439. Breaking Free and Reclaiming Life After Christian Patriarchy

00:00

Tia Levings, New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, opens up about her harrowing escape from Christian fundamentalism and reclaiming her life. Tia discusses the impact of religious pressure, the lies behind Christian nationalism, and her healing journey from trauma. Learn how Tia chose progress over fear, created healthy boundaries, and now advocates for societal change.

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In this episode you will learn about:

Insights into the dangers of Christian fundamentalism and nationalism
How Tia navigated trauma from religious control and rebuilt her identity
The impact of high-control religion on self-development and individuality
Tia’s healing process and journey to reclaim her life after escaping
How she uses visioning and journaling as tools for self-growth

Episode References/Links:

Guest Bio:

Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, a memoir detailing her escape from Christian patriarchy. Her next book, The Soul of Healing, releases with St. Martin’s Press in 2025. Tia’s work sheds light on the abuses of Christian fundamentalism, religious trauma, and evangelical patriarchy, and she has been featured in Salon, HuffPost, and Newsweek. A sought-after speaker, she’s appeared in Amazon’s docu-series Shiny Happy People and her social media content has garnered millions of views. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, Tia is a mother of four and enjoys hiking, travel, and painting.

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Episode Transcript:

Tia Levings 0:00

We've all had hard, bad experiences, but it's what I was able to do with it that I'm able to move forward and do more things as a whole person. I don't consider myself broken anymore. I don't consider myself scarred. I consider myself whole. And to get there, I did everything that healing has to offer.

Lesley Logan 0:20

Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.

Lesley Logan 1:02

Be It babe. Get ready. If you haven't read the book that we're going to talk about, then you need to take a pause and order her book. It is very informative, is very important, is very needed. We have our guest, Tia Levings, today and I'm actually going to try to make this as quick as possible, because I just want to get into her brilliance. So she is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, and she does have another book coming out. And she escaped the patriarchal fundamentalist Christian life, where there was just so much trauma and abuse that she was going through. And then we talk about her journey in that. And also we talk about why she's doing what she's doing today, and what's so important about it. And she's had so many be it till you see it, moments in her life, like truly so many, and she still is. And I just find her absolutely one of a kind and truly amazing. And I am so excited for you to hear this podcast. So take away your distractions. Enjoy this and if you haven't read A Well-Trained Wife, then please do. It's a beautiful book, and it's an important example of things that are happening to women and people every day. And you know, it's very easy for us to judge what we don't know, and then we can know it, and we can have some empathy for it, and we can also kind of understand why things are going on and how also can we reach out? What is it that we can do? So here's Tia Levings. Thank you so much for being a listener on the show. Thank you, Tia, for being a guest on the show. I'm so excited for everyone to hear you, and if they don't know you yet, to know you. All right, loves Here you go.

Lesley Logan 2:35

All right, Be It babe. I'm gonne be honest. I don't fangirl very much. I'm a fan girl a little bit for now, because I have heard this woman on another podcast over a year ago, at the time they're recording this, and then when I heard she was gonna have a book and I'd have to wait till the summer of 2024 and I was like, I hate the publishing world. Why are we waiting so long? Tia Levings is our guest today. She is the author. She's a bestselling author. New York Time's Bestselling Author, congratulations, of A Well-Trained Wife. I absorbed this book as quickly as I could. And then I was kind of bummed that I put it down, and I was like, well, I, maybe, I should have (inaudible) much longer. Tia, in case they don't know you, can you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at?

Tia Levings 3:10

Yes, I am the New York Time's Bestselling Author of A Well-Trained Wife. I'm still practicing saying that. It's my memoir of escape from Christian patriarchy, and I educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism online. So a lot of people meet my work through either just like you did, an interview or my reels or my social media platform.

Lesley Logan 3:28

Yeah, your reels have been so informative. So we're recording this right now in the summer of 2024 we're before the election, and one of the things that I've loved about your work that you've put out there is explaining to people why some of these rules and laws and things people want to change, why people would want that to happen? Because I can sit here and go, why would anyone want that? And then you're and then you're so good be like, well, this is how they live, and this is why it's like that. And so it's been really fascinating. I was able to share with my husband, and then as I listen to your beautiful book, I would tell Brad, I pause and go, here's what's going on in her life right now. I would share with him, so he probably feels like he knows you, too. So you have your book, and it's about your story. And in the beginning of your book, you talk about being a young girl going to church. And it took me back to my parents were very into church, went every single Sunday, we also were church hoppers. So there's part of your story that part of me goes, oh, my God, this could have been me. I went to a Christian university. I went to Assemblies of God. So, speak in tongues, you know, dance in the aisles. A little more fun.

