Was I In A Cult? - Christian Patriarchy: "The OG 'Trad Wife'"

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Four hours into a hostage situation between a man and a woman, the man walks out the door. In that moment, the woman's primal instinct kicks in: "Grab your kids and RUN."  Later, she learns that action may have saved her life. He wasn't just leaving. He was going to get a gun. And the man? It was her husband. At 33-years-old, Tia Levings walked away from the Christian Patriarchy system that dictated her body, her voice, and her life for 13 years. If there were ever a guest who embodies the entire ethos of this show, it's Tia Levings. A badass is an understatement. Now a New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife and featured in Shiny Happy People, Tia joins us to unpack:  'Trad wives' and how this movement is far from just churned butter on Instagram. The wedding night she finally has language for. The daughter she lost. How, and more importantly why, the Christian Patriarchy movement has surged over the past decade. And her new book. I Belong to Me. The survival guide she wishes she had access to when she first got out. It's now our #1 recommendation for anyone leaving a high-control group. A non-judgmental, non-preachy, non-guru self-help book? Who knew?! Tia is brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest. And if you leave with one thing, let it be her words: "If you can't speak in your power, you can't f*ck in your power."  NOTE to our Patreon subscribers: You can watch the full, unedited two-and-a-half-hour interview with Tia now on our Patreon. Thank you for being on this journey with us. FIND TIA: Website: tialevings.com Socials @TiaLevingsWriter: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Substack: tialevings.substack.com — where she does real-time religious deconstruction TIA'S BOOKS: I Belong to Me: A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (now in paperback)   FOLLOW US  → For more culty content — follow us on Instagram & TikTok → @wasiinacult SUPPORT THE SHOW Join our Patreon! Get ad-free episodes, bonus content, and behind-the-scenes conversations. (And our forever gratitude)   HAVE A CULTY STORY? Email us → [e-mail]

The views, information, or opinions expressed by the guest appearing in this episode solely belong to the guest and do not represent or reflect the views or positions of the hosts, the show, podcast one, this network, or any of their respective affiliates. When you're in the cult, you're constantly avoiding discomfort, you're dissociating from it, and healing means you're going to look at it, and you're going to hold it, and you're going to hopefully overcome it. So that means you have to be willing to look in the dark rooms and the parts of your character that fell for it and or are reacting. Of course, you were reactive.

You were stirred up and jabbed at every single day by someone who is high control. It's almost impossible to heal in that environment. And so you have to leave it in order to heal from it. Welcome back to our show, everyone. I'm Tyler Meesam. Hey, guys. I'm Liz Ayacuzzi. Liz is joining us south of the border.

I am. I'm in Mexico and I'm a happy person. right now. And she's never happy. So this, it's all it takes. Leave America. Be happy. But we're more, we're more happy because we're back with you. Yes. After a very long few weeks, didn't it feel so long. It was so long. I just had to pull out my microphone and spew music facts to no one.

It's a very humbling, very humbling. Kind of what I think I do on this show. But nonetheless, we're back. We're so happy to be back. A lot has happened in the world since we've been with you. I mean, most importantly, the Cubs won 10 games in a row. I watched everyone. That's all that matters. Which is why they won 10 games in a row.

I went to a Dodgers game and watched them. Real quick, Dodgers Stadium is not a great place to watch a game. It's expensive. It's hard to get in. It's terrible to get out. L.A. I've been to a lot of Major League Stadium. I'm sorry, L.A.

It's just not a great place to see a game. Great team. bad place to watch. It's sort of like any big venue in L.A. I feel like is the anticipatory anxiety of parking and getting out of there. I've heard that the Clippers Arena is really easy, that they've really made it easy. You can go in and you don't, there's no lines.

You just literally can walk in and grab a hot dog. You don't even need to pull out your phone. It just registers it. It's very high tech, very high tech. Obviously. Every place has that now, Tyler. I know. but not Dodgers Stadium.

Not Dodger Stadium. So, yes, the Cubs have been winning, but they dropped three in a row, and now they won yesterday. I might drop some other Chicago sports news on you, Tyler. I mean, it may not be our key demographic sports. Did you hear about the Bears drafting Logan Johnson? He was the 57th pick. So Heinz had a deal with NFL. 57th pick of the draft gets a lifetime supply of ketchup.

which would be cool, except the kids going to Chicago. Yeah. So they use ketchup on a hot dog is a crime. You will go to Chicago jail for doing this. So in pure Chicago fashion, an Italian sub shop owner, he steps in and he offers this guy a lifetime supply of Jardinara. Okay. Do you know what Jardinara is? I don't.

It's the spicy pickled vegetable thing that Chicagoans are obsessed with and put on everything. and put on all their sandwiches. And if you're seeing the bear, you know, Jardinara is like a religion on the show. There's a whole thing where Richie loses his mind about putting ketchup on a hot dog. So now this kid has a lifetime supply of both ketchup and Jardinara. That's a weird thing to have just stalked in your fridge, but why not? I feel like this is how morning show hosts have to tell news. Can you believe it?

Now the guy's got ketchup and Dardanera for life. And then the male co-host is like, I would take that an heartbeat. Now to weather. Exactly. But now let's go to weather. Whether or not someone was in a cult, how is that? Great.

The answer on the show is usually yes. It's just yes. One day we're just going to be like at the end of it, no. I guess it was a bowling league. But we've done 130-something episodes. At this point, they're all cults. So we started this show in 2021, right? Around that time, yeah.

In fact, you called me about this show the day before my seven-year-old, seven-and-a-half-year-old son was born. So it's been seven and a half years. Wow. That was a long time ago. 2019 when we first brainstormed. Well, since then, we have done a plethora of episodes. So it's with fantastic guests.

