Tia Levings on The Well-Trained Wife

00:00:02
Welcome to the a world of Difference podcast. I'm Lori Adams-Brown and this is. A podcast for those who are different. And want to make a difference today. Our guest is Tia Levings.

00:00:14
Tia writes about the realities in hristian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma. She's also a podcaster, a speaker, and a content strategist. You may have seen her quoted in Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek, but she's also appeared and what many of us saw, which was the hit Amazon docu series Shiny Happy People. She's based in Jacksonville, FLorida, and she's a mom to four incredible adults, and she likes to travel and hike and paint and daydream. But you'll also find her on social media.

00:00:44
You've probably seen her some of her reels, either on Instagram or TikTok. She's writer. Her memoir, a well trained wife about her escape from chrisTian patriarchy, is her first book. It's releasing this summer. I'm very excited to have an advance copy and to have Tia on the show talking about her memoir and why she wrote it.

00:01:07
A very warm welcome to the World. Of Difference podcast, Tia Levings.

00:01:17
This is a trigger warning for this episode. We will be discussing domestic violence and. Abuse in a religious context and in a home environment. And if these are anything that that you have experienced that would be triggering to you, listener discretion is advised. Hi, Tia.

00:01:33
A very warm welcome to the a world of Difference podcast today. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. It's an honor. Thank you so much to your publisher as well, who reached out to me about your book, which I have been reading on planes and trains and on my couch sitting by the fireplace and, you know, a book like this that goes so deep into some really hard topics, you know, I found myself needing some kind of body work for myself.

00:02:01
That warm, cozy blanket, that warm mug, that ambiance. That helped me feel safe and process what you're talking about. But I just thank you for how brave and vulnerable you were to write this book, which I know is going to make a difference for so many people. It has for me. But to begin with, I'd really like to, for people who don't already know who you are, just give us a brief overview of who you are and kind of why you wrote this book.

00:02:25
Yeah. First of all, I will say I'm so glad that you took self care around the book. When people read it quickly, I get nervous for them, for their nervous systems. So I'm really grateful that you honored your body and your needs. Yeah.

00:02:38
So I. My name is Tia Levings. I wrote a well trained wife, which is the story of how I got into and then escaped from chrisTian patriarchy, which very high controlled religion and a violent marriage. A lot of people interact with my work online. That's how they first see me through either Amazon's shiny happy people or my platform, which educates on the abuses and chrisTian fundamentalism and other high control religion.

00:03:03
And I write the anti fundamentalist, which is a sub stack on deconstructing fundamentalism as it relates to our headlines, politics, family, faith, process, spirituality, you know, anything, because I. Fundamentalism and fundamentalist attitudes can be in anything. So that's my day job. That's what I work on. The book comes out in August, so.

00:03:24
Which is why I'm on the podcast circuit. Yes, exactly. We want people to pre order. So that's your many of. One of many pitches we're going to give.

00:03:34
Yeah. Now, I'm excited to promote this book because there are many listening in this community that are in some very concentric circles from what you write about. In fact, I first heard about you when I watched shiny happy people, which covers IBLP and Gothard and all these things that, until I watched that documentary, I didn't realize how the concentric circles related to southern Baptists and all of that. But I know there are southern baptist listeners to this podcast. There are also people who are of many different faith backgrounds who may have experienced fundamentalism within Islam or Judaism, you know, a variety of other places.

00:04:13
And so as we kind of unpack this together a little bit, and you talk about fundamentalism itself, maybe it's good just to give a little bit of a definition. What do you mean when you say fundamentalism and how would people recognize it? Yeah, I really simplify this definition. I've heard some, like Theo, broad type guys get into really lengthy explanations of what fundamentalism is. But my take is any kind of pure ideology that's valued over people.

00:04:40
So if you are pursuing the purity of an idea over someone's humanity, or over need or imperfection, and there's a formula. There's usually a formula for happy living attached to it, and then if you do, a plus b equals happiness. That's fundamentalism.

00:05:01
Can you hear me? Yeah, it can be. Yeah. Sorry, we broke up for a second. I think it can be very disorienting for people who have been given a very pure form of their ideology or faith or religion, and then having these very confusing elements that come in sort of sideways and that's sort of, you know, your story.

00:05:22
And it's a story of many people listening to this. And so you, I think one of the things in the book that, you know, really kind of shocked me in the first few pages was like, you know, you're talking about people that, you know, I didn't necessarily know personally, but I knew people who were in Jacksonville, FLorida, for example. I know people whose stories relate to Jerry Vines at First Baptist Jacksonville. And that's like a huge part of your story. And so, yeah, I'd love to just touch on that for a little bit, because as you were a child, you moved to FLorida and you end up in this church, which is, how many city blocks was it?

00:05:57
Again? We had eleven city blocks of property in downtown Jacksonville, and it was the first big mega church in the southeast. It was very large, mainstream congregation. We had two pastors. One of our pastors was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

00:06:12
So when people, like, handle my story and they're tempted to think that it's fringe, I think it's really important to remember I grew up in an ordinary southern baptist church in mainstream America. And that is exactly how extremist views enter. You know, that's the environment where they thrive is in a congregation full of very earnest people who want to do the right thing with their life. They're looking for ways to have happy lives, happy families, good marriages, protect their kids, and they're listening to external sources on high to tell them how to do that. It's the perfect petri dish for fundamentalism to grow.

00:06:48
Couple that with, in the late eighties and nineties, the rise of Bill Gothard and his evangelistic method of recruiting within churches, and it was like a perfect storm. Yeah, absolutely a perfect storm. And so people are so easily sort of groomed into this. And my husband, he's got a marriage and family therapy masters, and he focused on trauma. And one of the things he often says is people who have experienced trauma lend toward dogmatism.

