December 25, 2024 • 45 mins
Tia Levings was raised within the same strict Christian fundamentalist ideology as the infamous Duggar family from 19 Kids And Counting. By the time she was 19 years old, Tia found herself in an abusive marriage where the violence was sanctioned by the church.
In this must-listen episode of No Filter, Tia tells Mia Freedman about the ways she was groomed to be a Trad Wife, and the moment she knew she had to run for her life. This is a story of indoctrination and survival, of reinvention and strength…but it is also about the thousands of other women who haven’t escaped the Trad Wife movement, and the new ones who are joining every day.
You can hear the second half of Mia's conversation with Tia here.
You can find out more about Tia and her book, A Well Trained Wife, here.
You can follow her on Instagram here.
And if you need to talk to someone, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
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Host: Mia Freedman
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to a MoMA Mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waders.
This podcast was recorded on Hey, I'm Jemma Bath, host
of True Crime Conversations, and did you know that the
team at Mamma Mia is bringing you over one hundred
hours of the best content from your award winning podcasts
for the Hot Pod Summer of your Dreams. Well, we
are here at two Crime Conversations. We've handpicked some of
(00:37):
the most chilling and thought provoking episodes from our feed,
including gripping cult stories, powerful interviews with crime victims, and
in depth accounts from women who have been incarcerated sharing
the journeys that led them to that place. And that's
just the beginning. Today, I'm bringing you the story of
Tia Levings from No Filter, another amazing podcast on the
(00:57):
Muma Mea network hosted by Mia Friedman. In this episode,
Mia chats with Tea, who grew up in a strict
Christian fundamentalist community. By the time she was nineteen, she
found herself in an abusive marriage, with the violence actually
being supported by the church. Here's the original episode. Have
a listen, and we'd love to hear what you think.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
in the world when I left school. When Tiya Levings
was a teenage girl, she was preparing to serve a
husband that she hadn't even met yet, because Tina was
brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, where being a trad
(02:11):
wife was the only option for girls, a marriage with strict,
old fashioned gender roles where the man was the boss
and the woman served him, and that's exactly what she did.
Around the time Tia got married in the early two thousands,
the whole trad wife lifestyle or that wasn't called that then.
It has been glorified on TV around the world by
(02:33):
a show called nineteen Kids in Counting. You might remember it.
It was about the Dugger family, the parents, Michelle and
Jim Bob. They were also Christian fundamentalists, like Tea and
the community where she grew up. They wore old fashioned clothes,
and they chopped their own wood, and they homeschooled all
their children. They had so many children it was kind
(02:54):
of fascinating to watch. But what we've since learned is
that there were some really dark things going on in
that house among the Douggers, and Tea experienced similar things
in her own tradwife marriage. She barely escaped from that
marriage with her life. She had to grab her children
and flee in the middle of the night. Tea's story
(03:16):
is a story about survival, indoctrination, fundamentalism, but it's also
a story about marketing and how tradwives aren't just a
quirky trend on Instagram or a funny reality show. This
is why Tea has written a book about her trad
life and why she wants you to hear her story
as the former trad wife who got away. Tea are welcome.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Thank you so much for having me. You start your.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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. I have thirty
five hundred members at that time, and then it quickly
grew to ten thousand, and then twenty thousand, and by
(04:17):
the time I graduated high school, our sanctuary sat over
ten thousand people. I was there six days a week.
It was a lot of fun. I would not have
pointed to a lot of it as being particularly traumatic
or problematic. I was being systematically groomed and conditioned to
self subjugate and self gaslight and cooperate with an authoritarian model.
(04:39):
But I didn't know that. I knew that I was
just having this Christian evangelical experience that had a lot
of money and privilege attached to it, and I didn't
know any different. I talk about this sometimes like a
culture within a culture, and it's based on the verse
in the Bible that says be in the world, but
not of it. And so we really were practicing a
(04:59):
parallel Christian culture in the world, but not engaging with
the world, not informing our worldviews, not growing and into adults.
We were growing to prepare to be Christian wives and life.
And that is all. That was my second ten years.
I got married at nineteen.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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
(05:39):
or Goddard.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
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
(06:01):
come and then they would be sent back out to
their churches to proselytize within their congregations for this stricter
form of Christianity. If you're familiar with the Dugger family
on TLC's Nineteen Kids accounting, that's the most visible family
of the Gothard system. I was in Shiny Happy People
last year and that did a big expose on the
(06:21):
IBLP and how it works and how it has gone
into because of its agenda, it's gone into every branch
of government and the entire evangelical movement. That's why I
call it the cult without walls, because we were part
of this high control group with very strict criteria that
meets all of the cult definition, but it doesn't have
(06:43):
a building. And so people identify with cults is like
it's a place you go and it's a single person
you follow, and that is not how high control religion works.
I believe it does meet all of the cult criteria,
and if you listen to survivors, you hear from multiple backgrounds,
all kinds of different evangelical sex and denominations, with very
similar experiences.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What's the role of the Douggers in the ibopay and Gothod?
