Episode #187: I Belong to Me with Tia Levings
Tia Levings was an original trad wife — decades before the hashtag. Recruited as a child into the world of Bill Gothard's IBLP through a Jacksonville megachurch, she spent thirteen years inside Christian patriarchy: nine pregnancies in ten years, submission framed as love, abuse framed as discipline — until a harrowing 2007 escape with her four children and a year in hiding. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, became a New York Times bestseller; her new book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma (May 2026), maps the road back to selfhood.
In this conversation, Christine and Tia go inside the machinery of high-control religion — the real hungers it feeds, the intelligence of the women who stay, the erasure of women past fertility — and out the other side: reclamation, estrangement and repair, boundaries that flex instead of armor, receiving people who leave, and building a spirituality spacious enough to stay private. Timely, tender, and unflinching — including why “family voting” isn't a fringe fantasy, and what it takes to answer the question at the heart of Tia's work: do you remember who you were before they told you who to be?
Resources & Links
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Tia Levings
- Website: tialevings.com
- Instagram: @tialevingswriter
- Substack: Tia Levings, Writer (Substack)
- Books by Tia Levings
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Shiny Happy People
- Watch on Prime Video: Shiny Happy People on Prime Video
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Christine Mason
- Website: Rosebud Woman / Christine Mason
- The Nine Lives of Woman: Book page
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Jim Palmer
- Center for Non-Religious Spirituality: Center for Non-Religious Spirituality
- Personal Substack (Deconstructionology): Jim Palmer on Substack
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