Tia Levings 4:35

A little more fun.

Lesley Logan 4:37

Just a little more fun. But you had stomach issues and anxiety and just like this worry and fear and so but I noticed that in your book, as you tell your story, you also then continue to try to be this good Christian woman. And I was like, oh my god, she was being it till she saw it in a way that was negatively affecting her. So can we talk a little bit about, about like, Why? Why you were doing, why were you trying to fit in so much, and how did that affect you?

Tia Levings 5:07

I love this question because what you're really describing is faith. And faith is the idea that you can become this thing, you can grow in this way that you aren't yet, but if you do these things, then you will achieve this and you trust that you will get there. And that's tangled up in fundamentalism because they drop the promise constantly that if you follow this formula, you will achieve this promise. And the promise they kept showing me was acceptance, love, blessing, prosperity, happy family, happy husband, happy parents. I am a very sensitive person, and I came onto this planet with a lot of big feelings and a lot of raw nerve endings and expressing out how do I get loved? What do I have to do in order to be loved and accepted and safe? And I'm hyper aware to everything. So I think that there is a personality piece to this. I think there's a cultural piece, a family history and generational trauma piece. There's a lot of things that went into little Tia became a people pleaser, really, at a very early age, and I was in a culture that sent almost exclusively messages that I needed to change myself in order to be desirable, so I was very eager to follow those formulas and fake it till I make it because I didn't want to burn in hell. I didn't want rejection. I didn't want, I didn't want to be miserable or unhappy or called a heretic or, you know, cast out so that, that's it.

Lesley Logan 6:34

Yeah, and I think how many young people, especially young women, you know, I think you describe a lot of our listeners, highly sensitive, highly empathic. You know, they would say that they're a people-pleaser. And we've said on the show before, guys, people-pleasing has gotten very few people anywhere. Yeah, if you have found someone who people-please their way to the top, please, by all means, send in my way. I'm happy to figure this out, but it broke my heart, because I was like, oh, my god, yeah. I remember being like, oh, how do I be even better at being this Christian girl who shows up because you don't want to be the, of course, you don't wanna be the things they say could happen to you, and, of course, you want all the things that they promise. So it is interesting how your sister, you mentioned in your book, is not the same way, did not end up in the same path.

Tia Levings 7:20

Monica, she's just not as sensitive. I don't know how to describe it. We come from the same family, but she's just not as sensitive. She's sensitive in a different way,. I think. She understood that exteriors were exteriors and internals were internals. And I think there's some, probably some family stuff that is just her experience of our family is different than my experience. And so to give you an idea, I was born with a tooth and I had colic. I was my mom's firstborn. We have a very different bonding experience than my sister, who was born compliant and affectionate and calm and so she didn't have, I think, the same creative rage, I think, to feel wanted (inaudible) she was wanted.

Lesley Logan 7:21

Wow. I think if you were a firstborn, I was gonna say, are you firstborn? Because there's something like, I am a firstborn. I also think, my siblings and I were born, my mom was 21 when she had me, and 25 when she had my brother. There's three of us in there, so she.

Tia Levings 8:20

Everyone has a different experience of your mom.

Lesley Logan 8:22

Yeah, everyone has a different experience because, you know, that's a young mom, first of all, with not a lot of help, and she ended up having some postpartum issues that definitely affected how my brother was even raised, and so it's so, you are correct there, and I think that's really important for us to dive into. And I think when you guys read her book, you'll understand. You might have a sibling or a cousin, like, how did you end up like this? But it's just like, it's a, we, no one is like, a constant. You know, we're all kind of changing. Okay, so I want to explore some things. You mentioned fundamentalism. I think there's an interesting problem in our life today that there's Christians and then there's Christian nationalism and there's fundamental, like, can you kind of explain some of the differences? Because I know that there might be some Christian listening, who might I'm not trying to discount or make fun or truly ignore, that that is something that you might believe in. But there are differences in what Christianity was, or it should be, or is, and then what Christian nationalism, fundamentalism, is.