You know, as the leader of that church.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
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
(07:33):
will feel attracted to it and choose it. And it
worked in a big influential way in America. Plenty of
people watched that show just to watch the car accident
and the crazies, but plenty more thought it was an
enviable way to live. And the trad lifestyle that we
find ourselves in today is in large part influenced by
fundamentalism on TV.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So, while you were preparing for womanhood, talk to me
about your teenagees and what influence the IBLP and Gothard
had on you.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
So it was an invisible influence for me in my
high school years because I didn't know about him. His
people were around me, and I was observing that, and
I was learning all their special rules, and I was
observing that there was this way in our church to
be a special kind of Christian, a holier Christian, somebody
who was more devout and more sold out and serious
in their faith, and that it had a lifestyle projection
(08:24):
in that they wore different clothes, and they had lots
of children, and they decided to homeschool their children, and
so we had a lot of respect and reverence for them.
Not everyone wanted to live that way, but it seemed
very much like an option you could take. It wasn't
a serious pursuit of mine until I was married and
very quickly a young mother, and I was in abuse
and I needed to keep my baby quiet at night,
(08:46):
and I turned to an older mother in that system
to teach me how to help my baby sleep, but
also keep the home. It's called keepers of the home.
And so I wanted to be a godly Proverbs thirty
one woman and be good. You know what I was
trying to be, which was just a Christian wife and mother.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
You talk about in your book that at fourteen, when
most young girls are 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?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
What's purity culture for someone who's not familiar with purity culture.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
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
(10:08):
make you impure and that you are trying to stay pure.
So that you can be an undefiled bride for your husband.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
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 brastrap 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
(10:57):
waistline or cleavage or something that might attract a man's attention,
and that is ruled as immodest clothing. Your behavior can
be immodest, and that you can be loud or laugh
too loud, stand out in any way. You know that
can become a thing. But it's all external.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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
(11:34):
it was your job to protect men from the sin
of you.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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
(12:02):
the things I was feeling as a sexualized young person,
those were my temptations to sin and step out of
the will of God. So constantly suppressing any urges or
attractions or desires so that I wouldn't feel them. It's
very important to not feel them so that you can
remain pure. And then it's supposed to magically turn on
when you're married, which we know now it doesn't for
(12:25):
a lot of women's sexual dysfunction is very, very high
because our nervous system does not acclimate that way. That's
not how the human body works.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Did you have sex before your wedding at nineteen?
Speaker 3 (12:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
After this, bright 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?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
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
(13:36):
near Christmas time, about four weeks later we were engaged.
I didn't really know him, but he had decided I
was the girl he wanted to marry, and I was
in pursuit of a husband at that time. I was
very open to this is the only thing I can
do with my life is to be a Christian wife
and mother, so I need a husband to do that.
I was primed and ready to receive whoever said they
(13:56):
were God's will for my life.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
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
(14:28):
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.
That's how I'll get through this. And that didn't work
because I was chosen for marriage first and it just
didn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
You took about being chosen. Did you want to marry
this guy? Was he nice? Did you like him?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
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 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.
(15:09):
So I was locked in very quickly and did not
feel like I really had a choice by that point.
You don't believe you can say no to a man
or to God, and they are one and the same.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
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,
(15:48):
then you know it's right. And I was very practiced
at shutting down my signals, my arguments, any resistance I had,
and I instead funneled that energy into talking myself into it.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Tell me about your wedding day. Did you like it?
Speaker 3 (16:04):
It's magical. I did love it. My parents went all out.
My mom's a seamstress. She's 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 it
(16:26):
was romantic and candlelight and really beautiful. I mean, it
was not smooth and without issue, but I was overwhelmingly
really happy, and I felt like I was celebrating this
launch into the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Blind, which was very simple, wasn't it it.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
We ended up being quite metaphorical. Yes, your wedding night.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What did you know going into it about what was
going to happen on your wedding night?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
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
(17:44):
this is what they tell young fiances. We had been
in an engaged class and had premarital counseling through the church,
and so there was no real sex education or instruction
or transparency. But they did, you know, set us up.
We also read Elizabeth Elliott's Passion and Purity, which talks
a lot about remaining pure until your wedding night so
that you can give yourself as a spotless woman to
(18:06):
your husband, and you will be rewarded with great pleasure
and married passion, and it will be beautiful and procreative
and song of solemn and love of joy. That's a
book in the Bible that talks about sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Sounds awesome. Is that how it went down?
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Just 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
(18:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
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 were his property. Well, consent
wasn't something you even knew about, was it.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
What does the term quiverfull mean? Oh?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
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?
And so that is metaphor that child is an arrow,
(19:56):
and you want a quiver full of arrows for your
culture war against the West and against secularism and democracy,
everything that the Christian nationalists and the dominionists are against
in the Bible. Of course, this was the Psalmist, so
there was an actual war that they were talking about
with the weaponry that they had available in Bible times.
The quiverful mindset in the evangelical movement was promoted through
(20:19):
Bill Gothard's institute. He did not author that this is
just what they latched onto because dominionism is their underlying theology.
They want to dominate the world's government through population, so
they want to have as many babies as possible without stop.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Which was turned into such a kind of a funny,
quirky joke on fifteen in counting or sixteen on counting
with Great Douggers. 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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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 ejectifies children because
it reduces them to a number, and there's a host
of lifestyle accommodations that come with that kind of backwardness
(21:19):
that modern society would ordinarily reject.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
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?
Speaker 3 (21:31):
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,
(21:53):
because who doesn't love rows and rows of beautiful, obedient
children and sweet babies. And the women involved want motherhood.
I always say, fundamentalism exploits the thing you wanted for yourself.
