Christian Patriarchy and Abuse: Tia Levings on Leaving High-Control Religion

What does religious trauma actually look like inside high-control Christian environments?

In this episode of Faithful Politics, we sit down with Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife and I Belong to Me, to unpack her experience inside Christian fundamentalism and her journey out. Tia shares what life looked like inside a patriarchal, high-control religious system and how those environments shape identity, relationships, and personal agency.

We explore how theology, culture, and authority structures work together in these spaces. Tia explains how belief systems are reinforced through obedience, how questioning is discouraged, and how survivors often internalize blame for harmful outcomes. She also discusses how movements like the Institute in Basic Life Principles and figures like Doug Wilsoninfluence broader religious and political culture.

The conversation goes deeper into the concept of religious trauma and how it can mirror symptoms associated with PTSD. Tia walks through common patterns survivors experience, including loss of identity, fear responses, and difficulty trusting themselves after leaving. She also explains why rebuilding a sense of self is often harder than leaving the environment itself.

We also examine the connection between high-control religion and broader political movements, including Christian nationalism. Tia highlights how these belief systems scale beyond individual households into larger cultural and political influence.

Finally, Tia shares what healing looks like. Her latest book, I Belong to Me, focuses on recovery, autonomy, and rebuilding identity after leaving high-control environments. This episode offers a practical and honest look at what it takes to move forward.

Buy the book, I Belong to Me A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781250374271

Guest Bio

Tia Levings is an author and advocate focused on life inside high-control religious environments and the recovery that follows. She is the author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy and I Belong to Me. Her work centers on religious trauma, deconstruction, and helping survivors rebuild identity and autonomy after leaving fundame

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:16

It was in two thousand seven when I escaped. We did not have language around religious trauma or deconstruction or ex-evangelical Christian nationalism. While I grew up steeped in it and I definitely participated in it in my marriage, it hadn't reached quite the national, you know, structure that we're at today, you know, where it's in the highest levels of our government. The villains and the players are still the same, so I knew it was coming, but you know, I didn't, I was very focused on trying to develop a sense of self and trying to find out if I could even heal at all, like if that was even accessible, because the message in 2007 was if you're traumatized and broken, then you're gonna always be broken. That's you know, you just need to accept that about yourself and make the best of your can't, you can't. And I didn't accept that. I do not want my hard story to be my whole life.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's going on, Josh? Hey, how's it going well? Uh, it's going well, thanks. And today we have joining with us Tia Levings. She is an author and advocate who focuses on life inside high control religious environments and the recovery that follows. Her work shines a light on the abuses of Christian fundamentalism and offers contextual insights into the realities of religious trauma. She wrote a memoir called A Well-Trained Wife, My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, which detailed her experience in a fundamentalist subculture, shaped by patriarchy and strict authority, and has a new book, I Belong to Me. Let me see I oh everyone here. I belong to me focuses on life after leaving. And we're just so glad to have her on the show. So welcome to Faith of Politics, Tia. Thank you so much. You are very welcome. What's what's funny, or maybe it's not funny, I'm I'm familiar with your first book, Well Trained Wife. I we and I'm convinced it's in this house somewhere. So, like when when this book was sent to me in my brain, I was thinking I was looking for a blue-colored book that was similar to that. I go to my wife, I'm like, have you seen a book by Tia Levy? She's like, I don't know. And I'm like, it's blue, it's got a blue cover.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

She's like, ah no, mission accomplished because when it got designed, they wanted that visual association, and you just demonstrated it. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Dang it. So whoever whoever is in charge of that that whole process, you know, give them give them a raise. But yeah. So you wrote a book. I belonged to me. Yeah. So explain to us why why this book was necessary and what what does this book accomplish that a well-trained wife didn't accomplish?

SPEAKER_03 2:47

Yeah. So a well-trained wife is my personal memoir of entrance and escape in Christian patriarchy. And the back 25% of it does include my healing process. That was a tribute to my editor who was like, we need to see a connection between the woman who left and the woman that we meet online today, because at that point I was doing a lot of online advocacy for survivors and able to use my own voice and speak articulately. And, you know, obviously I didn't seem like a recent escapee. So, like, how did I do that? And how I did that was really a trailblazing kind of experience. I was in 2007 when I escaped, we did not have language around religious trauma or deconstruction or ex-evangelical Christian nationalism, while I grew up steeped in it and I definitely participated in it in my marriage. It hadn't reached quite the national, you know, structure that we're at today, you know, where it's in the highest levels of our government. The villains and the players are still the same, so I knew it was coming, but you know, I didn't, I was very focused on trying to develop a sense of self and trying to find out if I could even heal at all, like if that was even accessible. Because the message in 2007 was if you're traumatized and broken, then you're gonna always be broken. That's you know, you just need to accept that about yourself and make the best of your can't, you can. And I didn't accept that. I do not want my hard story to be my whole life, and I didn't want to be trapped in the past, and I didn't want to cycle through the same patterns and behaviors, and I also was shouldering way too much responsibility for what happened. I wasn't holding the system accountable and I wasn't talking to other survivors, and so you know, all of that became evident during those 10 years of very in-depth, concerted trauma therapy to try to reclaim my life. And so when I launched a well-trained wife and I was talking about it online, very quickly my DMs filled with Me Too stories, fellow survivors, a community had formed around deconstruction and ex-evangelicals. And I was having these warm conversations of solidarity with comrades and fellows. You know, we were all trying to find our way. And it's very individual. What people come from is different. Where they get into the entry point of being able to ask questions again is different. And a warm-hearted, nurturing person, so these conversations were that way. And so I just really kind of just developed very organically. This is the most logical follow-up to a well-trained wife. It gives survivors coming out now something that we never had in, you know, 10 years ago, and which is a guidebook of like you're not alone, and what you're gonna encounter on this journey is different than you're gonna find in any other trauma landscape. There's some unique challenges here, and you just need to know that you're valid and normal and that there's hope for you, and that you're you know not alone. We can we can work through this. And so it's a patient book, it's conversational, it's a love letter to my fellow survivors.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Yeah, that's I really appreciate everything, you know, behind the the book and the story. It's it's cool to hear be able to talk to the author and really hear like what's going on internally and what was going on in your head and the experience of it. I think that's a really unique opportunity that I get to do that that I love being able to do that, right, on this podcast. And you know, I I obviously the book is bringing out a form of um well, bringing it at least an understanding that certain forms and maybe all forms of toxic religion cause real trauma. And I I would love for you to talk about the the realness of the trauma that toxic religion causes and why is agency, selfhood, and like spiritual autonomy, like why is that the answer? Uh yeah, that that uh that that you've you've discovered. I'd love to hear that.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