And they just keep coming. They just keep coming. Our guests never cease to blow us away, you guys. Like today's guest, after Tyler had worked on the episode, he just texted me one sentence. She is remarkable. And I stand by it. Many of you may already know the name T-Elevens. She's one of the most articulate voices in the religious trauma space right now.

Her name comes up often in conversation about Christian patriarchy and the Tradwife movement. Which was new to you. I just learned about it. I'm going to dive a little deeper, apparently. Maybe turn some butter. Tia is the New York Times best-selling author of a well-trained wife. Her memoir of escaping Christian patriarchy after 13 years inside of it.

Her story was featured in the docu series, Shiny Happy People. That's the one about the Duggers. Because she was recruited into the same cult they were, the IBLP, which is Bill Gothard's empire. But then her marriage takes her into something a little more extreme. Her new book, I Belong to Me, comes out tomorrow, May 5th. It's a survivor's guide to recovery after religious trauma or cults. And I'm going to say it right here right now.

It is now my top recommendation for anyone getting out of a high control situation. I loved this book. Incidentally, you can listen to this entire interview that Liz did. solid three hours. On our Patreon, it's three hours. 240. It's three hours. It's three and a half hours.

I edited the pauses out. It was three and a half hours. You can listen to it unedited on our Patreon. It is really great. Tia is brilliant and she's funny. I really enjoyed listening to her. And I loved every minute of our time together. So thank you, Tia.

Let's get into it, shall we? Let's do it. First of all, would you just please introduce yourself? I will. I'm Tia Levings and I'm the author of The New York Times Best Selling, A Well-Trained Wife. It's my memoir of Escape from Christian Patriarchy. And then my new book is called I Belong to Me, A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope after religious trauma.

And I think it is the book of a time because we have so many people leaving cults at high control relationships and high control dynamics. And they're like, now what? What do I do now? What I love so much about it is it's just so not judgmental, if that makes sense. Like, I cried. And it actually, like, showed me things in my own trauma and healing that I'm still dealing with or new things that I'm now dealing with that aren't having to do with specifically my cult experience

because that doesn't really present as much. But the content is what so many people ironically end up in fucking cults for. Exactly. That's just why it exists, because it was very hard to write a self-react. help book in this space that is not prescriptive, not judgmental, not selling anything, not a guru. I just wanted to be like, hey, solidarity. This is what it's like. And your heart's on every single page. Thank you. And your vulnerability is on every single page. And I'm getting emotional. I hope it stands out in the space as something different. It does. And I think I'm getting emotional

because it's so sad. How desperate people are for help. Real help. That doesn't explain them. Real help. And how many people take advantage of that. Yeah. Anybody who's lived through anything can benefit from what you've written. Thank you. But something that's comprehensive for the whole journey that helps someone feel seen on the path of belonging back to themselves, not necessarily following a new modality. And so that just is a love letter in response to the DMs I got. That's really how it began. Just a pour out of love and you're not alone. I would even open it up further and say that this is for any woman who has lived within patriarchy of any kind of society that we sort of live in. What woman out there hasn't had a moment where their voice has been shut down. Even if it's in a micro second in a meeting, I'm in my 40s, so I don't know what the 25-year-old women out there experience is specifically.

What we see on social media is that they're rising in a new patriarchy, a neo-patriarchy, and it is very much the story of our grandparents. Yeah, that's a whole other thing. I love the stuff you're doing about tradwives, because that always, I was like, what in the fuck is going on? Am I the only one like what is happening here? No, we're in this massive, very highly calculated strategic ethical regression, and we see the outcome of that on social media.

Why? Can you just tell me, why? Why is this happening? It's real simple, actually, when it boils down to the fact that white men want to stay in control and power. They've been sweating the way the demographic has shifted and that would put white men in the minority by the mid-2020s. I've heard that story my whole life. And they coalesced around a single issue of voting for the abortion conflict to create

this movement. And the model that they have is white men on top, everyone else is subservient. you have generations of women who've been educated, they've been allowed in the workforce, we've had the civil rights movement, we've had equality in DEI and all of these things, they want to reshape society and dismantle that. So in order to do that, they're going to do that through the legislative power that we see happening in politics. But they also do it through the soft cell marketing of just convincing us that the way that we've

been living is chaotic and overwhelming. And they had a big part into why it was so chaotic and overwhelming, why we don't have child care, why we don't have health care, why Americans are struggling so much, but then they come in and they say, here's the solution. And so the trad life is a box for women. We know that because we've broken out of that box multiple generations now, but they keep selling it because that's the only way that they can get women out of the public sector. They've got to get us home.

So they create a world where we choose to go home because it's too overwhelming out there. Now, quick context in case you've been blissfully avoiding this corner of the internet, like I have been, Tradwife, which is short for traditional wife. This is the name for a movement of women on social media who are presenting a particular vision of femininity. Long dresses, lots of children, homemade everything, sour dough from scratch, the husband works, the wife stays home, the kids are homeschooled, no birth control, no career.

I think one obvious thing that makes me a traditional wife is that I submit to my husband and he's the leader of this household. I love being a trad wife. And this might be crazy, but I love asking his opinion. What should I wear? What do you like better? What do I do with my hair? You're allowed to take care of him. You're allowed to honor him. You're allowed to greet him when he comes through the door, right? You're allowed to run him baths when you see that he's just really, really tired today. You're allowed to make sure that dinner is on the table. I also think I'm a childwife because I believe that men were created naturally smarter, stronger, and more capable than the average woman. The husband is the head of the home and the

wife submits to his leadership. When he starts work, you're allowed to put his clothes out He doesn't have to think about laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, and all those things because you've already handled them and you've done them with joy in your heart because you are a wife. In the Bible, it says God created us as the weaker vessel. Can I get a very much? The aesthetic is wholesome and slow and beautiful. The most famous one is probably Valerie and a farm. Shout out to Tyler here. She's a Mormon mom in Utah with eight kids and millions of followers who churns her own butter on.

on camera, but there are thousands of them now, across every flavor of religion, all selling the same vision. A simpler life, a softer woman. A return to the way things used to be. P.S., I make my own butter often. Not all the time, but it's not as hard as one would think. It's really not as hard as one would think. Neither is mayo. I make mayo.