Tia Levings 9:21

Yeah, thanks. I like being able to draw these distinctions, because I think they're just really relevant to where we are today. And my number one pushback that I always receive is not all Christians. And I'm like, I am very aware that all Christians are not the same, painfully aware, that is, that has been the glaring truth of my life. So at least, bottom, you know, Christianity is a belief system that the only thing you need to belong is belief, is proclaim your belief. And so a lot of people have used the word Christian throughout history because it's so broad and it's just part of our world religions and our and our archeological history, it means different things in different time periods. And so I think in like, I'm Gen X and when I grew up in the 80s, Christianity was pretty like it was a lifestyle. It was a belief choice. It was a belief system, different than Catholicism or Judaism or Buddhism. But it's just one of the world's religions, and there was a mainstream presentation of it. And in previous times in history, maybe there was more agenda attached to it, but in the 1980s it really felt like you could just decide to be Christian or not. You could take your kids to church. You could be more devout or not. There wasn't a larger framework and agenda you were buying into when you decided to be a Christian. It was your decision for your life, and it was your personal walk with Christ. That is not what it is today. Today it is in a political movement. It is buying into entire ideologies and groups that don't really have anything to do with Jesus whatsoever. Whereas I was more familiar with different denominations and flavors of Christianity when I was growing up, like you mentioned, Assemblies of God is different than Southern Baptist, but we have enough in common that we might sit at the same table. It's not like that anymore among Christians and Christian nationalists, because they're so divorced from Jesus. Christian nationalism, buys into this fundamentalism that's been rising over 50 years, that's been, that has a political agenda that has dominionist theology at its core, which is that Christianity should take over the entire globe and they truncate or that's not the word I want, they co-opt into evangelisism, because that's how the Mets, the Methodists spread. You evangelize your belief system, either through your lifestyle, your words and deeds, or through active missions. And so it helps spread this message. But it's, it's one of the lies I hope to uncover with my work the most, because this, what I'm from, is not just an alternative lifestyle or a belief in Jesus. This is a political ideology bent on dominating the rest of the culture, and that's why it's important to unpack it and examine it.

Lesley Logan 11:54

Yeah, I think I'm an elder millennial and so I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, and I never remembered people's business of politics even entering a conversation on a Sunday. It just wasn't (inaudible).

Tia Levings 12:09

Technically, it's a law for them to tell you how to vote, and we kind of adhered to that back then.

Lesley Logan 12:13

Yeah, we did. And you just kind of loved everybody you know. And my parents were those Christians, like, you moved in the neighborhood, and they would show up at your door and they bring you food. And if someone passed away, they're like, how can we help you? How can we like, they took my mom, took pregnant teenagers off the street who've been kicked out of their houses. That's the type of person we were and if you're nodding along because that sounds familiar to what you're used to, that is not what they're preaching today. Because it's really like, it's I don't see them taking anyone's kid in. I see all them wanting to kick everyone's kids out that don't believe it in the way they believe. And that, to me, is so antithetical. And you're like, what Bible are we reading? How are we doing this?

Tia Levings 12:55

Today is about legislative morality and making their views make, by force, making, forcing you to comply with the way they believe and getting involved in politics to the exclusion of any American plurality or democracy, and it's taken them years to get here. This didn't just happen. This is not one President's fault. This is a long standing strategy that does involve our lifespan, but we were too little, and it was too new to really be a force in our formative years.

Lesley Logan 13:23

Yeah, so I guess, like you've read this, you wrote this amazing book, and in this book, you talk about and I also found it very fascinating, because you say, people say, not all Christians, and in your marriage, in your life, in this world, you went through many different types of different churches, and they seem to just get, continue to get worse and worse. As far as, like, what you as a woman could do and even what your kids could do, you know, obviously, with, the book is here, so you've got out, so we're not spoiling anything, but you all have to, like, the story is just incredible. You have to read it. But I guess I want to go to the after the book, because after the book ends that part of your life, because there's another be it till you see it moment, like you went through a healing process. It just is intense. And I guess maybe we can talk a little bit like, what does years of abuse or years of control do to a body? And how did you get to a place where you could actually write them? I mean, you're a writer, so that's not the problem. But like, get the point where you could actually tell the story, and not almost relive it?

