I Belong to Me: Tia Levings on Escaping Christian Patriarchy and Reclaiming the Self
What happens when the “perfect Christian wife” decides her life belongs to her after all? In this episode of The Rose Woman Podcast, Christine sits down with Tia Levings, New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife and I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma. Tia writes and speaks about the realities of religious trauma, evangelical patriarchy, and the trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture; her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, and the hit Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People. Together, Christine and Tia explore how high-control religion shapes women’s bodies, marriages, motherhood, aging, and even our politics, why the trad wife aesthetic is so seductive right now, what happens when adult children step away from the faith of their families, and how to slowly rebuild a sense of self, boundaries, and spirituality on your own terms. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tia is mom to four grown kids and, when she’s not writing or speaking, she loves to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. If you’ve ever felt confined by an ideology, a relationship, or a role you were told to play, this conversation offers language, validation, and a gentle map back to yourself.
In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:
(00:00:35): Who Is Tia Levings, And Why Religious Trauma Matters
(00:05:19): Childhood Move To The South And How A “Normal” Church Led Into High-Control Religion
(00:09:21): Inside the organization by Bill Gothard (IBLP) And Tradwife Culture
(00:12:28): How High-Control Christianity Glorifies Women’s Suffering While Blocking Real Supports Like Childcare And Healthcare
(00:14:29): The Cost To Women
(00:17:02): Reclaiming Midlife As A Powerful “Queen Era” Of Women’s Lives
(00:19:32): Are Tradwives “Stupid”? How Isolation and Under-Education Protect Patriarchal Systems
(00:22:46): Submission as “Discipline” and Why Divorce Can Be A Life-Saving Boundary
(00:25:58): Parenting Under Patriarchy
(00:30:03): Escaping Abuse and Rebuilding Life
(00:35:01): Tradwife Aesthetics, Project 2025 and How Christian Patriarchy Is Moving Into U.S. Politics
(00:38:23): Estrangement In Christian Families
(00:41:41): Tantric Parenting
(00:43:34): New Book: “I Belong To Me”
(00:49:23): How To Support People Exiting High-Control Groups
(00:56:34): Deconstructing and Reconstructing Spirituality
(00:59:29): Living As Your Full Self After Control
Helpful links:
Tia Levings - Author of I Belong to Me: A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma (St. Martin's Essentials, May 2026) and A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
Subscribe to tialevings.substack.com
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Transcript
Tia Levings 00:05
Knowing who you are and what you're about, it aligns with how I changed the boundary conversation for myself. So I, I didn't look at boundaries as rules. I looked at them as I'm somebody who and what my values are and expressions. And then the lines are not firm. I'm free to flex them as I feel necessary. I'm not threatened all the time. I'm not in a defensive posture all the time. My intuition told me that that was great. I didn't know there was there was an explanation for it. I love learning that.
Christine Mason 00:35
Hello, everybody. It's Christine Marie Mason, and this is the Rose Woman Podcast. Welcome back. If you're a regular listener, and if you're new, I'm so glad you found us. We talk about all things related to consciousness, love, liberation, and living with a more effulgent, radiant, and soul presence, so that every relationship in the world becomes better, and we become lighthouses for that kind of experience of being alive on Earth, at Rosebud, we like to say more peace, more power, or open mind, soft heart, or more joy, less suffering, and all of those are definitely guidelines that I use in the show. So today is on the more joy, less suffering side of things. As my guest today, I have Tia Levings, the New York Times best-selling author of a well-trained wife, her memoir of escaping Christian patriarchy, and her brand new book I Belong to Me: A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma You may know her from the Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People So, one of the things that's important in this conversation is while Tia was the original trad wife and was married very young into a life of total submission and has come out the other side, what she is telling us here is that the model that is inside of these high control patriarchal religious environments is the model they're attempting to export into the body politic for all of us. So if you look at Project 2025 that's trying to take away Title Nine, that's trying to get women out of leadership positions, is trying to take away the right of women to vote. All of that stuff is coming directly from this Christian patriarchy movement that she escaped. When I look around at the magnificence that men and women are creating in the world, when their souls are unfettered and they're allowed to access the tools and the opportunities, they just create so much beauty. And this idea that we should be controlling another human being is directly antithetical to the tantric texts, and basically, I think to the entire vision of what a good life is, what a good life is for. So, as I was saying, Tia was the original trad wife decades before the hashtag. She was recruited as a child into the world of Bill Gothard's Institute and Basic Life Principles, and then married into a life of total submission, and she is out the other side now of a harrowing escape with her four children, and then 15 years plus of healing. I want to just mention before we begin: this conversation does touch on domestic abuse and pregnancy loss. So if that's not something that you're up for today, you just want inspo. Maybe save that for another time. Take care of yourself. What moved me most in this conversation is that Tia refuses both easy stories: the one where the women who stay are fools, and the one where leaving is the end of the journey. She offers a map of reclamation, how a self gets buried and how it gets found again, and it doesn't matter if you were in this particular high control environment, any high control environment where you think you have to really contort yourself to belong, is going to have some echoes in today's conversation. Before we go too much further, I want to make a plug for Rosewoman.com. We've just completely redone the site, and I hope you love it. I've added an encyclopedia of all of the women's health and sacred sexuality and life stage education that's under library, and some many other changes there. So if you are ever looking for archives on the show, and you want to listen outside of Spotify, you can always listen direct at rosewoman.com or at my own personal site, christinemariemason.com, which has also gotten a facelift. I want to tell you also that I am starting my fall courses in mid September, and they have been expanded. We now have Living Tantra 101 and then an Advanced Topics class 201 for those who'd like to come back. All that is at christinemariemason.com, and I look forward to being with you in person. Those are highly interactive. We are definitely not doing the buy the content. It's really more about investigating. How the tantric material hits your own life, your own ability to walk in joy, and as I was saying in the beginning, more peace and more power. Okay, with all of that, please settle in for a conversation with Tia Levings. As I understand it, you were about 10 when your family moved from Michigan to Florida, and it was your mother who thought a church might help the family find its footing. So, could you walk us through how your mom's search became your life inside the Christian patriarchy?