It's very easy. Taste better. It's healthier. Anyways. Maybe I should start on Instagram. Trad, dude. Tread hug. husband in the making.

Yeah. Well, also, like, fine, let's go back to a simpler way of the way things used to be, but that doesn't mean let's reverse our place in the world. We can slow down and have a job. Yeah. Yeah, I have a job. And not be dictated by our husbands. Right.

I work my ass off. I'm constantly working, but I still can make mayo and butter every once in a while. Right. How about we slow down and you men make the butter? I don't see why not. And the mayo and the laundry. Yeah. My eyes were opened with this episode.

I was really, it really got to me just listening to it of what is happening. And the steps back we are taking, she mentions it, the steps that women have taken forward seem to be eroding very quickly. And it's this propagandaized. Anyways, it's all in the episode. I don't need to tell you. She tells it much better than I. And so the trad life is a very beautiful aesthetic on the surface, but you get a few steps in and then you turn around and look back and you can't get out because you have also traded your agency and your autonomy and you're completely dependent on the benevolence of the partner you're with is how safe you are. And a lot of women are not safe.

And when they've taken away your divorce rights and your education opportunities and your employment equality, you cannot just change your mind and go back to work. So yeah, it's a method of control, but it's on a broader scale, a reshaping. shaping of society. What I take a lot of hope from is that this is the first time in human civilization that the survival stories of what it's like to actually live that is side by side their ideal. So where they used to preach the ideal and only have their glossy images as present, no, people can just Google religious trauma is now. What is an ex-vangelical? What is a former childwife? What happens when we don't vaccinate our kids en masse? Like all these cultic practices have results side by side online now. And that,

That's never been available before. And it does trip them up, stop their movement, change the tide. What do you think about my brother who's a white male or my co-host who's a white male or like the men that would hate to be aligned with that, right? Also your husband, Liz, you forgot to mention him. Him as well. Yes, correct. I'm happy that you called me out and gave me the props I deserve, obviously. But and Rob, our editor, Rob.

Obviously, Rob, Rob, yes. And all of our white male listeners for that matter. Yes. You know who you are. So fighting the patriarchy, in my standpoint, my filter is not hating man. It is not misandry. It's not swapping the narrative for another like power imbalance. Everyone suffers in patriarchy, men too.

So when we have good men who have deconstructed patriarchy and misogyny in their own lives, when they believe in equality, when they are standing up for their sisters, mothers, girlfriends in an equal society, those are good men. and I celebrate them. I raised them. I have three of those men. I'm partnered to one of those men. We need more of that. Fighting patriarchy is not just a woman's movement. The kind of men that they're talking about on charge is a hierarchy, a vertical power structure, and most men will also submit to it. Because in the alpha male headship model, like for example, Doug Wilson, who's the pastor of Pete Heggseth right now, in that model, all the other men submit to him to. They are betas. They are not alphas. They are not kings. And so it's a big lie.

Do you think because of social media, a lot of really smart, intentioned, non-serts of patriarchal society, watch the content, get recipes from the content, maybe even. Myself included. Maybe even a part of them idealizes the life. You know, a lot of them are young, beautiful women who somehow stay very skinny after six children. Their bodies don't change. And it just seems so seamless. And it looks good, right? It looks good, which we know how all called start is from that space.

What's really going on in these things that we see? Why is this bad? So that's a great question. And I think it really requires a critical eye for scam and marketing. There are no old tradwives. And their hair does fall out. And they get uterine prolasses after multiple kids. But they stop making social media content when that happens.

Right. Because their system makes them invisible when they're no longer young and beautiful. When they're no longer fertile, they're irrelevant. So you are being sold by an ever refreshed young woman in a beautiful aesthetic that comforts our nervous system. And it's a direct anecdote to the chaos and the overwhelm that's out in the world. So we are doing a couple things when we sit down and scroll it. We're getting our dopamine. We're calming our nervous systems.

We're looking at simpler times and romanticizing and idealizing. We're probably engaging in magical thinking. And so these are the same on ramps to every single cult group that there is. We're being marketed to. And that engine behind it, Peter Thiel is behind it. It is a well-funded machine designed to change an entire society. Tell me a little bit more about that. So Peter Thiel owns Evie magazine.

Like when you're looking at Ballerina Farm, it's funded by these packs. They pay their influencers a lot better than that. they do on the left. Like the left is not systemic and strategic and creators are on their own. Not so on the right. That calculated man-manosphere that we talk about is the same thing happening on the Treadwife end. This is a truth that for a lot of the big Tadwife influencers, they have a double set. That's not their real house. They have a staging area. They have nannies and support staff and all of these behind-the-scenes things. Those are not the real dangers. The dangers are next level down where you got little Brittany at home and she,

She's trapped and she doesn't have a credit card and she has to ask her husband permission for everything. And she made some reels talking about how great it was to submit to her husband. But now he's taking his anger out on her and she has absolutely no way out. It's like the worst MLM I've ever heard of. Yes. That's a great metaphor. That is what it is. But to sell submission.

