Speaker 1: You're listening to a mom and me a podcast. Mama
Speaker 1: Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that
Speaker 1: this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 2: I heard a voice in my head, in my mind,
Speaker 2: in my heart that said run, and he had gone
Speaker 2: to his office to get his gun. So if I
Speaker 2: had stayed, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now,
Speaker 2: and we drove.
Speaker 1: Away from Mamma Maya, you're listening to no filter and
Speaker 1: I'm mea Friedman. When I was a teenage girl, I
Speaker 1: was kissing boys and dating, and I was hanging with
Speaker 1: my friends. I was working at Woolly's, and I was
Speaker 1: desperately trying to get a fake ID so that I
Speaker 1: could sneak into clubs. Well, the usual teenage behavior, but
Speaker 1: I was also dreaming about my future, thinking about who
Speaker 1: I wanted to be when I grew up, what I
Speaker 1: wanted to do, what adventures I wanted to have out
Speaker 1: in the world when I left school. When Tia Levings
Speaker 1: was a teenage girl, she was preparing to serve a
Speaker 1: husband that she hadn't even met yet. Because Tina was
Speaker 1: brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, where being a trad
Speaker 1: wife was the only option for girls, a marriage with strict,
Speaker 1: old fashioned gender roles where the man was the boss
Speaker 1: and the woman served him. And that's exactly what she did.
Speaker 1: Around the time Tia got married in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: the whole trad wife lifestylethough, wasn't called that then. It
Speaker 1: was been glorified on TV around the world by a
Speaker 1: show called nineteen Kids in Counting. You might remember it.
Speaker 1: It was about the Dugger family, the parents, Michelle and
Speaker 1: Jim Bob. They were also Christian fundamentalists like Tea and
Speaker 1: the community where she grew up. They wore old fashioned
Speaker 1: clothes and they chopped their own wood, and they homeschooled
Speaker 1: all their children. They had so many children. It was
Speaker 1: kind of fascinating to watch. But what we've since learned
Speaker 1: is that there were some really dark things going on
Speaker 1: in that house among the Duggers, and Tea experienced similar
Speaker 1: things in her own tradwife marriage. She barely escaped from
Speaker 1: that marriage with her life. She had to grab her
Speaker 1: children and flee in the middle of the night. Tea's
Speaker 1: story is a story about survival, indoctrination, fundamentalism, but it's
Speaker 1: also a story about marketing and how trad wives aren't
Speaker 1: just a quirky trend on Instagram or a funny reality show.
Speaker 1: This is why Tea has written a book about her
Speaker 1: trad life and why she wants you to hear her
Speaker 1: story as the former trad wife who got away. Tea
Speaker 1: are welcome.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: You start your story in nineteen eighty four when your
Speaker 1: family moved from Michigan to Florida. Talk to me about
Speaker 1: your early years in the way that your family changed
Speaker 1: when you made that move to Florida.
Speaker 2: When I was ten, we moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and
Speaker 2: my parents wanted to give us a good childhood, a
Speaker 2: protected childhood, a happy one. And in Jacksonville, the message
Speaker 2: was all over the city that the best way to
Speaker 2: do that was to join the biggest church in town.
Speaker 2: So it was a Southern Baptist megachurch. We had thirty
Speaker 2: five hundred members at that time, and then it quickly
Speaker 2: grew to ten thousand, and then twenty thousand, and by
Speaker 2: the time I graduated high school, our sanctuary sat over
Speaker 2: ten thousand people. I was there six days a week.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of fun. I would not have
Speaker 2: pointed to a lot of it as being particularly traumatic
Speaker 2: or problematic. I was being systematically groomed and conditioned to
Speaker 2: self subjugate and self gaslight and cooperate with an authoritarian model.
Speaker 2: But I didn't know that. I knew that I was
Speaker 2: just having this Christian evangelical experience that had a lot
Speaker 2: of money and privilege attached to it, and I didn't
Speaker 2: know any different. I talk about this sometimes like a
Speaker 2: culture within a culture, and it's based on the verse
Speaker 2: in the Bible that says be in the world, but
Speaker 2: not of it, And so we really were practicing a
Speaker 2: parallel Christian culture in the world, but not engaging with
Speaker 2: the world, not informing our worldviews, not growing and into adults.
Speaker 2: We were growing to prepare to be Christian wives and mothers.
Speaker 2: And that is all. That was my second ten years.
Speaker 2: I got married at nineteen.
Speaker 1: You call it a cult without wolves, which is really
Speaker 1: interesting because by that I assume you may it's hiding
Speaker 1: in plain side. You talked about it's a megachurch, so
Speaker 1: it's not just like a fringe few kind of people
Speaker 1: meeting in a basement. It is like literally tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people. What is the IBLP. Is it Gothard
Speaker 1: or Goddard.
Speaker 2: Well, Gothard is how we say it, but it's God Guard,
Speaker 2: which is just so funny to me. Bill Gothard started
Speaker 2: the Institute of Basic Life Principles the IBLP. For sure,
Speaker 2: there's a headquarters in Australia, there's a headquarters in America.
Speaker 2: His model of growth cross denominational lines in that he
Speaker 2: taught biblical principles, so Christians from churches all over would
Speaker 2: come and then they would be sent back out to
Speaker 2: their churches to proselytize within their congregations for this stricter
Speaker 2: form of Christianity. If you're familiar with the Dugger family
Speaker 2: on TLC's Nineteen Kids and counting, that's the most visible
Speaker 2: family of the Gothard system. I was in Shiny Happy
Speaker 2: People last year and that did a big expose on
Speaker 2: the IBLP and how it works and how it has
Speaker 2: gone into because of its agenda, it's gone into every
Speaker 2: branch of government and the entire evangelical movement. That's why
Speaker 2: I call it the cult without walls, because we were
Speaker 2: part of this high control group with very strict criteria
Speaker 2: that meets all of the cult definition, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: have a building, and so people identify with cults is
Speaker 2: like it's a place you go and it's a single
Speaker 2: person you follow, and that is not how high control
Speaker 2: religion works. I believe it does meet all of the
Speaker 2: cult criteria. And if you listen to survivors, you hear
Speaker 2: from multiple backgrounds, all kinds of different evangelical sex and denominations,
Speaker 2: with very similar experiences.
