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Today it hit me when he hit me, blood shaking in my brain. Maybe there wasn't a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.

Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles--a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, keepers of the home.

Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn't risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be in the world, not of it. So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.

Indoctrinated from early childhood in Christian patriarchy to obey, conform, and want what others wanted for her, Tia Levings learned love and acceptance meant being someone other than herself. After years of marital and religious abuse, she escaped with her children (a story told in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife) and thought the worst was behind her.

But that was just the beginning.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year path to psychological health. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman able to tell her hard story without retraumatizing herself, a woman able to reach a hand back to help others claim what's theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn't get your present and future too.

Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources built around a multi-step model, Tia Levings will guide you through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind, soul, and body after religious trauma --so that you can too.