Yeah, that's a really long question as far as like the different categories of my life that my brain was just cycling through.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Like you know, because answer whatever part you want to.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

No, it's a journey, right? Like even using the phrase toxic religion, like what's that? You know, so much of it's evidence-based, and what fruit is this bearing in your life, and what what bags are you left holding for the ideologies that you choose to support? I was a very ardent, determined believer who tried really hard to be a good girl and give this my best. And I, you know, most of my life heard that this is the right way to be, that there was a very clear sense of right and wrong and morality, and that we had it. And we had it, we had a corner on this. And I gave that my all. I bel I hook, line, and sinker, you know, really believed everything. And the pudding, you know, it was the proof in the pudding. It wasn't the out the outcomes kept lining up in ways that were not as promised. And at some point, you have to deal with that, you know. Like I was able to bypass a lot of it. I was able to push it aside and say, you know, this isn't, this must be user error. It's must be my fault, you know. I stayed in that territory for a very long time. That that it's entirely my fault. There's nothing wrong with the system because it's God, you know, and and I grew up understanding you don't question God and you don't question, especially male interpreted presentation of God. If if God, if a man says God says this, then that's that's the gospel and you obey it. And, you know, it was not privy to the way the movement was changing over the past 50 years, you know, I just I could feel this narrowing, but I thought it was devotion. And I thought that, you know, it was everybody had the best motives, and I didn't understand political power growing up, and that, you know, other than our benevolent wish for America that we would make this a godly nation and it would be better for everyone, and there would be some resistance, but they just needed to eventually agree with us and it would be fine. You know, it alienated me from much of society and from balance and from nuance and health. And, you know, when I encountered these issues, I wasn't pointed in the direction of a psychologist or, you know, somebody who could maybe help me work through this. It was always back into this closed loop system. And we were really suffering from it. So toxic religion, yeah, I mean, I I call that kind of graduate level deconstruction because in the beginning I was just dealing with toxic relationships and I was dealing with toxic outcomes, and I had not gotten to a place where I could look at the system and the religion itself as a contributor. That's even with occult escape, because I really, really did believe that this must be our fault as a family and my fault as a person. And and and so, you know, that's something I got to later when I had more capacity and I'd healed to a place where it's safe to ask those questions of the system and it's safe to examine it. And, you know, we're supposed to be fruit investor in fruit inspectors. The Bible says that, but I didn't want to look at that fruit. I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to, I didn't want to know there were more like me. It broke my heart, the idea that there would be more people who'd suffered through what I suffered. So yeah, all of that. And then coming out of it, realizing that a lot of people assumed the worst part to recover from was the violence, and it wasn't. It was that I had no sense of self. And so having to contend with indoctrination, the impacts of indoctrination on my young childhood through, that's that turned out to be the most difficult thing to sort through in healing.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

W with your um your conversations with other survivors, are there are there similarities, structural, environmental, you know, congregational like things that that you you know you find other survivors are are explaining or saying, you know, like where they would tell you something and you would you would nod your head because you understand exactly what it is that they're talking about. Like are what what are the common common themes?

SPEAKER_03 10:42

Yeah, so it's funny because when you're in a movement, you don't necessarily know it's a movement, you know, you don't really know that that you're part of something. I knew that I was a good Southern Baptist. I knew that I, you know, had signed this covenant um membership when I joined Doug Wilson's church plant in Tennessee. So I knew, you know, like there some of these groups, there were people who had similar s experiences because we belonged to the same group. What was more surprising was to see the patterns that crossed denominational lines. So understanding like the IBLP for existence, for example, is a big part of my early marriage story. And I was never a financial donor to IBLP. I never signed anything that said I joined this. They were just a force in my church, and I came under the mentorship of people who were proselytizing that. So it's surprising to pull back, you know, 20,000 feet and see, oh my goodness, this was a national movement I was a part of. What? You know, like that's the power of people sharing their experiences and talking. And one of the biggest pieces of feedback I get from a well-trained wife is someone who says to me almost every day, I didn't have your exact experience, but I could relate, or I was on the same path, and without a few little turns, that would have been my story too. And we have these like insider codes and you know, patterns that we recognize in one another. And it's that's what brings that like fellowship of survivorship to it. The deeper stuff, the the heavier parts of my story, I didn't know if there were others who had experienced the same things that I did. And I was very hesitant to say them out loud and to share them and to write them. And I had this idea that if I was going to reach just one woman in her kitchen who had maybe experienced the same thing, that it would be enough. I got that before the book was published just by talking about it online. So yeah, I mean from from big-wide movements like the Southern Baptist Convention to the IBLP, to you know, Doug's Covenant Reformed Group and and wife spanking, you know, like they all have I'm not the only one, you know. This is a this is a movement and and and that's my work is to uncover it by exposing it. But there's always solidarity.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

I mean, it's just like it's it's all it's laughable and yet it's not, of course, right because it's it seems absurd. Because it's so real. Yeah. And that there are actually people doing this is super scary. Yeah. Right? And it's like this is like it it's just wild. And I I would love to think about like with your you you're very honest, right, about your story and this. Obviously, it's very autobiographical. And one of the things though that that is interesting to me is that there's this combination of like theology, culture, expectations that you grow up or that you're part of it, and it doesn't just like it's not just ideas, right? It's like these shape every part of your life, they shape your like your nervous system, how your nervous system reacts, how you're seeing and thinking about what is good and bad. And I would love to like how how did you know, even thinking about the shame, right? You describe it's not just shame around sexuality, right? But it's a reshaping of how you saw yourself in the mirror, how people see themselves in the mirror that go through similar things. And I would just love for you to talk about like what what was the what happened in that shaping that was so damaging? So that the people that haven't read the book aren't aware of the story, they can hear it and they can go, oh wow, I want to learn more about that, I want to understand that because that's oh my goodness. Like, I can't believe that was happening. What what what was going on?

SPEAKER_03 14:40

That is you're really good at asking these multifaceted questions, and I love that because it's not simple and it's not static. It's not like one thing happened to me. This is a cumulative, complex issue. Complex PTSD is real, you know, and you're touching on it. So one of the big things that you're describing here is that these ideologies all have practical manifestations. When a pastor preaches a sermon, he's a lot of times dealing with an ideology or a scripture, a concept, a teaching, a belief. But it has to have a practical application in the home. This is where the three-step sermon comes in, right? You know, like here's your three steps. My pastor was very famous for that, Jerry Vines. But you these practical manifestations are what women in the home are a lot of times implementing and doing and and teachers are trying to interpret. And so, you know, it starts in my story with I'm four years old, and this is the decade of my life where we were just cultural Christians. My parents weren't fundamentalists. We were, well, I mean, my mom went to a brethren church growing up, so it was pretty strict. But we went Christian Christmas, Easter, a few Sundays a year in between, you know, and God was important. But at Sunday school, I learned that I was gonna burn in a literal lake of fire and I needed to make prayer of salvation, you know, to be saved. I didn't understand because I was four, I was a baby, that I was making the spiritual dis decision for the rest of my life. And that if I ever questioned it or stepped away from it, that would be seen as, you know, sin, a backsliding, disobedience. That's a tremendous amount of weight to put on a four-year-old's shoulders. I was also precocious and intelligent. I was already reading. So I internalized deeply the guilt that I was responsible for something as bloody and heinous as the cross as a little child. It was traumatic to me to hear that and to understand that something I did put Jesus on the cross. And then to that, you know, we moved to Florida when I was 10, and I'm in this megachurch culture, and I'm very quickly steeped in strict purity cultures, evangelism. This way is the right way, the wrong way, this is your whole world. You should not be friends with lost people, you're there to evangelize, you know, this is this is your path. And by the time I'm 18, you have one outcome. You should be a Christian wife and mother. And so your future's foreclosed on, you don't have any more possibilities, this is it. And I happen to want that for myself. You know, I wanted to be a wife and mother. I didn't think that was the only thing I could do, but I didn't not want it. And that personality trait in myself, this feeling like I am high capacity and I can do many things, shows up a lot in my story of like, I don't have a problem with what you're telling me. I'll do it to the best of my ability. But I I think God's big and expansive and loving, and I want both. And I didn't think that was incompatible. But they were telling me eventually, you know, that is very incompatible. There's only this you can do. And so the isolation sets in over slowly, over time, you know, your ideologies are narrowing because what my husband was doing, my very devout husband, he was looking for answers from the Bible and from his spiritual leaders on how to be a godly husband and father. And he was continually pointed to patriarchal and higher control resources. So we're narrowing very slowly over time. And it just seems like we are searching God's own heart. We want to follow, we want to be good, we want to be obedient. And it isn't until I realized this is gonna kill us. Like we're we're not okay. We gotta go. And I tried in 2004 to get a divorce. I told my Christian counselor at my big mega church, you know, that this is what had been presented to me, meaning domestic discipline, meaning that, you know, I was in domestic violence, I was not safe. And his answer was, you need to subject yourself more, you need to honor your husband more, and that if you submitted, you wouldn't be in danger. So, wow, you know, like when you know your church hasn't got your back, what are you gonna do? It would be another seven years before I would break free, but or three, I'm sorry, 2004 to 2007. And it got a lot worse after that. So, you know, this is complex and accumulative.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

You you mentioned earlier Doug Wilson, and that's a name that a lot of people will probably be familiar with if they watch the CNN special. But I'd love for you just to kind of talk a little bit about like just the the environment, the teaching, the crack, I believe it's called, the C R E C like like what what what's so special or unique about kind of like Doug Wilson's church?

SPEAKER_03 19:14

It's funny to me because he's my villain from 20 years ago, and here he is on even more prominent, you know, the villain to the country now. Doug's an outlier. He had to form his own denomination, you know, can't doesn't play well with others. He has to be the boss. He has his own publishing arm, his own church, his own everything, you know, it's always the Doug Show. And he has this kind of humble grandpa shtick that he uses to be kind of non-threatening and non-assuming. And in interviews, he'll talk about things that are gonna happen 200 years from now, even though they're happening right now. Like he's made a lot of groundwork in the past 20 years. So it's really important to look at the fruit and the outcome of Doug's ministry more than what comes out of his mouth. That's extremely vital, and that's why I value so much that survivors have been able to come forward and say, actually, reality check, here's what it's like to live in a Wilson church, here's what it's like to be excommunicated and formally shunned. I was excommunicated and shunned because I put my writing in my own name and not my husband's. And I wrote about mu Mary, the mother of God, and I said, She shows us that God needed a woman, and they lost their minds. You know, that was enough to get me the Theotokos I wrote about, and that was enough to get me excommunicated and and horrible things said to me about my children being better off drowned than with than with me as a heretic, you know, awful things that come from your pastor. But Wilson's whole ministry is focused on the family as the model. Um, it's a theonomy that applies the Old Testament to modern-day penal code. And it can look like we were coming from this kind of shallow Baptist convert energy where you're just focused on converting people, and then the question was, well, now what? I'm a Christian and I want to grow deeper in my faith. Now what? And Calvinism was rising through evangelicism in the 90s, so we became Calvinists and we followed that path and that track. And his view of God is, you know, it's angry, it's warlike, it's domineering, it's violent. We could go on and on, but you know, it really the fact that Pete Heggseth, who belongs to that church, is talking about Armageddon and brings us to the present moment. It's it's alarming and it's a five alarm fire.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is. Uh, we have been following this like you know very closely, Will and I, looking at everything that's happening, the worship services that are happening, that they have going on at the Department of Defense or War, I know they changed this or Department of War, right? So they the the worship services that are going on. We've been following what's happening with Doug Wilson, and it's extremely concerning. And I just gotta ask, like, when you were there, like you know, I know that you got to this point, right, where you're like, This isn't this isn't right, I've got to change. Um, something has to change. When when do you think was the first time? Like, were you ever sitting there and you're hearing like Dominionist theology, or you're hearing this thing, you're Just like this doesn't make sense. Like, how can God be like so loving? But you're telling me that if I like talk about like married that I'm gonna burn in hell for eternity, but that doesn't seem like that's a love. So when did that like cognitive dissonance? How early did that start? What was that?

SPEAKER_03 22:35

Yeah, to some extent, this is a through line in my whole life. I'm a skeptical person. I'm curious. I love asking questions. I love hearing both sides of the story. I love digging down underneath the surface of things. I love looking at outcomes and you know, comparing them to the promises. So some of that is just baked into who Tia is. The biggest crack came after my daughter died in 99. So my daughter, this is an open spoiler and a well-trained wife. My daughter was born with a fatal heart defect and she lived for two months. And we were in the process of converting to Calvinism during that time. So the conversations that were being had around me were about infant baptism, predestination, election, and they couldn't agree. Was my baby burning in hell? Was she elect because Doug has a line where he talks about a non-elect fruit can't come from an elect tree kind of a thing? And so, like the idea that there was a lot of pressure on me to grieve for a set amount of time and then get back to it. You know, I was supposed to have more babies, get back to being a quiverful, get back to raising an army for God, get back to, you know, counting God's for my blessings and being thankful that she um was taken. And I was a long time from being able to process any of that. You know, this cracked me open. And I was not able to be the same person I was before her, and I didn't want to be. I didn't want to act like my daughter just didn't exist, which is what it would have taken. And so mentally, my skepticism really cracked at that point. I was like, I'm not believing everything I hear, hook, line, and sinker anymore. I am starting to have these little internal arguments. But I had this idea that I'm a can-do kid and I can, I can work think my way through this. I can make our family really happy. I can lean into Doug Wilson, it has a lot of zeal and lust and feasting, and there's alcohol and cigars and Kierkegaard and, you know, like big books, and and so there's a lot of zesty living, and I thought, oh, I can I can really make the most out of this and live a joyful life for for God. And so we did that, and that's what really led through the next seven years of this embrace of headship and the family and really trying to make the most of it and live this full dynamic life, and it still failed and unfaltered and and still divulged into this like just disintegrated into this high control situation where we were dependent on the church to tell us everything. This external power structure was so strong. And I think, I mean, I talk a lot about people getting out sooner than I did. I really waited until it was life or death. I waited until I was almost killed. My children were almost killed. If we didn't leave that night, we would have died. I don't recommend that to anybody. And like the signs were there. I was just in despair that year. My my husband had like a seven-month period where he was experiencing this long extended mental breakdown and eventual psychotic break. And I too was in despair of God. Like, if God doesn't know me, if there's nothing special about me, then why am I here? Why am I doing any of this? I could be anybody, you know, but body parts at this point. I'm a womb, I'm hands, I'm I'm there's n my children don't need Tia. And so it really caused a crisis of my faith. And that I had nothing left to give it. I had no steam, I had no fuel to give an ideology anymore, and it needed my humanity cared for, and they did not care. Their humanity to them is disposable. You're gonna die anyway. You know, that whole worldview, this is its natural conclusion. And so that's what I was living with. And I was, I realized I wasn't willing to die for it. That's what it came down to.

SPEAKER_02 26:18

How much um how much was theology used to, you know, achieve like obedience for for women? Or or was it just more, you know, of this sort of men and women are, you know, whatever? Like like I I I'm I'm curious, like it was theology used more than the patriarchy or or or or were the two inseparable?

SPEAKER_03 26:41

Aaron Powell Both and that's a great question. For the most part, there everything has a scriptural backing. There's a lot of cherry picking happening. But then if that you know expires or just doesn't cover it, then you always have just what your husband said. You need to just submit to your husband. And so those conversations come up when women agonize over like my husband wants me to do something that's actually a sin. Should I do it? And then the advice is yes, because submitting to your husband can cover that sin. That you're that you'll be he'll be saved through your obedience and your sweet spirit, which is also scripture verse. You know, so it's like it it always comes, it's a circle.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

How did they explain the logic behind that? Like, do they ever explain like so or like you know, if I guess like so like if someone's sitting there and they're like, Well, you have to obey your husband because the Bible says that you're gonna have a sweet, you know, spirit, but you go and you're looking at it and it doesn't look like it makes sense, like from the context or whatever when you're looking at the scripture. Like, how did they explain the logic to you? How how do they do their hermeneutics essentially? Yeah, like how did they get there? Because of you know, you look at the historical context, right, of the New Testament and how much that plays into how we interpret it. Did they do that kind of stuff? Did they pretend to do that kind of stuff? And then was it like it looked really intellectual, but it's not? Like what did they do? How how did they work through that?

SPEAKER_03 28:12

It's yeah, you're right, on target with all of it. And there's so much intellectualism that's practically an idol. You're trying to make logic where there's none. Like it's the logic fails, especially to anyone with intelligence. But if you start to push back on that, then you're supposed to die to self. And so what happens is you suppress your internal argument, you suppress your like whatabouts and your holes and the things that come up that's like, that doesn't even make sense, or that's been disproven, you know, by science, or you know, whatever. That could be anything. You, especially if you're female, you button that, you keep yourself silent, you don't vo voice something that might cause someone else to backslide or be disrupted. And you're supposed to have that conversation with your husband who's gonna tell you, honey, you're worrying about this too much, let it go. I'm right, you know, like you just need to, and Doug Wilson is very consistent in all his cronies, like it's this isn't just the world of Doug. There's a network here. The the consistent message is husbands are ahead of their households, they they are in charge of their fiefdom, and you're supposed to just comply. So when logical arguments rise, you push them down because it's not gonna stand up to logic.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Thiefdom.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

Yeah, his whole thing is built on this crusade. Did you see the AI meme yesterday where they had actual crusader outfits in front of the Capitol? It's the Vision Forum catalog brought to life.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

It's horrible. I I it's just it really is horrible. So so how do you how do you basically tell the difference between when like it's like a biblical self-denial, right? Like self-denial is not a bad thing, always, right? We want to teach our kids discipline, we want to teach our kids self-denial, we want to teach our kids to control themselves, things like that. And yet there's obviously a place where it crosses this threshold. How how do you how did you distinguish that? May maybe help us understand good self-denial, good discipline versus what they're doing that's just like self-eraser, or erasure, it's abusive. What how how even make more clear the difference between those two things?

SPEAKER_03 30:26

I can tell you how I do it in recovery. I look at impact and capacity. So maturity, you know, in maturity, we're not going to center ourselves all the time. We're going to defer, we're going to care for the least of these and care for the unrepresented and the minorities and the people who are hurting. And in our healthy selves, we have the capacity to do that without self-destruction. But if we are in a situation where it's actually destroying us to do this, it's actually weakening us beyond what we can handle. That probably is a signal that someone else needs to take that weight or I need to step back and care for myself. I am not going to allow myself to be destroyed by either someone else's need or the this message that I'm just a consumable resource that doesn't matter. That's the martyr syndrome, and that's where it kind of swings out of balance in this in these groups. That's like you're kind of supposed to align with that martyrs, martyr idea, and suffering is glorified, but that the fruit of that is not consistent even with Jesus. Like Jesus is love and expansion and growth and giving and generosity. And you can really do that the best when you are cared for and when you are, you know, cared for yourself and you have resources. So I'm kind of it's a flip. You know, I'm not, I'm not suffering to drain to annihilate myself. I am nurturing myself so that I can then give and be generous and understanding my limits. This is also like really important when you're living in community. It's okay to share the load. Like there's no idea, there's no requirement that I need to burn myself out when there's a perfectly fine helper right here, you know, who can take some of this. It's a little counter to patriarchy, but it's much more sustainable in the long run.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

I'm I'm curious about your um your journey to to find yourself in your identity, because I'd imagine for so many years you you were practically given your identity. People told you who you had to be, what you believed, where you went, so on and so forth. And now you're an icon of you know, strength, of just just being a strong woman and and you know, taking taking life by the horns and showing it who's boss kind of thing. And and and I and I'd love to just hear kind of like what that journey was like. So, you know, you went from one person named Tia to the person you are today named Tia.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

And that was probably a journey that, you know, you would you would love to see more women take. So so help help create the roadmap.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

I love that. So, you know, when I got out, I was 33 years old. I looked like an adult. I had four children. I had to convince the court that I could be a responsible parent for. I didn't know anything about myself. I didn't know who I was without that marriage or without this group, and I didn't have a sense of self. And so the Tia that existed then looked like chameleon. I was always trying to people please. And so if you know, I was sussing out, like what do they what do they need from me? Who do they who do they want to, what do they want to see? How can I most make them happy? And, you know, skillful people can recognize, you know, when someone's not standing in their selfhood, they have no healthy sense of idea, you know, of who they are. They can't, they can't protect other people because they can't protect themselves. They have no boundaries, they they don't have preferences and know what they want, so that they can't eat they can't also shield from what they don't want. That's not a secure environment for children. It's not a secure environment to protect you from other cult hopping and predators. A lot of people worry when they come out of high control that something was wrong with them because they keep attracting this energy. And it's like, it's right here. You are bait, you're you're vulnerable to attack because you don't have any defenses called your healthy sense of self and you know, your skin boundary. So so much of it was going back to the beginning of where I had been indoctrinated, where we'd gotten off track. You know, much of high control religion talks about the teenage years aren't real. You don't really need adolescence, you know, you don't really need this period of differentiation from your parents. You need to foreclose on your future very quickly so that you can become the breeders and the soldiers for the movement instead of, you know, your brain's not developed till you're 25. They already have you by the time you're 25. I I already had four children by the time I was 25. It's that's the way it goes. So, you know, going back and saying, okay, what was I supposed to have developed? What, what are these skills? And we have these wonderful, elastic minds. And healing is possible, recovery is possible, retraining is possible. You might have to unlearn some habits and you can relearn new ones. But learning how to like expand my bandwidth that way and know myself, spend time with self-acceptance, pass personality tests honestly, by not being afraid of giving the wrong answer to this, you know, Myers Briggs, you know, like little things like that. Extremely practical. My book is extremely practical steps that are with you in that moment. It's not a theoretical, you know, academic book. It's like, I couldn't pass the Enneagram test, and here's why. You know, but I couldn't love myself if I didn't know myself. And I can't really love anyone else either if I haven't, you know, done that work. So yeah, it is an ongoing journey. I'm not done. The eight stages of development go all the way to your deathbed. And, you know, so we're all still growing and developing. And a lot of people, you know, will have like a midlife crisis. This is part of it. You know, they're finally, they're at the end of the rope, they've lived everybody else's wish for themselves, and now they want to know who they are, you know, at 50. That's a pretty common coming of age story for adults.

SPEAKER_02 36:01

Yeah. How uh how important was you leaving that environment? Because I I know when I when when we spoke with Stephen Hassan, uh cult expert, I remember him telling us the story about how he left the cult, you know, was in the hospital and he was in, you know, around the moon, moon cult or whatever. And that was kind of the beginning of his process. Like, did you find once you've left that environment, like there was there was like no other influences on you?

SPEAKER_03 36:28

Oh, I wish. I wish. Like if I have regrets, it's a lot of the things that I decided in those first three to four years of recovery, which I really look at the aftermath of a tremendous shock, you know. My entire life fell apart. I lost so much in 2007 and really had to start from the ground, sometimes in the negative numbers to rebuild. And if from that vulnerable place, you know, real life was happening. I was expected to hop to it. I was going to school double time, I was raising four kids. I we spent a year on the run, like a lot of real life was happening. And I got remarried in that time to somebody who was not abusive but very high control. I joined another parenting group that was very high control, but it said it had all the answers and it was validated by the police force. So I was like, okay, must be right. I was still co-opting my power and my my agency. And I and I made a lot of mistakes in those early times. So I have a lot of grace for people who are coming out of cult breaks and shocking things because they need a lot of protection. They they're asked to make major life decisions again from a very vulnerable, wounded place because our culture is so capitalistic and rushes people back to the game, you know, and they're not ready. They haven't healed. And so yeah, like though if I have regrets, it's from the things that I decided then that actually had, you know, like it was another layer of leaving and another layer of deconstruction. It took me longer to get out. And some of those situations, they unraveled over time, you know, because I hadn't gotten to a place where I could call it or stand in my power or anything. Like I'm not, I'm not like some sort of badass warrior. I'm just Tia. I've been through shit and I try to live a humble, gracious life. And I'm telling this hard story because it came from my country. Like it was a very real, like, oh my God, this is gonna scale up. And I'm one of few who can write about it, talk about it without hurting myself, and I can convey it to people who need to hear it. So I felt a responsibility towards it. But like I hope this has an end point. I hope I get to go write novels and and have, you know, a quiet life. I'm just a barefoot girl, you know. This wasn't this wasn't what I dreamt for myself.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Yeah, I imagine, I imagine that it isn't. And you know, I when I'm hearing you talk, I see I don't I it's hard because I don't see myself in it because I didn't have the same experience, but I grew up Christian, and it's so weird that I could grow up Christian and have such a different experience and have such like like that I could be yeah, a Christian, and so is Doug Wilson, but I would not like want to put myself in the category with Doug Wilson for very few things, right? Right. And I'd want to be in the same category like with that, like in terms of association with what he believes and what I believe, especially knowing the kinds of things that like in your story, the kinds of things I've heard. It's like I and yet we're supposed we're both supposed to be Christian. It's it's a very strange cultural socio, like sociological thing. Go ahead. You you were I I saw something on your on your mind.