Speaker 1: What's the role of the Duggers in the Ibopa and Gothard?
Speaker 2: You know, as the leader of that church, they were
Speaker 2: kind of reputation ambassadors. They had some influence in sway,
Speaker 2: but they were one of star families because of the
Speaker 2: number of children that they had and their high visibility
Speaker 2: and their political involvement. But really their role was lifestyle evangelism.
Speaker 2: So their purpose was to show the world what a
Speaker 2: great lifestyle this is, so that people will feel attracted
Speaker 2: to it and choose it. And it worked in a
Speaker 2: big influential way in America. Plenty of people watched that
Speaker 2: show just to watch the car accident and the crazies,
Speaker 2: but plenty more thought it was an enviable way to live.
Speaker 2: And the trad lifestyle that we find ourselves in today
Speaker 2: is in large part influenced by fundamentalism on TV.
Speaker 1: So while you were preparing for womanhood, talk to me
Speaker 1: about your teenagees and what influence the IBLP and Gothard
Speaker 1: had on you.
Speaker 2: So it was an invisible influence for me in my
Speaker 2: high school years because I didn't know about him. His
Speaker 2: people were around me, and I was observing them, and
Speaker 2: I was learning all their special rules, and I was
Speaker 2: observing that there was this way in our church to
Speaker 2: be a special kind of Christian, a holier Christian, somebody
Speaker 2: who was more devout and more sold out and serious
Speaker 2: in their faith, and that it had a lifestyle projection
Speaker 2: in that they wore different clothes, and they had lots
Speaker 2: of children, and they decided to homeschool their children, and
Speaker 2: so we had a lot of respect and reverence for them.
Speaker 2: Not everyone wanted to live that way, but it seemed
Speaker 2: very much like an option you could take. It wasn't
Speaker 2: a serious pursuit of mine until I was married and
Speaker 2: very quickly a young mother, and I was in abuse
Speaker 2: and I needed to keep my baby quiet at night,
Speaker 2: and I turned to an older mother in that system
Speaker 2: to teach me how to help my baby sleep but
Speaker 2: also keep the home. It's called keepers of the home,
Speaker 2: and so I wanted to be a godly Proverbs thirty
Speaker 2: one woman and be good. You know what I was
Speaker 2: trying to be, which was just a Christian wife and mother.
Speaker 1: You talk about in your book that at fourteen, when
Speaker 1: most young girls at the mall and shopping and maybe
Speaker 1: getting on Instagram and posting selfies, your job was to
Speaker 1: prepare at age fourteen to be a Christian wife and
Speaker 1: mother within the church. What did that preparation actually look like?
Speaker 2: Hell, that's a great question, because we weren't actually preparing
Speaker 2: to be wives. And if they had been teaching us
Speaker 2: here's what you might practically face as a wife, I
Speaker 2: might have had some more tools under my belt. Instead,
Speaker 2: it was looked like a lot of what you don't do,
Speaker 2: very heavily focused on purity culture and remaining a virgin
Speaker 2: not tempting men.
Speaker 1: What's purity culture for someone who's not familiar with purity culture.
Speaker 2: Purity culture is an entire culture that's built around keeping
Speaker 2: you sexually pure. So it includes modesty so that you're
Speaker 2: learning how to dress in a very modest manner that
Speaker 2: won't tempt men. It also includes your behavior, your speech
Speaker 2: being modest in all ways. We call it purity culture here,
Speaker 2: because this is the idea that your behavior can make
Speaker 2: you impure and that you are trying to stay pure
Speaker 2: so that you can be an undefiled bride for your husband.
Speaker 1: I want to ask about modesty, because what does modesty
Speaker 1: actually mean in this context, because for most people, modesty
Speaker 1: means you don't go around perhaps begniting yourself. You have humility,
Speaker 1: but that's not what this kind of modesty in religious
Speaker 1: fundamentalism means. Can you explain what it is?
Speaker 2: That's the big irony is that modesty, especially in scriptures,
Speaker 2: has a lot to do with your bearing and behavior.
Speaker 2: But what it's become an evangelical culture is a hyperfixation
Speaker 2: on the length of a girl's skirt and whether or
Speaker 2: not her brasstrap is showing or Bill Gothard has a
Speaker 2: teaching called eye traps. So these are the way clothing
Speaker 2: is designed to draw your eye to say, a slender
Speaker 2: waistline or cleavage or something that might attract a man's attention,
Speaker 2: and that is ruled as immodest clothing. Your behavior can
Speaker 2: be immodest, and that you can be loud or laugh
Speaker 2: too loud, stand out in any way you know that
Speaker 2: can become a thing. But it's all external.
Speaker 1: Is it about sexuality? Because it's at an age. You know,
Speaker 1: a fourteen year old girl, she's growing breast, she's menstruating,
Speaker 1: she's suddenly aware that men are looking at her in
Speaker 1: a different way. She's maybe feeling hormones, she's maybe feeling things.
Speaker 1: In fact, she no doubt is all of the things.
Speaker 1: How are you taught to interpret that that all of
Speaker 1: that was dangerous and that it was sinful, and that
Speaker 1: it was your job to protect men from the sin
Speaker 1: of you.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's completely internalized. The actual scripture says that if
Speaker 2: a man lusts, he should pluck his eyes out and
Speaker 2: never mentions what the girl is doing. But we flipped it,
Speaker 2: the evangelical culture flipped it. It was all focused on
Speaker 2: first how we were addressing and being, but then eventually
Speaker 2: our very worth was sinful, distracting, dangerous, tempting. I interpreted
Speaker 2: the things I was feeling as a sexualized young person,
Speaker 2: those were my temptations to sin and step out of
Speaker 2: the will of God. So constantly suppressing any urges or
Speaker 2: attractions or desires so that I wouldn't feel them. It's
Speaker 2: very important to not feel them so that you can
Speaker 2: remain pure, and then it's supposed to magically turn on
Speaker 2: when you're married, which we know now it doesn't. For
Speaker 2: a lot of women's sexual dysfunction is very, very high
Speaker 2: because our nervous system does not acclimate that way. That's
Speaker 2: not how the human body works.