Tia Levings 14:24

Yeah, I love that question too, because it's really more my focus once I get this off my chest, you know, I have to tell you what broke me before I can tell you how I healed from it. So I have another book underway called The Soul of Healing. And the contrast of these two books is that in the beginning of A Well-Trained Wife, I'm a child who should be developing as a child. I should be developing my sense of self through normal child development, which is denied you in high control religion. They do not want to nurture individuality. They do not want you to become your best and highest self. They don't want you dreaming and daydreaming of what you can become. You're supposed to become what they want you to be. That's the whole goal.

Tia Levings 14:58

When I was in recovery when I broke out of that, I was faced with a dilemma. I had to become someone, become who I am. But I had had no self-development. There was no foundation there. There was just like this broken heap of rubble to put back together and say, okay, I'm going to kind of make a person out of this. And I couldn't have done it without vision and imagination and healing. I did it with 10 years of trauma therapy and putting myself back together. As far as the challenges go, like, what's broken? How can I heal this? How can I address this trauma? All of that happened, and the writing was a piece of that. The writing was, it started out as a therapeutic journal, and then it developed into a novel, because I thought I would tell this hard story with some distance, emotional distance to it. But that's where I was at the time. I wasn't able to say this happened to me. And then it was a book with a pseudonym, because I tried someone else's name on that didn't fit either. And then finally, as I get through my healing and I have become Tia, I'm ready to tell my story of what happened to Tia. And all of that is becoming who I wanted to be, and it's, it's a building process. I have a vision board that somewhere in the middle, there, I eventually hung alongside of it a victory board, because my visions were coming true, and I had needed to mark them as accomplishments, and I became a real different, I have a different life today that you can see in pictures, because they came they came true.

Lesley Logan 16:20

Okay, hold on, okay, I love a vision board, like, I still have this vision board. You don't know this yet, but my listeners do. I had three stints in my life where, like, I was without address and, I never had to sleep on the streets, I always had a car or a couch to crash on. So I'm very, very grateful. And I was also had a job, and so I like also tell people it's just sometimes expensive to get into housing. But I, during one of my last stint of that, I did a vision board, and my new apartment was so small I had to, like, just put it in the closet, and I would pull it out every once in a while, and I'd go, oh my god, that's happened. Oh my god, that's happened. But I didn't realize I should have put a victory board, and so now we should all have almost like a book. It opens up and you could, oh, you're great. So okay, so okay, okay, this is so good. The amount of be it till you see it you've had then you had a be it till you see it to become Tia. That is something I don't think we ever give people credit for. I'm sure there's so many people are like, oh, look at her. Now she got out, and now she's this, you know, spokesperson, who's just like, charging up and trying to call these people out, but there was 10-plus years of you becoming you.

Tia Levings 17:25

Yeah, it's very important. I was a shocked, broken mess in 2007 when I escaped, and that was a time when there wasn't the same amount of resource trauma, informed resources didn't really exist yet. Language didn't exist. I certainly wasn't in a habit of accurately naming my experiences. So I had to learn how to call what happened to me by its actual name. I had to learn how to externalize the story with honesty and stop putting like rose-colored glasses on and daydreams and idealism. I had to stop protecting so that I could be honest from the page. That's one of the things you see reflected in my book, is that I speak very plainly about really hard things. That's the reflection of being able to say what happened to me in no nonsense terms, that was a growth step. And so all of that together builds to somebody who has a voice and has learned how to use it. It's not something I had. In 2007 I couldn't have ordered a pizza because I stuttered and stammered too badly to have a conversation with a stranger without so much anxiety that I would have just shut down. And today I can do an interview like this. That all took practice. Like, right now, I'm practicing because I want to be able to do Tiktok lives. And I've never gone live on Tiktok before, two days ago. So I'm practicing in five minute increments on Tiktok. It's that kind of like little have a vision of where I want to be and I want to, I need to practice the mechanics of it, and so I give myself time to practice and envision and all of that. But there's also a lot of grief work involved in that. I don't want to gloss over the grief work, because being able to envision what I want for Tia meant I had to first contend with what it cost me. I can't just envision myself back to 20 and start over. I have to have a new vision for Tia at 50. What does Tia at 50 look like, and what can she do with what she's been given?

Lesley Logan 19:14

Oh, my God, you're 50.

Tia Levings 19:15

I am.