00:07:16
And so I remember that part of your story where you're a young girl, you're in a new school and new friends, and there's this total horrible guy that your friend introduces you to, and you have this very traumatic experience. And the reaction to that is like, how can there be more rules to keep me safe? At least that's my impression. What would you say as you unpack that? And you wrote about it, which, thank you for writing that.

00:07:42
It's so incredibly vulnerable and brave. And I know that so many people are going to see themselves in your story, both for their bodies being objectified. And as a young girl, kind of coming into your own and figuring out who you are when you have these systems, it makes it really hard for them to see through it all, because if you've been told by a pastor or a youth leader that your body is shameful and you're supposed to cross your legs and you're actually such a good writer, the way you write this, you find a way to have these rules keep you safe, and everybody around you is expecting you to do that, too. So what role do you think this whole trauma and sort of dogmatism response may have had for you as a young child without really a chance to fight against it? Yeah, I think because it was my entire environment, and I agree with your husband so much there.

00:08:41
I think fundamentalism is attractive during times of chaos because it offers an order and a structure. It's very comforting. And that is how it was presented to me. I felt chaotic. I had been traumatized, and yet I was promised by authorities.

00:08:56
I really trusted that if I just continued down this narrow road and just purified my faith, purified my behavior, that it would result in this beautiful outcome, and that the real burden was on me to conform to that. And I put my whole trust into it. Despite numerous opportunities where I was being presented with counter evidence, it didn't get through because the words were so powerful to me and the promises were so hungered for, the chaos, the undiagnosed trauma. I mean, like, it's really important to remember. We didn't have any vocabulary for that.

00:09:30
So I was holding that within my little, you know, 1213 year old mind that I wasn't trauma informed. I was trauma experienced, you know, and that word didn't exist, and language and people to tell didn't exist. And I internalized the entire choice. Everything that I got into was never anyone else's fault. It was my fault for being the wrong placed at the wrong time or wearing the wrong thing or thinking the wrong thing or having disobedience in my heart.

00:09:57
And so the. The message that if I just obeyed the rules well enough, I would be loved and accepted and safe is something that I carried throughout my entire childhood. Yeah. And I know people listening to this, maybe some women in particular, are really resonating with that part of your story, and they still are carrying it because the, you know, in general, outside of religious environments, still women are told to be small, to be silent, to defer. But it's really extreme in certain religious environments, especially the one where you were literally just being told to cover yourself up in how you dress with purity culture, and you were told to submit, and you use kind of phrases around women being groomed to defer to every man, and therefore, you know, be easily preyed upon.

00:10:50
And so as you unpack that now, what is some language that's been able to help you process that for yourself and other women that, you know? Well, the entire rewind button was very important. So when I. It's, like, probably relevant at this point in the story to say that when I started writing the book, it was started as a therapeutic exercise. I had escaped.

00:11:11
I was completely broken. Such a hot mess of devastation in 2007, and my first therapist suggested I start journaling, and we started naming the things that I went through, and that was powerful, you know, to have words attached to my experiences. But then as we started to look at each experience and say, well, what led you to that decision? And what led you to the one before that? And we went backward and backward and backward over the years, and I'm going through a faith deconstruction process at this point.

00:11:40
But it wasn't what I set out to do. I was just retracing my steps and what kinds of influences had led me to make certain choices over and over again. I had to go back into this religion, that it wasn't my plan. I thought my faith was kind of safe and off limits and separate from domestic violence. And I.

00:11:59
Even the language of domestic violence was new to me at this point in therapy because I didn't. He had never punched my face, so I didn't think that I had been battered. And so just expanding my whole understanding of what domestic abuse can look like and how it manifests was a season, you know? But then to retrace my steps back into my religious background really emphasized how I had been groomed and conditioned slowly over time to, for example, not put my own interests, like, not even consider my own interests or my own.

00:12:34
Needs. Or desires or dreams. Everything had been subjugated kind of systematically, and so that there was just no resistance to anything. There was no waiting period or hear yourself think or any of the things that I do today as a healthy person making decisions that didn't exist when I was a young woman. And I wasn't equipped with any kind of language or model, role model, or resource, you know, to go to and say, hey, is this a good decision I'm making here?

00:13:05
Because the decision was already made for me, you know, for example, I married who I married because he said he was God's best for my life, and I had just spent 18 years hearing that, you know, you will marry God's best for your life and without any, like, conversation about what that might look like and who he might be. Other than my list of qualifications, I have some of that in there, too. Like, we were taught to have qualifications for a husband, but it's amazing how adaptable that list can become when someone says that they want you. Yeah. And you grew up as a child hearing a pastor talk about his wife, who's sitting right there, who was a child when he was, you know, expressing interest.

00:13:46
He's 25 years old in seminary, and, like, was it his dad? That's like, oh, there's this girl in the glee club. And he said she has all the parts in all the right places. It's just so nauseating. Yeah.

00:13:57
How was that to hear that as a child? Like, what was that like to experience that kind of a story from your pastor? Yeah. The biggest two stories that. That was just preached over and over again for years.

00:14:08
Like, it's kind of hard to imagine if you have a southern baptist background and you're familiar with the culture, to be a church six times a week is pretty normal, involved in some kind of church activity, and that is your whole world and everyone around you is hearing the same thing. So the messages that you have that you hear from the pulpit are compounded in from multiple directions in multiple ways all the time. And one of those was a short engagement. The value of a very short engagement. Both of my pastors had had two week engagements so that they could have sex.