Tia Levings 05:33
It is a critical place to start. It was not where I thought I would start my story for years. When I was writing what happened to me in adulthood, I started with my wedding, and I had to retrace the steps back to why I had made a series of decisions that I had made, and and were they really decisions? And that led me to this move, which I knew I had carried in my heart as this very cataclysmic moment in my childhood. We left a small town in rural Upper Michigan, pretty idyllic, if not a little feral '80s childhood on a farm for this big hot city in the South. It was with very little preparation and very little notice, and massive culture shock to a very sensitive kid. And my parents, you know, they were in their late 20s when this happened. I give them a lot of grace for their own equipment at the time, psychological equipment, because in 1984, parents didn't really have a lot of that, but they did know that they wanted to help their daughters fit in. I have a younger sister, and they wanted us to acclimate to our city. And in this culture, in this city, was this southern religion that was as oppressive as the heat. I mean, it really is everywhere in the South. Is like the humidity, and so when you're looking for community, there's literally billboards and advertisements all around you of where to go to church and where to take your children and where to find community and support, and you know, just like a good, wholesome childhood. So that's what they did. There are a lot of churches to choose from in Jacksonville, but there was one big central place downtown where, if you were anybody, anybody who was anybody went there. So my mom wanted a big music ministry. She wanted a lot of youth group programs for her daughters, and so it seemed like a pretty innocent decision on their part. Within that first year, we were going six days out of seven to some kind of church activity, you know. And previously in Michigan, we had gone to church maybe a few times a year, definitely the holidays, and it was more of a culturally Christian kind of experience, and so it was. It was a lot of culture shock and very formative.
Christine Mason 07:46
It sounds like it also closed off other opinions
Tia Levings 07:49
completely. I mean, I didn't learn the word foreclosure in regards to your future, you know, until I was years in recovery. In fact, it was just a few years ago that I learned that phrase. But that decision was one of the first major foreclosures on what we would not do because of what we were doing. You know, when you spend six days a week in one pursuit, there's a lot of things you just don't have time, you know, for doing. And that church environment did a lot of active shaming of anything else that would help you explore or develop as a child. They were very invested in helping produce a certain outcome in kids, and so that we were on a pretty uniform track right away to be the same, do the same, talk the same, dress the same, and so all of the self exploration that is supposed to happen in the middle school years and in teenage years is is gone. So you're foreclosing on a certain future from a very young age, and it's backed by Scripture. You know, it's backed by God said that you should be this way.
Christine Mason 08:46
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, but then there's the whole part about letting your light shine, which is a unique light to you. So a little bit confusing in that front.
Tia Levings 08:55
It was very confusing for me. I will say, as somebody who is, I would say, a vibrant person. I've always been a vibrant child. They used to say, you know, when Tia walks into a room, and I had to learn how to dim all of that and and get small and get quiet because most of what makes me me was not acceptable.
Christine Mason 09:15
Well, here you are with New York Times bestseller. So so much for that plan.
Tia Levings 09:19
I had to reclaim. So,
Christine Mason 09:21
so for people who aren't familiar with what it's like inside of that particular Baptist line, or even maybe even more so, the Gothard Quiverful sort of line, what is that like?
Tia Levings 09:34
Yeah, so it's important to distinguish that what my parents joined was just a Southern Baptist mega church. They just thought they were taking us to this big, shiny, wealthy church, and what they didn't know was that at the same time period-this is the late '80s, early '90s-there was this organization run by Bill Gothard out of Chicago and Indiana at the time called the Institute of Basic Life Principles, and he positioned his events as interdenominational. Cross denominational, and so anybody could come from any church, study these biblical principles, and then return to their church and recruit from within. And that was rising in our congregation, but it they weren't open about that. They just looked like large families, little house on the prairie families. They were homeschooling before homeschooling was popular, like where most kids in our most families in our church had like two kids, maybe three. They were having eight, 910, 11 children and talking about how letting you should let God decide your family size, and they weren't explaining why. What was what was behind this? Why would you do this? It was always just presented as we're extra obedient to God. We're additionally obedient to God, you don't have to do these things for your salvation. But if you're really spiritual, you will. And so, as a observant kid who was sleuthing out, you know how to be the best girl to stay out of hell. You know, was very at this point very motivated to not get left behind in a rapture event and not go to hell if I died young. I wanted to be the most obedient to God that I could possibly be, and so I was paying attention to these families and the ways that they were choosing to live, and it was attractive. I loved Little House on the Prairie, so it seemed like you know Anna Green Gables has a big family, and so and I read those books, and she did have a large family, and and she's wasn't a fictional character to me at this point. She was real, so the idyllic trad wife life that we see today online is the same thing that I was seeing in my church, and it was just as appealing and comforting as a way to be devoted to God.
Christine Mason 11:36
It feels like you've got both the carrot and the stick, the fear of hell, and the fear of the rapture, or and also this sort of idyllic, almost like a neo romanticism, like a look at sort of the way humans are supposed to be. That goes back to a a time when all of those daily chores of human embodiment were like real labor. They required a stay at home team. Right.
Tia Levings 12:01
Well, you you grow your team, you grow your eldest daughters into helpers, and you you know it is all of that labor and suffering is is is making use more holy. So you're aligning with Christ. It's everything's elevated.
Christine Mason 12:15
One risk in a sort of secular liberal viewpoint is to make that stuff of pathology, but it does seem, and you think you've spoken to it, how this feeds real hungers inside of people, like the certainty seeking.
Tia Levings 12:28
Yeah, it's easy and comforting to have the right answers, and and know that you're in safe places, and you're in you're in good with God, and you're not in danger, and also you're taught in those environments to depend on external structures for instruction, what to think, what to believe, who to vote for, how to live, and so you don't have to figure out anything for yourself if you're listening to these external structures, and so it is relieving in a lot of ways to to just trust and obey, you know, depend on God. Listen to your elders. Do as I say, and there's a certain amount of rest in that because the the world's very chaotic and scary, and they increase that fear. They they you know they bargain on that fear, but they also help create that chaos by making it harder. There's like so many things we could point to in feminism and secular life where real solutions to problems have been suggested, and they're shot down by high control religion. You know, and so, like for example, childcare. We could have childcare. We could have healthcare, and that would relieve the burden for a lot of families. But the religious ideologies are against that. They want women at home taking care of as many children as possible, so they don't allow us to have those things voted through. So that's an example of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you're really exhausted and overwhelmed, and you don't know what to believe in the world, it's easy and attractive to take a step back and say, "Well, I just won't be politically concerned. I just won't be engaged in politics. I won't try to figure this out myself. I'll just believe what my pastor tells me, and oh by the way, what my pastor tells me is the voice of God. So I'm also being obedient and blessed for being submissive.
Christine Mason 14:11
That's a very tricky line. The voice of God is coming through the pastor, particularly when it bears very little resemblance when it comes to women to what the actual teachings were, which was like, oh, Jesus had women like funding his ministry, and you know, etc. etc. So, so let's talk a little bit about the life of women in this context and your life in particular prior to leaving. What would what would you say characterized it?