I wanted motherhood. The mothers I knew all wanted motherhood,
and it's the very vehicle that they are reduced by
until sometimes the point of death.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You say sometimes until the point of death, do you
mean that they are encouraged to keep having pregnancies. Because
I've 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
(22:34):
the role of women within this system.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
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.
That happened again and again. We would see a mother
die in her thirties early forties from essentially exhaustion related causes,
(23:02):
and then replaced it with a younger a younger woman,
and she'd continue having babies for that man.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
It's interesting what you say about Also, 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.
(23:27):
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 you have
an intelligent point to make. He's your head, he's a
conduit of Jesus. He's amazing, and of course you're also
his consumable resource. So don't be surprised if he's up
in your business, undresses you with his eyes, wants to
(23:48):
devour you, invades your space. Is that what your life
was like? How did that play out well?
Speaker 3 (23:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
I had, because when you say in your business, to
be clear, you mean sexual assault and rape by husbands
of their wives.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Right I did. 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
(24:39):
you can't say no, then you're not free to say yes.
It's just they got married. Their marriage was consent, period.
That's the world.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
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
and 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
(25:19):
was also getting in trouble for things that weren't really wrong.
So I was always trying to suss out where the
line was, What is small enough for you? Because sometimes
just my breathing could make him angry, or an expression
and opinion at the table. You know, you're not supposed
to have an opinion, But I'm somebody who is a lot.
I am a lot of person. I am a lot
of expression, and I have ideas and dreams and thoughts
(25:43):
and opinions. And I was also the more mentally capable
parent for my children. So a lot of times I
didn't agree with what was going on, and I would
push back for their sake, to be protective, and that
usually would get me in some serious trouble in consequences.
So yeah, I think that was descriptive of most of
my years with him, that there's a stance happening between us.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
How soar enough to your wedding night, did you have
your first child?
Speaker 3 (26:08):
I had a miscarriage three 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.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (26:30):
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 newlywed
(26:51):
couple that was struggling some time in space to find
our feet. I thought I had sound arguments for using contraception,
and I did use contraception on the sly, even though
I was heavily trained not to. I was really trying
for our health to not do that. And it also
just really uped the state because now there's a child involved,
(27:12):
and then children involved, and it's not just me anymore
that's going to pay the consequences. And I so badly
wanted to give my children a happy childhood in a
secure home. So it just made me dig in harder.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
It didn't have any way out, so there was not
a lot of time spent dreaming of escape. I dreamt
of salvation. I wanted someone to come save me and
make it better, but I didn't dream of escaping because
divorce is absolutely forbid, and they would probably rather you
commit suicide than divorce. But of course they don't say that,
but in general, if you die, it's a little bit
nicer than if you get a divorce in that circle.
(27:46):
So I didn't want to do either. I didn't want
to die and I didn't have access to a divorce.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Because women in the church was 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 did the church and the
ibl pay tell you about motherhood and parenting? There was
(28:14):
a list of things that you could skip. Wasn't there?
How did that work? And what was on that list?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
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
(28:41):
and it interfered with your decision to have more children,
then you stopped doing that thing.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Can you read that list.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
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,
(29:07):
a second income, the entire concert 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.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
What do all of those things have in common?
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Oh, they have many things in common. One of the
largest is mandatory reporters, So.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
To keep you away from anyone who could alert authorities
to what was going.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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
(30:08):
paramothers to prepare to be a wife and mother. And
then there's skilled at being keepers of the home. We
don't want our daughters knowing consent. We don't want our
boys to feel like they need to ask for consent.
The list all has a very subtle sales process. I
was like, shouldn't I take my child to the pediatrician?
I should get them they're vaccines. No, you don't need
(30:32):
to do vaccines, and you don't need to do well
child visits because the pediatrician will pressure you to use
western medicine, and we don't use that. We don't use doctors.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
You don't use doctors.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Only in case of emergency.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
After this shortbreak, how one of the greatest losses of
Tea's life was also her greatest gift and ultimately the
cay to her freedom.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
You had four children very quickly. You actually had five
children very quickly, but one of your daughters, Clara, died
at nine and nine 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
(31:26):
was born with a heart condition, wasn't she.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
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
(31:50):
and believed that we were on the way to wellness.
You know. It was definitely with that mindset that we
were going to get better and go home. And I
include her story in the book the way that I
do because the entire experience of Clara absolutely broke me open.
It broke the spell of mind control. I had never
lost anyone before I lost my daughter, so it was
(32:13):
just jarring and shocking all by itself, all for the
reasons that anyone can imagine and when you lose a child.
But the experience was so complex and it was impossible
to box myself back up after. I could not be
the person I had been, and there was a great
demand on me to become that again when I got
back home. There was so much pressure on me to
not grieve too long, you know, don't make people uncomfortable
(32:36):
with your grief, get back to business quickly, have another child,
give God all the glory. And I just couldn't box
myself into that anymore, as she made that impossible.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And there was no therapy, no in that list that
you recited, mom, friends, you couldn't even talk to other women.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
To hear, it's the Handmte's style.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
What did the church teach you about discipline and obedience,
both of your children and of yourself high control?
Speaker 3 (33:30):
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.
(33:54):
And so they're convinced that if there aren't this high
control model, their children will go bad and that they
will lose them into a lake of fire. The stakes
couldn't be higher, because it's an eternity in hell. And
so all of that convinces parents to do whatever their
authority tells them they need to do. And there's no
shortage in patriarchy of resources encouraging parents to treat their
(34:17):
strong willed child, you know, with a rod of correction.