Speaker 1: Did you have sex before your wedding at nineteen?
Speaker 2: I had an early sexual assault when I was thirteen
Speaker 2: that I interpreted as maybe my first kiss. I wasn't
Speaker 2: really sure. I didn't have anybody to talk to about that,
Speaker 2: and I had one kiss with a boyfriend otherwise, but no,
Speaker 2: did not have any real experience before my wedding night.
Speaker 1: After this brag, tea gets married at nineteen and her
Speaker 1: life is about to change dramatically, and then she realizes
Speaker 1: she was in danger really from the first night of
Speaker 1: that marriage. How did you meet your husband?
Speaker 2: Yes, So this big mega church I go to, or
Speaker 2: went to, is Jacksonville support City. So we have a
Speaker 2: naval port and he was a sailor that came in
Speaker 2: on a ship and attended our navy ministry. We had
Speaker 2: this big military ministry to reach the sailors for Christ.
Speaker 2: They come in for you know, community and to meet girls.
Speaker 2: So that's what happened. I went to a hay ride
Speaker 2: and he was there, and we met at a mixer
Speaker 2: near Christmas time. About four weeks later we were engaged.
Speaker 2: I didn't really know him, but he had decided I
Speaker 2: was the girl he wanted to marry, and I was
Speaker 2: in pursuit of a husband at that time. I was
Speaker 2: very open to this is the only thing I can
Speaker 2: do with my life is to be a Christian wife
Speaker 2: and mother, so I need a husband to do that.
Speaker 2: I was primed and ready to receive whoever said they
Speaker 2: were God's will for my life.
Speaker 1: Did having a job or a career ever occur to
Speaker 1: you or was that ever presented to you as a
Speaker 1: possibility When you say an agent girl, it's.
Speaker 2: A grief, you know. I share in the book how
Speaker 2: I learned to split myself. I had dreams and desires
Speaker 2: and opportunities and talents, and I had to learn to
Speaker 2: suppress them and stuff them down. They were not in
Speaker 2: accordance with what I was being told was the only
Speaker 2: acceptable outcome for my life, and it was unbearable to
Speaker 2: feel the loss of them. So I learned to stuff
Speaker 2: them away. And there was a season where I tried
Speaker 2: to I wanted to be an artist, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: if I'm an artist for God, I can do it.
Speaker 2: That's how I'll get through this. And that didn't work
Speaker 2: because I was chosen for marriage first and it just
Speaker 2: didn't work.
Speaker 1: You took about being chosen. Did you want to marry
Speaker 1: this guy? Was he nice? Did you like him?
Speaker 2: I didn't really know him. I did not feel attracted
Speaker 2: to him. I know in hindsight that if we had
Speaker 2: given it natural time, you know, to unfold, he would
Speaker 2: have shown his true character. He had behavior tendencies that
Speaker 2: were masked, carefully masked under charm, and that charm would
Speaker 2: have fallen away if we had given it more time,
Speaker 2: which he knew, and that's why he needed to secure
Speaker 2: me so quickly. So I was locked in very quickly
Speaker 2: and did not feel like I really had a choice
Speaker 2: by that point. You don't believe you can say no
Speaker 2: to a man or to God, and they are one
Speaker 2: and the same.
Speaker 1: So when he decided that he wanted to marry you,
Speaker 1: was it on an option to say no? Or you
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, I need a husband, Like why not?
Speaker 2: It's a great question, because I just feel for a
Speaker 2: little nineteen year old me who yeah, really didn't spend
Speaker 2: that much time thinking that. I think I project onto
Speaker 2: her that she wanted to say no, but I think
Speaker 2: that she actually didn't spend that much time deliberating. She'd
Speaker 2: been taught that you were going to say yes, and
Speaker 2: that's how you're going to know it's right. If you're asked,
Speaker 2: then you know it's right. And I was very practiced
Speaker 2: at shutting down my signals, my arguments, any resistance I had,
Speaker 2: and I instead funneled that energy into talking myself into it.
Speaker 1: Tell me about your wedding day. Did you like it?
Speaker 2: It's magical? I did love it. My parents went all out.
Speaker 2: My mom's just seems dress. She spent so many hours
Speaker 2: on my dresses and my bridesmaid's dresses. And we had
Speaker 2: a very traditional wedding, and it was near Christmas time
Speaker 2: the following year, and so it was just I took
Speaker 2: advantage of the whole season feeling festive, and we had
Speaker 2: a horse drawn carriage, and I had a cape, and
Speaker 2: it was romantic and candlelight and really beautiful. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was not smooth and without issue, but I was
Speaker 2: overwhelmingly really happy, and I felt like I was celebrating
Speaker 2: this launch into the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: You say you had a very traditional wedding. Before you
Speaker 1: walk down the aisle, your dad was like, are you ready,
Speaker 1: and you said, I can't see.
Speaker 2: Yeah. My veil was heavy chiffon. I wanted it to
Speaker 2: drape differently than the bridal tool. Bridle tool is very puffy,
Speaker 2: and I wanted a romantic drape. So I picked this fabric.
Speaker 2: It looked gorgeous and photos and it looked gorgeous by day,
Speaker 2: but we were standing in candlelight, and so when we
Speaker 2: flipped it over my head, I couldn't see anything. It
Speaker 2: was a shrouded woman and I had to walk the
Speaker 2: aisle blind.
Speaker 1: Which was very symbolic, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: We ended up being quite metaphorical.
Speaker 1: Yes, your wedding night. What did you know going into
Speaker 1: it about what was going to happen on your wedding night?
Speaker 2: I knew that we would have sex. I did not
Speaker 2: fully understand what sex was. I knew there would be
Speaker 2: insertion of anatomy and that it would hurt, but that
Speaker 2: it would be romantic and loving and God designed, and
Speaker 2: so it would be okay. That I would be held in,
Speaker 2: caressed and cared for. We had a book by ed Wheat.