Tia Levings 14:39
Fatigue. That's my that's always my first word because patriarchy and and high control religion need women in order to keep going. They need that labor force and they need that breeding force, and so in the service of your body, you will give and give and give, and it's never enough. That's why women in these groups, you know, they grapple with. Why am I never enough? Why why are my sacrifices never enough? There's always more. Many times I've compared it to a vacuum because every time you give up some, the air then sequesters, like it squeezes you more, and then now more is asked of you. In my experience, I was I was almost to the point of personal annihilation. I almost died for this, and I had to get to a place where I wasn't willing to die for it, but that took me 13 years of giving, giving. And like I said earlier, the labor is aligning you with Christ. So if you suffer, you're suffering with Christ. If you hurt, you're suffering with Christ. If you're sick, you can be sick well. You can suffer well and be happy in your suffering, and the martyr complex becomes part of this. Mother on a pedestal is a big piece of it. The more you suffer, the closer you are to God. So then you're going to choose things that cause more suffering, you know, because it elevates your holiness. So it it gets twisted really fast until you don't know who you are anymore, you know you've given and you've given more than you can, and it it denies the real drain, the physical drain that's happening on your body. Like when you have unlimited pregnancies, I had nine pregnancies in 10 years, with five live births and four surviving children, and they don't do any talk of the losses that are involved, the dangers and the wear and tear on your body with having close together pregnancies. What happens to your psyche when you have repeated losses, and the vitamins and minerals and all the things that we know, you know, are physical tolls on the body. Those aren't discussed because the ideology is the is tantamount.
Christine Mason 16:36
That's very very convenient to have a labor force where their compensation is in the afterlife.
Tia Levings 16:44
Yeah, yeah, you're always living for tomorrow and for the end and for eternal glory. You'll get you'll get to rest later. And I do think, and when I imagine women dying, it's like they finally get to take a break. Like, let me go to sleep, you know. And it's eternal rest. It's they got to die in order to get a break.
Christine Mason 17:02
Is that the same for women who have reached the grandmother stage?
Tia Levings 17:06
Oh, that's a painful era. In patriarchy, you know, you go from fertile to old woman really fast, and you go from fertile to invisible really quickly. You you have lost your value once you're no longer fertile. So around this menopausal era, which I am personally in and am personally experiencing as more of a queen era, where I have about 25 years ahead of me of wisdom, hard earned wisdom that I've that I've learned through my experience. My children are grown, my income is more disposable and available, and I have I have usefulness to society that I can see before I consider myself a crone, an elderly woman. I don't think I'll be elderly for quite a bit yet. But in patriarchy, I would already be used up. I would already be invisible. 50-year-olds are not helpful unless they are helping the younger generation of women do the same thing that they did. When you look closely in these groups, you see a lot of women dying in their 40s, a lot of marriages ending when they're in their 40s because they'll men swap them out for youngers. In the influencer field, we see old, tired trad wives being quietly transitioned to something else, while young, 20-something trad wife influencers start to rise, and so you see this like regeneration cycle from that 20 to 40 year old window, and the rest of a woman's life is just ignored. Like she's the old elephant at that point. No one cares, and so one of the things I'm really excited about with Gen X women turning menopausal and being so much more vocal online is that we're visible. We might not be valuable to patriarchal men, but that doesn't mean that we don't have value and we are reclaiming that for ourselves. So I find that to be very exciting to be a part of now.
Christine Mason 18:46
I have to send you my book.
Tia Levings 18:48
Yes, you do. The
Christine Mason 18:49
Nine Lives of Women, and it's all about the nine stages of sexual, sensual, and reproductive life from birth to 100
Tia Levings 18:55
Oh my God, to 100 See, like it's reclamation. It's a wider scope. Yeah, I love that.
Christine Mason 19:00
So, is your mom still in the church?
Tia Levings 19:02
She does still attend a Southern Baptist church. It's in a different city and state, and it's one of those topics we don't talk about a lot. She swears it's different, but she doesn't have any exposure to the outside world. To like, yes, it might be a little different from an '80s mega church, but that doesn't mean it's healthy by health standards. It's just maybe one step better. We talk about this a lot, and she supports my work quite a bit. But yeah, we have certain subjects we try to stay away from.
Christine Mason 19:32
You have resisted the framing that women in these movements are foolish or brainwashed. So you know, what do outsiders get wrong about the intelligence or even the agency of the women who stay?
Tia Levings 19:45
Yeah, it's really easy to call tradwives stupid, and to some extent, there is. I want to draw a little box around the quantifiable research that's been done into the IQ levels of those who like polar. Arguments. They don't possess a lot of critical thinking. They do have low IQs. They do have less education. Like to some extent, there is a intelligence difference there when you are systematically not educating women and they're you know they're procreating and educating children to complete the same cycle. However, knowing those women and being having been one of those women, the resilience, the creativity, the resourcefulness, the inventiveness, the the survival instincts to always be able to find the side streets and the hidden doors and the and the hidden ways to get through things, I have a lot of respect for them. I think what happens when we blame women, I'm not denying that brainwashing isn't a thing because I do think we have disinformation campaigns that are capturing people under spells, and there is a cult glaze that happens, and when you're under high control cults, that is definitely there. But when we when we discount the intelligence of these women as just not being there, just not being present, we are not holding the system accountable, the cult accountable, the men who are doing this teaching and actual brainwashing, or the isolation in a lot of cases that just don't know what they don't know because they're not allowed to interact with that information. I wasn't allowed to go to the library. I wasn't allowed to vote for myself. I wasn't allowed to have you know meetups with friends and make friends outside of my worldview. And at one point I wasn't even allowed to get together with other women from my church because we might talk to each other while we're there, and the men couldn't handle that. So when you when you look at someone who's so isolated and denied access to information, I do think it's unfair to just categorically, you know, discount them as stupid, when in fact there's real oppressive forces involved.
Christine Mason 21:43
That sounds like a horror story, like the Taliban or something.
Tia Levings 21:46
Yeah, I mean, for a long time, I worked on my book for 10 years, and for about eight of those years, the working title was the American burka, which is a title that did not age well, and I understand that. But the point of it was that they did-they had no problem vilifying high-control Muslim faith as oppressive to women, with this giant blind spot of how they were the basically the same thing. It's legalism and fundamentalism under a different religion, but fundamentalism can be in anything. It doesn't have to be. It's not the same like unique to one church or one faith tradition, you can be rigid and high control in literally anything from nutrition to what you wear to to what you believe in as far as God. So yeah,
Christine Mason 22:30
in Southern California, they have something called orthorexia, which is just like an obsession with clean eating, with rigid eating, high control food, surrender, devotion, order, belonging-these are all very genuine spiritual goods. So, how do you look at a high-control religion counterfeiting those? How do you tell the difference between devotion and captivity?