This environment that I was in and that is just
so alive and well today. One teacher really does lead
to another, and one book leads to another, and so
the ideas in one book will build off of that
and take you to the next level of extremity. And
while everyone may not achieve that far and extreme where
(34:39):
in my story it includes disciplining wives as if their
children and wife's banking, and maybe not everyone experiences that.
A lot of them experience a lot of harsh corporal
punishment of children, and on the very beginning of the spectrum,
babies because Michael Pearl's books talk about switching through blanket training,
which begins at four months old.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
What's blanket training? Can you explain what blanket training is?
Speaker 3 (35:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
When you say swat, does that mean hit.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yes, you hit them with any kind of switch approved switch.
So they recommended a twig, a stick, a twig, a
piece of plumbing, PVC plumbing pipe, blue sticks, flexible craft
blue 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,
(35:45):
it's barbaric.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
It sounds illegal. Is it not illegal?
Speaker 3 (35:49):
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 patriarchy. Children
(36:10):
have no rights, neither do women, and so that's not
the mindset they're operating from.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
You mentioned wife spanking. Did that actually happen to you?
Speaker 3 (36:20):
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
(36:40):
hear older daughters spanked by their fathers into their young adulthood,
and you will hear wives who have been spanked. It
is tied up in the theology that tells a man
that he's responsible for everything that happens in his home,
and he's answerable to God for all of the behavior.
And so that's how it's sold that you need to
hold her accountable and train her because her choices are
(37:03):
going to reflect on you on judgment Day.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Women can't vote, can they? They're not allowed to vote.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
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?
Speaker 3 (37:40):
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.
(38:02):
I had two more children after Clara, and four more pregnancies.
It was life, you know. I did not realize that
there was not an entertain again of getting out. It's
till death do you part, even if it's at his hands,
And it did come down to that. I think one
of the traits that I have as a Christian girl
groomed to people please and fawn. I tend to stay
(38:25):
in environments longer than I should. I can see the
writing on the wall, and then I lack the courage
to save myself and take myself out of that. It's
a life discipline I'm working on, and this is the
biggest example of it. I had to get to a
place where he was about to kill us. I had
to realize I was grooming the next generation of abusers
(38:46):
in order to put my foot down and say enough
is enough. And then when you try to leave an
abusive person, it becomes much more dangerous and violent, and
that's what happened. Then violence escalated.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
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. In October of
two thousand and seven, things came to a violent head
and I narrowly escaped with my children in the middle
(39:16):
of the night. What happened on that night, if it's
not too distressing to recount.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Sure, I'm gonna 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 trig
er 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
(39:44):
didn't want to take that from them prematurely. So we
had gone trigger treating, and after we got home, he
had some sort of psychotic break. I really don't have
good language for what happened with the inside of him,
other than that he snapped. He held me hostage for
four hours with the length of firewood, threatening to kill
me and kill the children, and then he suddenly left.
(40:05):
And I heard a voice in my head, in my mind,
in my heart that said, so I packed us up,
grabbed the laundry and the children and my laptop, and
I left. 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. We drove away.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Oh my god, how old were your children then?
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Ten? And down ten to two and a half?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Way back, if 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
(41:10):
I survived this mentally, how I educated myself and the
connections that I made that were outside of the religious
groups that we were in. And they were other Christian
women going through very similar dynamics with different expressions. Like
none of them were like in as much high control
as I was, but they had toxicity in their marriages,
and they had family dynamics where we could relate to
one another and talk in a real way about what
(41:32):
the kinds of things that we were facing. And I
had also started a business by the time I left
a blogging business and I had a successful website at
that time, So I grabbed my laptop because I knew
my livelihood was in it in all of my contacts,
and those women helped me hide. They sheltered me and
took me in. And I do believe, I know that
we're seeing this again. There's underground railroads forming of women
(41:55):
connected to women, helping one another out of dangerous situations,
and in America, you know, helping women get abortions, helping
women find health care and resources and get out of
domestic violence. So they saved my life, they really did,
and they kept my children's world somewhat balanced during that time.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Was there a moment where you thought, Okay, I've done it,
I've left and I can't return to that life.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
It was that night. Yeah, that was done. It was
a complete severance.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
And what happened after that? What was the next twelve months?
Like for you and your kids?
Speaker 3 (42:28):
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
(42:49):
years and putting my life back together. I mean, I
really did set to healing, raising my kids, securing my employment,
getting on my feet, and I had it in this
context that this bad marriage happened to us. It wasn't
till years later in therapy when I had to start
reversing my decision making process and exploring what made me
(43:10):
those choices in the first place, what made me go
along and comply, And that's what led me to the
religious trauma and understanding the grooming and conditioning I'd been
part of as a younger woman.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
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,
(43:43):
because you had no right to say no, I don't
want you to read this. How do you undo that.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
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 healing, and I've had break
throughs along the way that I'm writing about now. But
(44:14):
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. And then there were harder times where
I have deeply embedded patterns of fawning and people pleasing
and cooperation, and I have to really work on situation
by situation and carefully with a therapist. So it's a
(44:37):
little mixture of both. But I did not accept that
I wouldn't heal like I want that from my life.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Well, this is not the end to his 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
(45:08):
Nielman and Ballerina farm We're trying to sell this life
to a whole new generation of women. There's so much
more of this incredible conversation, more than we could share
in one episode here. So if you're not already a
Muma Mea subscriber, let this be the episode that makes
you one. I'll put a link in the show notes
and I'll see you in part two.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
If you're looking for something else to listen to, like
and follow all of our Muma Mea podcasts, which are
currently bringing you Hot Pod Summer one hundred hours of
summer listens, from spicy conversations to incredible stories, fashion, beauty,
and more.
