Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Escape from the Trad Wife Life with Tia Levings

00:00:00.000 Tia Levings was recruited into a Christian fundamentalist movement as a young wife.

00:00:05.300 She quickly learned that being a godly and submissive wife in the Christian patriarchy 0.87

00:00:09.800 included strict discipline, isolation, and required women to be silent keepers of the home. 0.91

00:00:17.660 Years of pain and abuse followed. But after becoming a mother, Tia realized that she was

00:00:23.780 the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men 0.68

00:00:29.140 and submissive women. That's when she fled with her children. I love, love, love this quote from 0.97

00:00:36.140 Tia. Today it hit me, when he hit me, blood shaking my brain. Maybe there wasn't a savior coming.

00:00:46.200 Maybe it was up to me to save me.

00:00:51.820 All of this is documented in Tia's new book, A Well-Trained Wife, My Escape from Christian

00:00:57.400 patriarchy. That comes out in August, and I'm so excited for it. Since Tia escaped from that life,

00:01:05.020 she's become committed to growth, empowerment, and connection, and helping others to survive 0.56

00:01:09.900 the trauma and to escape the Christian fundamentalist lifestyle. One of the things 0.96

00:01:15.460 she says a lot that really gets to me is if we continue to ignore the messages that the

00:01:20.860 fundamental evangelical Christian community are sending out to us, then we're just plunging this

00:01:26.920 country right into the near future of the book The Handmaid's Tale. Tia was a tradwife, and she 0.98

00:01:33.800 escaped. And she has written beautifully about the inhumanity of tradwife life and why it is not 1.00

00:01:40.780 something to be celebrated with beautiful pictures on social media. We are so lucky to have Tia on 1.00

00:01:46.540 the podcast today.

00:01:56.920 So my name is Tia Lovings, and today I educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism.

00:02:05.960 I grew up in a Southern Baptist megachurch in the 90s, and the evangelical church politicized

00:02:14.400 at the same rate that my character developed, my personhood developed into adulthood, into my life.

00:02:20.380 So everything that we see today related to evangelicism was in its seed format in the 90s, which is just a very interesting backdrop for the drama that became a big chunk of my adult life.

00:02:35.060 I'm the proud mama of five and had nine pregnancies in high control religion, otherwise known as the Christian patriarchy.

00:02:43.960 Some listeners may be familiar with that. 0.66

00:02:47.760 If they've seen the Duggar show, the 19 kids and counting, I was part of the Institute of Basic Life Principles, which we call the IBLP.

00:02:55.420 And then from there, I moved into an ever-narrowing, high-control religious path that landed me in a cult that I was excommunicated from and then had to actually escape from in a very dramatic midnight escape from a violent marriage.

00:03:10.660 I call it church-sanctioned domestic abuse.

00:03:13.680 Aside from that, I'm also a content marketer, busy mom, play the flute, hike, walk, cook.

00:03:21.480 I'm a grandma now.

00:03:22.540 Got two little grandsons.

00:03:23.920 they were born a month apart they were supposed to be born on the same day but one came early

00:03:28.660 that's that's so awesome i'm i'm so in the thick of it with little kids i've got a six

00:03:33.920 a four and a one that my grandma days seem real far away well and i let me commend you to be able

00:03:41.900 to write and create anything else other than human beings at this point in your life is incredible

00:03:47.960 Thank you. Thank you. And some days it feels impossible. And so I, yes, I appreciate,

00:03:54.220 I appreciate all of those words. I really, really do. I want to, I want to go back to a little bit

00:03:59.760 of what you were saying, just so our audience understands better. When you say high control,

00:04:06.780 what does that mean? That is a broad term that we were using in the, there's a segment online

00:04:13.980 that considers ourselves ex-evangelical, that we are deconstructing our faith. And high control

00:04:19.920 religion is a phrase that we use to describe the kind of traditions that we come from that are

00:04:25.580 not as clear as denominational lines. So when we have somebody from a Baptist background relating

00:04:31.260 to something that the fundamentalist LDS church espouses, those are two groups that don't think

00:04:36.620 the other is a real Christian, but we actually have the same experiences. And so when you're

00:04:42.320 looking at a power dynamic in religion that is high control in every way. It's a power structure

00:04:48.400 that's usually top-down. There's an authoritarianism there. There's an understood

00:04:52.680 subjugation of women. And the life choices that you make will be controlled and determined by 0.99

00:04:58.560 your religious belief. And so are you religious today? What would you consider yourself now?