Tia Levings 22:55
For me, it has to do with the exploitation of the person believing. So, if they are being harmed through their devotion and the ideology they're serving is more important than their humanity. Then I would call foul on that. Being like being spiritual, it's not as it's not as simple again as saying spirituality is what's at fault here. It's not. It's in service to an ideology that harms people, spirit expression and part of who we are-that's you know not going to exploit and consume and harm you. It's not going to harm other people unless that becomes more important than the human practicing
Christine Mason 23:30
it. Yeah, and you and you spoke about that related to the marriage that submission was framed as love and abuse as discipline. So, so right in the heart of even the most loving, intimate relationship you're encountering disharm
Tia Levings 23:43
yeah this just came up this week I was just in a conversation about divorce and people you know they're sad about divorce and they don't they think they see it as a failure and they don't want it to be that way but that casts marriage itself by itself as a success and that's not true. Something broke that marriage, and all divorce does is validate that it's broken and offer the married people freedom to go then heal and repair what broke that union. If we hold up marriage as an institution that must be served no matter what, now we are serving an ideology instead of humanity, and that's fundamentalist.
Christine Mason 24:22
There are divorce parties now.
Tia Levings 24:24
Yeah, there are
Christine Mason 24:25
divorce showers
Tia Levings 24:26
and registries, and you know, divorce saved my life. So, congratulations,
Christine Mason 24:31
because no happy marriage ever ended in divorce. So I must have been unhappy. So you were talking a little bit about there was no level of submission that was ever enough, and anyone who's ever survived any religion at all, or just a controlling marriage, the pattern seems to be the same.
Tia Levings 24:49
Yeah, there's always more asked of you. There was never a point where they're like, "Wow, okay, you you gave up this thing, and now we're satisfied that we've we've seen your sacrifice and we've seen that." This is the best you can give. No, there was always more you could give, or had to give, or were obligated to give, or do against your own conscience. That came up for me with parenting. Often, like there were so many things I wanted to do differently as a mother, and I wasn't allowed to do that because it disrupted the vertical power structure that we were engaged in with the umbrella of authority, which meant that I was to submit to my husband. Ideally, as the as my husband was submitting to God, but that really became more of an evil even playing field because men are gods in their families. Everything God says comes out your husband's mouth, so you're supposed to obey it, even even if he's wrong. And so I would have to lay down my preferences, or my opinions, or my convictions, or my intuition, and sacrifice that in order to obey my husband, which was seen as better or or more valuable than protecting my kids or mothering them the way that I wanted them parented.
Christine Mason 25:58
What were some of the things you would have done differently.
Tia Levings 26:01
I wouldn't have spanked them. I wouldn't have drilled catechism into their brains from the time they were able to talk. And we did catechism drills so they could recite question and answer truths about God. And I would have skipped that. There were times I would have had them psychologically evaluated for learning challenges or learning disabilities and things like that, and we weren't allowed to use those doctors or see psychologists. Socialization things came up a lot. Different opportunities I wanted them to have, but I was warned against them because we're not supposed to be of the world or engage with the world. And and you know I could see my kids were lonely and unhappy. They were also really dynamic, fun learners, and I always wanted to give them more opportunity, not less. So, like when our homeschool curriculum was taken away so that we could replace it with McGuffey readers, I grieved that I didn't want to give them dull black and white books from the 1800s. I wanted to give them, you know, the latest and greatest homeschool curriculum I could find for them. I thought I was doing homeschooling to give them more educational opportunities, not less. But that's not what the patriarchy wanted. The patriarchy was teaching at that point, and still today, that you don't really need to educate your girls after they're 13. You don't really like eighth grades really all they need. You can switch to home crafts and home domestic arts at that point. They don't need to be preparing for college when they're not going to go to college, and they don't need to, you know, know civic things because they're not going to vote and not going to have a job. So, like those kinds of things, I was very against. And if I fought for them, then I was being disruptive in my marriage. If I argued with them or brought valid arguments, researched arguments, then I was being a disruptive spirit in the home and would then be disciplined for it. So
Christine Mason 27:54
I'm just having I'm having a moment of my own grief right now around all of the gifts that we've lost as a culture because of that. When I think of all the amazing women authors, writers, artists, astronauts, policymakers, business leaders, you know, in addition to being wonderful mothers and all of the sort of appropriate or all the most amazing preachers, I I feel so sad for all those giant hearts and brilliant minds that we didn't get to know seem so selfish, and also kind of like cutting off your right arm as a as a as a masculine householder. Like you got like you have like somebody who's like could totally walk with you and make everything go so much better. I mean, you must put so much pressure on the men too.
Tia Levings 28:39
I really do. I think that this is why men don't thrive. the The system is sold as a way to give men more power, but it really just adds to their burden and responsibility, the weight that they have to carry, the load that they're responsible for. And what as I started learning what egalitarian marriage looked like, that really made sense to me because I could see how my husband needed a teammate. He needed help. He needed a helper who could be equal, not another child to take care of. You know, he wasn't doing well with what he had on his plate, and patriarchy increased his responsibilities, and it broke him. And he was already on his way to being broken. You know, he needed real help, but I don't think men thrive in that environment, and I don't think boys benefit from having a single version of masculinity presented to them. It's one dimensional; it denies them full emotional expression, and they aren't taught how to relate to women in an equal way. So then they later have problems with power and control in the next generation because they've never been taught to deal with successful equal women, and to some extent, our culture is guilty of this because we spent so many decades working on female equality and not on the boys who would then have to relate to equal women. You know. They don't know what they're doing. That's some of that's our fault.
Christine Mason 30:03
Yeah, just meet the human in front of you without the gender bias is still pretty challenging. Or this sort of like, who am I if I don't have these prescribed roles? Existential confusion. So you spent about 15 years in the marriage, and then 15 years healing. I have my symmetry. Also, I married at 18, and was out at 30-five, so with four kids, so a little bit of a little proximity in the timing. But I want to understand the reclamation process and what it was like to get to the point of writing the first book.