Speaker 2: It was called intended for pleasure. And then also like
Speaker 2: this is what they tell young fiances. We had been
Speaker 2: in an engaged class and had premarital counseling through the church,
Speaker 2: and so there was no real sex education or instruction
Speaker 2: or transparency. But they did, you know, set us up.
Speaker 2: We also read Elizabeth Elliott's Passion and Purity, which talks
Speaker 2: a lot about remaining pure until your wedding night so
Speaker 2: that you can give yourself as a spotless woman to
Speaker 2: your husband and you will be rewarded with great pleasure
Speaker 2: and married passion, and it will be beautiful and procreative
Speaker 2: and song of solemn and love of joy. That's a
Speaker 2: book in the Bible that talks about sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1: Sounds awesome. Is that how it went down.
Speaker 2: That's not how it went down. What actually happened is
Speaker 2: that I had three sexual assaults on my wedding night
Speaker 2: and no language to describe that or a way to
Speaker 2: ask for help or explain. And a week later I
Speaker 2: ended up with a raging infection and a doctor who
Speaker 2: shed light on the fact that there had been battery
Speaker 2: involved and violence. But I really did not understand what
Speaker 2: happened on my wedding night until a good fourteen years
Speaker 2: later when I was finally given language for marital rape
Speaker 2: and what consent means.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry that that happened to you. It's shocking,
Speaker 1: and when you talk about it in the book, it
Speaker 1: is so shocking. I don't want to make you relive it.
Speaker 1: But was there a part of you that thought, oh,
Speaker 1: this doesn't seem right. It sounds like maybe there there
Speaker 1: was no consent because you you his property as well.
Speaker 1: Consent wasn't something you even knew about, was it not?
Speaker 2: At all? That is not a word I knew until
Speaker 2: I was out of this marriage. Part of that is
Speaker 2: just culturally, we didn't have very much of a conversation
Speaker 2: around consent. The therapeutic language that we have available to
Speaker 2: us today has evolved because survivors and because of researchers
Speaker 2: and therapists. At this point, we're in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: In the story, I did not have that.
Speaker 1: What does the term quiverful mean? Oh?
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is based on a verse in the Bible.
Speaker 2: It's relating children to weapons, and if you're going into war,
Speaker 2: you want lots of weapons. So the verse says weapons
Speaker 2: in the hand of a warrior are children unto the Lord,
Speaker 2: happy is the man that has his quiver full of them?
Speaker 2: And so that is metaphor that child is an arrow,
Speaker 2: and you want a quiver full of arrows for your
Speaker 2: culture war against the West and against secularism and democracy,
Speaker 2: everything that the Christian nationalists and the dominionists are against
Speaker 2: in the Bible. Of course, this was the Psalm, so
Speaker 2: there was an actual war that they were talking about
Speaker 2: with the weaponry that they had available in Bible times.
Speaker 2: The quiverful mindset in the evangelical movement was promoted through
Speaker 2: Bill Gothard's institute. He did not author that. It's just
Speaker 2: what they latched onto because dominionism is their underlying theology.
Speaker 2: They want to dominate the world's government through population, so
Speaker 2: they want to have as many babies as possible without.
Speaker 1: Stop, which was turned into such a kind of a funny,
Speaker 1: quirky joke on fifteen in Counting or sixteen on counting
Speaker 1: with great doggers. But from what you say, there's something
Speaker 1: a lot more insidious about it. It's literally repopulating the
Speaker 1: world with a particular type of fundamental religious belief.
Speaker 2: They want white Christian babies, They want to dominate elections
Speaker 2: and population with an ideology that is not pro democracy.
Speaker 2: It is not equality or freedom. It ejected five's children
Speaker 2: because it reduces them to a number. And there's a
Speaker 2: host of lifestyle accommodations that come with that kind of
Speaker 2: backwardness that modern society would ordinarily reject.
Speaker 1: You were careful to say in your book that your
Speaker 1: world was not fringe. It was very mainstream, and that's
Speaker 1: how it thrives. Can you tell me more about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the Duggers again are going to serve as
Speaker 2: a really good example. This is a lifestyle. When we
Speaker 2: talk about it, the tendency is to say that it
Speaker 2: was fringe and extreme, except TLC put it on TV
Speaker 2: and it had many years of seasons and lots of
Speaker 2: money and millions of viewers. They promote themselves as a
Speaker 2: innocence and a wholesome aesthetic. That's very appealing and attractive
Speaker 2: because who doesn't love rows and rows of beautiful, obedient
Speaker 2: children and sweet babies. And the women involved want motherhood.
Speaker 2: I always say fundamentalism exploits the thing you wanted for yourself.
Speaker 2: I wanted motherhood. The mothers I knew all wanted motherhood.
Speaker 2: And it's the very vehicle that they are reduced by
Speaker 2: until sometimes the point of death.
Speaker 1: You say sometimes until the point of death. Do you
Speaker 1: mean that they are encouraged to keep having pregnancies, Because
Speaker 1: I thought this for a long time actually about Michelle Duggerh.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it's not safe. She'd had cesareans, she'd had complications,
Speaker 1: she was still trying to get pregnant and pregnant and
Speaker 1: have more and more and more babies. Are women really
Speaker 1: just seen as baby factories? Essentially, is that the role
Speaker 1: of women within this system.
Speaker 2: Women are seen as breeding cows, and they're interchangeable, and
Speaker 2: they die from things like ongoing uterine issues, prolapsed uteruses,
Speaker 2: early cancer diagnosis, exhaustion, depression, lack of resources, and then
Speaker 2: they're replaced with a younger model who will continue having babies.
Speaker 2: That happened again and again. We would see a mother
Speaker 2: die in her thirties early forties from essentially exhaustion related causes,
Speaker 2: and then replaced it with a younger a younger woman,
Speaker 2: and she'd continue having babies for that man.