Yeah. Well, patriarchy is a pyramid scheme. You have the little man on top. The next level is women and the labor forces children and people. people of color. When did this start just in the past few five years? On social. On social, somewhere around 2016 is when it really started taking off. It's in parallel to the Trump movement. How much does religion play a part? Most of it is religious in one way or form. It's not the same religion. So you have like a large population of the Mormons, Valerina Farm is Mormon.

You also have Protestant evangelicals. You also have trad Catholics with Opus Day. And then you have this smaller segment of the tech birther movement that is also against contraception wants unlimited baby size and women at home taking care of good genetics children. And it's essentially what we talk about on this show all the

time with cults have moved and migrated to the internet as a form of recruitment because God, you have way more access. Yeah, sure. Sure. And for an ideological cult with no walls, the internet's well suited for that. So you guys are being recruited all of the time. This movement wants young men for soldiers and young women for breeders.

They want them to get married before their brains are developed. They were open about this at CPAC. Someone said, you need to get married before you're ready. You need to have children before you're ready. You need to have more children than you think you can handle. By design, they do not care that you have to raise those children until they're adults because they're not raising adults. They're raising new followers. That's a whole other sticky wicket because they have to indoctrinate you, which means that they replace your child development and your development into an adult with indoctrination to repeat the cycle. So when they decimated our education system, the result is a less literate society. So what are you going to do with a less literate society?

Well, you can put them to work. You can have them have babies and you can have them fight wars. But they created that in the past 20 years. Now we have a generation of kids that are less literate than their parents and grandparents. But then let's talk about the abuse, right, behind the pretty photos and the pretty videos and the nice food and the babies that never cry. Well, because they're spanked, just stop crying. So when you see very orderly children all in a line and they're all smiling and no one is stepping out of a toe, there were practices and drills at home to make them get that way. There was discipline in place to make them get there.

This is where the religious ideology comes into play. I wasn't allowed to vote. I wasn't allowed to shop on my own. I didn't have access to the money and decision making money. All of my energy went to creating this aesthetic, making sure I had this structure, and I believed I was doing it to a higher end. Everything is sacred and holy.

So if the goal is to have as many children as possible, then you have to simplify in other things. Something has to give. And so where it gives is anything that's progress, anything that might give your kid autonomy or privacy or a say or access to mandatory reporters. That's a whole other stick. wicket of it because when you avoid the pediatrician and you never go to school, you have less

access to people who could recognize abuse in your home and report. When you look at these women, if you put yourself in your shoes of that age and being in the marriage you're in, do you think you would be one of those influencer type people? Absolutely. I had a very popular blog, Livingdeliberately.com. Got 80,000 hits a day back when blogging was brand new, and those are still great numbers. I would have been on social media. I would have been leading people in this gentle way of life. I was a good trad wife. I was a good mom of little children. I was a good homesteader, good homeschooler. And yeah, I would be getting brand deals. I'd be making the money. Can we talk a little bit about your story? For those that don't know your personal cult story

or haven't read your book yet. I would like to remind listeners that it took me 10 years to write a well-trained wife, and one of the goals with a well-trained wife was to show how subtle getting into a high-control dynamic and getting into a cult really is. And for me, I just thought that was how I grew up. I did not realize that the world was narrowing until I was in a very narrow situation. So the story opens with my first 10 years in Upper Michigan. I had culturally Christian parents who valued God in church,

but they didn't lead heavily with it. And then we moved to Florida. That was the shift to a Southern Baptist megachurch. It was just white and wealthy and happy. And we didn't have any reason to think that it was nefarious or high control or abusive. I made my first lifetime spiritual decision at four and a half years old when I prayed the prayer, to stay out of hell, to repent for causing the crucifixion of Christ.

So in a lot of ways, my childhood development was replaced with religious indoctrination at that point. I think the obedience culture that was so rampant in that church and the vilification of anything outside of that church was a really big aspect of how it narrowed over the next 10 years into a more fundamentalist environment. And you don't really know that until you look back and you're like, oh, the only people I know go to this church. And I'm only allowed to have this one outcome to my life now. I was graduating high school and my friends were deciding where they were going to go to school. And I knew I was going to be a Christian wife and mother. And anything I did was only in pursuit of that one thing. I wanted to be safe and happy. And so

here's this big organization. We had 11 city blocks in Jacksonville, Florida. You know, this is a good Hobby Lobby Christian way to live. You're going to be happy. You can live, laugh, love. You know, you can have a great time. And so I had no reason to question that. And the whole goal was to stay a virgin. You cannot cross that line. And I didn't. So I married someone who showed up and said, I'm God's will for your life. And he said it to a girl who understood that God speaks through men. And if a man says something to you, you obey it. And so I said, okay, we had a short engagement.

I knew I didn't want to do it. I knew that I didn't love him. I trusted God would help me love him. It's my job to change. We were overtly told, you are help me to your husband, which means you are supporting him and you are helping him be a better man. And so when it's elevated and put that way, you know, it's a God-given duty.

we had a wedding and I was literally standing at the back of the church and I put my veil down over my face and it was a heavy chiffon fail. It wasn't like typical bridal veiling and when we put it down I couldn't see and I realized I was going to have to walk the aisle blind and that metaphor to my poetic mind was like you don't want to do this and I looked towards the door and I was like where would I even go? I remember the line you said because it stung in my head. where does a runaway bride go when she stops running? Yeah. And I had sexual assault on my wedding night, which I didn't know to call it that.

I just knew that I had told him repeatedly to stop and that it was violent and I didn't know. I was in shock. Your anatomy isn't discussed. You don't know anything about your body. You don't know how it works. I didn't know what a penis really looked like or how it operated until it was forcing its way inside my body, which was so traumatic. so dissociating, so violent. I don't think he knew he was raping me.