Tia Levings 30:35
I spent that second 15 years in a second marriage that was not violent, but it was still had a lot of the same patriarchal dynamics and control. What happened after my escape? So I had a very visceral, harrowing escape for listeners who aren't familiar in 2007 and then I had I spent a year in hiding, and then I had to like rebuild my life. And one of the hardest parts of that was I didn't have a really formed sense of self. I looked like a 30-three-year-old mom of four kids, but I didn't. I didn't know who I was or how to self-assert. And I was being tasked with protecting my kids, being a sole custodial parent, fighting in court for them, being employed. There were a lot of challenges immediately that a I what I wasn't really equipped for. I was a young girl in my mind, a dependent. I could do like I could run an amazing household, but I didn't know how to, you know, advocate for them in public school, for example, or provide for us, you know, in the in the wider scope and all of the things that we we joke and we call oh adulting is hard, but like, yeah, I didn't learn any of that stuff, so I had to forge my way. And I got sick. I got reactive for a long time. It was very triggered and dysregulated. There were things happening in my second marriage that reminded me of the first, but sometimes that was fair, and sometimes that was unfair, and I really couldn't tell anybody what happened to me. I was always a writer. I was always journaling, and when I started going to therapy, which was initially to cope with this big medical crisis that had formed with autoimmune disease, and you know, I think in hindsight was mostly trauma finally coming out of me manifested in physical illness quite a bit, and so I was going through this extensive testing process and ended up in therapy for that. And my therapist suggested I start writing this experience. And when you start writing things down, a couple things come up right away. You got to have words. You have to be able to say what happened, but then when you do say what happened and you externalize it on the page, a context begins to emerge, and I could see there were other people in the room, there were other responsibilities people held. It wasn't all on me. I've there was a system at work, and there was a reason for everything that happened as far as why I was there in the first place, or why I didn't leave when I could have or should have, or what it would have taken to leave, and why didn't I have that agency to go? And so those questions arising as I was writing became part of the discovery process. And somewhere I was working on a fantasy series at the same time with a writing coach, and at some point close to the 2016 election, I was venting to her one day about how politics was activating me, and I was getting so triggered over Donald Trump and things I was seeing around me and the justification when the evangelical church endorsed him. What a betrayal that felt like to me because he had been so overtly abusive, and they were now saying this was okay after you know being very self-righteous for a very long time and and claiming a higher standard. So I was venting this to her, and she's like, "You need to stop what you're doing right now and write that book, write your memoir of what happened. And I had not ever really thought I would even say this stuff out loud, let alone write it. You know. So for a few years, those drafts were a novel. I tried them as a novel. I tried them as a memoir with a pseudonym, and then I was healing. You know, going to trauma therapy this whole time. So eventually, right around the 10th draft, I was ready to tell it as my memoir in my own name and promote it as a story. And then in 2021, when the Josh Duggar trial came to light, I started making video content online, and that because the Duggars were part of the same cult group that I was part of with the IBLP, and that changed everything. The producers from Amazon found me, which led to me getting my literary agent and selling my book. So the content continues to be as timely as ever because I was an original trad wife, and now we have a trad wife movement. And the what I lived is the Project 2025 vision for America that the Heritage Foundation has planned, and and so there's just a lot of synchronicity and timeliness in my story. So I haven't really stopped talking about it since it came. Out in 2024,
Christine Mason 35:01
I think it's really vital, and that's you know one of the reasons I reached out to you. There are a couple of reasons. One is the tradwife esthetic piece is so charming in the age of AI and technological overwhelm and division. Like I just want to shut out the world and live this beautiful, gentle life, which you know fantasy on many levels, you know, but but so there's that piece. But then the other one is this sort of family vote thing that's getting pushed in the public sphere right now, which seems totally outrageous. So to finally come out and finish finish that one thread, to come out and write that book, how are you received? What happened after that for you? I mean, I that would feel like to to me knowing that there's this whole high control group of people who who you had to hide from, you had to go into hiding from. It must have been so scary to put your name out with the book. I mean, how did you do that?
Tia Levings 35:52
Yes and no. So, number one, I had done my trauma therapy to know that I could tell my story without retraumatizing myself. I had integrated these experiences. I understood why I was sharing the ones that I was, why I was not sharing others that I that aren't in the book. You know, there's reasoning behind all of that, and I knew that I could tell my story in a clear voice. I was also met with me toos and solidarity from other survivors, which was super helpful because I knew I wasn't alone. This is a system-wide harm, so there are system-wide survivors. We might not have every detail in common, but very often have a lot of commonality, and so that gives me strength too because I know I'm speaking as part of a choir, not just as a soloist out here. But then also, my publisher put my book through in a very extensive legal process and fact check, and so there's nothing in that book that doesn't have a receipt attached to it that isn't verifiable and meets the standards, so that I'm not like accused of slander or defamation because the standards there's legal standards you have to meet in order to make those charges, and so I'm protected from that. And knowing that I have that reinforcement gave me a lot of courage to let it go. It was still really hard when it when it released, and I realized so many of my secret stories that I never thought I would even tell my family are now in a book. You know, and they're they're a best-selling book, and over 100,000 copies have been sold now, and so it's that's a lot of people reading your book and library copies and all of that, and so sometimes the exposure like is just is kind of real, but the reason why it feels that real is because I know it's not over. This is coming for our country. It used to be really scandalous when I would say, "Yeah, they're not going to let women vote, and people would be like, "Oh no, that's like that's got to be really fringe and extreme, right? But now here we are in 2026, and head of household voting, family voting is openly being discussed in multiple spheres, and I have been saying that all along because it was in 2004 that I wasn't allowed to vote that I first heard head of household voting presented from the patriarchy. So,
Christine Mason 38:05
so in in practice, it's already happening.
Tia Levings 38:07
Yes, in practice, it's already happening. What their their vision for the country is what they practice in their homes, and that's why it matters. We know what they're practicing in their homes.
Christine Mason 38:18
I heard someone say that your pages on estrangement and Christian families are the best written on the topic.
Tia Levings 38:23
That was kind.
Christine Mason 38:25
Estrangement is kind of a grief part that nobody really speaks to. But what do you want people to understand about that?