You're listening to a MoMA Mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waders.
This podcast was recorded on Hey, I'm Jemma Bath, host
of True Crime Conversations, and did you know that the
team at Mamma Mia is bringing you over one hundred
hours of the best content from your award winning podcasts
for the Hot Pod Summer of your Dreams. Well, we
are here at two Crime Conversations. We've handpicked some of
(00:37):
the most chilling and thought provoking episodes from our feed,
including gripping cult stories, powerful interviews with crime victims, and
in depth accounts from women who have been incarcerated sharing
the journeys that led them to that place. And that's
just the beginning. Today, I'm bringing you the story of
Tia Levings from No Filter, another amazing podcast on the
(00:57):
Muma Mea network hosted by Mia Friedman. In this episode,
Mia chats with Tea, who grew up in a strict
Christian fundamentalist community. By the time she was nineteen, she
found herself in an abusive marriage, with the violence actually
being supported by the church. Here's the original episode. Have
a listen, and we'd love to hear what you think.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
in the world when I left school. When Tiya Levings
was a teenage girl, she was preparing to serve a
husband that she hadn't even met yet, because Tina was
brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, where being a trad
(02:11):
wife was the only option for girls, a marriage with strict,
old fashioned gender roles where the man was the boss
and the woman served him, and that's exactly what she did.
Around the time Tia got married in the early two thousands,
the whole trad wife lifestyle or that wasn't called that then.
It has been glorified on TV around the world by
(02:33):
a show called nineteen Kids in Counting. You might remember it.
It was about the Dugger family, the parents, Michelle and
Jim Bob. They were also Christian fundamentalists, like Tea and
the community where she grew up. They wore old fashioned clothes,
and they chopped their own wood, and they homeschooled all
their children. They had so many children it was kind
(02:54):
of fascinating to watch. But what we've since learned is
that there were some really dark things going on in
that house among the Douggers, and Tea experienced similar things
in her own tradwife marriage. She barely escaped from that
marriage with her life. She had to grab her children
and flee in the middle of the night. Tea's story
(03:16):
is a story about survival, indoctrination, fundamentalism, but it's also
a story about marketing and how tradwives aren't just a
quirky trend on Instagram or a funny reality show. This
is why Tea has written a book about her trad
life and why she wants you to hear her story
as the former trad wife who got away. Tea are welcome.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Thank you so much for having me. You start your.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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. I have thirty
five hundred members at that time, and then it quickly
grew to ten thousand, and then twenty thousand, and by
(04:17):
the time I graduated high school, our sanctuary sat over
ten thousand people. I was there six days a week.
It was a lot of fun. I would not have
pointed to a lot of it as being particularly traumatic
or problematic. I was being systematically groomed and conditioned to
self subjugate and self gaslight and cooperate with an authoritarian model.
(04:39):
But I didn't know that. I knew that I was
just having this Christian evangelical experience that had a lot
of money and privilege attached to it, and I didn't
know any different. I talk about this sometimes like a
culture within a culture, and it's based on the verse
in the Bible that says be in the world, but
not of it. And so we really were practicing a
(04:59):
parallel Christian culture in the world, but not engaging with
the world, not informing our worldviews, not growing and into adults.
We were growing to prepare to be Christian wives and life.
And that is all. That was my second ten years.
I got married at nineteen.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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
(05:39):
or Goddard.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
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
(06:01):
come and then they would be sent back out to
their churches to proselytize within their congregations for this stricter
form of Christianity. If you're familiar with the Dugger family
on TLC's Nineteen Kids accounting, that's the most visible family
of the Gothard system. I was in Shiny Happy People
last year and that did a big expose on the
(06:21):
IBLP and how it works and how it has gone
into because of its agenda, it's gone into every branch
of government and the entire evangelical movement. That's why I
call it the cult without walls, because we were part
of this high control group with very strict criteria that
meets all of the cult definition, but it doesn't have
(06:43):
a building. And so people identify with cults is like
it's a place you go and it's a single person
you follow, and that is not how high control religion works.
I believe it does meet all of the cult criteria,
and if you listen to survivors, you hear from multiple backgrounds,
all kinds of different evangelical sex and denominations, with very
similar experiences.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What's the role of the Douggers in the ibopay and Gothod?
You know, as the leader of that church.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
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
(07:33):
will feel attracted to it and choose it. And it
worked in a big influential way in America. Plenty of
people watched that show just to watch the car accident
and the crazies, but plenty more thought it was an
enviable way to live. And the trad lifestyle that we
find ourselves in today is in large part influenced by
fundamentalism on TV.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So, while you were preparing for womanhood, talk to me
about your teenagees and what influence the IBLP and Gothard
had on you.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
So it was an invisible influence for me in my
high school years because I didn't know about him. His
people were around me, and I was observing that, and
I was learning all their special rules, and I was
observing that there was this way in our church to
be a special kind of Christian, a holier Christian, somebody
who was more devout and more sold out and serious
in their faith, and that it had a lifestyle projection
(08:24):
in that they wore different clothes, and they had lots
of children, and they decided to homeschool their children, and
so we had a lot of respect and reverence for them.
