Tia Levings Escaped A Trad Wife Cult

You're listening to a mom and me a podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.

I heard a voice in my head, in my mind, in my heart that said run, and he had gone to his office to get his gun. So if I had stayed, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now, and we drove.

Away from Mamma Maya, you're listening to no filter and I'm mea Friedman. When I was a teenage girl, I was kissing boys and dating, and I was hanging with my friends. I was working at Woolly's, and I was desperately trying to get a fake ID so that I could sneak into clubs. Well, the usual teenage behavior, but I was also dreaming about my future, thinking about who I wanted to be when I grew up, what I wanted to do, what adventures I wanted to have out

Thank you so much for having me.

You start your story in nineteen eighty four when your family moved from Michigan to Florida. Talk to me about your early years in the way that your family changed when you made that move to Florida.

When I was ten, we moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and my parents wanted to give us a good childhood, a protected childhood, a happy one. And in Jacksonville, the message was all over the city that the best way to do that was to join the biggest church in town. So it was a Southern Baptist megachurch. We had thirty five hundred members at that time, and then it quickly grew to ten thousand, and then twenty thousand, and by the time I graduated high school, our sanctuary sat over

You call it a cult without wolves, which is really interesting because by that I assume you may it's hiding in plain side. You talked about it's a megachurch, so it's not just like a fringe few kind of people meeting in a basement. It is like literally tens of thousands of people. What is the IBLP. Is it Gothard or Goddard.

Well, Gothard is how we say it, but it's God Guard, which is just so funny to me. Bill Gothard started the Institute of Basic Life Principles the IBLP. For sure, there's a headquarters in Australia, there's a headquarters in America. His model of growth cross denominational lines in that he taught biblical principles, so Christians from churches all over would come and then they would be sent back out to their churches to proselytize within their congregations for this stricter

What's the role of the Duggers in the Ibopa and Gothard?

You know, as the leader of that church, they were kind of reputation ambassadors. They had some influence in sway, but they were one of star families because of the number of children that they had and their high visibility and their political involvement. But really their role was lifestyle evangelism. So their purpose was to show the world what a great lifestyle this is, so that people will feel attracted to it and choose it. And it worked in a

So while you were preparing for womanhood, talk to me about your teenagees and what influence the IBLP and Gothard had on you.

So it was an invisible influence for me in my

You talk about in your book that at fourteen, when most young girls at the mall and shopping and maybe getting on Instagram and posting selfies, your job was to prepare at age fourteen to be a Christian wife and mother within the church. What did that preparation actually look like?

Hell, that's a great question, because we weren't actually preparing to be wives. And if they had been teaching us here's what you might practically face as a wife, I might have had some more tools under my belt. Instead, it was looked like a lot of what you don't do, very heavily focused on purity culture and remaining a virgin not tempting men.

What's purity culture for someone who's not familiar with purity culture.

Purity culture is an entire culture that's built around keeping you sexually pure. So it includes modesty so that you're learning how to dress in a very modest manner that won't tempt men. It also includes your behavior, your speech being modest in all ways. We call it purity culture here, because this is the idea that your behavior can make you impure and that you are trying to stay pure so that you can be an undefiled bride for your husband.

I want to ask about modesty, because what does modesty actually mean in this context, because for most people, modesty means you don't go around perhaps begniting yourself. You have humility, but that's not what this kind of modesty in religious fundamentalism means. Can you explain what it is?

That's the big irony is that modesty, especially in scriptures, has a lot to do with your bearing and behavior. But what it's become an evangelical culture is a hyperfixation on the length of a girl's skirt and whether or not her brasstrap is showing or Bill Gothard has a teaching called eye traps. So these are the way clothing is designed to draw your eye to say, a slender waistline or cleavage or something that might attract a man's attention,

Is it about sexuality? Because it's at an age. You know, a fourteen year old girl, she's growing breast, she's menstruating, she's suddenly aware that men are looking at her in a different way. She's maybe feeling hormones, she's maybe feeling things. In fact, she no doubt is all of the things. How are you taught to interpret that that all of that was dangerous and that it was sinful, and that it was your job to protect men from the sin of you.