00:14:39
I mean, that was the reason the whole thing was to not have sex outside of marriage. So make the engagement really quick. Both of them married, like, prepared girls who had been chosen for them by elders. Like, there's. We don't want to use the word arranged marriage, but in hindsight, you can call a duck a duck, you know, and selected and groomed, and within two weeks, they were engaged.

00:15:03
And so by the time I'm a young woman on the same decision, I'm not. There's no reference in my mind that says a short engagement is a bad idea, that you might want to pause, that there might be good reason for two strangers not to get married. None of that was on the table. So, yeah, I mean, it's. It's true indoctrination.

00:15:24
There's. Yeah, and so when. That's your narrative. Right. And that's what you're being told as a little girl, and you mentioned how women.

00:15:34
There's this narrative around women who wanted careers, women who wanted to get married and have babies, and you just. You wanted babies. That's like. You know. But, yeah, there is this often narrative that I think we hear, and it's, you know, comes from Hollywood a little bit, too.

00:15:47
But I think in a lot of these church settings, it's this whole idea that women are the ones always longing to get married, and yet the narratives don't always match up in the end. It's stories like your pastor saying he just can't wait to get married. He's 25, in seminary, and he's going around hunting for this wife, and she's in high school. My guess is not thinking about marriage in her glee club. Right.

00:16:10
So often it's the opposite. That's true. And I think that's part of just the mass gaslighting that happens, is that we're told a narrative that is completely different than what the reality is. And so. And then also you being groomed, you know, like so many, to defer to men.

00:16:25
It really sets you up for these situations. But for those who haven't seen you and shiny, happy people or are just now pre ordering your book, which is another shameless pitch, we will put links in the show notes, walk us through. From the moment you marry this man and then where you end up fearing for your life, how did it go so quickly, quickly to something so hard and devastating? Yeah. So, one of the things that happens when you marry someone you barely know is that you don't know what things they struggle with.

00:16:55
And there were red flags. Before we got married, there was a compatibility test that we failed in premarital counseling. It was mandatory premarital counseling, and we also. There was also violence already, so if I had confided in anyone, maybe they would have raised a concern. But what I had on my hands was a young man who could not organize his own life, and he could not handle stress, and he really needed an external locus of control, which the church and high control religion is all too happy to provide.

00:17:28
They will give you. That's one of the dangers of fundamentalism. They will give you everything you need externally for the validation that you're on the right path. They'll give you the plan, the rules, the consequences. Everything is there.

00:17:40
And he really did love theology, so he loved to study. He was under, like, for fun. He would read John MacArthur's commentaries and, you know, and collect these big theology books, and. And he just was looking back, like not a very normal 21 year old guy in the navy, but I could see how he was really trying to be a devout person and a man of God. He really wanted to be that.

00:18:09
His ability to handle it and handle stress was not there. So one of the reasons why it became so dangerous so quickly is because he got in over his head with a relationship and a marriage and responsibilities and a job and the trappings of life, and then patriarchy hands this huge plate of responsibility on top of that. And I think this is one of the reasons I really wanna. I hope one of the outcomes of my book is the message that in patriarchy, everyone suffers. It's not good for the men either.

00:18:37
Like, instead of an equal partner, they get this subservient person who defers to them, which just increases their responsibility load. And it's. That's not fair, that's not partnership, that's not mutuality, that's not collaboration. That's not Adam and Eve in the garden. It's none of those things.

00:18:53
It's this top down extra pressure. He couldn't handle it. And his answer, which we were conditioned to do, was to turn to God, turn to church, turn to theology, which deepened our high control theology. What was happening on a wider scale, the backdrop behind us is that the evangelical church was politicizing in the nineties, and it was becoming more fundamentalist on the whole, in part because of Gothard's influence. But there were many influences happening at that time.

00:19:21
And then, in addition, reformed doctrines started to come in which the high control Presbyterians are. They add Calvinism to this mix, and that's really dark theology to add to somebody who already has a lot of mental illness and already believes in their own depravity to their core. You know, it really darkens my story at that point. And then the lines blur between high control religion and domestic abuse and mental illness, and it just becomes this really tangled braid that there was no escape from. There was no safe place, there was no relief.

00:19:55
It was the deeper into theology we got and the deeper we got into these high control groups that were supposed to have all the answers, the darker our lives became. And by the end of that marriage, by the time I'm ready, like, I'm about to die, at this point in the marriage was 14 years, we were in a high control group, a Covenant Presbyterian church, that we had to sign a covenant to enter, and we had to be excommunicated from to leave. And it was a congregation of wife discipliners and spankers and. And homeschoolers where everybody was like, minds. That was the term.

00:20:33
Like, we're in a like minded church. And of course, they don't lead with that, that this is what we do out in the open. You know, you don't find out until you're in it that. How deep you're in it. And, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was bad.

00:20:47
And it was the most extreme part of this whole patriarchal just religion that I think people have. But it's, I think, important to remember that that's a 14 year span. That's with two really ardent, well meaning people experiencing something that is way more common than people talk about. Because there's shame involved, there's embarrassment involved, there's secrets. And patriarchy, nothing in patriarchy advertises or leads with the truth of what they're, you know, what you're gonna get.

00:21:19
They lead with the shiny. That's why it's called shiny happy people. They lead with the beautiful image of the trad life and the shiny, happy babies and. And who doesn't love babies, you know, like you said, I wanted babies. I wanted five babies.

00:21:30
And patriarchy is really good at using the thing that you most want for yourself against you. Motherhood was an easy drug.