00:05:09.140 I call myself spiritually private today. That is a very careful answer because I grew up in a

00:05:16.840 tradition that, number one, embraces asking people deeply personal questions about their

00:05:23.340 core beliefs. That's what evangelism is, that it's hard, is that you're going to approach strangers

00:05:28.600 and ask them about their eternity and their deepest faith. Also, because I have a fundamentalist

00:05:34.820 background. I resist putting myself into any kind of binary or box. I love binaries and boxes. They

00:05:41.400 make me feel safe. That's what fundamentalism does. It takes chaos and creates order. So it's

00:05:47.620 very important to me in recovery to avoid putting myself into that kind of space. And also faith is

00:05:53.680 very fluid and it grows and evolves as we grow and evolve. And I want to allow some room for that. So

00:05:59.100 saying that I'm spiritually private sends a message also that we get to respect this

00:06:05.420 autonomy in one another. And it provides me that safety. Yeah, I love that answer. And I ask

00:06:13.440 because I get so many messages from Christian women who say they so often feel attacked by

00:06:22.680 mainstream media. And they're like, I'm just this regular Christian lady that like, you know,

00:06:27.560 I'm Episcopal, I'm Lutheran, I go to the church, but we don't see enough of me in the world. So

00:06:34.180 thank you for having different kinds of opinions on when we're not attacking each other. And I'm

00:06:41.420 like, well, that would be, it would be a lovely world if we could all just have these conversations

00:06:45.360 without attacking each other. And I try to be really open about my own faith. I was raised

00:06:51.220 catholic light so you know since we went to church for uh midnight mass and sometimes easter

00:07:00.260 and that's about it and then i went to all girls catholic school in high school uh which was a

00:07:07.000 shock to the system but it was because i was a 13 year old juvenile delinquent in middle school

00:07:11.120 and we had to do things like pray for our unborn babies and all of the babies that may be aborted

00:07:18.340 in the world, which was shocking to me. And now I'm fairly agnostic and I'm super, I'm very open

00:07:23.700 about that. But I love the idea of being spiritual and I love the idea of faith. I just fucking hate

00:07:29.860 the patriarchy. And that is what I rub up against with mostly, mostly every religion, major religion 0.99

00:07:36.960 on the planet. I wrote a whole book called If Nuns Ruled the World. I love Catholic nuns. I think 0.64

00:07:42.540 Many of them are bad ass feminists, but the patriarchy, they get me every time, every time. 1.00

00:07:51.660 And so that's where I am. And I just like I like to put it all out there so that listeners never think I'm trying to push anything on anyone. 0.87

00:07:59.240 I'm like, this is me. This is what I think. Now let's talk about this.

00:08:03.380 Well, it's you said a lot right there. And what's really important that a couple of things that came up was to remember one another's humanity,

00:08:10.840 that we are more than the beliefs that we espoused. Also, anyone who says I'm just a regular old

00:08:16.540 Christmas Christian lady, that doesn't exist anymore. And one of the problems is that the

00:08:21.080 faith-based groups have not done a good job of cleaning their house and they have been taken

00:08:26.220 over by extremists. So that's why it's very important we have these conversations. The

00:08:31.280 patriarchy is a big, big umbrella term for some very strategic and specific dominionists in

00:08:40.800 America. They have an agenda. They share it. They congregate. It's open every single Sunday.

00:08:46.300 They talk about this. It's something that happened right under America's nose. And if we don't talk

00:08:52.900 about it, we're going to lose our ability to talk about it. So that's my log on the fire to burn the

00:08:58.680 patriarchy down is that I lived the most extreme version of this and I will tell. Yeah. Yeah. And

00:09:06.540 And you did live the most extreme version of this. I don't want you to give away anything from your wonderful book, but what did the most extreme version of this look like for you without giving away the whole thing?

00:09:24.460 Sure. Well, and I do give away a lot online. And I was in Shining Happy People and a lot came out in that too on Amazon. So the high points are definitely there. In the 90s, through primarily the homeschooling movement, a very conservative brand of Christianity found a foothold.

00:09:43.960 I was becoming a young wife and mother at that time.

00:09:46.640 So I bought in as a way to be a better wife and mother, solve some problems in my marriage.

00:09:53.480 Fundamentalism always offers solutions to these problems.

00:09:58.340 They promise to take your chaos and make it glorify God and be orderly and calming to

00:10:05.800 the nervous system.