Yes, it's completely internalized. The actual scripture says that if a man lusts, he should pluck his eyes out and never mentions what the girl is doing. But we flipped it, the evangelical culture flipped it. It was all focused on first how we were addressing and being, but then eventually our very worth was sinful, distracting, dangerous, tempting. I interpreted the things I was feeling as a sexualized young person, those were my temptations to sin and step out of

Did you have sex before your wedding at nineteen?

I had an early sexual assault when I was thirteen that I interpreted as maybe my first kiss. I wasn't really sure. I didn't have anybody to talk to about that, and I had one kiss with a boyfriend otherwise, but no, did not have any real experience before my wedding night.

After this brag, tea gets married at nineteen and her life is about to change dramatically, and then she realizes she was in danger really from the first night of that marriage. How did you meet your husband?

Yes, So this big mega church I go to, or went to, is Jacksonville support City. So we have a naval port and he was a sailor that came in on a ship and attended our navy ministry. We had this big military ministry to reach the sailors for Christ. They come in for you know, community and to meet girls. So that's what happened. I went to a hay ride and he was there, and we met at a mixer near Christmas time. About four weeks later we were engaged.

Did having a job or a career ever occur to you or was that ever presented to you as a possibility When you say an agent girl, it's.

A grief, you know. I share in the book how I learned to split myself. I had dreams and desires and opportunities and talents, and I had to learn to suppress them and stuff them down. They were not in accordance with what I was being told was the only acceptable outcome for my life, and it was unbearable to feel the loss of them. So I learned to stuff them away. And there was a season where I tried to I wanted to be an artist, and I thought, oh, if I'm an artist for God, I can do it.

You took about being chosen. Did you want to marry this guy? Was he nice? Did you like him?

I didn't really know him. I did not feel attracted to him. I know in hindsight that if we had given it natural time, you know, to unfold, he would have shown his true character. He had behavior tendencies that were masked, carefully masked under charm, and that charm would have fallen away if we had given it more time, which he knew, and that's why he needed to secure me so quickly. So I was locked in very quickly and did not feel like I really had a choice

So when he decided that he wanted to marry you, was it on an option to say no? Or you were like, yeah, I need a husband, Like why not?

It's a great question, because I just feel for a little nineteen year old me who yeah, really didn't spend that much time thinking that. I think I project onto her that she wanted to say no, but I think that she actually didn't spend that much time deliberating. She'd been taught that you were going to say yes, and that's how you're going to know it's right. If you're asked,

Tell me about your wedding day. Did you like it?

It's magical? I did love it. My parents went all out. My mom's just seems dress. She spent so many hours on my dresses and my bridesmaid's dresses. And we had a very traditional wedding, and it was near Christmas time the following year, and so it was just I took advantage of the whole season feeling festive, and we had a horse drawn carriage, and I had a cape, and

You say you had a very traditional wedding. Before you walk down the aisle, your dad was like, are you ready, and you said, I can't see.

Yeah. My veil was heavy chiffon. I wanted it to drape differently than the bridal tool. Bridle tool is very puffy, and I wanted a romantic drape. So I picked this fabric. It looked gorgeous and photos and it looked gorgeous by day, but we were standing in candlelight, and so when we flipped it over my head, I couldn't see anything. It was a shrouded woman and I had to walk the aisle blind.

Which was very symbolic, wasn't it.

We ended up being quite metaphorical.

Yes, your wedding night. What did you know going into it about what was going to happen on your wedding night?

I knew that we would have sex. I did not fully understand what sex was. I knew there would be insertion of anatomy and that it would hurt, but that it would be romantic and loving and God designed, and so it would be okay. That I would be held in, caressed and cared for. We had a book by ed Wheat. It was called intended for pleasure. And then also like

Sounds awesome. Is that how it went down.

That's not how it went down. What actually happened is that I had three sexual assaults on my wedding night and no language to describe that or a way to ask for help or explain. And a week later I ended up with a raging infection and a doctor who shed light on the fact that there had been battery involved and violence. But I really did not understand what happened on my wedding night until a good fourteen years later when I was finally given language for marital rape and what consent means.