Speaker 1: It's interesting what you say about also, so you've written
Speaker 1: about how the wives have to talk in a very
Speaker 1: quiet voice. I mean anyone who's heard Michelle Dugger and
Speaker 1: watch that TV show. It is so unthreatening and soft,
Speaker 1: and you write it's on purpose, like the trained childlike voice.
Speaker 1: Fundy women. Fundamentalist women are trained to adore their men
Speaker 1: by offering their rapt attention, even if he's an idiot,
Speaker 1: even if he's not saying much at all, even if
Speaker 1: you have an intelligent point to make. He's your head,
Speaker 1: he's a conduit of Jesus. He's amazing, and of course
Speaker 1: you're also his consumable resource. So don't be surprised if
Speaker 1: he's up in your business, undresses you with his eyes,
Speaker 1: wants to devour you, invades your space. Is that what
Speaker 1: your life was like? How did that play out well?
Speaker 2: In my case? I don't know if we can say
Speaker 2: fortunate or not. My husband really hated physical contact and sex,
Speaker 2: so in my particular case, he was not in my
Speaker 2: business very often. And it's a miracle that I had
Speaker 2: the number of pregnancies that.
Speaker 1: I had, because when you say in your to be clear,
Speaker 1: you mean sexual assault and rape by husbands of their wives.
Speaker 2: Right. I feel entitled to women's bodies, and they're raised
Speaker 2: from childhood to believe that. Most cases most of the
Speaker 2: survivors I talked to, frequent assault is just the norm,
Speaker 2: and they don't know any different, and they don't even
Speaker 2: know to call it that. Again, not vocabulary available to us.
Speaker 2: It would never dawn on us to say no, because
Speaker 2: we haven't been able to say no about anything else,
Speaker 2: and they've never heard something like if you can't say no,
Speaker 2: then you're not free to say yes. It's just they
Speaker 2: got married. Their marriage was consent, period. That's the world.
Speaker 1: Did you ever step out of line? Did you raise
Speaker 1: your voice talk to him in a way that wasn't
Speaker 1: adoring and approving? Because these women are also humans, So
Speaker 1: did that ever happen to you?
Speaker 2: This is part of my self preservation. Yes, it happened
Speaker 2: to me. My parents actually, you know, they're just they
Speaker 2: just took us to church. They weren't high control people themselves.
Speaker 2: I was a spirited child. I was raised to run
Speaker 2: an play and explore and do things like that, so
Speaker 2: being married to this did not come naturally to me.
Speaker 2: I was constantly at war with my expression, and I
Speaker 2: was also getting in trouble for things that weren't really wrong.
Speaker 2: So I was always trying to suss out where the
Speaker 2: line was what is small enough for you, because sometimes
Speaker 2: just my breathing could make him angry, or an expression
Speaker 2: and opinion at the table. You know, you're not supposed
Speaker 2: to have an opinion. But I'm somebody who is a lot.
Speaker 2: I am a lot of person. I am a lot
Speaker 2: of expression, and I have ideas and dreams and thoughts
Speaker 2: and opinions. And I was also the more mentally capable
Speaker 2: parent for my children. So a lot of times I
Speaker 2: didn't agree with what was going on, and I would
Speaker 2: push back for their sake, to be protective, and that
Speaker 2: usually would get me in some serious trouble in consequences.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I think that was descriptive of most of
Speaker 2: my years with him, that there's a stance happening between us.
Speaker 1: How so, enough to your wedding night, did you have
Speaker 1: your first child?
Speaker 2: I had a miss carriage three months after our wedding,
Speaker 2: and then I had my first baby. I was pregnant
Speaker 2: three months after that, six months after the wedding, so
Speaker 2: he was born the next year.
Speaker 1: How did having a baby and becoming a mother, which
Speaker 1: was clearly your job description and your purpose, how did
Speaker 1: that change the dynamic within your family and how did
Speaker 1: it change your life.
Speaker 2: It was also my dream. And so again I split
Speaker 2: in this way because I loved being a mom and
Speaker 2: I loved having my babies, and I wanted every single
Speaker 2: one of them, and it was always attention within me
Speaker 2: because I just because I wanted them doesn't mean I
Speaker 2: wanted one a year. I wanted to give my body
Speaker 2: a break. I wanted to give us, as a newlywged
Speaker 2: couple that was struggling some time in space to find
Speaker 2: our feet. I thought I had sound arguments for using contraception,
Speaker 2: and I did use contraception on the sly, even though
Speaker 2: I was heavily trained not too I was really trying
Speaker 2: for our health to not do that. And it also
Speaker 2: just really up to the stakes because now there's a
Speaker 2: child involved, and then children involved, and it's not just
Speaker 2: me anymore that's going to pay the consequences. And I
Speaker 2: so badly wanted to give my children a happy childhood
Speaker 2: in a secure home. So it just made me dig
Speaker 2: in harder. You know. It didn't have any way out,
Speaker 2: so there was not a lot of time spent dreaming
Speaker 2: of escape. I dreamt of salvation. I wanted someone to
Speaker 2: come save me and make it better. But I didn't
Speaker 2: dream of escaping because divorce is absolutely forbidden. They would
Speaker 2: probably rather you commit suicide than divorce, but of course
Speaker 2: they don't say that, but in general, if you die,
Speaker 2: it's a little bit nicer than if you get a
Speaker 2: divorce in that circle, so I didn't want to do either.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to die and I didn't have access
Speaker 2: to a divorce.
Speaker 1: Because women in the church were so consumed and are
Speaker 1: the ones that are still there of course looking after
Speaker 1: you know, up to a dozen children, sometimes more, but
Speaker 1: many children very close together, which puts an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of pressure. And often these women are very very young
Speaker 1: when they become mothers. What the church and the IBL
Speaker 1: pay tell you about motherhood and parenting. There was a
Speaker 1: list of things that you could skip. Wasn't there? How
Speaker 1: did that work? And what was on that list?
Speaker 2: So in my work today, I have a list. I
Speaker 2: started compiling that list, and I call the series things
Speaker 2: my Gothared fundamentors said I could skip to have a
Speaker 2: quiver full, because there was a whole long list of
Speaker 2: ordinary things that I took for granted that were part
Speaker 2: of child rearing that they just didn't do so that
Speaker 2: they could have more babies. If you did that thing,
Speaker 2: and it interfered with your decision to have more children.