Not everyone wanted to live that way, but it seemed
very much like an option you could take. It wasn't
a serious pursuit of mine until I was married and
very quickly a young mother, and I was in abuse
and I needed to keep my baby quiet at night,
(08:46):
and I turned to an older mother in that system
to teach me how to help my baby sleep, but
also keep the home. It's called keepers of the home.
And so I wanted to be a godly Proverbs thirty
one woman and be good. You know what I was
trying to be, which was just a Christian wife and mother.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
You talk about in your book that at fourteen, when
most young girls are 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?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
What's purity culture for someone who's not familiar with purity culture.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
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
(10:08):
make you impure and that you are trying to stay pure.
So that you can be an undefiled bride for your husband.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
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 brastrap 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
(10:57):
waistline or cleavage or something that might attract a man's attention,
and that is ruled as immodest clothing. Your behavior can
be immodest, and that you can be loud or laugh
too loud, stand out in any way. You know that
can become a thing. But it's all external.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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
(11:34):
it was your job to protect men from the sin
of you.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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
(12:02):
the things I was feeling as a sexualized young person,
those were my temptations to sin and step out of
the will of God. So constantly suppressing any urges or
attractions or desires so that I wouldn't feel them. It's
very important to not feel them so that you can
remain pure. And then it's supposed to magically turn on
when you're married, which we know now it doesn't for
(12:25):
a lot of women's sexual dysfunction is very, very high
because our nervous system does not acclimate that way. That's
not how the human body works.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Did you have sex before your wedding at nineteen?
Speaker 3 (12:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
After this, bright 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?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
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
(13:36):
near Christmas time, about four weeks later we were engaged.
I didn't really know him, but he had decided I
was the girl he wanted to marry, and I was
in pursuit of a husband at that time. I was
very open to this is the only thing I can
do with my life is to be a Christian wife
and mother, so I need a husband to do that.
I was primed and ready to receive whoever said they
(13:56):
were God's will for my life.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
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
(14:28):
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.
That's how I'll get through this. And that didn't work
because I was chosen for marriage first and it just
didn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
You took about being chosen. Did you want to marry
this guy? Was he nice? Did you like him?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
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 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.
(15:09):
So I was locked in very quickly and did not
feel like I really had a choice by that point.
You don't believe you can say no to a man
or to God, and they are one and the same.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
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,
(15:48):
then you know it's right. And I was very practiced
at shutting down my signals, my arguments, any resistance I had,
and I instead funneled that energy into talking myself into it.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Tell me about your wedding day. Did you like it?
Speaker 3 (16:04):
It's magical. I did love it. My parents went all out.
My mom's a seamstress. She's 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 it
(16:26):
was romantic and candlelight and really beautiful. I mean, it
was not smooth and without issue, but I was overwhelmingly
really happy, and I felt like I was celebrating this
launch into the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Blind, which was very simple, wasn't it it.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
We ended up being quite metaphorical. Yes, your wedding night.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What did you know going into it about what was
going to happen on your wedding night?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
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
(17:44):
this is what they tell young fiances. We had been
in an engaged class and had premarital counseling through the church,
and so there was no real sex education or instruction
or transparency. But they did, you know, set us up.
We also read Elizabeth Elliott's Passion and Purity, which talks
a lot about remaining pure until your wedding night so
that you can give yourself as a spotless woman to
(18:06):
your husband, and you will be rewarded with great pleasure
and married passion, and it will be beautiful and procreative
and song of solemn and love of joy. That's a
book in the Bible that talks about sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Sounds awesome. Is that how it went down?
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Just 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
(18:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
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 were his property. Well, consent
wasn't something you even knew about, was it.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
What does the term quiverfull mean? Oh?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
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?
And so that is metaphor that child is an arrow,
(19:56):
and you want a quiver full of arrows for your
culture war against the West and against secularism and democracy,
everything that the Christian nationalists and the dominionists are against
in the Bible. Of course, this was the Psalmist, so
there was an actual war that they were talking about
with the weaponry that they had available in Bible times.
The quiverful mindset in the evangelical movement was promoted through
(20:19):
Bill Gothard's institute. He did not author that this is
just what they latched onto because dominionism is their underlying theology.
They want to dominate the world's government through population, so
they want to have as many babies as possible without stop.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Which was turned into such a kind of a funny,
quirky joke on fifteen in counting or sixteen on counting
with Great Douggers. 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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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 ejectifies children because
it reduces them to a number, and there's a host
of lifestyle accommodations that come with that kind of backwardness
(21:19):
that modern society would ordinarily reject.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
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?
Speaker 3 (21:31):
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,
(21:53):
because who doesn't love rows and rows of beautiful, obedient
children and sweet babies. And the women involved want motherhood.
I always say, fundamentalism exploits the thing you wanted for yourself.
I wanted motherhood. The mothers I knew all wanted motherhood,
and it's the very vehicle that they are reduced by
until sometimes the point of death.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You say sometimes until the point of death, do you
mean that they are encouraged to keep having pregnancies. Because
I've 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
(22:34):
the role of women within this system.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
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.
That happened again and again. We would see a mother
die in her thirties early forties from essentially exhaustion related causes,
(23:02):
and then replaced it with a younger a younger woman,
and she'd continue having babies for that man.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
It's interesting what you say about Also, 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.