I think he thought he was doing what the church told him to do, which is get it done. It's your wedding night. And of course I was saying, no, I don't want this. No, stop, this hurts. But you're not supposed to stop. You're supposed to consummate on the wedding night. That's important to capture because that's part of the way it's normalized in these marriages.

And in some churches, even there's a phone call to make sure that you've done it. I didn't know. I was in shock. And didn't have anybody to tell. I mean, it really set a cycle of having experiences in alienation and isolation at home and then I have to figure out how to live through it. I have to keep up appearances. I knew I couldn't get divorced. I had no options. I was a baby. I was 18, 19, 20 years old. And that was reaffirmed at church was you should just submit more. And so I trusted because that's what you do in obedience culture. You trust and obey. And I had baby after baby. In that 10 years, I'd be pregnant nine times, five live births and four surviving kids.

We switched churches four or five times as we narrowed and narrowed, ultimately ending up in a Doug Wilson covenant church where we signed a covenant of membership. And it was as closed cult as you can get to a classic cult. This is a building. This is a leader. This is a contract. Tell us a little bit for the people that don't know about Doug Wilson. The easiest way to explain Doug Wilson is that he's someone who doesn't get along with others. So he had been Presbyterian and he got kicked out for different heresies and he went and he started his own denomination so that he would be the head honcho.

And it was originally called the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches. And if that gives you white supremac vibes, yes, absolutely on purpose because he believes in ideal enslavement. But he started his own college and printing press called Canon Press. It has sent out homeschooling materials and critical thinking, logic, rhetoric, debate, patriarchy-type books all over the world. That's his primary mode for recruitment. But he is the dominant end of this theonymy that teaches the Old Testament needs to be applied to modern-day American penal code. So when you hear this brand of Christians talking about stoning people for being gay or women who are completely out of the public sector, we're all at home. We never show our faces.

We never speak online. That is who we're talking about. It's wild to me because this is the chief villain in my story that took place almost 20 years ago now. And he's still the prominent villain in America today. Was he your specific cult leader? No, we were at one of his church plants in Tennessee. It's very much like a franchise. Doug Wilson has a model for marriage called federal marriage.

And federal marriage teaches that the husband is responsible to stand before God for everything. that happens in his house, including his wife's behaviors and her thoughts and her deeds. And so if you need obedient children, you're using strict discipline. If you need an obedient wife, you're going to also use strict discipline. So domestic discipline was introduced as a way to keep women in hand and keep them under control. But this is something that's talked about in communities because men have to find a way. Just like women have to like share recipes for how they're going to make jam, the men have to be like, how do you get your wife? wife to obey. What happens if she won't submit? And so a lot of families will practice extra prayer

and fasting, some isolation, put her in time out. She can't go to prayer meeting. But then some family spank. And so that is what my husband presented to me. I was at a breaking point. I did not think I could submit to a physical discipline. And so I went to a Christian counselor. This was the first person on the planet I told every single thing to. I was so completely honest with him. And I said, here's what happens when he's dragging me down the hall by my hair and he's slamming my head and he's controlling everything about me. And the answer again was you need to just honor him more. You just need to submit to him more. And if you do that, then this won't happen. And when I went home, I found out I was pregnant again and I could not put the pregnancy at risk, you know, by random

violence. So desperate. I submitted to that. How old are your kids at this time? 11 to 2. There was four of them. Oh, and Clara. Clara was the baby that died in 99. She had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which is half of her heart was missing. She broke my brain open. She broke my heart open. She's a really big part of my story because she is my first cult crack. I could not go back to any of the ways I thought before. I couldn't be who I was before. They wanted me to pretend like she pretty much didn't exist and just get back to the program. And I was, There was no way I'm going to live my life as if my daughter didn't exist. That's not happening. How do you deal with the loss of a child? I didn't deal with it. I carried her with me and I carry her life with me. Her death is part of her life.

It's not the only part of her story. When someone asks me how many children I have, I include her. And so internally, emotionally, mentally, what's going on? That whole year is probably the most blurry year of my life. That grief was so encompassing. and my isolation was so habitual at that point. I was as tradwife as you can get and alone a lot with two toddlers who really needed their mom. But when I look at attachment issues and when I look at some of the grief that I wish I could just take back so badly,

those are some of the more quiet legacies of this life that I look for ways to share and talk about because I know there are mothers living with that right now. What about friendships? Nope. I was not supposed to have any friends. They do not want the women meeting. You don't get together unless there's a man's chaperoning you. So the exception would be if that is a mentor to you.

They were older women who had more children and the older women teach the younger women to love their husbands and bekeepers of the home. But that's not hanging out with your girlfriend. Right. You can't go to Susie's house and have a glass of peanut grisio. Absolutely not. There was no wine. There was no drinking.

There were no movies. There were no gossip sessions. There were no, you know, everything had to be faith washed. I did have outside friends because I had. I had found this homeschool co-op that I was a part of in Tennessee, where I made friends outside of our church. But they were always trying to get me to isolate and leave that behind. So when they moved us out to the country, it was in part to get me away from that co-op

and away from those friends, who were also conservative Christian homeschoolers. It's not like I was outhorring it at a club. It was, this was like to Cub Scouts and American Heritage Girls, which is Christian Nationalist Girl Scouts, and that was seen as dangerous. My husband, he kind of intentionally lost his job because he had slugged his boss, which we were very lucky not to get slapped with charges or a lawsuit. But he found this church in Tennessee, and it was really important to him that we moved to this particular town in Tennessee for this particular church. And when I got there, I realized that I was smack dab in the middle of a closed cult group that taught wife discipline and taught federal marriage and was a Doug Wilson adherent. And then it got really dark.