00:10:07.220 So I had all of that.

00:10:09.280 I was a traumatized young wife living in abuse and I needed a way.

00:10:13.280 And so I call them my Gothard Fundy mentors.

00:10:17.280 This was a group of people in our big, big church.

00:10:19.940 There were 20,000 people on the roll at First Baptist.

00:10:23.280 But we had a church within a church, and that was Bill Gothard's evangelistic strategy to go into these churches.

00:10:31.740 They would send believers into these churches to recruit from within.

00:10:35.760 And so I was prime material.

00:10:37.260 I was a young, hungry wife who needed guidance. 0.95

00:10:40.260 And the Bible says, let the younger women turn to the older women to learn how to be

00:10:44.700 wives and mothers. 0.99

00:10:45.880 So I thought I was doing the right thing.

00:10:48.740 I asked these women to help teach me.

00:10:50.980 They did.

00:10:51.880 They taught me their fundamentalism.

00:10:53.700 And so through a series of restrictions of things I was not to do and practices I was 0.80

00:11:00.160 to implement, which ultimately resulted in what we call today the trad wife lifestyle,

00:11:06.160 that's basically what this resulted in. 0.91

00:11:09.560 Um, it, the, the world just became more and more restrictive at the same time.

00:11:15.340 There's no end.

00:11:16.160 There's no, there's no point in fundamentalism where you're holy enough, pure enough, working

00:11:22.440 hard enough, sacrificing enough, suffering enough.

00:11:24.860 And so it drilled down as my then husband became more theological.

00:11:31.560 Um, he was looking for more solutions, you know, to this patriarchal umbrella of authority.

00:11:37.160 if anyone's seen shiny happy people there's a really good graphic of what the umbrella of

00:11:43.160 authority is which is basically god husband wife and children are at the bottom um it's meant to

00:11:49.120 protect you and instead it exploits like a pyramid scheme and um at the at the very end i ended up in

00:11:56.160 a very high control cult was excommunicated from my writing and had to escape violence that my

00:12:03.760 church said was okay. My church said this is, and I don't mean my one congregation, I mean my entire

00:12:10.160 faith group condones patriarchal authority structures that taken to their end result in

00:12:18.740 physical violence that a husband is supposedly justified in doing because he's the authority

00:12:24.000 in his home. He's the head of household. Sometimes I call my story the prequel to The Handmaid's Tale.

00:12:29.220 So if you watched The Handmaid's Tale and you felt, wow, this is really close to reality, yes, I can tell you I lived in the world that would have resulted in that.

00:12:39.520 And it's important to remember that Atwood used real fundamentalist groups as her model.

00:12:46.440 Yes, I do watch The Handmaid's Tale and think, wow, we live in the just before times of this world.

00:12:55.520 So just before times. Absolutely. Absolutely. We are going to take a really quick break. And when we get back, I want to talk about some of the incredible subsects you've been writing lately that, by the way, people send me send me these every single day. Your subsect is called the Anti-Fundamentalist. So good. And I want to dive into some of them. One of the headlines is what it's really like to be a trad wife.

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00:17:01.860 of $175 or more, plus free shipping for a limited time. Happy sleeping, friends. It's time to get

00:17:09.960 cozy. We are back and I really, I've spent a lot of time on your sub stack lately.

00:17:24.040 I feel like I do feel like I know you personally now because I've been reading all about your life.

00:17:30.900 And the one that I started with was what it's really like to be a trad wife.

00:17:37.540 And this is so interesting to me because we see the hashtags, we see the influencers, and I want you to tell our audience the real story.

00:17:46.460 What is it really like?

00:17:49.320 Yeah, and I think this is important.

00:17:51.340 And one of the benefits of listening to someone who's experienced it is that I can bring a humanity to the situation that might be lacking if you're an outsider looking in.

00:18:00.340 And there are a lot of outsiders looking in because social media has given us such a platform and visibility that we used to have to share at a homeschooling convention or within our churches.

00:18:13.900 You know, it was very one-to-one in the 90s.

00:18:16.600 And then we had blogging.