Lesley Logan 19:16

Oh my, gorgeous. Anyways, I know because that's the other thing I don't think people even give themselves credit for. They like leave the job, they leave the relationship, or they leave the religion, and then they don't realize that there is a grief process, because you are grieving what was, what you lost in doing that, what, you can't get time back? I can't imagine you going through all the things you went through in trying to heal yourself and also be a parent to your beautiful children. And so, because we have so many moms who listen when you have a baby and you didn't even have them at the hospital, you had your first at home. I still, somehow, they still insert mom guilt, somehow it comes in. It's not, it's like, so how, what did you have to tell yourself to go through that? Because you had to also give yourself permission to take care of you so that you could take care of them.

Tia Levings 20:09

Yeah. So during the years that I was healing, I was raising four children and also going through a vicious divorce and custody investigations. And, you know, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't bad. I just saw it ends with us, and I got so angry because she hands over, in the movie, this is a spoiler, in the movie, she hands her newborn to her abuser and says, I would like a divorce, and no mom from abuse is going to, number one, put her newborn in the father's hands and give him potentially volatile news, that's not going to happen. But also he's like, oh yeah, I think we should, oh yeah, I agree with you. Thank you. No abuser says that. That is not what it's like to leave domestic abuse. So I had a big process to go through, and I had children to raise and life to change, and I had been, you know, always resisting the internal fundamentalism in our home in their early childhood and try to raise them the way that I wanted to. But it was a different scenario when I had teenagers and I didn't have fundamentalism, telling me I had to churn out this cookie-cutter. So it was kind of wild west in some regards. I had a second husband during those years. We had that to contend with. And so there was a lot, there was a lot happening. And just like knowing what TIA is, isn't, it was a question. It was, still a question, I hope it's always a question. The only thing I promised myself was that everything that I'd been through had already taken enough time. It had already taken my life. It took my past. It took my childhood. It took my children's childhood. It took my virginity. It took all the glossy imagery that they promised and never delivered on. It was not going to get my present and it was not going to get my future, because that was the only thing I had control over. So that was my promise to myself, was it changes from here on out.

Lesley Logan 21:47

Yeah, thank you for bringing up that movie. I haven't seen it. I saw your post on it, and then I saw, like, people are, like, backlashing up, like, lively, and they're trying to figure out why. And I'm like, I don't think it's any of these reasons. I think what people aren't saying is what they can't always articulate what you did so well, just like, this is unbelievable. This is not how it works. And they didn't have anyone who got experience with it on that movie. Because I just think that you would really, yeah, so, but that's a different episode. Okay, so here's the thing that I find fascinating about you, and I'm so grateful for you, because you're putting towards the things like, I like, even though I grew up somewhat in my, I don't think I ever there's parts of me I watch Tiny Happy People with you in it. I was like, oh, I do think my parents got that book at some point. We were never on the blanket, but we were spanked sometimes. I was like, this is because God loves you. And like, I was, so there's some interesting things that I think my parents tried out and then also let go of because they were very much into football. And my grandparents' version of church was watching, oh, my god, I can't think of it right now, but it's like a Sunday night prayer movie with angels. It's not coming to my mind, but like.

Tia Levings 22:52

Touched by an Angel?

Lesley Logan 22:53

Touched by an Angel. Yes, we watched every Sunday. My grandma's like, this is church, we're going. So I had some outside influence I think that really kept my life away from that. But, so you, but you have now, because you can, you can pinpoint these things, what I find so fascinating is that you are spending time trying to help people understand what fundamentalism is, what we're looking at here. And I, one, commend you, and I'm grateful for you. But two, and I'm also wondering like, why are you doing that?

Tia Levings 23:21

Because somewhere around 2015, yeah, I think it was 2015, I realized that everything I'd run away from, and then I escaped and with the risk of my life and losing everything and leaving everything behind, all of that was coming from my country, and there was be no, there was no hide and be quiet and be anonymous about it anymore. It was you need, you have a story to tell. You know what it's like to live in that America because you lived in that America, being the only people who can tell what it's like to live in Project 2025, or the Christian patriarchy, to that extreme, is somebody who's lived it and but there's not very many people who can talk about it. They are, if they survived at all, if they got out, they haven't done the work to tell the story without re-traumatizing themselves, they haven't, don't necessarily, have the same talents and gifts for clarity or for being able to write or being able to put themselves out there. And so I knew I'm like, well, there's a handful of people who can do this, and I'm one of them, and I have a responsibility to tell the story and to get the workout. The situation has only intensified as I made that decision. My book is timely and we knew that two years ago, we knew that four years ago, and it just keeps getting more timely. And I'm like, please read it before the election.