Those are the darkest two years of the whole experience. And that was how deep into your marriage? So we're talking in years 12 and 13. So you had survived all of these years of balancing it, trying to stay small, trying to stay sweet and submissive, trying to keep it beautiful and safe and happy for my children. And with nowhere to go and no options and no money and no bank account, no agency, like, it was one thing for a cocky outsider to say, well, why doesn't she leave? It is not that easy when you're in cult control and have absolutely,

no options to help yourself get out. And your ex-husband... He was on a slow descent, but then it accelerated into this psychotic break that was just building, building, building, and he was struggling with real insanity. He was seeing demons in the walls, and he was super paranoid, and I was begging him to go to the doctor. And I was thinking, like, maybe it's an infection and it's impacting your brain. You know, because I knew I couldn't say, see a psychiatrist or anything like that.

And I'm scared every single day. I'm scared to go to sleep. I would not go to sleep unless he was asleep first, and he wasn't sleeping much. So I wasn't sleeping much and didn't know who I could talk to and I was terrified. What was Doug Wilson's church opinion around divorce? Oh, it's not allowed. It's better to die than be divorced. That's why it took staying as long as I did because I knew I was going to die that summer.

I was either going to die by suicide or I was going to die at his hand. And I couldn't bring myself to commit suicide because my kids. But at the same time, I was having this career window open because, my blogging was earning money. And so all of a sudden I had income and I opened a bank account. And all of these things that would become so crucial in my eventual escape. And I started to really despair in the spirituality of this part. I've realizing that, especially in Doug Wilson's church, women are body parts. You are hands, you are a vagina to fuck. You are a baby womb making machine. That's all you are. And then that extended to the men or the from God. If they don't value Tia,

then God doesn't value Tia. And then why would I want to follow a faith that doesn't know me or value me for who I am? And I did not have any kind of framework for a world without that faith. I could be in a different church, but I couldn't not be with that faith. So it was a library visit. I checked out a book on every world religion that the library had stopped. I was like, okay, I'll start there. And it was just this other way of being Christian for a breath. Because when I saw that there's another way. to be out there. That is all I needed to see. And then when the violence became life or death, which was a four-hour hostage situation where he left and went to retrieve a gun, and I found that out afterward, I felt this instinct of run. Grab your kids and run. If I stayed in a second longer, we were going to die, literally die. And I did. I left, but I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know what my life was going to be. I wasn't even thinking that far ahead. I was thinking we have to get out of this house right now. We have to get to safety. ended up at a priest's home that night.

And they helped me get to a different state the next day. So then where did you go? Home to my parents. The first few weeks was just a blur. We were just all in shock. And I was not sure what I was going to do, trying to give my kids a vacation with grandpa. And Allen does not mentally well.

The violence would get quite a bit worse from a distance. He had a full psychotic break. He threatened an officer with a gun. There was lots of restraining orders. And then there was an order from our investigator who told me to take the kids and leave and go into hiding and not even tell my parents where we were going. And that lasted almost a year of going from friend to friend and trying to not settle anywhere or stay too long anywhere where we can be found. Who were the little guardian angels in your life that stepped up to help your kids? I love this question.

No one's ever asked this. I love that because it gives me a chance to really highlight. this was a village. It really was. It's ironic because that Hillary Clinton, when she wrote, it takes a village, was so vilified at church, so vilified because you're not supposed to have external resources. You're not supposed to depend on other people or send them to school or any of those things. But at the same time, depend on our village only. So only, they're not there to help you. It's not like they're showing up at your house and helping you when you have a baby. I was alone postpartum. I was alone with my sick kids. And so the irony was.

when I got out, it was an actual village. There were amazing public school teachers who really involved themselves in my kids' lives and help them come up to grade level and blend in and fit in socially and learn new things. We had friends, parents that would shoulder some of that burden or keep a kid over a weekend or something like that. So yeah, I was a lot less alone once I was out and once I could be honest about what was actually going through. You met another man? I did. Husband 2.0. That was 15 years. relative stability, certainly financial stability. He was an involved father figure. He was present. He made sure their needs were met after a time of chaos. Ultimately, he did not want to be married to

someone who is a writer who's going to talk about cults and liberal things. And when I sold the book, he said, it's writing or me. And so I said, bye. Wow. I'm choosing myself. I'm not giving up this thing that gave me so much freedom and pivot into the dreams and my life and an effective voice into a cultural moment that needs survivors speaking. I'm not giving that all up. So we had a very amicable divorce and then I pivoted. I went to Europe and fell in love with myself, basically. I was so happy to be on a trip alone for nine months. And for the first time, you know, I didn't have anybody to take care of. I wasn't schlepping kids. I wasn't making sure anybody was happy. I was just walking Europe, basically, and taking boats and trains are what I did.

And then I posted this little paragraph and I was like, I was in Paris with the person I love the most. And it turns out she's me and I'm alone here because I'm alone now. And within seconds, my friend was in my DMs. We have known each other, you know, forever and deconstructed at the same pace and we're both single at the right time. And that was that. We reconnected. And I was like, oh, my God, it's you. I wasn't going to date.

I wasn't interested in men. I was like not going to do, no, no, no. Going to be single for the rest of my life. But it's him. When I saw the message, I was like, you are the one person. I would break that creed for. And he's there. I have a trauma-informed partner who likes me,

likes my neurospicy, likes my eccentricities, likes my success in my life. It means everything to me. That's wonderful. And he loves that you're a writer. He loves it. And he knows the care and keeping of a writer. He brings me food.

He provides me with cats. It's like I live in a cat cafe. It's very soothing. My nervous system just feels so safe. We hug each other and we're like, co-regulation, co-regulation. I've never co-regulated with someone before.