I'm so sorry that that happened to you. It's shocking, and when you talk about it in the book, it is so shocking. I don't want to make you relive it. But was there a part of you that thought, oh, this doesn't seem right. It sounds like maybe there there was no consent because you you his property as well. Consent wasn't something you even knew about, was it not?

At all? That is not a word I knew until I was out of this marriage. Part of that is just culturally, we didn't have very much of a conversation around consent. The therapeutic language that we have available to us today has evolved because survivors and because of researchers and therapists. At this point, we're in nineteen ninety six. In the story, I did not have that.

What does the term quiverful mean? Oh?

Okay, So this is based on a verse in the Bible. It's relating children to weapons, and if you're going into war, you want lots of weapons. So the verse says weapons in the hand of a warrior are children unto the Lord, happy is the man that has his quiver full of them?

Stop, which was turned into such a kind of a funny, quirky joke on fifteen in Counting or sixteen on counting with great doggers. But from what you say, there's something a lot more insidious about it. It's literally repopulating the world with a particular type of fundamental religious belief.

They want white Christian babies, They want to dominate elections and population with an ideology that is not pro democracy. It is not equality or freedom. It ejected five's children because it reduces them to a number. And there's a host of lifestyle accommodations that come with that kind of backwardness that modern society would ordinarily reject.

You were careful to say in your book that your world was not fringe. It was very mainstream, and that's how it thrives. Can you tell me more about that?

Yeah, And the Duggers again are going to serve as a really good example. This is a lifestyle. When we talk about it, the tendency is to say that it was fringe and extreme, except TLC put it on TV and it had many years of seasons and lots of money and millions of viewers. They promote themselves as a innocence and a wholesome aesthetic. That's very appealing and attractive because who doesn't love rows and rows of beautiful, obedient

You say sometimes until the point of death. Do you mean that they are encouraged to keep having pregnancies, Because I thought this for a long time actually about Michelle Duggerh. I'm like, it's not safe. She'd had cesareans, she'd had complications, she was still trying to get pregnant and pregnant and have more and more and more babies. Are women really just seen as baby factories? Essentially, is that the role of women within this system.

Women are seen as breeding cows, and they're interchangeable, and they die from things like ongoing uterine issues, prolapsed uteruses, early cancer diagnosis, exhaustion, depression, lack of resources, and then they're replaced with a younger model who will continue having babies.

It's interesting what you say about also, so you've written about how the wives have to talk in a very quiet voice. I mean anyone who's heard Michelle Dugger and watch that TV show. It is so unthreatening and soft, and you write it's on purpose, like the trained childlike voice. Fundy women. Fundamentalist women are trained to adore their men by offering their rapt attention, even if he's an idiot, even if he's not saying much at all, even if

In my case? I don't know if we can say fortunate or not. My husband really hated physical contact and sex, so in my particular case, he was not in my business very often. And it's a miracle that I had the number of pregnancies that.

I had, because when you say in your to be clear, you mean sexual assault and rape by husbands of their wives.

Right. I feel entitled to women's bodies, and they're raised from childhood to believe that. Most cases most of the survivors I talked to, frequent assault is just the norm, and they don't know any different, and they don't even know to call it that. Again, not vocabulary available to us. It would never dawn on us to say no, because we haven't been able to say no about anything else, and they've never heard something like if you can't say no, then you're not free to say yes. It's just they

Did you ever step out of line? Did you raise your voice talk to him in a way that wasn't adoring and approving? Because these women are also humans, So did that ever happen to you?

This is part of my self preservation. Yes, it happened to me. My parents actually, you know, they're just they just took us to church. They weren't high control people themselves. I was a spirited child. I was raised to run an play and explore and do things like that, so being married to this did not come naturally to me. I was constantly at war with my expression, and I was also getting in trouble for things that weren't really wrong.

How so, enough to your wedding night, did you have your first child?

I had a miss carriage three months after our wedding, and then I had my first baby. I was pregnant three months after that, six months after the wedding, so he was born the next year.

How did having a baby and becoming a mother, which was clearly your job description and your purpose, how did that change the dynamic within your family and how did it change your life.

