahead and break something. Paint something and don't follow the color rules. Do something that's out of your norm, like turn left instead of right when you go to the grocery store. Every time we break those kinds of rote patterns, we're challenging our mind to think more openly, and that makes us less easily controlled by high-control forces that want to exploit us. The action steps are kind of ordinary, but that is the resistance.
AA: Perfect. I love that. Well, I am so excited for your new book coming out next year, and I will anxiously await the big title reveal. In the meantime, Tia Levings, thank you so much. And actually, if you can tell us really quickly where listeners can find your work on social media and everywhere else that you are doing work.
TL: I'm @tialevings on all the social platforms. My substack is called “What the Fundamentalist?!”, so tialevings.substack.com, and my website is tialevings.com. I have a fundie cheat sheet on there if you don't know some of the insider terms of the things that we talk about in this form of patriarchy. And A Well-Trained Wife is available everywhere books are sold.
AA: And again, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Go out and buy it today. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tia, for being here.
TL: Thank you for this. So much fun.