Speaker 2: Then you stopped doing that thing.
Speaker 1: Can you read that list to me?
Speaker 2: These were forbidden? And I just warn you the list
Speaker 2: is jow dropping well, child visits and pediatricians, academics, haircuts, shopping,
Speaker 2: play dates, socialization, extended family gatherings, birth control, rest, mom friends,
Speaker 2: a second income, the entire concept of being a teenager, toys, snacks,
Speaker 2: education for girls, gynecological visits, consent, sleepless nights, privacy, the dentists,
Speaker 2: separate bedrooms, baby food, pants, voting, therapy, art, and debt.
Speaker 1: What do all of those things have in common?
Speaker 2: Oh, they have many things in common. One of the
Speaker 2: largest is mandatory reporters.
Speaker 1: So to keep you away from anyone who could alert
Speaker 1: authorities to what was going.
Speaker 2: On exactly, agency and ideas that you might have options.
Speaker 2: That's a big piece of the why you would not
Speaker 2: have academics in your homeschool. We weren't allowed to go
Speaker 2: to library. We weren't allowed to educate our daughters, you know,
Speaker 2: because why do they need college. They're going to be
Speaker 2: just wifes and mothers. So their education really stops around
Speaker 2: sixth seventh grade. And then they become just little mothers
Speaker 2: paramothers to prepare to be a wife and mother, and
Speaker 2: then there's skilled at being keepers of the home. We
Speaker 2: don't want our daughters knowing consent. We don't want our
Speaker 2: boys to feel like they need to ask for consent.
Speaker 2: The lists all has a very subtle sales process. I
Speaker 2: was like, shouldn't I take my child to the pediatrician?
Speaker 2: I should get them they're vaccines. No, you don't need
Speaker 2: to do vaccines, and you don't need to do well
Speaker 2: child visits because the pediatrician will pressure you to use
Speaker 2: western medicine, and we don't use that. We don't use doctors.
Speaker 1: You don't use doctors.
Speaker 2: Only in case of emergency.
Speaker 3: After the shortbreak, how one of the greatest losses of
Speaker 3: Tea's life was also her greatest gift and ultimately the
Speaker 3: cay to her freedom.
Speaker 1: You had four children very quickly. You actually had five
Speaker 1: children very quickly, but one of your daughter's, Clara I,
Speaker 1: died at nine and a half weeks old. Yes, I'm
Speaker 1: so sorry for the loss of Clara. That must have
Speaker 1: been impossibly difficult. How did that thrust you into the
Speaker 1: world outside the church, just because of hospitals and doctors.
Speaker 1: She was born with a heart condition, wasn't.
Speaker 2: She yes, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which is where just
Speaker 2: half of the heart develops. After she was born, we
Speaker 2: traveled out of state to have surgery, and so I
Speaker 2: was immediately immersed into a world where women could be doctors,
Speaker 2: women had jobs, women used childcare. I was alone and
Speaker 2: apart from my husband, I was apart from my babies
Speaker 2: and my mentors. We were in a completely different environment
Speaker 2: and believed that we were on the way to wellness.
Speaker 2: You know. It was definitely with that mindset that we
Speaker 2: were going to get better and go home. And I
Speaker 2: include her story in the book the way that I
Speaker 2: do because the entire experience of Clara absolutely broke me open.
Speaker 2: It broke the spell of mind control. I had never
Speaker 2: lost anyone before I lost my daughter, so it was
Speaker 2: just jarring and shocking all by itself, all for the
Speaker 2: reasons that anyone can imagine and when you lose a child.
Speaker 2: But the experience was so complex and it was impossible
Speaker 2: to box myself back up after I could not be
Speaker 2: the person I had been, and there was a great
Speaker 2: demand on me to become that again. When I got
Speaker 2: back home. There was so much pressure on me to
Speaker 2: not grieve too long, you know, don't make people uncomfortable
Speaker 2: with your grief. Get back to business quickly, have another child,
Speaker 2: give God all the glory. And I just couldn't box
Speaker 2: myself into that anymore, as she made that impossible.
Speaker 1: And there was no therapy. No in that list that
Speaker 1: you recited, mom, friends, you couldn't even talk to other women.
Speaker 2: No, And if I did, the only women I would
Speaker 2: have been speaking to were my mentors, who would have
Speaker 2: been schooling me to more practical activity and husband obedience.
Speaker 2: Like there's no compassion, empathy, friendship to.
Speaker 1: Her, it's the Handmte's tie.
Speaker 2: Well, I call my story the prequel, the real life
Speaker 2: prequel to the Handmaid's Tale. And it's important to note
Speaker 2: that Atwood used real Christian fundamentalist groups as her model,
Speaker 2: like she didn't make that up. Everything in her books
Speaker 2: already happened.
Speaker 1: What did the church teach you about discipline and obedience,
Speaker 1: both of your children and of yourself high control?
Speaker 2: It has to have a method. So one of the
Speaker 2: things that's true in patriarchy is it's very fear based,
Speaker 2: and they're terrified like these fundamentalists are not evil, crazy
Speaker 2: people that want something different than the rest of us.
Speaker 2: They are just like you and me, and they want
Speaker 2: comforting answers, they want reassuring binaries, they want organization in
Speaker 2: times of chaos, and they want happy families and successful children.
Speaker 2: And so they're convinced that if there aren't this high
Speaker 2: control model, their children will go bad, and that they
Speaker 2: will lose them into a lake of fire. The stakes
Speaker 2: couldn't be higher, because it's an eternity in hell. And
Speaker 2: so all of that convinces parents to do whatever their
Speaker 2: authority tells them they need to do. And there's no
Speaker 2: shortage in patriarchy of resources encouraging parents to treat their
Speaker 2: strong willed child, you know, with a rod of correction.