It's amazing. Amazing. Now, as a cat owner myself, I can agree. It's really nice when a cat lays around you and hangs out next few. Of course, I just have one. Not running a cat cafe over here. We'll be right back.

You said one thing that I think is really important because I think it's so much of people coming out of cults. They don't do the work because they don't want to be known as the person that was in a cult. Oh, number one is shame is not useful to me. So anytime shame comes up, it's a flag for why would somebody want me to feel ashamed of this? Who's benefiting from that shame? It's always your oppressor. Shame is a weapon, just like fear, and these groups all use the same thing.

So let's set shame aside. If you're married to a narcissist for 20 years and you're wondering what does that say about me, it probably says that you cared about commitment. It probably says that he was very charming and you were not fully aware of his whole character at the time of decisions. It probably means you were vulnerable to love bombing. What was true of your life? Like there are systems involved. There are influences and cultures involved.

It becomes where. manageable and we bring more understanding to it, which I find very calming and grounding of, okay, and also it gives you a way to change your mind going forward. How am I not going to do that again? What kind of steps am I going to do to not be vulnerable to a love bomber? You know, like, so you start thinking about it cognitively and sharply in defense for yourself, in protection of yourself. Tell us a little bit about the personal journey of how you got to the awareness and knowledge that you have today and are able to articulate it. I mean, it's not that many. It's not that many years later, Tia. It's really not. And like, it's really not. And you went through a fuck

ton of shit, man. And I just had this moment where you were like, oh yeah, I know what's C PTSD is. And I was like, because 10 years ago, we did not even talk about complex PTSD in the terms of religious trauma. But it was only for soldiers back in 2007. It was all. And it wasn't complex. It was just PTSD. And so I got to heal and recover at one of the best times in civilization. Because these things were becoming where in real time online and I would hear it and then I would have to go look it up and find out what exactly it was and see if it worked or fit. And so I wanted the book to read that way because I assumed like people can come from all their different on ramps anywhere they're at in their journey they can jump in and it will apply. And you know, every chapter is a question that survivors

have and carry and get stuck by. So readers who pick up I belong to me will notice like the first half is grappling with shock. What happens when you're in shock and you can't name what happened to you? You don't know how to talk about it. Maybe you're having somatic symptoms where your system floods every time you try and you're way too activated

to put it into language. I spent years there. And it's a really vulnerable place because other high control people see that as someone they can fix and save and also recruit. So you fall into cult hopping at that point. You fall for another high control relationship.

It might just be that you were taken advantage of while you were in shock and you haven't dealt with your aftermath. And that was certainly true in my case. So my book has a lot in there of how to care for myself now when I go into shock. So I'm not replicating that. I'm not continually falling for this scheme. Because if you can develop this resilience and care for yourself when you are knocked off center and put into shock, which we all experience psychological shock on a regular basis, you will be less vulnerable to people who would like to exploit you and take advantage of you. Like I told you the first part of the book is a lot of shock and aftermath and naming things. But the second half are the more the graduate level deeper parts of

recovery. I have a chapter on story wounds and how we're harmed through story, but also how we can heal through story. And then guilt and grief and how intertwined those two things are and how for me grief work became the biggest key of all, learning how to grieve my chapters on boundaries are different, you know, because I want them to be flexible and organic and focused on what I can do, not what I can't do, and also not on controlling other people, using boundaries to control other people. And then my sex chapter isn't like anybody else's sex chapter because it's barely about sex. It's a lot about trauma and the way that it impacts our other systems. What is the chapter called again?

Is sex always this way? Well, you sort of say that like sex and sex. voice? Yeah, for me it was very tied to voice. So listeners may be familiar with Fundy Baby Voice. I do a lot of educational work around the vocal modalities that is done in fundamentalism to stay sweet and childlike, to seem unthreatening, to sound very feminine. And some of it is overtly taught and some of it is culturally caught. But the result is women are tone policed. And parallel to that, women coming out of these groups are full of sexual pain, horrible experiences that don't match the promises, you know, and there's a lot of fear and shame involved in it. And so as I did my work,

I found that healing my voice healed a lot of my sexuality and vice versa. They're very intertwined. There's a lot that happens in your system sexually and your sexuality as a whole that will impact every other aspect of your life. So I have a line in the book where I say women can't fucking their power unless they can speak in their power. And it's true vice versa. If you can't speak in your power, you can't fucking your power. We're familiar with women who've never had an orgasm. So like finding out where these connection points are, bring us back to this hyper modesty, hyper purity culture where you, you know, the goal is to stay a virgin until you're married. So you're not acclimating to sexual activity through dating. You're not finding out if you have

chemistry with your partner. You're not trying things and finding out what you like so that then you can communicate what you like to your partner. It's not anything like that. I did not know any of that as a Christian bride. Did you know what an orgasm was? No. I was capable of having them, but I didn't know what to call it. And I didn't know that it was something I should have with my husband. He would have like a five-minute encounter with me with no touching or kissing or intimacy, and then it would be done. Somehow I would get pregnant. So, you know, it was a very shaming experience, very dysfunctional, and I had a lot of unpacking to do. When you got out, you were young. You're actually stepping into your height of sexuality.

Yeah, I was 33 when I escaped. What's your relationship to sex? I had it very isolated to just him at that point. I just knew I had a dud that we weren't compatible. And I really longed to have a partner that I would have chemistry with. And that is the strength I had with Husband 2.0. We did have chemistry. And he was tender and was kind. And so that was like a new discovery for me. like I'd had five children at that point, but I was in some ways was having my first real sexual encounters that were consensual and enjoyable. I'm grateful for those years. When did you discover what you like?