00:18:17.920 So I was a big lifestyle blogger when blogging was brand new. And so I have another

00:18:22.520 sub stack piece called I would have been a trad wife influencer because when I was a trad wife,

00:18:28.180 that's absolutely what I would have done. There's a lot of validation found in getting someone else

00:18:34.640 to admire your lifestyle and sign on to it. And that's the evangelistic method that is

00:18:41.140 promoted and used because it has a religious root, you know? So at its essence, I think of

00:18:48.320 the trad wife life as a kind of a spectrum. And it's important to remember that at its essence,

00:18:53.740 it is an abbreviation for traditional housewife. A traditional housewife that with, if that's what

00:19:00.740 we're going to call it, that broadens the amount of people who would find this lifestyle attractive.

00:19:05.580 when we have a political system in power that is screaming traditional quote traditional values at 0.63

00:19:13.380 us they're talking about the same kind of belief system that we see in the trad wife life and that 0.91

00:19:19.820 we raise you know we raise these red flags around but if we broaden it and pull the lens back a

00:19:24.980 little we're like okay hold on a second this is different flavors of the same thing um what it's

00:19:32.180 like to actually be a trad wife is like stepping back in time. We did it willfully because we had

00:19:38.280 we had the past so heavily romanticized through, you know, like Little House on the Prairie and

00:19:43.120 Jane Austen and the 50s perfect leave it to beaver life. We we had the past so glorified as an

00:19:51.300 aesthetic that it seemed safe to emulate and that we would find happier families, happier marriages, 0.94

00:20:00.420 better wellness all of these things that the trad wife life kind of espouses we would find 0.99

00:20:06.920 solutions to our problems in so it does become an all-consuming lifestyle and like i don't think

00:20:14.780 the average trad wife life person walks into that and says oh i want to you know be i want to look

00:20:22.880 like it's 1845 or look like it's 90 right i think they think they want to live wants live well on

00:20:31.280 one income or be home with their children or cook really good food with that looks pretty um

00:20:37.880 the the biggest difference between what i lived through and what i see today online is that we

00:20:43.980 didn't have social media so we didn't have as much performance pressure to make every single step

00:20:50.100 aesthetic. And I'm, that's where the horror lies for me right now, because it isn't pretty behind

00:20:56.220 closed doors, offset off stage. You know, the, the trad wife life is ugly and it's oppressive 0.92

00:21:02.220 and it takes away rights and children suffer and women suffer and you boil the water that will 1.00

00:21:09.600 kill you with your own hands. Like it's, it's a life that women build for themselves and it's a 0.99

00:21:15.620 prison that they build for themselves. So you don't see that while it's happening. You just 1.00

00:21:20.540 think you're doing this pretty thing, this kind thing. Motherhood was my gateway because

00:21:25.500 I was a young mama and I loved being a mama and I wanted to be home with my babies and I wanted

00:21:33.040 my baby not to cry in the night. That was the thing that first led me to raise my hand. I asked

00:21:38.320 for help getting my baby to sleep through the night. Yeah. Yeah. And one thing, so many things

00:21:46.520 you said resonated with me, but one of them is this kind of promise of safety and security

00:21:53.060 is a really powerful drug. I think we are all, especially I know when I became a mom,

00:22:01.400 became desperate for a stable life, for a secure life. And I think there's a lot of promises of

00:22:10.320 that that come with the fundamentalist movement. It's like, oh, okay, yes, someone's going to

00:22:17.020 support you. You can stay home with your babies. This can be a beautiful time for you. And like

00:22:23.820 you said, once you get inside of it, that's when the abuse starts.

00:22:28.120 one of the most insidious things about it though is that when you pull the lens back even further

00:22:33.720 you see how it's a world of their own making so the world is a scary place right now and it makes

00:22:39.520 you want to keep your baby safe but if we take a look at why the world is scary right now we look 0.94

00:22:45.220 we immediately see moms don't have the resources that they need there's no health care they took

00:22:49.380 away abortive health care there's no safe like social security is going away there's wars fought 0.75

00:22:55.140 in different places. They're making it that way. So they kind of do, and I say they, the patriarchal

00:23:01.840 leadership, they kind of do it in tandem. The message to women is, well, if you want to be 0.98

00:23:06.980 safe, you got to come home and you need to have more babies. And then they elevate it to a calling 1.00

00:23:13.520 so that any ambition and frustration that you feel you can then medicate with by reminding

00:23:18.780 yourself that this is the highest calling you can have on your life. And they put this religiosity

00:23:24.240 onto it. And at the same time, they're making our world less secure, more frightening. And so it 0.90

00:23:31.280 drives us that way. Their ultimate goal is to get women out of the workforce. They don't want women 1.00

00:23:35.660 in the workforce. They don't want to share leadership with women. They can't force us home. 1.00

00:23:40.700 What they have to do is get other women to convince us to come home. And I love home. Like, 0.91

00:23:45.240 I don't want to say bad things about home. Home is great. But home can be a prison if that's the

00:23:51.400 only option that you have in your life yes yes yes and and yes and that's what i what i say when 0.92

00:24:00.160 i talk about why do i think that trad wife content is dangerous and i think because it is it is

00:24:08.520 glorifying women giving up their agency and women giving up their power and saying oh it's it's easy

00:24:15.580 for you to stay home so why would you need child care why would you need systemic help why would

00:24:20.820 you need the government to actually care for women and children? And by making this life look 0.62

00:24:27.500 so beautiful and easy. That's the bait. That's right. You're absolutely right. But it's to an

00:24:36.480 end. They don't just want you to not have childcare and not have options because they're

00:24:41.660 meanie butts. They're not just like big bad monster guys that just don't think women deserve 0.99

00:24:47.720 nice things. They have to eliminate those things because that's part of their world order that they 1.00

00:24:52.720 have for dominionism. And if you back this up and you look at the religious roots of it, 0.63

00:24:57.060 it's called the Seven Mountains Mandate. And it's a very specific strategy to take religious

00:25:03.860 dominion of America and then the globe. They can't have any of that stuff in the way. They

00:25:11.140 can't have a socialistic society where people's needs are met because they need an authoritative

00:25:17.120 of power structure in order to meet their goals. So when you have like the rise of authoritarianism,

00:25:23.760 suddenly it becomes really important that we protect other people's rights to do something

00:25:29.760 that we may not choose for ourselves. Women can still choose to be home with your babies, 0.52

00:25:34.800 but you should vote in a way that protects someone else's right to have choices because they don't 1.00

00:25:40.840 have the same life that you have. And if you know, and one of the things that happens in

00:25:45.080 religious fundamentalism is they will take our religious freedom and they will exploit it for

00:25:49.360 their own benefit. They want religious freedom only to gain power so that they can then take 0.92

00:25:54.760 away yours because their future does not have religious freedom. We are all one kind. We are

00:25:59.840 all one Christian in their vision. And we know this because we look at the way they live.

00:26:04.600 That's the really important thing that makes this not a conspiracy theory or something that's like

00:26:09.580 just conjured. We can just look at the way they live. And I do believe deeply because I've lived

00:26:15.120 it that the way they run their homes is the way they want to run the country. So if you want to

00:26:20.340 see what it's like to be under their headship, you have to listen to the people who live in their

00:26:24.280 homes, which means you have to center survivors of religious trauma. They're the ones that are

00:26:28.740 going to tell you what it's like to live in that life. And you write so beautifully about what it

00:26:35.080 was like to live in that kind of life. Another one of your essays on Substack that I loved was

00:26:42.260 the chronic fatigue of the trad wife life. Can I just read a couple of lines of it for our 0.95

00:26:49.580 listeners who haven't read it yet? This happened every day at 3 p.m. 18 years ago. Because of the

00:26:56.460 work I did, it also happened at 3 p.m. every day this week. The fatigue starts at the back of my

00:27:03.460 throat, which is also the front of my cervical spine. My cheeks hollow as my mouth waters hot

00:27:09.580 with the tang of anxiety. My shoulders droop. The wave of exhaustion progresses over my body

00:27:16.900 like the lengthening shadow of late afternoon. You're such a good writer, by the way.

00:27:23.920 That's beautiful. But talk to me about that. Talk to me about the chronic fatigue of the

00:27:29.440 trad wife-like? So I spend a lot of time with religious trauma survivors, and we all come away 0.99

00:27:35.840 from that life with a host of autoimmune symptoms, chronic fatigue, exhaustion, body memory. And,

00:27:44.020 you know, you've probably heard the phrase, the body keeps the score in relation to trauma. It's

00:27:48.040 also a very well-known book. But the body memory of how your system, your nervous system in

00:27:55.740 particular records and reacts to the stresses. It isn't something that leaves you very easily

00:28:01.880 and without a lot of treatment. So complex PTSD is what we're wearing. It's what we carry with us.

00:28:08.040 And so in that piece, I was reflecting how writing about the child life that week was also calling

00:28:15.140 back in my body to what it was like every afternoon when I knew daddy's about to be home.

00:28:20.400 And for me, that meant I could be in really big trouble. I could be beaten. I could be spanked. I could be scolded. I needed to have everything perfect. So here's where the imagery of the trad wife life that you might have encountered online comes in because that's showtime.

00:28:38.380 When daddy walks in, the door is showtime. 0.50

00:28:40.940 You better have all your children behaving.

00:28:44.320 There is no like, no, there's no exhausted mother handing off a baby when dad walks in

00:28:48.940 because you finally have your partner at home.

00:28:51.340 It's the reverse opposite of that.

00:28:52.760 Every child must be clean, well-behaved.

00:28:55.160 You're going to report on your day.

00:28:56.680 You're going to serve his needs and all of his creature comforts.

00:29:01.360 You're not going to inundate him with your problems or what you encountered in the day

00:29:05.520 because that is not what is important to him.

00:29:08.020 What he needs is to relax after he's had a long, hard day at work.

00:29:12.680 So it's not like the 50s housewife with the drink in hand, although I suppose some secular

00:29:16.980 trad wives might be doing that. 1.00

00:29:18.840 The Christian trad wives don't do the drink part, but they do everything else. 1.00

00:29:23.020 I mean, there could be sexual favor. 1.00

00:29:25.440 You know, as soon as you walk in the door, it could be whatever it is, whatever he wants.

00:29:29.680 And so that takes a panic toll, adrenaline, cortisol.

00:29:35.120 the fact there are consequences for behaviors during the day takes a toll so the exhaustion

00:29:44.920 is something that stays in your body and can mask and cause other physical symptoms you know that

00:29:50.700 are somebody may go to the doctor and say I'm having this physical symptom and not ever trace

00:29:56.720 it back to the traumatic root so that's what that you know the exhaustion is pervasive it's

00:30:02.820 profound it's uh you've had babies so you know how you how you feel at the two-week mark

00:30:07.180 where you haven't slept you you gave birth then you didn't sleep for two weeks

00:30:11.340 you've been on call for 24 7 that kind of bone exhaustion is what it's like almost every day

00:30:19.080 yeah yeah no i mean i remember that that well that yes i and you know the body also desperately

00:30:30.280 wants to forget about it because otherwise we wouldn't keep having babies but um actually i

00:30:37.880 mean now i i have to say honestly now that i've hit 14 months with what will absolutely be my

00:30:43.980 last child because we got my husband snipped um and i i use that language because i'm like it's

00:30:49.160 like i just took him to the vet and i just snipped it right we're done with that um we got he got

00:30:54.520 fixed I fixed him um I forget it I told I have a friend that's going through it right now and she's

00:31:00.580 like this is pure hell and I'm like oh yeah I forgot forgot that's what it's like it's true

00:31:06.060 it's true but the body does keep score and it does come back to you and I imagine writing all

00:31:12.900 of this you write about this almost every day the trauma must come back to you all the time

00:31:19.520 yes and no um it i have been in 16 years of intense trauma therapy um and i've learned to

00:31:27.780 metabolize much of it so i can tell my story without re-traumatizing myself i can talk about

00:31:33.540 it and work with survivors triggers being what they are you know you don't always have a lot of

00:31:37.900 um like advanced notice of a trigger you know it's sudden it's it's what comes up and in this

00:31:43.580 particular week when the trad wife life started really becoming part of the big conversation

00:31:49.680 again, the things that got me are the incongruency between the glossy images and the reality

00:31:56.800 and some of the condensation of people who don't understand that these women choose this life 0.51

00:32:05.660 because they think it's going to make them happy. And in that way, we're all the same.

00:32:10.120 So having some compassion for their humanity is really important. And also, if you don't want to commit the exact same mistake that they're doing, you have to extend some compassion to the excavation and exploration process.

00:32:24.560 what they're doing and what they're taught to do is systematically deny other people's humanity.

00:32:29.400 And we don't want to be like that. You know, we don't want to just be the same thing in reverse.

