Episode #65: Banned Books: A Well Trained Wife, with Tia Levings, part 2 of 2
Are you interested in writing a memoir? Then this episode is especially for you!
We're excited to have Tia Levings, author of the upcoming book A Well Trained Wife, as our guest for Sexvangelicals this week.
Tia talks with us about:
Hero’s Journey (4:30): Tia starts us off: “It's a way to externalize the trauma so that you're not constantly re-traumatizing yourself every time you tell the story. My character goes through this trauma. It's a very emotional journey, and ultimately it's a character arc and the best novels all have these kinds of journeys. It's called the hero's journey.
Not Exploiting Your Own Story (6:20): Tia describes: “I had a trauma informed memoir coach, that meant there was a lot of talk about self care and there was a lot of talk about not exploiting myself through the story. Every scene had to earn its place in the story, and it was told in a way that is just what happened. It's like a factual, this is what happened. And then I wrote about the emotions that I took from it, the story that I took from it, the wisdom I gained from it, just like we do in our life.”
Babies and Resilience (8:05): Julia says: “Babies get such a bad rap and I think babies have to be the most brave human beings on the entire planet. So to consider, oh, okay I'm actually going to treat myself a little bit like a baby. And to reframe that in such a positive way to me is brilliant.”
Children and Exploitation (11:00): Tia discusses: “This was also very intentional on my part, they (her children) had already been exploited through fundamentalism. That's it from the time they were born. In dominionism and Quiverfull children are born for a purpose. And that's an agenda and they lose their identity and their humanity in that process.”
Nuance in Deconstruction (17:00): Julia states: “We love the nuance that you bring, because so often the world around deconstruction can be overly simplistic when we view things like gender, among many other things, and in fundamentalism, we learn a simplistic, rigid perspective of gender, and I hope that your book can, in the healing process, get us out of those binaries to a more compassionate perspective for all of us.”
Finding Light in the Dark (21:00): Tia shares: “Something that got me through a lot of the suffering in my whole life is if I'm going to have to live through it, I'm going to make something from it. I cannot get the time back. I know that's a loss and I do a lot of work around grief work. I'm going to make something positive of it. Take something and make this worth something in your life, help someone with it.”
Honoring Our Instincts (24:00): Tia says, “One of the things that happens in captivity, is that there's lots of little mistakes you make along the way before the big thing is made. And when you're groomed, there's lots of little introductions that happen before the big betrayal. And we train ourselves to blow past them, to lean not on our own understanding. I read somewhere that we're the only mammal that regularly shuts down our own instinct and denies our own instinct.”
Slowing Down (29:00): Jeremiah shares: “Julia, you and I have had different interactions between the two of us where both of us have practiced slowing down before we respond to each other. I think it's a little jarring for you when I do it. It's a little jarring for me when you relationally move to that space. But also being able to trust yourself and then also in the relationships that are trustworthy in your life, being able to, to kind of practice that together.”
Write the Book (32:00): Tia offers a tip: “If you're wondering if you should write, that right there is your answer. Start. Don't spend any time debating if your story is going to be valuable. Don't spend any time, especially in the beginning, trying to think of what the outcome of it is and that it's got to be marketable in order to be of value. That is a capitalistic, fundamentalist attitude that's been bred into us. The work of the book will benefit you, period.”
The Books of Deconstruction (35:20): Tia discusses the books that helped her deconstruction journey, “It was the key that was missing from so much of my healing efforts. I couldn't understand why I just couldn't get past things, but grieving turned out to be the reason. Another one that I use frequently is No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. It was my intro to internal family systems and the multifaceted mind, which I always thought of myself as.”
We hope this episode is a source of encouragement this week!
Let's heal together!