00:21:43
Yeah, that's the quote right there. And it's a trap. It's a trap for everyone, isn't it? And so you find yourself in this situation, and I know that people who are hearing this for the first time, wife spanking cult, that's not something that's widely known. It's not something, obviously, that's out there in the open and definitely not in a, like, presbyterian circle.

00:22:03
You wouldn't even imagine a mainline denomination name like that. You imagine it if you, if you could possibly fathom something so horrific in a very fringe, like you said, cult situation. And so as you have begun to share your story, you know, we do have this situation of this trad. Why? How is this even, like, a trend?

00:22:24
It's so mindy boggling at this point, but we have people at the highest levels of our government, and you sort of end the book, you know, kind of talking more about this, but no spoilers, just another plug as to why you should read this book, because it's not just a friend situation, it's, you're talking about the religious and political atmosphere happening right now in the United States of America, even leading up to this election here in November. And we have players in our own government doing videos in their kitchens, and it's just bonkers. And so how has your experience in this movement helped you understand some of this trad wife movement? And how it's involved in politics and everything. Well, I can tell you it's terrifying, Lori, the thing that I worked, I risked my entire life.

00:23:07
I barely escaped with my life and my children. It was a harrowing escape. And I got away and I put my life back together. And now I'm watching the exact same thing that I had ran away from with my, you know, I lost everything except for my life and my kids. I'm watching that come for my neighbors.

00:23:26
I'm watching it play out in the mainstream. I'm watching, like, when Katie Britt gave her State of the Union address with fundy baby voice, which is not our term for it. That's the outsider's term, and I use that when I'm educating. But she revealed her fundamentalist influences through her behavior. And it was the same feeling I had when I saw the Duggars first be on tv.

00:23:46
I was like, that is our group. I know what they're doing behind closed doors. They can't possibly be getting ready to tell America what they really do. And no, they're not. They're selling this beautiful image.

00:23:57
She's selling this really clear role definition. She was trying to appeal to our emotions with using her, her sweet, manipulative voice that she puts on. You know, when you're trying to coax and manipulate and gaslight, watching it play out on the stage is scary because I know exactly what it means. I know what restrictions are coming. We're seeing that in our headlines now.

00:24:19
And every time outsiders, especially outsiders who are raised, like, perhaps with a feminist background or very educated background, they look at it and they think, this can't possibly be true. Like, this must be fear mongering or this must be extremism, and this isn't going to come for us. And it absolutely is. Like, coming. Like, Roe is not where they ended.

00:24:41
And I said that when Roe ended, like, they're going to come for contraception, they're going to come for women working outside the home. They're going to come for voting. Like, I wasn't allowed to vote in patriarchy. And they talk about that now openly, too. So it's.

00:24:55
Do we just have to look at the people who actually lived in chrisTian patriarchy to know what they have planned for our country and the women here? So women and children are the bottom of the pyramid scheme? No, absolutely. That's how it works when there's this kind of extreme hierarchical complementarianism that some would refer to it as, but otherwise known as chrisTian patriarchy. Right.

00:25:19
But as you're writing this book and you're unpacking it all these years later, and you're starting to share about your experience through shiny, happy people and just ways that you're getting your message out there. I'm curious to know what you think. I mean, you just mentioned people that have been raised with feminism are sometimes surprised that this even exists and wondering if it's even truly a threat. But you, on the other hand, have really experienced it. What are some other things that you feel like are myths or things that you're constantly having to correct that seem shocking to people that you're having trouble kind of getting through to people with?

00:25:53
Yeah. Well, there's several of those good questions from inside the church. One of the biggest pushbacks is not all chrisTians. They love to. They love to say, well, not all chrisTians are this way.

00:26:06
And they get really hung up on the labels. And to that, I always say, number one, I never said all chrisTians. That's important. That's their language, not mine. But also enough.

00:26:17
The. Where it's the majority influence in the country and also, how many is too many? You know, what is enough? Like, these are abuses that are happening in plain sight, and the evidence is there. If you listen as you center survivors and you listen to survivors coming out of patriarchy, our stories are extremely consistent.

00:26:39
And the boldest things I've said, the most horrifying things that I've said in my story, my inbox is always full of, me, too. Me, too. That happened to me, too. Thank you for saying this out loud. I didn't think anybody would ever say this out loud.

00:26:54
And I've committed to myself that I will. Like, the only thing I can take from my experience is that I worked through the trauma therapy enough to where I can tell my story without re traumatizing myself. And I have a responsibility to do so if I see it happening all around me and to my fellow neighbor, like, I got through, I got into this so innocently, and I. And I just don't want to give it my entire life. I want to stop it.

00:27:19
And the only way to stop it is to tell the truth of what happened. So I will say the thing, you know, these are hard things to say sometimes, and they feel like, you know, embarrassed. But I would rather be a little embarrassed talking about it than watch it happen and watch it play out. It's. I don't think.

00:27:34
I think I'm off track with your question a little bit, but that's. That's what I hear the most, is, like, incredulity that it. That it's really real. And I always point back to survivors and say, well, just listen. Just listen to the people coming out of it.

00:27:46
They'll tell you everything you need to know. Yeah. And, you know, we do have a very imperfect both justice system and I would say just a lack of framework and especially evangelical spaces to center survivors. It's always pretty much the opposite, what we see centering the perpetrators, the predator pastors, I call them. But at the same time, I think that the way our justice system works really kind of gives an excuse to churches to not listen to just one survivor because you always have to have a corroborating story.