Tia Levings 38:33
So I'm gratified that that feedback came. I was very of all the chapters in the second book, which is you know my healing process and everything that I encountered on that, and it is written from a survivor's standpoint. I'm not an academic. I'm not a therapist. I I lived through these experiences, and I'm sharing them because sometimes when we talk about what we went through, we help other people with what they're going through, and it's not prescriptive. It's just you know common sharing. That's the spirit that I belong to me is written in, and estrangement was the most delicate chapter because the wounds are deep, they're fresh, and they're ongoing, and the people who are wounded by estrangement are being pulled on like a tug of war online right now. Focus on the family has a course that reaches parents that teaches them to double down on their beliefs and not hear their children. Children are adult children, you know, are in therapy and they're they're being granted language and insight into what they experienced collectively and individually, and why and where that came from. And so, there's a lot of tension in that conversation, a lot of delicate feelings, and I didn't. I wanted to first do no harm, you know. I wanted to validate the complexities. I've also walked on both sides of estrangement personally, you know. For example, I have children who have estrangement from their father, and we have a permanent restraining order, and I do. And so, like that's an estrangement that will be upheld, and there's good reason for that. And then there's other times when others have estranged from me and my family, and it's been my journey, my work to understand and respect their autonomy as why that's there. Like sometimes no contact is a very healthy plan of plan of action, and it's the only plan of action you can take. Sometimes, but in high control religion, there's so few boundaries. Differentiation is not taught like the act a child goes through in becoming their own person. That is seen as a threat to parents. Parents are very entitled; they feel entitled to respect and contact, and grandchildren and all of these things, because of this power dynamic that they were taught. Like just because you're the parent, you're entitled to this, and your child is being mean to you if they're not granting it to you. And there's also just a collective lack of accountability at play. So, anytime we talk about any of it, chances are someone in the room is going to feel offended and immediately activated, and so that's a really hard space to speak into. I do think we're making great gains in it quickly. There's so many good therapists online right now that are speaking into this space and calling out the grifty coaches who are like making money off of people's pain and encouraging parents to to be mean to their children, insist on that ideology over that child's needs, and ka-ching, ka-ching for the support group that helps you, you know, stay angry at your kid. So I think we're making gains, but the fact that that chapter was received well means a lot to me because I tried to speak into both both spaces with a lot of kindness.
Christine Mason 41:41
Yeah, I practice a classical tantric philosophy, and the idea there is that your children are have chosen you, and your job is to help them express their fundamental uniqueness.
Tia Levings 41:55
Oh, that is complete opposite from high control religion. Couldn't be more opposite
Christine Mason 42:00
that you are that you're you're you're there to like take them to every activity and then like see which ones light them up and help them go into the flow, the flow state and then keep taking them to that because it helps them identify their gifts and like your whole job is to be this sort of cultivator of their unique essence and to hear like to hear that and and I know it's it's not unfamiliar in the sense like I have friends who are disfellowshipped by the Jehovah's Witnesses or you know I I have a little retreat center on the Big Island of Hawaii and many people who are in high control religions will come there and go the opposite like go completely to the other end of like complete resistance to authority won't listen to anybody's opinion on anything, like even have lost the capacity to collaborate because they they are doing. I think what you're talking about in establishing the sense of self for the first time outside of someone else's opinion, and I would also give a plug here to what Jim Palmer's doing with the Center for Nonreligious Spirituality. He seems to really have a lot of resources on just these questions. But the idea that you would live and let live, like have a totally joyful relationship with your children or your grandchildren, appreciating them for who they actually are-that's pretty liberating. That'll take away a lot of pain points.
Tia Levings 43:19
I agree. I enjoy my kids so much, and I love discovering who they are and and fostering who they are. You know, and what I can do to support them. So it's been freeing to not have to serve the ideology and to have that relationship with them.
Christine Mason 43:31
So you have a new book, right? I belong to me.
Tia Levings 43:34
I do.
Christine Mason 43:34
It's a sovereignty claim, obviously, and yet we are relational creatures. So how do you hold the sort of self possession component and the communion? I guess this feeds right into the point I was just making about learning how to live inside of community after you have built a layer of distrust that anybody has your best interests at heart. Right.
Tia Levings 43:55
Yes, the whole phrase is born out of a discomfort that I had. Sovereignty was a very hard word for me to sit with. It's actually not in "I belong to me on purpose. The word sovereignty because I couldn't, I wasn't there yet, but I knew that I was grappling with the idea that I don't belong to anyone else. We're not possessions. We're not objects. I belong to myself, and which then allows me to be outward facing, so that I can then engage in community. I can. I'm not in danger of being subsumed by a group or accepted only if my beliefs align conditionally and transactionally. I wanted to know who I was before they told me who I was, and that's the central question of the book: Is do you remember who you were before they told you who to be, and I did. That's the importance of my first 10 years in Michigan, and all in my first, my early childhood years. I was somebody. We're born. We're born people, and I had done my deconstruction to that point where I did believe that children are born good. They're born people with rights. And I had divested from any teaching that taught us that we didn't. You know that the children are just these vessels to be formed and shaped into the perpetuators of the system. So as I was grappling with that, like every chapter of "I Belong to Me" has a reframe. "I Belong to Me. We're told in in Christianity so often you belong to Christ. You belong to Christ. You are not your own. You don't have consent over what happens to your body. You don't have consent over what you'll do in your life and why you're here. And that wasn't true. That isn't that it wasn't the outcome that I came to through healing and the ability to have boundaries and personhood and selfhood and an identity, and to the Christian's point, I could not ever answer why God would have created me if He didn't want me. Like they, they're all about this personal relationship with Christ. But I'm like, if He doesn't want Tia, then why did He make Tia? You know, there must be something to Tia that makes me uniquely me that is worth protecting and honoring, and so that's how it kind of came to be. I still sit with sovereignty. Self sovereignty is is still a hard phrase for me, but that's okay because the book's not a definitive, you know, end all. It's the beginning of a process, and I learn from people like you who have have looked at self sovereignty and have you know looked at other ways of spirit than than what I was taught, and that's why I'm always learning.
Christine Mason 46:26
Yeah, there's a a piece that I've been working with in the last couple of months on when when does the need for boundaries dissolve?
Tia Levings 46:33
Oh, what a question!
Christine Mason 46:34
Once you're so in the in the Sanskrit world, it's called porna or fullness, and once you're so centered in yourself, and you're so full of yourself in the good sense. Then you can constantly calibrate to what's appropriate and emergent around you. Like he thinks, you know, versus like I have to have this armor because I'm not exactly sure what I'm feeling in the in the moment.
Tia Levings 46:57
I love that full of yourself in the best way, that self possession and that just like knowing who you are and what you're about, it aligns with how I changed the boundary conversation for myself. So I, I didn't look at boundaries as rules. I looked at them as I'm somebody who and what my values are and expressions. And then the lines are not firm. I'm free to flex them as I feel necessary. I'm not threatened all the time. I'm not in a defensive posture all the time. My intuition told me that that was great. I didn't know there was there was an explanation for it. I'm I'm I love learning that.