00:32:33.200 So to like contextualize and deepen the conversation means, okay, well, I can see

00:32:39.320 why they would choose something like that. It's the, the people teaching it to them aren't leading

00:32:43.860 with the, with the reality. They aren't being told, you know, there's no informed consent in

00:32:48.120 this world. There's no consent at all. So they're not like saying, Hey, you know, let your husband

00:32:54.520 spank you it'll be fine you know they're not they're not saying that that's even going to

00:32:58.660 happen in fact they would feign shock that that ever ever happens like you know that's not that's

00:33:05.220 not common absolutely common but yeah right that's not right it is it is common there there is a there

00:33:12.540 is a lot of physical abuse that clearly is not talked about um and it's definitely something

00:33:18.860 that is never seen in these glossy images on on social media right and people are very married

00:33:27.020 to their own experience so when you have someone who's a prominent um influencer they may say well

00:33:33.020 i've never experienced that so therefore it must not exist because they don't have any capacity to

00:33:38.200 think beyond their own experience and they're and i encounter that all of the time in the survivor

00:33:43.300 community. Two of my biggest arguments that I come up against are the not all Christians 1.00

00:33:48.440 argument. And also, well, that wasn't my experience. So therefore, it must not be real. 0.71

00:33:55.720 Right. Right. How much can you tell us about how you personally escaped from this life?

00:34:03.240 Yeah, this this part is shared in depth in other places. But I mean, the the high points of it

00:34:11.520 are that I had gotten excommunicated because I wrote about Mary, the mother of Jesus.

00:34:19.580 And I wasn't supposed to be writing in my own name. I wasn't supposed to be writing at all.

00:34:23.880 I had a very well-trafficked lifestyle blog at the time. When blogging was brand new,

00:34:28.700 there wasn't a thing called an algorithm yet. It was a free-for-all. And my blog was called

00:34:35.160 Living Deliberately. And it got thousands of hits a day. And so it was doing well. And

00:34:40.480 That drove the elders pretty crazy. So I was excommunicated. Without the external power

00:34:49.300 structure of elders and a pastor and church, that was keeping us in line. My husband, who was

00:34:58.140 very mentally ill, also not coping very well as a patriarch, because there's a whole line of

00:35:04.520 dialogue to have about this with how the men suffer in patriarchy, especially if they aren't 0.96

00:35:10.760 the alpha male, you know, the one on top. So he wasn't doing well and he couldn't cope with that

00:35:17.520 lack of external control. And several months passed and things got as close to hell on earth

00:35:26.600 as it can get. And then there was a midnight hostage situation, four hours of being held

00:35:33.280 hostage and a tiny little window where there was a magical opening in the universe and a voice in

00:35:40.960 my heart that said, run. And so I grabbed my kids out of their bed and we ran. It's fucking brave

00:35:47.360 is what it is. And I wanted to ask that because I do think that there are a lot of women who are 0.95

00:35:56.820 in a similar situation that you were in who who do feel hopeless who are like I can't leave there's

00:36:03.720 not a way out I don't I don't see the path out and and I'm sure that you've encountered this

00:36:10.960 with all of the work that you've done with survivors but just hearing that someone else did

00:36:15.840 it is sometimes enough to start making your own way have you experienced that with other women

00:36:22.100 that you've worked with? Yeah, my whole hope with with writing my story was that I would help one

00:36:29.340 woman who was in her kitchen. I have this like kind of image where she picks a book up at Walmart

00:36:34.720 or a Target, like someplace she shops anyway, because she probably doesn't get to go to a

00:36:39.780 bookstore. And she picks it up and throws it in her cart and she gets to read it. And something

00:36:44.740 I say gives her enough of a model for how it can happen and how you can recover, because you have

00:36:51.420 to kind of believe that there's something better out there for you. When you're that desperate,

00:36:56.040 I knew I was on the verge of becoming another murder-suicide story on the cover of People

00:37:00.060 magazine. I knew that that was going to be the fate of our family, or I was going to take care

00:37:06.380 of things myself and die. I knew we were at the end. And so having something like that,

00:37:13.220 if I could just have known that there was something out there for me, would have helped

00:37:17.560 me maybe leave by daylight. Maybe I could have done this differently without it getting so

00:37:22.960 desperate and so close to the edge. And that has happened. I've heard from those women as a result

00:37:29.120 of my work online. So I know I didn't need the book coming out for that to happen. But that is

00:37:34.360 the hope for outcome. That's why I went for a traditional publishing route. I want a wide

00:37:38.720 distribution for my story. I have a highly relevant story because the tradition I come from

00:37:44.680 is what's rising to power in america right now and it is very important that the average

00:37:51.080 average christian that we started talking about at the beginning of this interview

00:37:55.740 um understands what's happening like that this vote if you vote for donald trump this election

00:38:02.360 it may be the last vote you ever cast because authoritative government systems do not allow

00:38:08.700 They're not pro-democracy. And they floated head of household voting at the last RNC. I was not allowed to vote when I was in this world. There was no voting for women. And listening to that and really understanding that's the stake. It's not like, well, do you like this candidate or not? No, that's a luxury. That's a privileged luxury that we do not have in 2024.