00:28:22
But it's so hard for a survivor to come forward ever. And it's really hard even to have that second one, even though a first one's been brave, because when they see the first one come forward, they watch what happens to them and the rest just tend to shrink back. Like, I don't want to do that. For good reason. Right?

00:28:37
Like, it's a lot to ask. And so as you were starting to tell your story, was that anything that happened to you, did you feel like you were kind of a lone voice out there for a little while? Did you have any sort of experience with that? Yeah, for a long time. My book sold on its 13th draft and I'd been working on it for ten years.

00:28:55
And during that time, I was like a rising ability to be articulate about it, speak about it, say things online. And I didn't start making reels in video format until 2021. So my platform really changed when I started doing that. But beforehand, you know, plenty of people didn't believe me. Some things that helped with the me too movement where it was being taken more seriously, because just the mass, you know, of people saying so, you know, was a convincing tide.

00:29:26
Right now in our, in our social media conversation is this, would you rather meet a bear or a man in the woods? And everyone, women are like, bear fair, you know, and I, and I have a video. I was on vacation with my friends and we saw bears in Asheville in the woods. And we rolled down our window and it was a mama bear crossing the road with her cubs. And I was like, cheering her on and talking to her the whole time and no hesitation in my spirit.

00:29:51
And the thing is with the bear conversation is that if you are attacked by a bear, no one is going to disbelieve you if you're attacked by a man, which is statistically way more likely. There's this disbelief that comes with it. I have to put my focus on the survivors. I have this vision when I was writing my book that there's some woman in her kitchen and she's feeling really alone and overwhelmed with the amount of abuse she's living in. She doesn't have language for the things that she's experienced, but she knows that she's close to the breaking point.

00:30:26
And she throws my book into her cart at Walmart. She can't go to a bookstore even. You know, it just. It just happens to be something she can toss in with her milk and bread, and she gets my book. That woman is who I care about more than all the detractors.

00:30:39
And like you said, podcasts, like, putting it out there where people, like, they can listen to a podcast, maybe in a little more secret, a little more covertly than, like, watching something on tv or attending a talk or something like that. So, yeah, I know. I'm sure there's naysayers, but they're not my business. My business are the people who need to hear from somebody who's been through it and came out on the other side. And a big part of my work is putting language to experiences.

00:31:07
So that feeling you have in your gut when you watch the Duggar family, that something's off. What I have the ability to do is tell you why. You're absolutely right. It is off. And here's what's going on.

00:31:18
And that's just affirmation. That's language and affirmation that they need in order to make their decision and follow their intuition. I feel like that's a big part of what I do. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm so excited to think about those women at Walmart getting your book and being able to find someone who's giving language, because I know anyone who's a survivor.

00:31:42
So many of the journeys of survivors that I know personally is that once you get language, it helps you see. And I had a book, a church called Tov, that Scott McKnight and Laura Behringer wrote that I was being very badly spiritually and psychologically and abused at my church by my pastor. And it was that book that gave me the language. It's like if you haven't been told what's happening, the gaslighting is still working on you. But the language, it's always the words.

00:32:07
It's all in the words, right? And so I'm really excited for you and your story to help people. As you're thinking about those women going to Walmart and shopping with their cart, what are some of the things that you would want to tell them if they do end up listening to this podcast out of curiosity of whether they should keep reading the book. Yeah. One of the things they say about hard memoirs is that if you're holding the book, it has a good outcome, and that can be really good to hold on to.

00:32:35
When you're. When you're struggling through someone's narrative and it's triggering and activating and upsetting, it has a happy ending. If they retained the ability to then come out of it, tell the story, put it, sell it, put it on paper, you know, that whole thing, then that's a triumphant all in itself. But really coming and going from it, identifying, being able to relate with elements of the story, maybe not the whole thing. I think one of the things that comes out with my book a lot with readers is that it's so relatable.

00:33:06
Even though they didn't experience the exact same thing, they experienced enough of it to be able to relate and to just not feel alone. To know that there's solidarity and that the steps that you make towards freedom or towards articulation and understanding your own situation. There are people out here that will understand. They're welcoming, there's community that's building. It's not what it was even ten years ago to leave.

00:33:31
There's a network and there's life out here. It's not so solitary, I think, is. Yeah, solidarity is a big thing.

00:33:43
Absolutely. I get this question a lot for myself, having worked through the past three years in the aftermath of my own CPTSD, which is another thing that's going on around social media with John MacArthur right now, where they're saying it's not real, and that's just even worse. The gaslighting that your mental health diagnosis isn't real. But for those who have experienced trauma, and religious trauma in particular, who have either PTSD or CPTSD, and working through that, that's an experience that I've worked really hard. There's so much work to walk through.

00:34:19
Right. And it's a longer journey than you ever expect. But there's so many co healers, I call them in this movement. It's a very sacred space for me. I also have had trouble kind of walking into certain churches that trigger my nervous system, and I know that you kind of had that sort of experience, too.

00:34:37
But if someone is listening and they really don't know how to explain to their family that it's really hard for them to walk back into a religious environment that feels very similar to one where they were, you know, injured in some way. What would you say to somebody listening right now?

00:34:53
First, big hugs. That's a very hard place to be. Family, faith traditions tend to be so laden with emotions and baggage and memories, and especially if you're the mom figure in that scenario, you're expected to help hold things together and overcome, especially like, be a good role model to your kids and things like that. It is, though, one of the most primary ways you can self advocate and stand up for your own bandwidth and health. And once I realized in my own journey that the continuing to go into those environments, knowing what it was doing to me was active self harm, that changed my ability to be assertive about it.