Christine Mason 47:33
It's so beautiful. It's ironic because you was you said something so important with the you know God must have wanted Tia. So feel the shift in your body. Like if you believe that your sort of essence is seated in your own heart, and that it runs like vertically along your spine, and that it's emanating from the inside of you, then your connection vertically to whatever spirit is, and down to the earth and out to others, is like coming from a very centered place versus this unstable leaning out, it's it's you actually end up feeling deeply connected to the ephemeral, the esoteric, the spirit, and being able to like sense what's what would be called morally or ethically righteous, like what would actually be doing no harm, and it's it's so soft. Doing no harm is so soft. I love
Tia Levings 48:22
that; it is so soft.
Christine Mason 48:23
It's so you know, you know, you because it's just so moving to me because the the idea that you would do harm to do good is is like the number one oxymoron.
Tia Levings 48:35
Right. Yes, I was railing against that my whole life. It made no sense to me, and they would try to explain to me why you had to hurt someone in order to love them. For example, you have to spank them because then they'll know that's the only way they'll know you really love them. That didn't make any sense to me. It's not logical. There's got to be other ways to love someone or guide someone or protect them from running in the street, which is always their example. You have to spank your kids so they don't run through the street, and I'm like, really, you don't have another way to solve that problem?
Christine Mason 49:05
Well, maybe you were planted inside of this experience so you could help other people escape. So for the for the woman who's listening, and if if someone is listening or knows someone is, and they they feel the pull of sort of your clear script, whether they're inside or outside of religion, how how would you speak to that hunger?
Tia Levings 49:23
I honor it, and I encourage baby steps and little bites. Go let let way lead to way. You don't have to revolutionize your life or throw away entire structures that you're not ready to. This isn't like a demolition crew coming in to do this to you. One of the most important things I found in healing was that you're personally in charge of your pace, and so if you feel yourself led to something, go at your own pace. Don't let that be an external driver, and trust that the universe has got you. Like it's kind of scary to go into the unknown. I'm doing so much research right. Now into why people leave things, and most people don't leave things unless they have a little bit of an idea, at least of where they might go, because it's scary to go into the total unknown. But you're also you don't have to. You can go. You can let a lamp be a light unto your feet. You can let small steps happen, and and just listen for what comes up, because in my experience, once you start a road of curiosity, the universe will meet you, and you will find yourself surrounded by the things that you in the way you need to go. Like it'll just show up everywhere. You'll just start seeing things, and I really trust that.
Christine Mason 50:37
That's so beautiful, way by way. What about sport words for people who are receiving someone who's newly exiting.
Tia Levings 50:45
Oh yeah, so this is important. We are getting ready as a culture to do this a lot, and we're not ready, in my opinion. I think MAGA is about to have a major cult break, and I think there's going to be a large exodus of people who are either going to overtly leave and be loud about it, or more likely, quiet and just try to re-enter society. And there's a lot of anger on the outside. There's a lot of people who don't want to receive that, and they want accountability. And so, I think it's really important when you're receiving someone who is making changes in their lives to give them the space to do that, understand there are stages and steps to healing. Accountability is usually a later step; it's not a first step. And when somebody cracks, when they've had a mind break that's shattered their identity and their entire worldview, there's a lot of quiet work that has to happen in the dark first. And sometimes the most important thing someone can do is bear witness and give them room to do that. So I know that we have this call for justice, and we want we want you know we want accountability, we want apologies, we want moral outrage, but that will usually just drive somebody to push to the other side, the other pendulum really, really hard and quick, out of self protection. So
Christine Mason 52:04
there's a Saturday Night Live skit on that.
Tia Levings 52:06
Yes,
Christine Mason 52:07
have you seen this one where the mom? I'm thinking maybe I might have been wrong about, and the kids are like, ah,
Tia Levings 52:15
yes,
Christine Mason 52:15
and she's like, if you if you keep making fun of me, I'm gonna take it all back. Yes,
Tia Levings 52:19
yes, it's um hard. It's our hard work, our hard work to be gracious about what we don't want to be gracious about. I get pushback when I say that because they're like, "I don't want to be gracious with people who, you know, fill in the blank social issue, and I hear that. So maybe, maybe you can let them be while they do their thing, or maybe you can relate to a time when you've been in the same boat. It's hard to be prescriptive. I'm not very good at being at telling people what they should do, but I can point out like the the ways the the process works. So when someone breaks from a cult, they they they are broken. They are shattered. They are sometimes very emotionally unstable. So providing some form of stability to them is a good idea, or providing them some openness, such as an invitation to talk when they're ready. It's not saying we're not going to have that conversation. It's saying I respect your autonomy enough to tell me when you're ready to have that conversation because we do need to have it.
Christine Mason 53:19
That's something from the Palmer work that I think is very beautiful, even when he's teaching people how to be spiritual guides, the main thing he's teaching them is to how not to be spiritual guides, how to be merely witnesses and help people identify what they actually think and feel themselves, particularly somatically and other things like that. I can have an argument with you if I know you're sovereign, that's very strongly worded. But if you're used to being controlled by someone else, it's going to hit you completely differently. So I think just having an understanding of what the mindset is when you aren't full of yourself and you have these vacant pockets that others land inside of you, that would be a great article for you to write. Actually, how to re-enter society after MAGA and how to receive people back.
Tia Levings 54:03
I will take that idea. Thank you. It's I will write. I can write to that. I also think about it like in terms of my kids. So, like parenting adult kids or emerging adult kids sometimes just involves letting them make their own mistakes and understanding this is where they are right now, and I can't control them. I have to go. Oh, okay, that's what you want to do this time. All right. Well, let me know what you need for support. I'll be here when you need me. And it's hard. That's hard work. But geez, they're not going to learn any other way.
Christine Mason 54:33
I would my youngest. Oh my god, he like totally was couldn't organize himself out of a paper bag for the longest time, and and now you know he's he's engaged and he's a firefighter, aerial firefighter in the West, and he's doing really amazing work. He's like really together, but there were there were some years in there where I was just like, is he gonna like end up being one of those kids who live in the basement? Right. Like, but he grew out of it. Yeah. If you're listening. Listening, I never doubted you-not once, right? But
Tia Levings 55:02
that-that's a powerful phrase. Letting people grow out of it, like they need room to grow out of it. They-they got to own that process for themselves.