SPEAKER_03 39:40

I feel for you. You're in such a painful intersection right now. Um, because really not all Christians, but the only criteria to call yourself a Christian is belief in Christ. And they do, and you do, and a lot of other people do. And for a long time, my position was people would be like, oh, not all Christians are like that. And I'd be like, Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm not here to cheerlead the people who are doing it right. I'm here to expose abuse. And people who are doing it right actually don't have a problem with that. They want abuse to be exposed and they want to fix it. Yes. Um, the fact that you're really worried about the reputation of the church tells me a lot right now. But I've recently changed that position because it is the job of Christians to police other Christians and to clean their houses of heretics and to clean their house of abusers. It's not secular society's job to decide who's a real Christian or not. To other to secular society, all Christians are the same because you all use the same word. So unfortunately, this word has changed over time and there are different definitions of it, and it really is the house's job to decide what that is. I wouldn't want outsiders to be deciding, you know, like what to call you. You should decide for yourself what to call you.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Yeah, no, absolutely. And and and I think we have done that, right? We've spoken out against this, we've said, I mean, you know, uh because of my issues with ever making a claim as to anyone's ultimate like destiny, you know, being like, I am not a I am not a judge, and I don't want to judge people's ultimate destiny. I want to do the best thing I can to expose them to what I know is love from God. But you know, that that is just one voice, right? And it's one voice that hopefully affects other voices and other people, and there's not that much of that happening right now. And I would love for you to help like what does someone what's probably one of the biggest things, like because I grew up in a Christian home and it's so different from you. So it's like the difference almost between a high control and low control environment. It's almost like you I think about the difference between libertarian and authoritarian politically. We've had some political science have come scientists come on to talk about like almost like a like a horseshoe shape where it's really left, right. That's fine. That's not nearly not nearly as big of an issue as libertarian versus authoritarian. And it kind of seems like that's the biggest difference. One of the biggest, not not beliefs are big things, right? But probably one of the biggest differences between me and and and Doug Wilson is he thinks that we should force people to do it. Where I do not think that. So libertarian versus authoritarian. And I guess like, what do you want what what's one of the biggest things that you think is misunderstood for guys like me or grew up in my context and they hear you and they're thinking they haven't like I've been able to talk to a lot of people and experts on Christian nationalism, actually see its dangers and its idolatry. But a lot of people, a lot of people are like, I mean, the Christian principles, that's what I grew up with, and I really don't see the issue with it. So what are they missing? What do you want them to hear about these high control environments and what's happening right now that they need to be like, though, this is very concerned concerning.

SPEAKER_03 43:01

Yeah, I always think it comes back down to fruit and outcomes. Like you're you're hearing the outcomes of it, and that's what's giving you pause. They are not hearing it. They're hearing the ideals preached, they're hearing the virtues, the promises in their environments, truth stories, reality checks are exiled and pushed away, and people are silenced and they're kicked out and they're shunned. And so you don't get a balanced view of like, okay, well, here's this ideology that someone's promoting. What is it really like to live that way? This is actually the first time in history that we have the consumer reports for being a Christian nationalist a click away online. The survivors are right there. This has never been the case before, you know, like the internet has given us this. You can find out what it's really like to live this way. And so, no hate on people who only hear the ideals. They're beautiful. The trad wife ideals, the Christian nationalist ideals, the stories that Doug tells, they're they're structured, they're comforting, they're all God ordained, you know, they sound intellectual and fine. And I understand the appeal, especially in a chaotic time. It sounds like this is reasonable. And I just come back to the outcomes like listen to the people. If there's a survivors from a movement, then you need to really have some pause with that movement. But the high control versus low control, I think, is really important too, because I I encounter this sometimes with people who have no religious baggage. They're they're like beautiful unicorns to me. But also the idea that they could just have a positive faith. And that fruit is always really fascinating to me. When they believe that God's actually expansive and loving and gracious and a positive form, why would anybody have a problem with that? You know, and that's a that's a valid fruit of a particular kind of Christianity. So again, it's it's the user experience that's important to me. Parents, like I raised my kids with God, but I raised my kids with science and research and balance and health and forward thinking too. I I raised them to be critical thinkers and to examine all sides of a situation. My God's not threatened by that, you know. God's God's big God, he can handle people asking questions. Otherwise, not really something worth believing in, you know. So it's it's always it's always about fruit for me.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

Earlier when you when you talked about religious trauma, you you used the word PTSD, which is is is a term that that that I think resonates with some people. For me, especially, because I'm I'm a veteran. When I got back from Iraq, I was afraid of like cardboard boxes on the side of the roads long before.

SPEAKER_03 45:40

Yeah, no, I get it though.

SPEAKER_02 45:42

But for somebody that's gone through religious trauma, like what are some of the you know signs, symptoms, triggers, you know, that that haven't been I'm laughing because they're just everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 45:54

And I had to flip the way I look at triggers because some people really get avoidant with their triggers. They want to avoid them because of the pain it causes. And it's so understandable because it's a cacophony of real physical symptoms that overtake your entire system, and it's so hard. But I have to look at triggers as information that there's something there that I need to pay attention to. So when they come up, which is inevitable because it's in every day, I have real practical physical steps I go through in order to help my system regulate so that I can retain a sense of reason and perspective. It is pretty constant. I mean, I can be listening to like yesterday Pandora and all of a sudden it starts playing Christian music, and I'm like, what? Why why? Or, you know, I go into the store and they're piping it in, or you know, it's Easter season, so literally the cruise, the cross is everywhere. The cross is really traumatic for me. I would rather focus on why Jesus lived than how he died, you know. He died because he of when he was and where he was, and I don't want to elevate that and the gory details are they're hard for me, but they're also everywhere, you know. So I can't like live a life that avoids pain. I need to have tools and capacity in order to contend with it and to understand it and educate about it. You know, I really hope I've had an impact in parents teaching their four-year-olds about crucifixion. I really do, because there's a lot of survivors and a lot of ex-evangelicals who are like, hey, that really fucked me up. You can't tell a four-year-old that. You're giving them nightmares for life. Like, so you know, it's that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 47:27

I I I really appreciate you saying that because I think that that this is this is me trying to turn a serious moment into a joke. So forgive me for a moment. It's okay. We laugh our trauma out too. It's important. A challenger exploding. I remember watching that on TV.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 47:44

Like, we we watched an entire team get murdered, die, you know.