It was also my dream. And so again I split in this way because I loved being a mom and I loved having my babies, and I wanted every single one of them, and it was always attention within me because I just because I wanted them doesn't mean I wanted one a year. I wanted to give my body a break. I wanted to give us, as a newlywged couple that was struggling some time in space to find

Because women in the church were so consumed and are the ones that are still there of course looking after you know, up to a dozen children, sometimes more, but many children very close together, which puts an enormous amount of pressure. And often these women are very very young when they become mothers. What the church and the IBL pay tell you about motherhood and parenting. There was a list of things that you could skip. Wasn't there? How did that work? And what was on that list?

So in my work today, I have a list. I started compiling that list, and I call the series things my Gothared fundamentors said I could skip to have a quiver full, because there was a whole long list of ordinary things that I took for granted that were part of child rearing that they just didn't do so that they could have more babies. If you did that thing, and it interfered with your decision to have more children. Then you stopped doing that thing.

Can you read that list to me?

These were forbidden? And I just warn you the list is jow dropping well, child visits and pediatricians, academics, haircuts, shopping, play dates, socialization, extended family gatherings, birth control, rest, mom friends, a second income, the entire concept of being a teenager, toys, snacks, education for girls, gynecological visits, consent, sleepless nights, privacy, the dentists, separate bedrooms, baby food, pants, voting, therapy, art, and debt.

What do all of those things have in common?

Oh, they have many things in common. One of the largest is mandatory reporters.

So to keep you away from anyone who could alert authorities to what was going.

On exactly, agency and ideas that you might have options. That's a big piece of the why you would not have academics in your homeschool. We weren't allowed to go to library. We weren't allowed to educate our daughters, you know, because why do they need college. They're going to be just wifes and mothers. So their education really stops around sixth seventh grade. And then they become just little mothers paramothers to prepare to be a wife and mother, and

You don't use doctors.

Only in case of emergency.

After the shortbreak, how one of the greatest losses of Tea's life was also her greatest gift and ultimately the cay to her freedom.

You had four children very quickly. You actually had five children very quickly, but one of your daughter's, Clara I, died at nine and a half weeks old. Yes, I'm so sorry for the loss of Clara. That must have been impossibly difficult. How did that thrust you into the world outside the church, just because of hospitals and doctors. She was born with a heart condition, wasn't.

She yes, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which is where just half of the heart develops. After she was born, we traveled out of state to have surgery, and so I was immediately immersed into a world where women could be doctors, women had jobs, women used childcare. I was alone and apart from my husband, I was apart from my babies and my mentors. We were in a completely different environment and believed that we were on the way to wellness. You know. It was definitely with that mindset that we

And there was no therapy. No in that list that you recited, mom, friends, you couldn't even talk to other women.

No, And if I did, the only women I would have been speaking to were my mentors, who would have been schooling me to more practical activity and husband obedience. Like there's no compassion, empathy, friendship to.

Her, it's the Handmte's tie.

Well, I call my story the prequel, the real life prequel to the Handmaid's Tale. And it's important to note that Atwood used real Christian fundamentalist groups as her model, like she didn't make that up. Everything in her books already happened.

What did the church teach you about discipline and obedience, both of your children and of yourself high control?

It has to have a method. So one of the things that's true in patriarchy is it's very fear based, and they're terrified like these fundamentalists are not evil, crazy people that want something different than the rest of us. They are just like you and me, and they want comforting answers, they want reassuring binaries, they want organization in times of chaos, and they want happy families and successful children.

What's blanket training? Can you explain what blanket training is?

Yes, Blanket training is a behavior modification practice that begins in infancy. So as soon as the baby starts to move, put them on a blanket, and every time they try to crawl off of the blanket through a normal child development of exploration, you stop them and swat them and tell them no.

When you say swat, does that mean hit?

Yes, you hit them with any kind of switch approved switch. So they recommend it a twig, a stick, a twig, a piece of plumbing, PVC plumbing, pipe, glue sticks, flexible craft glue sticks. There's a number of implements they recommend. But you start as a baby and you teach that baby to not move unless you've.

Given it permission. My god, it's barbaric. It sounds illegal. Is it not illegal?