I think I still am. Yeah. I mean, I'm a kind of high drive, high capacity person in every sense of the word. And I'm really late to this party. And I also will not get my youth back. There's things that just those 20-year-old titties are gone. Man, they were so pretty. I did not appreciate them. But, you know, I think I'm just still growing. I think I'm still

discovering the world. Where were you at in terms of religion? It's been an ever-widening deconstruction. So I was Orthodox for most of the second marriage until I started to really identify the religious roots of the things that had happened to me and the way that they were similar even in the Orthodox Church, in any brand of Christianity, in any brand of patriarchy. And then as Christian nationalism rose, I absolutely couldn't participate. And COVID happened. And that gave me a way to step back and realize that, oh, I'm actually healthier and happier when I'm not at church all the time. And then around the time I sold the book, I discovered that I no longer wanted to label myself in any way. And I certainly don't want it on my spirituality, which I want to remain very pliable and flexible and fluid.

I'm Tia. I'm spiritual, but I don't need to adhere to any, like, group with the name. And I can't help us think of like your story, right? What it took for you to be where you are now. Look at what you're doing to help the world and find yourself and your soul through doing that, which is also incredible. But when you think about the women that you knew that are still there, I'm scared for them because it's not the ones that we see online. It's not the ones that are on the stage selling the mindset. It's the ones who are secret. You know, when I wrote my books, they tell you to write to an ideal reader.

And I imagined a woman who was at home washing dishes in despair, and maybe she grabbed this audiobook. And she's listening in secret because I do hear from a lot of readers who read it in secret in my DMs. People do reach out and say, I decided to leave because I read this book. So, yeah, I think about the silent ones. It's really the ones in the shadows that I keep me up at night, that I'm really. concerned about that keep me going. There's such an exodus coming. This Tadwife movement is going to have

the same wave of exodus that other movements have had before it, that my group had before it. And they're going to turn to the resources that are being made right now. I didn't have those resources in 2007. So that's kind of what keeps me going because otherwise the discouragement of seeing this repeat and magnify and intensify would be too much. Well, you blow me away. I'm just truly honored to have this time with you and I'm bringing you back. I know this was a good long conversation and we know we could keep going. We have so much more to go, but I'm, I really do think your book is going to help a lot of people and I know it's coming out soon. Yeah. So I belong to me. Comes out May 5th. I read the audiobook. So if you prefer audio, it's my voice. A well-trained wife just came out in paperback

since doing well. Well, thank you, Tia. I really recommend both of your books. And I also want to recognize that given everything you've been through in all of the trauma, this book is, it ends on that positive, happy, like your life isn't over note, which I think is what everybody needs to hear. One of the things I say a lot is that trauma took my past, but it doesn't get my present and my future too. I want to make something beautiful with it, but I don't want to be reliving it constantly and want it integrated and metabolized so that I can go do other things. There's so much more to this life. So I have a long way to go yet, and I don't want my cult story to be the only thing I ever do or did. So that means I have to integrate it and completely resolve it.

I told you, and I was right, she's remarkable. The white man was right, everyone. I'll take that award. But she is. Tia is remarkable. I have so much love and admiration for her. And her new book, again, is I belong to me. Comes out tomorrow, May 5th. Just get it, guys. It's wildly enjoyable, and I'm going to say it. It's enlightening. Yeah. Enlightening.

Yeah. You can purchase the book in our show notes. And if you use that link directly in our show notes, it helps us. We like to be helped. We could use the help. We could use the help. A well-trained wife is in paperback now, and you can find Tia at Tia Levens writer on social and at tiaelevens. dot substack.com, where she basically works through her religious deconstruction process publicly

as it's happening and guides readers along through theirs, as she says, quote, providing information, reporting connections, and solidarity in the anti-fundamentalist life. She's awesome. We'll have everything linked in our show notes. Also, don't forget, you can listen to this entire interview on our Patreon. Again, we spoke for, I don't know, at least two an half hour. If you want to catch every last drop, become a Patreon member. Yeah. If you want to hear all of this is mess up and mistakes, the stuff that I cut out, go for it.

Do it. Or just you want to hear two badass bitches conversating. White men loses again. See you. It really does help us if you become Patreon members. It really does help us create this important show. Thank you. It gives Tyler a very warm feeling in his bosom.

A burning in my bosom. A burning, yes. Just a shout out to our latest Patreon subscribers. Thank you guys so much. Charmed dryer. Gray Amendarres. Bonnie Smith, Catherine Burroughs. Hazel Vidian.

What a beautiful name. Hazel Vidian. Hazel Vidian, yeah. And Adrian Becker. Yours is pretty too, Adrian. Yeah. Good name. Everybody.

All these names. And my bosom continues to stay warm. We will be back next week with an Amish story, yes, an Amish story. This is real butter churning. This story kicks ass. I will tell you this, too. I just finished these episodes, editing them. Classic was I in a cult stories. Drama, pathos, comedy, great storytelling, little diversions, a kick ass escape, some tears. Honestly, it's Primo. Don't miss it. We went from first through eighth grade, and we just learned the basic stuff. math, reading, English, spelling.

We were not allowed to do science or history. If you're going to be in the Amish community, you don't need anything else. My eighth grade education card, it says, promoted to housework. Is that the funniest shit ever? That's all that's expected, my dear. Well, then Nicole is hosted, produced, written, edited, et cetera, et cetera, by Tyler, Trad Husband in the Making,

Mism. And Liz, one of the breeders, Ayakuzi. Just a womb for rent, Liz. That's all I am. And Rob,

20-year-old Tiddysparra. Rob got them, 20-old Tiddysparra. And Greta, Patriarchy is a pyramid scheme, Stromquist.