Lesley Logan 24:35

I know, that's why I posted today, because I was like, I don't think I get this I want, I'm gonna try get this episode out for the election. But I was like, how can I get this book in everyone's hands because what kills me is that people continue to say on any post about Project 2025, oh, Trump's doesn't know anything about this. And I am like, okay, because there's a picture of him with the, like, you want to just go, you want to shake people. You're like, what are you doing? We can't shake them, that would be abuse. But your book is so timely. And also you can spot things and almost, in a way, translate, because it is all English. It's just that it's a different worldview. So it's a different language, and you can translate it. For those of us who are going, what is going on and what does this actually mean?

Tia Levings 25:18

Even with Project 2025, the mechanics of it matter. So Trump not only knows about it, but he's president because of it. The Heritage Foundation, you might remember this, there was a push in the first Trump election, in the, in that election cycle. Two, they didn't like him, the Evangelicals didn't like him, and they wanted to pick someone like Ted Cruz or Chris Christie. And there was this debate over who's going to be the Republican candidate, and Trump was popular, but not so much with evangelical voters, more with the MAGA crowd. Then all of a sudden, boom, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham endorse him, and it's like this pivot. Everyone's like, what we're endorsing Trump now? The reason why they did that was because they're involved with the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025. Project 2025 founders and architects decided that a popular president could get their Supreme Court justices in and can get their legislation through. So they went with the most popular president and put him in office as a figurehead. He's there because of them. So it is bigger than him. It is ludicrous that he would pretend that he doesn't know about it when 80% of his administration was staff appointees from those organizations, it was 110 conservative organizations. And so that's why it also will outlast him if they swap him with another candidate, for example, Vance, or anyone else like him, if they're endorsed by the founders of Project 2025, we are in the same boat and that's what lands us with this legislation, with the Supreme Court appointees we've had, and with Speaker of the House, Johnson, like that kind of trend.

Lesley Logan 26:52

I know that's the thing that so, concern's the wrong word, sometimes you're just like, okay, how, it's, you start to go, how do you take a group, this is such a huge group of people, and if we escape one at a time, like Tia, you escaped, we're going to be in this forever. Obviously, you're sharing these amazing things that are helping us understand it. How do you see a possibility for us to, I don't, I don't want to say, break the spell, but help them see that I feel like they don't realize they're being used, and that, I think pisses me off the most, but they're being used, and that

Tia Levings 27:24

They're being (inaudible) not wrong about that. They're under mind control. They're under a spell. We know that in our bodies, you know we can feel that in our bodies. What I do about it is I choose the other way. I choose light, I choose life. I choose energy and progress. I want humanity to continue evolving and progressing as a society, not going back to puritanical times. There is a reason why we're not Puritans anymore, like, many reasons. We like progress and technology and goodness and education and rights. There's, our society moved forward because we don't want to be like The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorn and you know, all of, all of the things that were true in the 1500s. We choose life. So I choose life. I choose to go forward. That means I choose political ideologies and groups that maybe I don't agree with 100% but they're moving in the right direction. They're protecting my agency to continue to vote. I wasn't allowed to vote in Christian patriarchy. We will lose our right to vote in Christian patriarchy. I don't want that, so I vote for people who protect my right to vote. That makes sense?

Lesley Logan 28:25

Yeah, no, it totally does. With all this stuff where you have to kind of like, especially right now, especially in the time that we're in, guys, I think we're 74 days out from when we're recording this. How are you protecting, so how are you protecting yourself? Because every day you have to look at this crap and translate it for the rest of us, it really, absolutely, is like a touch point of my day to see what you're okay, I'm not crazy. This is what I'm seeing. This is very helpful. And, oh, this is why it's going on. So you are definitely helping so many people who are trying to figure out what they're seeing, right? But how are you protecting yourself? And I guess, continue to be it till you see it as being Tia?