(23:27):
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 you have
an intelligent point to make. He's your head, he's a
conduit of Jesus. He's amazing, and of course you're also
his consumable resource. So don't be surprised if he's up
in your business, undresses you with his eyes, wants to
(23:48):
devour you, invades your space. Is that what your life
was like? How did that play out well?
Speaker 3 (23:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
I had, because when you say in your business, to
be clear, you mean sexual assault and rape by husbands
of their wives.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Right I did. 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
(24:39):
you can't say no, then you're not free to say yes.
It's just they got married. Their marriage was consent, period.
That's the world.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
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
and 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
(25:19):
was also getting in trouble for things that weren't really wrong.
So I was always trying to suss out where the
line was, What is small enough for you? Because sometimes
just my breathing could make him angry, or an expression
and opinion at the table. You know, you're not supposed
to have an opinion, But I'm somebody who is a lot.
I am a lot of person. I am a lot
of expression, and I have ideas and dreams and thoughts
(25:43):
and opinions. And I was also the more mentally capable
parent for my children. So a lot of times I
didn't agree with what was going on, and I would
push back for their sake, to be protective, and that
usually would get me in some serious trouble in consequences.
So yeah, I think that was descriptive of most of
my years with him, that there's a stance happening between us.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
How soar enough to your wedding night, did you have
your first child?
Speaker 3 (26:08):
I had a miscarriage three 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.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (26:30):
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 newlywed
(26:51):
couple that was struggling some time in space to find
our feet. I thought I had sound arguments for using contraception,
and I did use contraception on the sly, even though
I was heavily trained not to. I was really trying
for our health to not do that. And it also
just really uped the state because now there's a child involved,
(27:12):
and then children involved, and it's not just me anymore
that's going to pay the consequences. And I so badly
wanted to give my children a happy childhood in a
secure home. So it just made me dig in harder.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
It didn't have any way out, so there was not
a lot of time spent dreaming of escape. I dreamt
of salvation. I wanted someone to come save me and
make it better, but I didn't dream of escaping because
divorce is absolutely forbid, and they would probably rather you
commit suicide than divorce. But of course they don't say that,
but in general, if you die, it's a little bit
nicer than if you get a divorce in that circle.
(27:46):
So I didn't want to do either. I didn't want
to die and I didn't have access to a divorce.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Because women in the church was 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 did the church and the
ibl pay tell you about motherhood and parenting? There was
(28:14):
a list of things that you could skip. Wasn't there?
How did that work? And what was on that list?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
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
(28:41):
and it interfered with your decision to have more children,
then you stopped doing that thing.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Can you read that list.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
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,
(29:07):
a second income, the entire concert 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.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
What do all of those things have in common?
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Oh, they have many things in common. One of the
largest is mandatory reporters, So.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
To keep you away from anyone who could alert authorities
to what was going.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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
(30:08):
paramothers to prepare to be a wife and mother. And
then there's skilled at being keepers of the home. We
don't want our daughters knowing consent. We don't want our
boys to feel like they need to ask for consent.
The list all has a very subtle sales process. I
was like, shouldn't I take my child to the pediatrician?
I should get them they're vaccines. No, you don't need
(30:32):
to do vaccines, and you don't need to do well
child visits because the pediatrician will pressure you to use
western medicine, and we don't use that. We don't use doctors.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
You don't use doctors.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Only in case of emergency.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
After this shortbreak, how one of the greatest losses of
Tea's life was also her greatest gift and ultimately the
cay to her freedom.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
You had four children very quickly. You actually had five
children very quickly, but one of your daughters, Clara, died
at nine and nine 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
(31:26):
was born with a heart condition, wasn't she.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
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
(31:50):
and believed that we were on the way to wellness.
You know. It was definitely with that mindset that we
were going to get better and go home. And I
include her story in the book the way that I
do because the entire experience of Clara absolutely broke me open.
It broke the spell of mind control. I had never
lost anyone before I lost my daughter, so it was
(32:13):
just jarring and shocking all by itself, all for the
reasons that anyone can imagine and when you lose a child.
But the experience was so complex and it was impossible
to box myself back up after. I could not be
the person I had been, and there was a great
demand on me to become that again when I got
back home. There was so much pressure on me to
not grieve too long, you know, don't make people uncomfortable
(32:36):
with your grief, get back to business quickly, have another child,
give God all the glory. And I just couldn't box
myself into that anymore, as she made that impossible.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And there was no therapy, no in that list that
you recited, mom, friends, you couldn't even talk to other women.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
To hear, it's the Handmte's style.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
What did the church teach you about discipline and obedience,
both of your children and of yourself high control?
Speaker 3 (33:30):
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.
(33:54):
And so they're convinced that if there aren't this high
control model, their children will go bad and that they
will lose them into a lake of fire. The stakes
couldn't be higher, because it's an eternity in hell. And
so all of that convinces parents to do whatever their
authority tells them they need to do. And there's no
shortage in patriarchy of resources encouraging parents to treat their
(34:17):
strong willed child, you know, with a rod of correction.
This environment that I was in and that is just
so alive and well today. One teacher really does lead
to another, and one book leads to another, and so
the ideas in one book will build off of that
and take you to the next level of extremity. And
while everyone may not achieve that far and extreme where
(34:39):
in my story it includes disciplining wives as if their
children and wife's banking, and maybe not everyone experiences that.