00:35:40
Growing into the ability to self advocate was a process of, probably a ten year process of being able to just stick up for myself and my feelings and allow the follow up, which is immediate, someone else's discomfort. Someone else is uncomfortable because I have to make this stand and they're probably disappointed and hurt and they're going to let me know that. And I'm a people pleaser and I come from, you know, deep entrenched co dependence. It's part of the religious tradition we get. And.

00:36:09
And so it was very hard for me to allow someone else to sit with their own discomfort because I was no longer going to be the one embodying all of the discomfort so that they could feel comfortable, which. That it played a really big role in my second marriage. And my second marriage ultimately did not succeed. So I'm careful when I'm giving out advice, you know, like, I'm not promising you results, except that I am happier, healthier and stronger self advocate for having gone through that journey. Ultimately, a partner that loves and cares about you going to support the fact that you can't go into an environment that's harming you.

00:36:43
Period. End of story. Yeah, that's good advice, and I'm really so sorry to hear about your marriage ending over that. And at the same time, just so you know, grateful that you're giving language to people who are having to choose what it means to heal, and that's very nuanced and it's very complicated. And I actually found your story.

00:37:07
Even though it's your story, it's no one else's story, and you're at the center of it because it's you. And at the same time, like any good story, we always find ourselves in someone else's story. And I think that as people hear yours, they're going to find ways to find the freedom and the transformation that they need. And it means what got you here is going to help you get to the next phase. And sometimes, unfortunately, relationships end and friendships, you know, in my story, it's betrayal of friends who are my pastors and co workers and friends.

00:37:39
And those relationships and friendships had to end, but I had to find new ones. And unfortunately, there are new ones, people who care about your healing and your safety. And so any advice for people who are rebuilding relationships? Because I find that that can be one of the more difficult parts of these kinds of stories of religious trauma, is finding new people. It's one of the reasons people still and never leave is because they don't want to lose their people.

00:38:02
And yet, finding new people can be something they don't trust themselves to do because they chose people that harmed them in the beginning. So are there any words of wisdom of what you've learned in your journey about how to choose those new, safe relationships coming out of it? Yeah, first and foremost. I mean, this might seem a little indirect at first, but I promise it will get there. First and foremost is yourself, the relationship that you have with yourself.

00:38:27
And what I actually did was I took myself on a big trip, a very, very large travel trip, where I just really finally got one on one with myself. And I loved myself. And I realized I would rather be alone than with somebody, anyone, who's making me miserable or sidelining my needs or not valuing who I am and what I bring. The uncomfortable truth with that is that very often I was asking others to do for me what I was not doing for myself. And that's why time with myself and really getting to the bottom of all the self worth stuff that comes up through this.

00:39:06
It was so important and it put into context all the rest of my relationships. I have. Like, I have something called the top ten, which is the top. It's ten very safe people that I have in my life that I know I can go to. And some of them are friends and some of them are professionals.

00:39:23
So I have, like, a. A top ten therapist, a top ten attorney, a top ten pr person, writing coach, and then I have friends. And that posse is one thing, one kind of friendship. And then I have other contacts that in the past, I might have gotten too personal with too quickly, or I would have looked to have too tight of a bond with, or I would have just co opted quite a bit of my self care into it, into different relationships, including my partnership, my most intimate partnerships. Like, I really think that's one of the things about being in codependent recovery is understanding what you are.

00:40:01
What you need is your responsibility first. And my book opens with this realization I made that I had to save myself. There wasn't a savior coming. I was my kid's only advocate, the only adult in the house. And if I needed rescue, it was up to me to save me.

00:40:17
And that was important to get me out of violence. But then it still took me the past 14 years to realize that that's almost a confrontation every day. I cannot co opt my needs to others, and I cannot do expect them to do for me what I'm just not willing to do for myself. And that's not to say I'm, like, hyper independent and can take care of all my needs. I think interdependence is beautiful, and we do need people, need people.

00:40:41
But it has freed my friendships and it's freed my relationships to not be so needy all of the time in ways that I really need to be taking care of myself, and they need me to be taking care of themselves. No one wants that extra baggage. They want a friendship. They want mutuality and reciprocity. Great advice for people who are struggling with that whole codependency piece, and it's great to hear that wisdom from you and all that you've learned in your journey.

00:41:09
There's one part of the book I wanted to read, and it is toward the end, but it's not a spoiler because it's not giving anything away other than the fact that people could have known this on their own. But it's just the way you worded it, which I felt was really just insightful in light of everything that's going on and why your book is so important. You know, we start out with this church that's, like, huge. It's multiple city blocks, and it's so huge, not just physically, but it's ginormous in your life and your experience spiritually and with your relationships and your family and everything. And it's this first Baptist, you know, Jacksonville, and you say First Baptist failure was too sad to gloat about in the sense that they had reduced themselves to a city block, right.

00:41:48
But also relieving it hadn't all been bad growing up in an evangelical megachurch, on the other hand, their negligence to prepare us for the real adult world had nearly cost me my life. I don't know how to register my feelings. A sensation my therapist called discomfort. She said I needed to sit in it, to let it be. And I think that reading those words and once again, you're just such a great writer.

00:42:11
And I read a lot of books, like saying something, you're welcome. But just that whole image. And I know you said you're a very visual person, which has its own, you know, challenges for people who are hearing songs and hymns about blood. And I have other friends that really struggle with that as children as well. But just the imagery of this church literally shrinking, that was just everything.

00:42:33
And just seeing how so many of these empires fall when they've been so controlling in these religious traumatic experience. And so as that is happening and your therapist is helping you learn to sit in the pain and suffering. One of the things I've seen in evangelicalism and in religious traumatic experiences within evangelicalism is a lot of people don't have the theology of suffering that would help them get through that and also don't have an ability to sit in the pain and suffering in order to grieve and move through that. And so what would you tell someone listening right now who just wants to keep their head in the sand and pretend it's not happening and move on? That's a great question.

00:43:18
Triggers are information. And when you're feeling triggered or activated and you're uncomfortable, and if you have zero tolerance for that, if it's just too painful, that is actually very powerful information that there's a lot more to unpack than you realize. There's something happening there. There's history there. That's when I would run, not walk, to my therapist and start uncovering things.

00:43:44
That intolerance is a nervous system response. That's your body's way of protecting you so that you're in survival mode. And, yeah, I mean, the second half of that is when you put your head in the sand and then you're just in denial. That is an option to you. That is available to you.

00:44:02
You can deny as coping mechanism, but I would beg people to realize that that is, you are harming yourself when you do that. You are now becoming a self perpetuator of whatever hurt you. Because healthy psychological well being does have tolerance to sit with something that's uncomfortable. A mature adult human being is able to sit in a certain amount of discomfort and face the stresses of their lives and identify problems and come up with solutions. And so if you're unable to do that, you just shut down.

00:44:33
That's really alarming. It's common. We all have been there, but, yeah, that's information to take very seriously. Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we're finishing up here, I do want you to give us a chance to find where people can find you in your book.

00:44:50
But I also want to give you a chance to say any last words to the audience listening around the world about the message that you're trying to bring. Yeah. I think that because evangelical outreach has been so pervasive and global that the reach for this is, and the impacts are much more widespread than one little american lens. And I think that if you find yourself relating to parts of the story, that I urge you to examine places where you may have religious trauma in your life and to know that you're not alone and to feel that solidarity. And I'm a big, huge proponent in healing that you deserve to heal, and that trauma took your past, but it does not to have your present and your future, too.

00:45:32
And you are the one in charge of that. So I'm working on my second book now. And that's my entire focus, is how I took my life back and how I regained my voice and I became someone who could talk about really hard things. When I left, I could hardly speak. I stuttered, and I couldn't tell my story, and I didn't know what had happened to me.

00:45:53
And I was completely broken. And the woman that you meet today online is not that same person. And I hope that people take encouragement from that in solidarity for finding me. I'm everywhere online at tlivings writer. My website is Tiavings.com, and my substack is Tiavings dot.

00:46:11
Substack.com dot. Thank you so much for the difference you're making and for bringing your differences to the table today. Tia, you are just really a voice to listen to, and you've made a huge impact on me, and I really am excited for people to get their hands on your book. A well trained wife, my skate from chrisTian patriarchy. Thanks for being with us today, Tia.

00:46:31
Thank you so much. This was amazing. This was a really heavy topic. And if you find yourself in a space right now where you just need to take some deep breaths, I encourage you to do that. This kind of a conversation can really bring up some things for some of us who've been in environments where we've experienced religious trauma, or for any of you out there who have walked through domestic violence or any type of abusive relationship with an intimate partner.

00:47:01
And I would just encourage you, if that is the case and it's bringing something up for you, that you just do some grounding right now. Just look around the room and think about three or four things that you can see. Notice what you can smell what you can hear, you can taste what you can touch just to ground yourself. And as we process what we've just heard and what Tia's spoken with us about, about her own story, I'm really reminded of the power of the stories of survivors and why it's so incredibly important that we center survivors in any situation. And as Tia is saying, things that are probably, for some of you knew that you've not really understood before or heard, and yet she's explaining to us that it's not just her, that there are others in these environments that she's come out of that are experiencing the same things, that she had to flee for her life over with her children, and that if she hadn't, she may not be with us today because her life was under threat in her own home.

00:48:15
And when she needed help from her community, her community was complicit in the exact same situation. So there was really no one inside that religious environment that could have helped her get out. And if it's new to you, if this is the first time you've heard of, and for the record, I don't think I knew more than a year ago about this culty type of environment that she describes, where there's this hierarchy, you know, there's God who's over the pastor and the pastor who's over the husband, the husband who's over the wife, and then the children are at the very bottom and having to really, you know, be submissive to every single person. And there's, like, you know, spanking that goes on with the children. But if this is new to you, that spanking of wives is happening because wives are being, quote, unquote, disobedient to their husbands, and husbands are in charge of reprimanding them and punishing them in this way.

00:49:13
That was something that was new to me, and I don't think I knew over a year ago that that even existed. And that's what she's describing coming out of. And that can be shocking for a lot of us who don't know that even exists, that type of domestic violence that's going on with wives in these communities that, like she said, are very much connected to main denominations that aren't fringe right. And so, like, she grew up in a Southern Baptist church, she was in a presbyterian church, and all this was going on. And it's, it's eye opening, but it's also important to understand and once again, listen to the survivors, because we're seeing some of this intersect with mainstream american politics at the moment as well with this person using fundy baby voice to rally people politically.

00:50:06
And I do encourage you to go watch her real and TikTok clip around this fundy baby voice where she unpacks it. It's been helpful to a lot of people from somebody on the inside and why even a woman's voice would be diminished and where women are made to be smart, small and silent and really powerless to speak or advocate for themselves or have any agency at all, which in itself is very emotionally and spiritually abusive in these environments. Right. And so unpacking the layers of it with somebody like Tia is so important. I really appreciate her voice.