Christine Mason 55:11
And if they ever complain about anything in their personal lives, particularly about a partner or a spouse, someone gave me this. Wow, that sounds a lot harder than it needs to be. Would you like a sandwich? Love it. I love that. Like no taking sides. Yes, just dropping a little hint
Tia Levings 55:30
and empathy
Christine Mason 55:31
and empathy
Tia Levings 55:32
and and support because oh my goodness, they're usually hungry when they make those decisions. So I like the sandwich.
Christine Mason 55:37
You know, like trying to just be normal and be present and be there for them, but like any if you
Tia Levings 55:42
without judgment,
Christine Mason 55:43
exactly, and that that seems to be a skill set in itself. That means deconditioning yourself from judgment, becoming an unconditional lover in your own right, and that's unconditionally loving. What is is you know sometimes challenging when you it's it's challenging for me when I see harm done, you know. Like it's very hard for me to remain non-judgmental. My inner righteousness, like Dorga, you know. Like I've got my little Dorga lion here that someone gave me. Oh, wow. You know, and her job is to walk around. She like rides around all dignified, and when the demon gets in the way, she rears up and she goes and gets the demon. You know, otherwise she looks very chill. You know, so that's how I feel inside sometimes, and and the compassion has to extend even to that. So I have one more question for you on faith. In leaving the church, a lot of people sort of lose Jesus and Mary the and Mary Magdalene, if they ever had her at all, and there is a sort of a Gnostic Christ consciousness more than Christ is sold in the evangelical church, and and I wonder how do people reclaim or do they reclaim? Do they get Jesus back on new terms? Do they get a general sense of spiritual well-being, like how do you how do you reconstruct a spirituality that suits you?
Tia Levings 57:06
Yeah, I there. I see all kinds. I take the approach to deconstruction that says you can't know the outcome ahead of time and really do it. It would be like deciding who's guilty of a murder before you have done an open investigation, so I didn't place any expectation on myself that I had to adhere to anything. I was free to ask any question, and trusting that the Almighty, should they be as presented as they were as my child in my childhood, that they were strong enough and big enough God to handle you know the questions of the little redhead. So I did. I did that. I also don't approach deconstruction as you are required to reconstruct any kind of system of belief or adherence. So the church is pushing back on this right now. They want people to deconstruct but keep Jesus. So you'll hear that a lot in the in this environment. Like you know, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't ask so many questions that you lose your faith. What I found for myself, and and this is just speaking for me, but I share it often, is that spirit is very fluid, and remaining curious and open means that I cannot adhere to groups and labels anymore. I need on any given day, my my spirituality may go one direction or another direction, and I want to protect that freedom for myself. So I always answer the question: like, are you still a Christian? As I'm spiritually private, in order to protect the privacy of my spirit and let that fluidity, you know, pervade. I don't want to ever have to announce why I no longer am an agnostic, or why I no longer am, you know, X Y Z. So I no labels, no groups, no groups that require belief for for real. Like I, if you have a statement of faith and you have to sign this thing in order to be part of our group, forget it. I'll never be a part of it again. But I really am open to all the ways humans have explored spirituality and what that can mean-the absence of it, the presence of it, the expressions of it-I find it all really expansive, and I love that. I love anything that is mysterious and remains a little out of reach for humanity. You know, because if it's a power higher than ourselves, then we don't have every answer. And I like spaces. I feel safer in spaces that preserve that mystery.
Christine Mason 59:27
Are you having fun now?
Tia Levings 59:29
I am a lot of fun. The world's bigger. I
Christine Mason 59:33
was going to ask you this, and I forgot. Are you making art?
Tia Levings 59:36
Um, kind of. So you'll see paintings behind me. And I was just lamenting yesterday that I haven't painted at all this year, and that's really unusual for me. And I don't have time because I'm writing two more books and the platform and speaking, and there's just a lot of things that are taking up my days. But I did not put my art supplies away yesterday. I was all set to pack them up, and I was like, you know what? You might still paint this year, so leave them and leave them within reach. We'll see.
Christine Mason 1:00:01
Yeah, I read that. I I was wondering if if if after you went through that childhood experience where they didn't want you to write and be an artist, it's so nice that you're a writer and an artist.
Tia Levings 1:00:09
Yes, I have to express. I consider myself compulsively creative. It's it's how I get my feelings out, and it's really important to me.
Christine Mason 1:00:16
I'll give you one more little gem from my tradition on that topic, which is that when you're creative, you are the closest to God. You're mimicking.
Tia Levings 1:00:23
I feel it.
Christine Mason 1:00:24
Mimicking that creative power of Shakti.
Tia Levings 1:00:26
I feel that. Yep.
Christine Mason 1:00:27
All right. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Please, everyone, if you're interested in this topic, or really you're interested in the experience of millions of people around the world who live in this way, have a look at Tia's books and the most recent one, which just came out in May, I belong to me, and they can find you in all the online places, right?
Tia Levings 1:00:46
Yes, tialevings.com and at tia lovings writer on all the social platforms.
Christine Mason 1:00:52
Thank you so much.
Tia Levings 1:00:52
Thank you.
Christine Mason 1:00:55
That was Tia Lovings. Her books are a well-trained wife and the new I Belong to Me, which is out now. You can find her at tialevings.com and at tia lovingswriter on all the platforms. A few things I'm carrying out of this conversation: one, high control systems counterfeit real spiritual goods. Surrender and devotion and order and belonging; those hungers are legitimate. But if the ideology has become more important than the human serving it, they're on the wrong track. Two, the women inside these systems are not stupid; they're just isolated. And when we mock them, which we shouldn't do for anyone, we let the system itself off the hook. Three, boundaries don't have to be armor. Tia reframed hers as, "I'm somebody who leading with values, and in my tradition, we'd say when you're full of yourself in the best sense, porna, the lines can flex because you're no longer defending a vacancy. And for if someone in your life or your community is leaving a high control world of any kind, witness first, stability first, accountability may come at a later stage, but it can't be the price of admission. And sometimes the most healing thing we can offer is just our presence, or as we put it, just a sandwich. Finally, the question Tia builds her whole new book around, which I'll leave with you: Do you remember who you were before they told you who to be? I think that's part of the mission of the show overall: remembering your core essence, recognizing your core glory, and living into that promise-the clearer and clearer lens of perception-I think I'll come back to what I said at the beginning. All those rosebud taglines we've used over the years: more joy, less suffering; open mind, soft heart; more peace, more power. Sending you much, much love in your own becoming. Thank you again to the company that makes this possible, Rose Woman. Rosewoman.com, the best in intimate care and body care and lifestyle stuff to support your reverent becoming through all the stages of life.