00:38:32.760 for. Yeah. When was the first time you got to vote? Well, I voted as a young woman

00:38:41.420 before we had that kind of teaching in our home. So it was the, which one was it? Clinton Gore

00:38:51.120 with, I voted in that election, Al Gore, but I didn't get to vote for him. Of course I was,

00:38:56.640 that was my secret but then i wasn't because we were in something called federalist marriage 0.90

00:39:03.580 which is another brand of fundamentalism um from doug wilson out in moscow idaho um and the women 1.00

00:39:10.960 in that tradition only vote when they need the popular vote which they're trying to do away with 0.92

00:39:16.440 so it's you know it'll it's a big complicated issue he would know he said i could vote if i

00:39:23.920 would vote the way he voted you can't have a wife that will vote differently than her husband that's

00:39:28.080 the big theological argument for it but really it's to eliminate women voters it's a go back to

00:39:34.380 the times before suffrage so um he knew he would know that i was lying i couldn't vote for pat

00:39:40.740 robertson i couldn't do it and so i was not allowed to vote yeah yeah um i mean just it's

00:39:49.480 It's just the chapter before Handmaid's Tale starts, just that one chapter before Atwood started writing.

00:39:55.780 That's really, really what it feels like.

00:39:59.040 I got chills when you talked about that woman who might be walking through Walmart and might see your book and then secretly put it in her shopping cart.

00:40:09.400 I know that we have some traditional wives who listen to this show and who listen to this show, you know, very, there are some who listen to this show. 0.93

00:40:19.480 just so they can get angry with me. Um, but I know that there are some who listen to this show

00:40:24.140 and appreciate a lot of the messages that they get here. What, what, what do you want to tell

00:40:31.380 those women who are still stuck in this world? Hmm. I think about this because I, I have to 0.80

00:40:39.700 think about like, well, what would have reached me? Um, and what did reach me ultimately was that,

00:40:44.760 knowing that the world out here is not anything like what they told me it would be.

00:40:50.580 I am not alone. I've never been alone. Like a community of people rose up around me to help me.

00:40:57.860 And I, and they didn't pressure me with their ideologies. Like I had come from a religious

00:41:03.020 background where I was told what to think and believe from my earliest childhood days.

00:41:07.540 Out here, I was allowed to think for myself and that at the pace that I needed. So leaving is

00:41:13.340 not necessarily a wholesale change of your mind on everything. It's about being safe and learning

00:41:19.120 to have your autonomy respected, and in turn, respect others' autonomy. The big thing that

00:41:26.900 drove me out was my children. I did not want to raise the next generation of patriarchs, and I

00:41:31.780 did not want to raise girls who thought it was okay to accept abuse. And I recognized my power

00:41:39.300 as a mother was to break a cycle and that it could stop with me. And it did stop with me.

00:41:44.480 My family line, my children are happy, healthy adults, and they're not fundamentalists today

00:41:50.380 because their mom left. And I know that there's a stigma when you're in that world of being the

00:41:56.100 one who leaves. You didn't break your marriage. You didn't break your belief system. It was

00:42:02.980 already broken. What you're saying is this stops with me and we're going to do it differently out

00:42:08.380 here. So yeah, I think I said something in Shining Happy People that a lot of people resonated with

00:42:16.340 and it's that the universe will catch you. And it's true. It's true. I've been supported every

00:42:22.440 single step of the way. That is all that we have for today. I am in awe of Tia and everything that

00:42:31.460 she has done and everything that she is doing. She is a force of a woman and a human in the

00:42:39.520 world. You can pre-order her book now, A Well-Trained Wife, My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.

00:42:47.340 It comes out in August. But if you need more Tia immediately, she is very online and her work is

00:42:56.420 incredible. You can find her on the Instagram at Tia Levings Writer. Her website is tialevings.com

00:43:05.980 and her sub stack is called The Anti-Fundamentalist.

00:43:12.220 Thank you for being here with us today. Go have a great one. Do something nice for yourself.

00:43:17.600 You deserve it.

00:43:26.420 We'll see you next time.

00:43:56.420 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - February 06, 2024

Escape from the Trad Wife Life with Tia Levings

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