00:50:41
I absolutely urge you to go pre order her book, a well trained wife where she describes her escape from chrisTian patriarchy. And, you know, once again, she doesn't necessarily even paint herself in the best light. I mean, I think that's a very risky thing for a survivor to do because one of the things we see often in these environments and really in the communities at large in our nations is that victim blaming is so common and discrediting the whistleblower, whistleblowers have to essenTially be 100% perfect to say anything, and that's never going to be the case. Right. But any little thing could discredit a whistleblower.

00:51:18
And she's, you know, describing her own childhood and even decisions that she made and not painting herself in the best light. And so just that vulnerability and the authenticity. I really appreciate her giving us that gift of her story, which is such a gift. Please go order her book. And those pre orders really do help authors.

00:51:40
So I encourage you to order her book today as soon as you're listening to this and share this podcast with anybody that might find it beneficial because there's many people out there suffering in silence and you can just put some Airpods on and wash your dishes or go for a run and listen to this. And it doesn't have to be something everybody knows about if that feels a little bit risky for you, whatever environment you're in right now. And I do encourage you to join us on our difference maker community because we do go a lot deeper with her on a conversation there and you can join us there for as little as dollar five a month. Actually, you can join for free, but if you want access to our exclusive interviews, and that's a paid community and we'd love to have you join us. I do go a little bit deeper with her there and it's a really amazing conversation with her.

00:52:24
And you can go to www.patreon.com. Aworldofdifference to get access to that exclusive interview and many others before we got a bunch of them in there for you. So please. This community really means a lot to me, and it's also not only a way to support this podcast, but it's a way to get a little bit extra. With that you wouldn't get in the regular podcast.

00:52:44
And so who doesn't want to hear more? Tia loving she's just such an incredible voice and I'm so excited to have her on the show today and to bring this to you. And if this podcast is something that is resonating with you at all, I would really appreciate if you would go give us a review. This helps people find us and it also helps me know what you thought. I really enjoy reading those and I read every single one and it means a lot helps me craft this podcast in ways that you give us your insights of what has resonated with you and also, once again, just to share it with someone else.

00:53:18
Because the whole point of making a difference is that we are trying to make the world a better place and it takes all of us together. And this issue is so important not just for women and wives that are suffering, but that just as Tia said, patriarchy hurts everyone. And it's something that's obviously appearing in the largest levels of the US government. And I don't really know how it's playing out globally, but would be really interested to hear your feedback about this particular episode of what you're seeing anywhere in other countries and other religious environments as well. Because I know this is not something that's exclusive even into ChrisTianity, but other faith spaces may be seeing some very similar things happening in your faith spaces as well.

00:54:02
And so please reach out. I always read comments on social media that you post, or if you send me DM or email me, please reach out on any of our socials. You can find us on Twitter.

00:54:18
I'm also on Twitter oreadbr and my DM's are open. Or you can find me on Instagram. Lori Adams Brown and we're at a world of difference on Instagram. I hope this episode has meant something to you and it's made a difference in your life in some way, and that if you know someone, you can share it with them and have a conversation together, because these are really deep topics and we don't want to keep our heads in the sand, but we want to do our part to not be complicit, to help each other out and I know some of you are following this situation in South Carolina, here in the United States, and Myrtle beach, where there was a pastor, John Paul Miller, who announced that his wife had committed suicide, and her name is Mika. And it turns out this happened on April 27.

00:55:07
So just as I'm releasing this podcast really soon, and it turns out there had been a lot of allegations of domestic violence that she had shared with others and her family, and there's a lot of reason to believe that it wasn't a suicide. And so that's situation is unfolding, and we can only speculate at this point where we're going to let the investigation do what it will do. But it is troubling to see that potenTially there has been not only abuse and even worse in this situation, but that the playbook of how these religious communities can allow a man like that to cover up what he's done to his wife or what he's even potenTially done to others in a situation. We see the playbook unfolding once again with COVID up and complicity of others involved in situations where sort of this bro club can cover for each other and spiritualize it away and victim blame and make it seem like it was her fault. And the pastor even announced when he announced her passing, that she was mentally ill, which falls along with that whole sexist trope we often see, which is, you know, she was crazy.

00:56:22
Therefore, people don't tend to question beyond that and not realizing that maybe if she did struggle with mental illness, it was because of abuse at his hands, you know, which would be the result of that. And so, yeah, just a lot of compassion for what's going on in that situation and that and Mika's family and we're watching to see that situation unfold. But I think as that's happening in real time and we're releasing this podcast once again. We're not a true crime podcast, but some things do intersect with us where we're trying to make a difference in the world, whether it's situations that are criminal, abusive, just conversations around politics or faith or education and all the spheres where we live and work and business and whatever conversation we're centering around and bringing our different perspectives around the table. Would love to hear your perspective around that.

00:57:11
There's a hashtag justice for Mica Mica going around on Twitter if you want to check out that. And a lot of people are covering it in the news. So, yeah, we're waiting to watch that situation unfold and hoping the best for her family to get justice for her for whatever happened and knowing that that's a warning sign for the rest of us that we can't just stick our head in the sand. We can't ignore things. The red flags that we're seeing that are abusive in our religious environments and in our our friends that we see and they're crying out for help.

00:57:45
So would really be interested to hear your perspectives on any of that. So once again, always reach out and I know that many of you are working in situations where you do on a regular basis help women in domestic violence to get out and find escape plans and support them through the process. So thank you all for that great work that you're doing. It really does make a difference and for all of you wherever you are around the world, I just really appreciate you listening to this part podcast and sharing it with others so that that makes a difference too. And as always keep making a difference wherever you are.tC