I am so thrilled to be able to share this conversation with Tia Levings with you today because if you don't know her and her work, you need to!
Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of religious trauma and the Trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture. Her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter and Substack at DeconstructingFundamentalism.com. Her second book releases with St. Martin’s Essentials May 5, 2026.
On this episode we talk about:
- Tia's incredible life story that led her to be doing the work she does today.
- How we see it playing out in religion, in our homes, in our own lives, in our country as a whole.
- What could cause a person to gravitate to fundamentalist thinking and things we can do in our lives to push back against and avoid that.
- Parallels between what she experienced in her religion and home and what we sometimes get sucked into in fitness and wellness spaces.
- The pipeline from wellness to getting red pilled and how it happens.
- How to embrace more both/and thinking when our own experiences (a religion, dieting, our identity, life in general) have impacted us so profoundly that we just want to scream "NO YOU'RE WRONG!".
- How to reconcile doing that when some people are just terrible people with harmful ideas.
- Simple daily practices to keep ourselves grounded in a both/and sort of reality in a world that is increasingly polarized.
- How to we show up in our relationships when our loved ones see things so differently than we do.
- Insider info she wants to share with people as someone who was in a high control religion and marriage and got out.
- What to do if you see yourself in her story.
- So many other important things!
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