Ep. 296: Healing from Religious Trauma, Silence Culture, and Modern Politics with Tia Levings
What Tia Levings Survived Looks Exactly Like the Country Being Built Right Now
There's a version of this conversation that could have been filed under "religious trauma memoir" and left there. Tia Levings — author of A Well-Trained Wife and the newly released I Belong to Me — has every credential for that category. She spent decades inside fundamentalist Christian patriarchy, survived domestic violence, escaped with four children, and spent years learning how to become a person again after a system spent her entire life coaching her out of personhood.
But that's not the conversation we had.
Because Tia isn't just talking about what happened behind closed doors in her marriage. She's talking about what happens when you scale that family model up to a government. And she's saying that we are already there.
"My Story Is a Prophecy"
Tia describes A Well-Trained Wife as the real-life prequel to The Handmaid's Tale. She was featured in Shining Happy People, the documentary series on the Duggar family. And she's clear about why she felt compelled to write not just a memoir, but a warning.
"It is the same Christian patriarchy that is in power in our government today," she told me. "My story takes a lot of those ideals to the extreme and fills them out to their natural conclusion. If you follow them to the letter...if you buy into complementarian marriage and submissive wives and trad life — what does that actually look like in a family?"
The answer is what she lived. And the reason it matters politically is that in patriarchal theology, the family model isn't just a domestic structure. It's the template for government. The head of the household maps directly onto the head of state. The submission expected of wives mirrors the submission expected of citizens. The silencing of questions inside the home becomes the silencing of dissent at the podium.
Tia has been watching both versions of this system her entire life. Most of us are only now starting to recognize the second one.
The Symptoms You're Feeling Have a Name
One of the most striking moments in our conversation came when Tia broadened her lens to everyone listening — not just survivors of religious communities.
"I have realized in the last couple of months that even though I wrote this to a fairly niche audience of people who have survived religious trauma," she said, "that's all of us now. Because we live in a patriarchal government that wants a theocracy."
Brain fog. Disrupted sleep. Fear about the future. Inability to make long-term plans. Not knowing whether to have another baby. Scrolling through the news while technically functioning — getting lunches made, doing your job, watching your shows — while something underneath is quietly coming apart.
Tia calls these symptoms of complex trauma. She spent years learning to recognize them in her own body. And she's watching them show up collectively, in real time, in people who have no prior frame of reference for what they're experiencing.
This is what it feels like, she says, when you aren't safe. And the first step is being able to name it.
You Were Trained to Not Have a Self
The through-line of I Belong to Me — and of this conversation — is the systematic dismantling of individuality inside high control religion. Not through overt force. Through something subtler and more durable.
"Indoctrination interferes with development," Tia explained. "They don't want you developing into an autonomous person with agency. They want you indoctrinated into becoming a uniform believer."
This starts young. Tia prayed her prayer of salvation at four and a half years old. She declared her political affiliation as a child. She was taught to be seen and not heard, to stay positive, to not make people uncomfortable, to prioritize hospitality and sweetness over honesty. By the time her brain had fully developed — around 25, according to neuroscience — she had already made irreversible life decisions inside a system she'd never been allowed to examine.
The traits that made her Tia specifically — her quirks, her personality, her questions — were supposed to be suppressed or modified so she could carry the load of the system's expectations. And because no single person was forcing her into silence, she didn't realize for a long time that she was being silenced.
"You already know what's going to get you in trouble," she said. "You already know what you can and can't say. You don't want to ruffle feathers. You don't want to be a distraction. And this is taught to little girls and little boys from childhood early on."
People-Pleasing Is Not a Personality Trait
This reframe hit hard in our conversation. Tia is a self-described lifelong people pleaser — she loves making people happy. But there's a point at which loving to make people happy and fawning for survival start to look identical from the outside, while being completely different on the inside.
"I'm not just people-pleasing to make people happy. That's way too innocent," she said. "I'm fawning for safety. I'm hoping for acceptance. I'm self-betraying in order to have acceptance from someone else."
Fawning — the lesser-discussed fourth trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze — is conditioned deeply inside patriarchal religion. It's rewarded. It looks like virtue. And it turns out to be one of the hardest patterns to unlearn, because the very system that installed it also taught you that wanting something different was sin.
Silence Culture Is Everywhere — Including the Briefing Room
We spent significant time in this conversation on silence culture — what it is, where it comes from, and how it operates at a national scale.
Tia traces it back to the language survivors use: I'll get in trouble. It sounds childlike, she says. That's because it is. It's childhood trauma, installed early and running quietly underneath everything. Choosing words carefully. Not making people uncomfortable. Not saying the thing that will set someone off.
"The perpetrators are walking free," she said. "They're not bothered. They're happy when we're silent. The systems love it because they can keep their operations running smoothly."
She connects this directly to watching female journalists get talked over, dismissed, or publicly humiliated for asking accountability questions. The moment Nora O'Donnell brought up a shooter's manifesto and got shut down. The pattern with Caitlin Collins, with Megyn Kelly. The professional calculus of needing to get the story answered in limited time — which means absorbing the abuse rather than naming it.
"It is normalizing abuse," Tia said. "And that has a downstream effect for our entire community, our entire nation."
The women visible in the current administration are part of this same pattern, she argues. They're there to recruit other women. They serve as optics. They provide political cover. And when the calculation changes — when they get old, when they become inconvenient — they'll be the first to fall. Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison. The men in the Epstein case are not.
It is, Tia says, completely normal. It's the oldest playbook in patriarchy.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Here's what Tia doesn't do in I Belong to Me: she doesn't spiritual bypass her way to a tidy conclusion. She doesn't tell you that everything happened for a reason or skip to the part where she's grateful. She's still living with the legacy of choices she made inside a system that promised her outcomes it never delivered.
When I asked her what "healed" actually means — if it means anything at all — she sat with it.
"About two years ago, I felt like: wow. I feel whole. I didn't feel broken. I didn't feel like I was carrying visible scars."
Her definition of healing isn't a flat line. It's being stretchy. Having margins. Being able to metabolize a trigger in real time so it doesn't store and fester. Giving from a place of generosity instead of drain. Feeling like the challenges coming at you — and they will keep coming — are things you can actually meet.
She tried CBT. Then brain spotting, a rapid-processing form of EMDR that moved through stored memories faster than she expected, with significant emotional release. Inner child work. IFS. Reparenting. Vagus nerve exercises. Medication — which she had to work through significant shame to access, because her community had taught her that doctors and pharmaceuticals were a failure of faith.
"You have complex trauma," she said. "You're going to have a complex solution."
The approach she advocates isn't a new ideology. It's the opposite. Take what helps. Leave the rest. Don't let the healing become another fundamentalism.
The Book She Needed and Couldn't Find
I Belong to Me exists because when Tia escaped in 2007, there was no language for what she'd survived. No framework for religious trauma. No therapeutic certification for deconstruction. She was learning how to name her experience while simultaneously trying to recover from it.
The book she wrote is the one she needed back then — written, she says, not as instruction but as accompaniment. A few steps ahead, hand extended, here's what I found.
It reads that way. Not preachy. Not prescriptive. More like a friend who's been through it telling you: the isolation they promised you would feel like? It doesn't have to be permanent. The belonging you're looking for? It starts inside you. And the brokenness they told you would be forever? That's not prophecy. That's a threat. And you don't have to accept it.
Listen to the full conversation with Tia Levings on Culture Changers.
xo, Allison
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