Tia Levings 29:00

Yeah. So Tia needs a lot of time to sit on the floor. I need time to be unplugged. I need time to stretch and move and get sunshine and walk. I'm really clear on my boundaries, and I use them every day. I also like a good, flexible boundary, not a rigid one. So that means sometimes I take a little step back and then take a few days off. I'm fortunate that my, I mean, it's the twisted curse of content that I make, it's still really timely and relevant, which allows me to repurpose older content sometimes when I need to take a little break from always diving into the most current issue. I'm also really grateful that there are so many other voices joining this that I'm not the only one out there. There's a lot of creators that all have their own strengths for explaining things, interpreting things, and sometimes there's a current event that'll come up, and I'll just like, I'm sitting this one out. I've got the middle of (inaudible) book release, or I've got something else, let the others carry it, and they do. And I know that we're not like, putting our heads together and deciding that, but I know that we're all doing that. We're all aware that this is a movement, and it's a counter-movement of intelligence and love and strength, and sometimes we need to set it out. It's also, interestingly enough, many of us are introverted, and so I noticed that you do what we can do, and then we understand that that's where our limit is, and I go take care of my needs, like my nervous system regulation is my top priority. So that's what I mean when I say I need to go sit on the floor. If I'm feeling overwhelmed or tired or something, I'll just sit down, and let the planet support me, and let everything, like all the energy fields, just kind of come down and the energy drop.

Lesley Logan 30:35

Thank you for sharing that I think so many people here need to hear like you, to have gone what you went through, and also to be so aware of what you need, that is a superpower, because there are so many people here who haven't gone through that journey, who do not know how to sit down.

Tia Levings 30:51

Right and we're caught in this new cycle full of urgency, and my promise to myself, one of many, but one of them is that I resist urgency. I want a life that resists urgency. So if someone's prodding me to hurry or push or forcing me to do something, I'll go the other way, just to spite them, because I'm not going. I was like, when I was a toddler, I would sit down. My tantrum style was to sit down and throw a fit and I think, oh, she just knew what she was doing. She just knew. No, no, I'm not going in there. No, you can't make me. Channel my inner two-year-old a little bit.

Lesley Logan 31:22

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think you mentioned that in your book, and you mentioned you have a second book. So I feel like I don't, you probably can't talk too much about it, but did you always know you were gonna write the second book? Did it come through after this first one was finished? Do we get to have more Tia? Like, more?

Tia Levings 31:39

It's called the soul of healing, and it's how I healed and how you can, too. It's a survivor's guide to do the thing that I did, because that's the follow up question I always get, and why we're having this interview. You did this, you went through this big story, and you put yourself back together, and that's what's fascinating. It's not, so, just a parade of the bad things that happened to me. We've all had hard, bad experiences. But it's what I was able to do with it that I'm able to move forward and do more things as a whole person. I don't consider myself broken anymore. I don't consider myself scarred. I consider myself whole. And to get there, I did some things that, I did everything that healing had to offer. So I was like, this really is a second book. It was, this book would have been way too much for that. So it sold really well, really quickly, in preorders. And that meant I was given the opportunity to sell the next one so close, on the heels of it. So The Soul of Healing comes out in 2025, probably in the summer, early fall.

Lesley Logan 32:38

Great. We don't have to wait because, like, too long, because, like, I already knew I was gonna buy a year ago. I already knew it was a deal. And let's just say, I think maybe the hard conversation is like a lot of us are hoping that come this election, that things will go the way joy is presenting itself, and then we'll just move on. And can you give, be the bearer of bad news, but the bearer of honesty, which is, what if they lose, hopefully they lose, what can we expect? Maybe, you're not a future teller, but do they just keep going? Because that means they just do. They've had 50 years of trying, so what do you see?

Tia Levings 33:14

I think that if they lose, which I which I ardently hope they do. Because it's terrifying if they win, if they lose, that we'll see a large chunk of people quietly awaken when their disillusionment falls away, when they see the emperor has no clothes. It gets contagious, becomes contagious, and so I think we will have societal change. There will always be a core of fundamentalism. You know, running through the tradwife movement is massive, and it is part of this. Those are people who are not going to like spin on a dime because it's November and the election went one way that I don't think they're the majority. So I think that the more we move forward, the more we crowd out antiquated ideas that don't bear good fruit. And generations, I have a lot of hope in generations, this new rising Gen X and below. I've always had technology. They have access to more psychological information than any other generation in all of humanity. I have hope for that. I think that's going to take us optimistic places.

Lesley Logan 34:17

Yeah, I do. I believe. I believe it too. I hope for that. Okay, I mean, I just want to spend all I just want to hang out with you. So, just so you know, I'm coming through Georgia, can we have coffee? We're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna come out and find how people can find you, follow you, get your book, and then your Be It Action Items.

Lesley Logan 34:37

All right, Tia, where do you like to hang out? You mentioned TikTok lives? Where can people just absorb as much of your amazingness? And where can they buy your books?