Speaker 2: This environment that I was in and that is just
Speaker 2: so alive and well today. One teacher really does lead
Speaker 2: to another, and one book leads to another, and so
Speaker 2: the ideas in one book will build off of that
Speaker 2: and take you to the next level of extremity. And
Speaker 2: while everyone may not achieve that far and extreme where
Speaker 2: in my story it includes disciplining wives as if their
Speaker 2: children and wife's banking and maybe not everyone experiences that
Speaker 2: A lot of them experience a lot of harsh corporal
Speaker 2: punishment of children and on the very beginning of the
Speaker 2: spectrum babies because Michael Pearl's books talk about switching through
Speaker 2: blanket training, which begins at four months old.
Speaker 1: What's blanket training? Can you explain what blanket training is?
Speaker 2: Yes, Blanket training is a behavior modification practice that begins
Speaker 2: in infancy. So as soon as the baby starts to move,
Speaker 2: put them on a blanket, and every time they try
Speaker 2: to crawl off of the blanket through a normal child
Speaker 2: development of exploration, you stop them and swat them and
Speaker 2: tell them no.
Speaker 1: When you say swat, does that mean hit?
Speaker 2: Yes, you hit them with any kind of switch approved switch.
Speaker 2: So they recommend it a twig, a stick, a twig,
Speaker 2: a piece of plumbing, PVC plumbing, pipe, glue sticks, flexible
Speaker 2: craft glue sticks. There's a number of implements they recommend.
Speaker 2: But you start as a baby and you teach that
Speaker 2: baby to not move unless you've.
Speaker 1: Given it permission. My god, it's barbaric. It sounds illegal.
Speaker 1: Is it not illegal?
Speaker 2: It should be, Oh, it should be. In America, spanking
Speaker 2: children is legal and children have died from it, but
Speaker 2: they are still publishing, and they are still practicing. And
Speaker 2: this movement fights very hard in court to protect parent
Speaker 2: rights over children's rights. So in the Christian page rich
Speaker 2: children have no rights. Neither do women, and so that's
Speaker 2: not the mindset they're operating from.
Speaker 1: You mentioned wife spanking. Did that actually happen to you?
Speaker 2: It did. It's a practice called Christian domestic discipline. I
Speaker 2: said in Chiny Happy people like a careful read of
Speaker 2: these books on discipline, Michael Pearls to train up a child,
Speaker 2: being an example of many. They don't have an age
Speaker 2: limit on when you should stop spanking your child. So
Speaker 2: if you listen to survivors of these movements, you will
Speaker 2: hear older daughters spanked by their fathers into their young adulthood,
Speaker 2: and you will hear wives who have been spanked. It
Speaker 2: is tied up in the theology that tells a man
Speaker 2: that he's responsible for everything that happens in his home
Speaker 2: and he's answerable to God for all of the behavior.
Speaker 2: And so that's how it's sold that you need to
Speaker 2: hold her accountable and train her because her choices are
Speaker 2: going to reflect on you on judgment day.
Speaker 1: Women can't vote, can they? They're not allowed to vote.
Speaker 2: It's not as clean cut as that. I was not
Speaker 2: allowed to vote, and they don't prefer women to vote,
Speaker 2: but they will utilize the female vote if the popular
Speaker 2: numbers are close, and in American elections lately they've been
Speaker 2: very close, and so women are allowed to vote, but
Speaker 2: they're expected to vote in compliance with their head of household.
Speaker 1: So that husband tells them who to vote for. Yes,
Speaker 1: you mentioned how Clara then losing her cracked you open.
Speaker 1: Was there a definitive moment when you decided that enough
Speaker 1: was enough?
Speaker 2: It took me seven more years to reach that point.
Speaker 2: I really came home from the hospital with this endeavor
Speaker 2: to be the best Christian wife and mother I could be.
Speaker 2: I felt emboldened in my faith. I felt empowered by christ.
Speaker 2: I felt like I'd seen an example of strength and
Speaker 2: power and that I could color inside the lines, so
Speaker 2: to speak. And that really did work to a point.
Speaker 2: I had two more children after Clara, and four more pregnancies.
Speaker 2: It was life, you know. I did not realize that
Speaker 2: there was not an entertaining again of getting out. It's
Speaker 2: till depth of you part, even if it's at his hands,
Speaker 2: And it did come down to that. I think one
Speaker 2: of the traits that I have as a Christian girl
Speaker 2: groomed to people please and fawn. I tend to stay
Speaker 2: in environments longer than I should. I can see the
Speaker 2: writing on the wall, and then I lack the courage
Speaker 2: to save myself and take myself out of that. It's
Speaker 2: a life discipline I'm working on, and this is the
Speaker 2: biggest example of it. I had to get to a
Speaker 2: place where he was about to kill us. I had
Speaker 2: to realize I was grooming the next generation of abusers
Speaker 2: in order to put my foot down and say enough
Speaker 2: is enough. And then when you try to leave an
Speaker 2: abusive person, it becomes much more dangerous and violent, and
Speaker 2: that's what happened. Then violence escalated.
Speaker 1: You wrote in the book that as you began to
Speaker 1: find your power, your husband reacted very badly, and you
Speaker 1: wrote balance was a delusion. As I became more independent
Speaker 1: and healthy, high control, religion and domestic abuse tightened their grip,
Speaker 1: my husband became more erratic and dangerous. You know. October
Speaker 1: of two thousand and seven, things came to a violent
Speaker 1: head and I narrowly escaped with my children in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night. What happened on that night if
Speaker 1: it's not too distressing to recount.
Speaker 2: Sure, I'm going to give you like the high level version.
Speaker 2: I knew that I had to leave, and I had
Speaker 2: been making arrangements to leave the next day with my
Speaker 2: children while he was at work. We had gone trick
Speaker 2: or treating, which was the first time our children had
Speaker 2: participated in Halloween and was part of a kind of
Speaker 2: new progressive community that we were in, and I felt
Speaker 2: like excited that they could do that, you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't want to take that from them prematurely. So we
Speaker 2: had gone trigger treating, and after we got home, he
Speaker 2: had some sort of psychotic break. I really don't have
Speaker 2: good language for what happened with the inside of him,
Speaker 2: other than that he snapped. He held me hostage for
Speaker 2: four hours with the length of firewood, threatening to kill
Speaker 2: me and kill the children. And then he suddenly left,
Speaker 2: and I heard a voice in my head, in my mind,
Speaker 2: my heart that said run. So I packed us up,
Speaker 2: grabbed the laundry and the children and my laptop, and
Speaker 2: I left. And he had gone to his office to
Speaker 2: get his gun. So if I had stayed, we wouldn't
Speaker 2: be having this conversation right now. We drove away.