SPEAKER_03 47:48

Yes. No, I would I watched that in my very fundamentalist Christian private school in sixth grade. We watched it and then they told us that it was a sign of the rapture, and we were about to be left behind if we didn't pray. Like the amount of psychosis that will cause a kid, like it was it was terrible and tragic. And yes, we laugh because we're what our bodies are trying to get this energy out. That's that's like a get it out. You know, you gotta put it somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

I mean, absolutely, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you, you know, I I'm a pastor, and so I it's not a big church, small church, really cool community. You know, I don't think we have any of this high control anything. I don't I'm pretty sure it's pr basically non-existent in in my church. And yet you think about like, hey, every every community group, every group that gets together, it forms certain, even if they're unspoken and unwritten, there are these rules, right? Um people violate them, they become taboo. There are taboos that happen in every every group, right? That and and people start to get, if they go against the group norms, against the group views, they can face the collective, I don't know, judgment of the group, discipline of the group, right? Wrath might be too strong a word unless you're in certain groups, and it certainly sure feels like wrath. There is wrath. And so it's like I I guess the thing that I'm wrestling with is like I'm a pastor and I'm trying to figure out what you and maybe it isn't for me, but for other pastors, like how do you know whether your church is harming people? Right? How do you know if it's if you're trying to do a really like like you're really trying to let people know the truth as best as you can, right? And you want to be able to give that for people and and then even have certain community, you know, expectations, maybe even things that the everyone, certain beliefs everyone in the community believes. Again, I actually don't think that's really that abnormal at all. I think that every group, at least has a few, very strong beliefs that and you know them what they are when you violate them and when people get really upset. Liberal groups, right-wing groups, they're all they all have that. Now they might treat it differently, they might treat you differently based upon their values and assumptions about human life, different things like that. But like those things exist, and I guess for a Christian or anyone who's trying to like create community right in this, how do you create community that's not harming people? How do you know when it's moving in that direction?

SPEAKER_03 50:36

Yeah, I'm I'll just tell you how I am. I don't prescribe this for anybody. I will not ever again belong to a group that requires belief for belonging. And that's true for hobbies. Like, doesn't have to be religious belief for that very reason. It gets gatekeepy really quickly. It gets uniform really quickly. And that same think, that group think for me is not safe. I understand why people want groups and why they find that sense of community. And, you know, like there's jokes about when introverts get together, they're in a room together, but they're all in their, you know, their own little spaces, you know, like that's my kind of group. Like we can, we we can we can retain our selfhood and be in space together and be in a cooperative effort together, but we don't have to be the same or even do the same things all the time in order to be in that group. That to me is a sign of safety. I know some people will say, like, if you're wanting to analyze your group for safety, what happens when there's an abuse that comes up? How is it handled? Who can be in leadership? Are you truly open and diverse and who can who can teach? What happens if somebody is different and they're an outlier? Does that mean they have to leave? You know, like there's analysis questions that you can ask. I think that when there's dysfunction, it's pretty evident. It's just a matter of how open people are willing to be to see it and examine it and make space for it. But yeah, I kind of to each their own there. My goal is to help people be really strong individuals so that they can they can apply that to whatever is important to them in their life.

SPEAKER_00 52:06

Yeah, I really, I really like that and and I really do appreciate that. Like, what what would you say is the final hope? Like, what are you hopeful for right now as you're moving into the future? And what are you wanting this book to accomplish for readers or listeners coming in? Like, what do you hope that it does in their lives?

SPEAKER_03 52:26

I hope that anybody that comes from any kind of high control dynamic finds a soft place to land, some hope that they can change their future, then they can heal their past and they can reclaim what their wild and precious life is meant to be. I do hope that accumulatively that survivors feel a sense of agency and autonomy enough to improve our world. And I have like a um pro-topian view of the world. So I'm not utopian, perfect, not dystopian, hopeless. I want to, you know, embrace progress so that we are counting, we're learning from our mistakes, we are learning from history, we are not ethically regressed, we are embracing science and research and survivor testimony and um finding new paths forward. You know, I at my heart I'm a little trekky geek, you know, from the 80s. So I'm always very excited about science fiction and how we move forward. You know, it's obviously not going back and living like the Puritans. That's not gonna bring us into the the next century. So yeah, things that things that bring life, bring smiles, bring hope. I do believe that there's restoration possible. I don't consider myself broken anymore. And I really want that wholeness for anyone.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

I really appreciate that, Tia. Thank you so much for coming and spending some time with us today, giving us your insight and your thoughts. It's been awesome.

SPEAKER_03 53:43

Yeah, thanks for your openness and your this whole conversation. It's great.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

Absolutely, absolutely. And to our viewers, guys, we're gonna put all sorts of these links into the description notes so you can check that out. Go check out, oh, and I want to actually I should say, sorry, I shouldn't go here. Maybe we can mark this. I'll mark this. Sorry. So, Tia, how can people get involved with you and how can they connect with what you're doing, follow you, all that kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_03 54:09

Yeah, it's super easy. Um, Tia at Tia Levings Writer on all the platforms. My books are available anywhere books are sold. Um, it's their well-trained wife is in every format paperback, audible, hardcover, ebook. It's in Kindle Unlimited. And my Substack is TALevings at dot substack.com, and that's where I unpack and deconstruct in real time what's happening in our headlines and culture today.

SPEAKER_00 54:31

That's awesome. And we will put those links in the description notes. And we again, we appreciate it so much. Thank you. Absolutely. To our viewers, guys, make sure you share this with someone who needs it. If you or someone you know has gone through this kind of uh abusive situation, man, we hope that you will uh reach out, get some help, find, get to the book, go to the websites, and um and reach out to us if you need anything. We'll help if we can. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations up right or left. But up.

unknown 55:03

Thank you.