It should be, Oh, it should be. In America, spanking children is legal and children have died from it, but they are still publishing, and they are still practicing. And this movement fights very hard in court to protect parent rights over children's rights. So in the Christian page rich children have no rights. Neither do women, and so that's not the mindset they're operating from.

You mentioned wife spanking. Did that actually happen to you?

It did. It's a practice called Christian domestic discipline. I said in Chiny Happy people like a careful read of these books on discipline, Michael Pearls to train up a child, being an example of many. They don't have an age limit on when you should stop spanking your child. So if you listen to survivors of these movements, you will hear older daughters spanked by their fathers into their young adulthood,

Women can't vote, can they? They're not allowed to vote.

It's not as clean cut as that. I was not allowed to vote, and they don't prefer women to vote, but they will utilize the female vote if the popular numbers are close, and in American elections lately they've been very close, and so women are allowed to vote, but they're expected to vote in compliance with their head of household.

So that husband tells them who to vote for. Yes, you mentioned how Clara then losing her cracked you open. Was there a definitive moment when you decided that enough was enough?

It took me seven more years to reach that point. I really came home from the hospital with this endeavor to be the best Christian wife and mother I could be. I felt emboldened in my faith. I felt empowered by christ. I felt like I'd seen an example of strength and power and that I could color inside the lines, so to speak. And that really did work to a point. I had two more children after Clara, and four more pregnancies. It was life, you know. I did not realize that

You wrote in the book that as you began to find your power, your husband reacted very badly, and you wrote balance was a delusion. As I became more independent and healthy, high control, religion and domestic abuse tightened their grip, my husband became more erratic and dangerous. You know. October of two thousand and seven, things came to a violent head and I narrowly escaped with my children in the middle of the night. What happened on that night if it's not too distressing to recount.

Sure, I'm going to give you like the high level version. I knew that I had to leave, and I had been making arrangements to leave the next day with my children while he was at work. We had gone trick or treating, which was the first time our children had participated in Halloween and was part of a kind of new progressive community that we were in, and I felt like excited that they could do that, you know, I

Oh my God, how old were your children.

Then ten and down ten to two and a half.

How old were you thirty three? And you mentioned grabbing your laptop. There was a group of an online group of women who became your lifeline and really showed you the door and the possibility that there was a way out. How did you come upon them and how did they play a role before that night happened?

Way back, we go back into the timeline to when Clara died. Just after that, my oldest was old enough for homeschooling, and I had stumbled on the homeschooling forums that had just formed. The Internet was brand new, you know, we were all pioneers in this new technology. I had a way to connect the outside world from home. And it is a big, big through line of how I survived this mentally, how I educated myself and the connections that I made that were outside of the religious groups

Was there a moment where you thought, Okay, I've done it, I've left and I can't return to that life.

It was that night. Yeah, that was done. It was a complete severance.

And what happened after that? What was the next twelve months like for you and your kids?

We had to go into hiding. We started divorce proceedings, which had to be separated from the custody proceedings because those required forensic investigations. The violence continued, and it was about a ten year process of all of that. You don't get divorced cleanly from someone like that and easily. But I was also going through trauma therapy through those

How do you unbrainwash yourself, because essentially you've been brainwashed since the age of ten about even how you think. One of the things that struck me so much in your book, you told me, You told me, you wrote that you couldn't even write a journal because you didn't even have any privacy of thought. You were worried that God would see it, or that your husband might find it. Because you had no right to say no, I don't want you to read this. How do you undo that?

It's a mixture of big BINGI growth spurts, and then a lot of careful day to day retraining rediscovery. I prefer like to emphasize curiosity and question asking and meditation. I have come up with my own steps of recovery and my own process of and I've had breakthroughs along the way that I'm writing about now. But there were also giant moments, like when Clara died. That was a giant moment where a lot of the spell was broken in my mind and I was curious and wanted to learn.

Well, this is not the end to your story, not by a long shot, because it takes a lot more than leaving a marriage to leave a cult. How do you unbrainwash yourself? How do you trust again, find love again, and learn how to be a grown woman in a world that you'd been kept apart from for so long. And what is ta you think about tradwives like Hannah Nielman in Ballerina Farm who are trying to sell this