Tia Levings 34:45

Yeah, I'm on every social platform except for Twitter. Don't do Elon. I'm at @TiaLevingswriter on all of those. I hang out on Instagram the most, and I do have a private readers group if you want to do book discussion and help me launch my books, it's AWTW readers, it's free, it's just private, so that we can talk about stuff, and I might have my substack, TiaLevings.substack.com, which is the anti-fundamentalist, where I share an active deconstruction process in our headlines, family news, current events, and we'll also what I'm deconstructing personally now, and I'm on TikTok. Like I said, I'm trying new things. I've always been unafraid of technology. I want to learn how to do it, but it's really just enough time and bandwidth things. So we'll see what happens there. I just realized I was feeling a little intimidated by a process, and I wanted to deal with that, so that's why I'm doing that.

Lesley Logan 35:36

Thank you for, that's a great little, like, yeah, we for (inaudible) why don't we explore wine and see what's going on? You don't have to, but you can just at least understand it. Okay, you've given us so much and, oh, by the way, you have, I believe you have a freebie on, like, the fundies thing as well. If you're in a fundamentalist situation, you're like, unclear. If your family is like, you have that as well in your sites as well.

Tia Levings 35:57

Yeah, if you go to tialevings.com I have tons of resources on there, and one of them is the Fundie Cheatsheet. You'll get it if you sign up for my emails and it, it gives you all like the insider terms of what I'm talking about, where I'm from, and also peaks to see where it's going.

Lesley Logan 36:11

Yeah. Okay, super cool. Okay, so bold, executable, intrinsic, targeted steps to be it till we see it. What do you have for us?

Tia Levings 36:19

Oh my goodness, these were hard to narrow down. My bold, my bold steps, okay, so spend time with yourself is the number one. Like tune out all the noise. Learn how to sit in silence. Learn how to move in walk. I do this when I'm walking a lot, and I try to become my own best friend. I pay attention to my nerves and what's coming up in my body, and I honor that, even if I don't have language for it. And then I spend a lot of time envisioning. I don't believe you can become something with intention unless you can see it. So I need to be able to see it. So I do vision boarding my journaling. I've practiced many times in the mirror being able to speak or smile or do the things. So whatever it is I'm trying to be. I try to really spend time envisioning what it's like to live a daily, ordinary life as that person, and then make those changes as I go. I don't know if those are beady enough for you (inaudible).

Lesley Logan 37:13

They are. They're brilliant, they're brilliant, they're wonderful. Yes, they're as amazing, more amazing. I thought they'd be from you. Just, yeah, you should know, you probably do already, because you've done so much work, but you're a gorgeous, incredible, smart human who is so generous. And I'm just so grateful that we got to have this moment and that you took time out of your busy promotion of your amazing, bestselling book, because it's really important to me, and I think every one of my listeners needs to hear it so listeners needs to hear it. So thank you. So you all are going to get the book if you haven't gotten already, because I told you to.

Tia Levings 37:48

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Lesley Logan 37:49

Oh, are you kidding? Like, I have only ever self-published and I did a terrible job of it, and that's so hard. Well, first of all, first of all, I didn't know you should have an audience first. So there's that. It's still, people still get it, and it's such a niche book anyways. But I have had so many friends who written books, so many people who've been on this it is so hard to authentically get on the bestseller list. It is very easy, if you're a dick on the side that we won't discuss, to have your family buy a bunch of books for you or your friends or a group you know, but you for you and other authors like you, authentically getting there because single people bought a book and told their friends about it. So you, just like incredible achievement, and I hope you continue to celebrate.

Lesley Logan 38:35

Thank you again for being here. You guys, how do you use these tips in your life? Make sure you tag Tia and tag the Be It Pod and get her book for your friends, because this, for us to overcome what is actually trying to happen, and not just the US and many, many places where they're trying to control women, specifically, we have to be educated on what it looks like so that we can make sure it doesn't happen. Because we can be it till we see it in the ways we want to be and the life we want to have and we want a vision. So thank you, Tia, so much for being here. Until next time, everyone, Be It Till You See It.

Lesley Logan 39:01

That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.

Brad Crowell 39:45

It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.

Lesley Logan 39:50

It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.

Brad Crowell 39:54

Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.

Lesley Logan 40:01

Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.

Brad Crowell 40:04

Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.

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