A lot of them experience a lot of harsh corporal
punishment of children, and on the very beginning of the spectrum,
babies because Michael Pearl's books talk about switching through blanket training,
which begins at four months old.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
What's blanket training? Can you explain what blanket training is?
Speaker 3 (35:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
When you say swat, does that mean hit.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yes, you hit them with any kind of switch approved switch.
So they recommended a twig, a stick, a twig, a
piece of plumbing, PVC plumbing pipe, blue sticks, flexible craft
blue 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,
(35:45):
it's barbaric.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
It sounds illegal. Is it not illegal?
Speaker 3 (35:49):
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 patriarchy. Children
(36:10):
have no rights, neither do women, and so that's not
the mindset they're operating from.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
You mentioned wife spanking. Did that actually happen to you?
Speaker 3 (36:20):
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
(36:40):
hear older daughters spanked by their fathers into their young adulthood,
and you will hear wives who have been spanked. It
is tied up in the theology that tells a man
that he's responsible for everything that happens in his home,
and he's answerable to God for all of the behavior.
And so that's how it's sold that you need to
hold her accountable and train her because her choices are
(37:03):
going to reflect on you on judgment Day.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Women can't vote, can they? They're not allowed to vote.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
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?
Speaker 3 (37:40):
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.
(38:02):
I had two more children after Clara, and four more pregnancies.
It was life, you know. I did not realize that
there was not an entertain again of getting out. It's
till death do you part, even if it's at his hands,
And it did come down to that. I think one
of the traits that I have as a Christian girl
groomed to people please and fawn. I tend to stay
(38:25):
in environments longer than I should. I can see the
writing on the wall, and then I lack the courage
to save myself and take myself out of that. It's
a life discipline I'm working on, and this is the
biggest example of it. I had to get to a
place where he was about to kill us. I had
to realize I was grooming the next generation of abusers
(38:46):
in order to put my foot down and say enough
is enough. And then when you try to leave an
abusive person, it becomes much more dangerous and violent, and
that's what happened. Then violence escalated.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
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. In October of
two thousand and seven, things came to a violent head
and I narrowly escaped with my children in the middle
(39:16):
of the night. What happened on that night, if it's
not too distressing to recount.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Sure, I'm gonna 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 trig
er 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
(39:44):
didn't want to take that from them prematurely. So we
had gone trigger treating, and after we got home, he
had some sort of psychotic break. I really don't have
good language for what happened with the inside of him,
other than that he snapped. He held me hostage for
four hours with the length of firewood, threatening to kill
me and kill the children, and then he suddenly left.
(40:05):
And I heard a voice in my head, in my mind,
in my heart that said, so I packed us up,
grabbed the laundry and the children and my laptop, and
I left. 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. We drove away.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Oh my god, how old were your children then?
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Ten? And down ten to two and a half?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Way back, if 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
(41:10):
I survived this mentally, how I educated myself and the
connections that I made that were outside of the religious
groups that we were in. And they were other Christian
women going through very similar dynamics with different expressions. Like
none of them were like in as much high control
as I was, but they had toxicity in their marriages,
and they had family dynamics where we could relate to
one another and talk in a real way about what
(41:32):
the kinds of things that we were facing. And I
had also started a business by the time I left
a blogging business and I had a successful website at
that time, So I grabbed my laptop because I knew
my livelihood was in it in all of my contacts,
and those women helped me hide. They sheltered me and
took me in. And I do believe, I know that
we're seeing this again. There's underground railroads forming of women
(41:55):
connected to women, helping one another out of dangerous situations,
and in America, you know, helping women get abortions, helping
women find health care and resources and get out of
domestic violence. So they saved my life, they really did,
and they kept my children's world somewhat balanced during that time.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Was there a moment where you thought, Okay, I've done it,
I've left and I can't return to that life.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
It was that night. Yeah, that was done. It was
a complete severance.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
And what happened after that? What was the next twelve months?
Like for you and your kids?
Speaker 3 (42:28):
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
(42:49):
years and putting my life back together. I mean, I
really did set to healing, raising my kids, securing my employment,
getting on my feet, and I had it in this
context that this bad marriage happened to us. It wasn't
till years later in therapy when I had to start
reversing my decision making process and exploring what made me
(43:10):
those choices in the first place, what made me go
along and comply, And that's what led me to the
religious trauma and understanding the grooming and conditioning I'd been
part of as a younger woman.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
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,
(43:43):
because you had no right to say no, I don't
want you to read this. How do you undo that.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
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 healing, and I've had break
throughs along the way that I'm writing about now. But
(44:14):
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. And then there were harder times where
I have deeply embedded patterns of fawning and people pleasing
and cooperation, and I have to really work on situation
by situation and carefully with a therapist. So it's a
(44:37):
little mixture of both. But I did not accept that
I wouldn't heal like I want that from my life.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Well, this is not the end to his 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
(45:08):
Nielman and Ballerina farm We're trying to sell this life
to a whole new generation of women. There's so much
more of this incredible conversation, more than we could share
in one episode here. So if you're not already a
Muma Mea subscriber, let this be the episode that makes
you one. I'll put a link in the show notes
and I'll see you in part two.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
If you're looking for something else to listen to, like
and follow all of our Muma Mea podcasts, which are
currently bringing you Hot Pod Summer one hundred hours of
summer listens, from spicy conversations to incredible stories, fashion, beauty,
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