Speaker 1: Oh my God, how old were your children.
Speaker 2: Then ten and down ten to two and a half.
Speaker 1: How old were you thirty three? And you mentioned grabbing
Speaker 1: your laptop. There was a group of an online group
Speaker 1: of women who became your lifeline and really showed you
Speaker 1: the door and the possibility that there was a way out.
Speaker 1: How did you come upon them and how did they
Speaker 1: play a role before that night happened?
Speaker 2: Way back, we go back into the timeline to when
Speaker 2: Clara died. Just after that, my oldest was old enough
Speaker 2: for homeschooling, and I had stumbled on the homeschooling forums
Speaker 2: that had just formed. The Internet was brand new, you know,
Speaker 2: we were all pioneers in this new technology. I had
Speaker 2: a way to connect the outside world from home. And
Speaker 2: it is a big, big through line of how I
Speaker 2: survived this mentally, how I educated myself and the connections
Speaker 2: that I made that were outside of the religious groups
Speaker 2: that we were in. And they were other Christian women
Speaker 2: going through very similar dynamics with different expressions. Like none
Speaker 2: of them were like in as much high control as
Speaker 2: I was, but they had toxicity in their marriages, and
Speaker 2: they had family dynamics where we could relate to one
Speaker 2: another and talk in a real way about what the
Speaker 2: kinds of things we were facing. And I had also
Speaker 2: started a business by the time I left, a blogging business,
Speaker 2: and I had a successful website at that time. So
Speaker 2: I grabbed my laptop because I knew my livelihood was
Speaker 2: in it in all of my contacts, and those women
Speaker 2: helped me hide. They sheltered me and took me in.
Speaker 2: And I do believe I know that we're seeing this again.
Speaker 2: There's underground railroads forming of women connected to women, helping
Speaker 2: one another out of dangerous situations, and in America, you know,
Speaker 2: helping women get abortions, helping women find health care and
Speaker 2: resources and get out of domestic violence. So they saved
Speaker 2: my life, they really did, and they kept my children's
Speaker 2: world somewhat balanced during that time.
Speaker 1: Was there a moment where you thought, Okay, I've done it,
Speaker 1: I've left and I can't return to that life.
Speaker 2: It was that night. Yeah, that was done. It was
Speaker 2: a complete severance.
Speaker 1: And what happened after that? What was the next twelve
Speaker 1: months like for you and your kids?
Speaker 2: We had to go into hiding. We started divorce proceedings,
Speaker 2: which had to be separated from the custody proceedings because
Speaker 2: those required forensic investigations. The violence continued, and it was
Speaker 2: about a ten year process of all of that. You
Speaker 2: don't get divorced cleanly from someone like that and easily.
Speaker 2: But I was also going through trauma therapy through those
Speaker 2: years and putting my life back together. I mean, I
Speaker 2: really did set to healing, raising my kids, securing my employment,
Speaker 2: getting on my feet, and I had it in this
Speaker 2: context that this bad marriage happened to us. It wasn't
Speaker 2: till years later in therapy when I had to start
Speaker 2: reversing my decision making process and exploring what made me
Speaker 2: make those choices in the first place, what made me
Speaker 2: go along and comply, And that's what led me to
Speaker 2: the religious trauma and understanding the grooming and conditioning I'd
Speaker 2: been part of as a younger woman.
Speaker 1: How do you unbrainwash yourself, because essentially you've been brainwashed
Speaker 1: since the age of ten about even how you think.
Speaker 1: One of the things that struck me so much in
Speaker 1: your book, you told me, You told me, you wrote
Speaker 1: that you couldn't even write a journal because you didn't
Speaker 1: even have any privacy of thought. You were worried that
Speaker 1: God would see it, or that your husband might find it.
Speaker 1: Because you had no right to say no, I don't
Speaker 1: want you to read this. How do you undo that?
Speaker 2: It's a mixture of big BINGI growth spurts, and then
Speaker 2: a lot of careful day to day retraining rediscovery. I
Speaker 2: prefer like to emphasize curiosity and question asking and meditation.
Speaker 2: I have come up with my own steps of recovery
Speaker 2: and my own process of and I've had breakthroughs along
Speaker 2: the way that I'm writing about now. But there were
Speaker 2: also giant moments, like when Clara died. That was a
Speaker 2: giant moment where a lot of the spell was broken
Speaker 2: in my mind and I was curious and wanted to learn.
Speaker 2: And then there were harder times where I have deeply
Speaker 2: embedded patterns of fawning and people pleasing and cooperation, and
Speaker 2: I have to really work on situation by situation and
Speaker 2: carefully with a therapist. So it's a little mixture of both.
Speaker 2: But I did not accept that. I wouldn't heal like
Speaker 2: I want that from my life.
Speaker 1: Well, this is not the end to your story, not
Speaker 1: by a long shot, because it takes a lot more
Speaker 1: than leaving a marriage to leave a cult. How do
Speaker 1: you unbrainwash yourself? How do you trust again, find love again,
Speaker 1: and learn how to be a grown woman in a
Speaker 1: world that you'd been kept apart from for so long.
Speaker 1: And what is ta you think about tradwives like Hannah
Speaker 1: Nielman in Ballerina Farm who are trying to sell this
Speaker 1: life to a whole new generation of women. There's so
Speaker 1: much more of this incredible conversation, more than we could
Speaker 1: share in one episode here. So if you're not already
Speaker 1: a Mum of Me a subscriber, let this be the
Speaker 1: episode that makes you one. I'll put a link in
Speaker 1: the show notes and I'll see you in Part two.