A Well-Trained Wife Quotes

“Years later, on Instagram, I’d read a meme that read, “Why were we taught to fear the witches instead of the men who burned them?” And who were witches, anyway, but women with knowledge, skills, and names?”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“When we are not free to say no, we are not free to say yes either.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“That’s People-Pleasing 101,” she said. “If you’re only saying yes so they’ll like you then you’re abandoning yourself and operating from a place of shame and extremely low self-worth.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Why were we taught to fear the witches instead of the men who burned them?” And who were witches, anyway, but women with knowledge, skills, and names?”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“When your cup runneth over, sometimes it’s not with blessing. Sometimes your cup’s full of crap.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“When Donald Trump ran for president and talked about grabbing women by the pussy, and then was lauded by Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and called a man of God, and all the Christians of my youth on Facebook applauded him and voted for him, I knew my problem wasn’t with spirituality or the divine. It was with the systems and personalities who’d sought to gain control and power in Jesus’s name, amen.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Maybe there wasn’t a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I’d met God in the trees, not at church.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“The Christians we knew were angry about the burkas we saw on the news. It was un-Christian, they said, to force women to be invisible and uniform. But I silently laughed at that. American Christians had burkas too. I wore one. The denim jumper was the American burka.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“And it wasn’t fair to my children that their mother had to heal and put herself back together in the same time span that they grew up.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Remembering that IBLP homeschool groups want to run our country the way they run their homes, I suddenly realized why it mattered so much that I talk about what it’s like in those households. I could tell the public what it’s really like. No female vote. No consent. No contraception. No choice. No careers. Courtship marriages. Stay-at-home daughters and parentified older siblings. Closets. Suppression. Book bans. Harsh discipline. Rigid roles. High control. Shame. As bad as it would be for women, it would be worse for anyone gay. Worse for anyone of color. Bad for anyone except a straight white patriarch … and I knew from experience it wasn’t really good or healthy for them either. We all deserve better.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I was doing what I’d spent my life doing: conforming to someone else’s vision so they’d keep me. No one will love you unless you obey their rules.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I stand up for myself. Not a Christian princess waiting for rescue. Not a co-dependent woman attempting to control someone else. A grown-ass adult who’d become her own advocate.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I tucked the lesson away, into a mental folder I kept inside myself for things I needed to know. Church made Mom happy. Mom happy made Dad happy. Parents happy made Monica happy. The power to make them all happy was mine, and I could wield it by swallowing it down and cooperating. Smiling children who got in line made parents, and God, happy.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“what did He think about women? If all we were to do was cook, clean, and have babies, why did He go through the bother of making us smart and capable of doing so much? Why did we have names? Why couldn’t I turn off my thoughts and ideas?”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“In therapy I fretted I didn’t know how to choose my own partner, folding and refolding my hands as I worked it out. Holding boundaries, so different from setting them, was unfamiliar and I could be easily talked out of an opinion or preference in order to support harmony, or his older wisdom, or male logic. As someone who loved spreadsheets and organization, he also loved systems and rules of convention. I tucked away some of my bold ideas of what freedom looked like and rested in the illusion of safety that came from this is how it’s done. Insecure, I taught my kids to go along with what he wanted, a fawning people-pleaser yet uncured.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“And staying meant raising sons who hit women. Staying meant raising a daughter who stayed with the man who hit her.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Purity culture hadn't prepared me for healthy sexuality. Keeping sweet hadn't equipped me to speak up about abuse. Waiting for touch to happen all at once hadn't allowed my nervous system to acclimate to intimacy. Doctors weren't evil agents of a New World Order. Scaring me with hell hadn't led to loving Jesus. Cutting off gay friends didn't make them straight. What else was wrong? Every day I found new things, old beliefs to pick apart and sort through.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“The point of Christianity is propagation toward the end goal of taking dominion. Men do it with propulsion. Women do it through servitude.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I will not accuse my husband of domestic violence due to Christian discipline.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Complicity is a choice.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I can tell you it’s profoundly difficult to both reckon with the past and live in the present at the same time. And it wasn’t fair to my children that their mother had to heal and put herself back together in the same time span that they grew up.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. Clearly,”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I learned to adapt, navigate, and survive. I’m thankful for my resilience.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“The mighty were falling, but with fundamentalist leadership rising in Congress, were they falling fast enough? The thoughts that kept me kicking my sheets at night centered on what I knew deep in my soul: the fundies want to run the country the way they run their homes. What I knew about that world was more valuable than useless trivia. It was insight. What if life in America became what I’d lived as a fundamentalist wife? Was I willing to just stay silent about what I saw? What I lived? Because even though many men were held accountable, we still had a raging narcissist in the White House”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“I didn’t have the GPA for scholarships. My parents didn’t have the money for tuition. SCAD was expensive and when I asked for a miracle in Sunday School, my teacher said, “Sometimes God tells us no by shutting all the doors.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“But isn’t it mean to tell someone no?” I asked my sponsor. “I hate disappointing them.” “That’s People-Pleasing 101,” she said. “If you’re only saying yes so they’ll like you then you’re abandoning yourself and operating from a place of shame and extremely low self-worth.” My stomach clenched. Saying the right thing to be liked and wanted ranked among my earliest memories. The right thing was whatever the listener wanted to hear. What I wanted didn’t factor into it.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Authoritarian, high-control religion doesn’t allow for both/ and. Everything is either/or. Same thing with high-control politics. Having health and balance, then, means being able to hold both. And to do that, one has to be open, willing, curious, kind.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“As bad as it would be for women, it would be worse for anyone gay. Worse for anyone of color. Bad for anyone except a straight white patriarch … and I knew from experience it wasn’t really good or healthy for them either. We all deserve better.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Maybe I was wrong about wanting to blend in and belong. Maybe being the heroine of my own fucking story was better.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy