About The Podcast
Tia and Laura met on social media in 2020 and developed a friendship–yes, even in real life!--and spent hours a day swapping voice messages, texts, and videos about all things fundamentalist cultures, deconstruction, religious trauma, and healing. Their conversations eventually became deeper, more personal as they processed the specific impact of these cultures on them, their relationships, and how they saw the world.
Knowing that they were not the only ones asking the questions they were asking and having the conversations they were engaging with, Tia and Laura decided to invite you into their virtual living room to join their conversation.
Come along as Tia and Laura discuss fundamentalism, healing, what they wish they would have known when they were younger, review books, discuss their own recovery, check in on the enemy (ya know, all those loud religious voices, organizations, and scandals!), and give their non-consensual advice to listener-proposed topics and questions!
Meet the hosts
Laura Anderson
Dr. Laura Anderson is a licensed psychotherapist, trauma resolution coach, author, educator, and speaker from Nashville, TN. She grew up in a high control religion and was a part of a ministry family where she lived on-site at a fundamentalist Christian camp. Post-high school, Laura was hired to work at her church in an assistant role where she finished a bachelor’s degree in Christian Ministry to pass the time while she waited for her future husband to appear. As a teenager in the thick of purity culture, Laura believed that her sole purpose in life was to be a wife and mother but after becoming a spinster at the age of 25 opted to continue pursue her education, eventually becoming a Marriage and Family Therapist.
It was during her time in her master’s degree program that Laura began to feel freedom to ask questions (what we now call deconstruction) and adopt different ways of thinking, believing, acting, and viewing the world. This process eventually led her out of organized religion and into her own process of healing from religious trauma and the impact of high control religion.
In 2016, Laura noticed a mass exodus of individuals from religion due to the political climate in the United States and began educating people in social media spaces about fundamentalism, high control religion, cults, dynamics of power and control, and religious trauma. This led her to co-create the Religious Trauma Institute in 2019 and in 2021 she opened the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery–a fully online trauma coaching company with practitioners who are trauma informed and trained to work with individuals coming out of cults, fundamentalism, and high control religion.
Laura’s book, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High Control Religion comes out in October 2023
Laura’s Links
Website - www.drlauraeanderson.com
Instagram - @drlauraeanderson
TikTok - @drlauraeanderson
Facebook - @drlauraeanderson
Substack - drlauraeanderson.substack.com
Tia Levings
Tia Levings is an author and activist exposing the abuses and dangers of Christian Fundamentalism. Tia grew up in a Southern Baptist megachurch during the 80’s and 90’s, when the evangelical church as a whole was becoming more fundamentalist and political. Groomed by the church to stay pure and marry the man God sent her, Tia understood her sole destiny was to serve as a wife and mother. But when the man God sent turned out to be abusive, erratic, and controlling, she had no way out. Divorce was out of the evangelical equation.
That’s when Tia turned to a group of older women at church who seemed to have family life all figured out. These women were part of Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles, the IBLP, and lived according to the “Quiverfull” mindset that taught women should have as many babies as possible for God. These mentors educated Tia on everything from frugal household management to accepting harsh treatment from the husband she was obligated to submit to—-and life narrowed into a series of strict rules and high control. The IBLP lifestyle was famously shined up for television by the Duggar family on the TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting.
After years of harrowing secrets and the loss of one of her children, Tia finally began to question the isolation, abuse, and restriction of her husband’s theology. Discovering other worldviews, culture, beauty and art helped Tia mentally break free, so that when she had a chance to escape with her children in 2007, she was able to assert herself and run.
It was in trauma therapy that Tia began to trace the roots of her experiences back to the doctrines of her childhood, and started writing and sharing her story. In 2022, when the oldest Duggar son, Josh, faced trial for heinous child SA images, Tia began sharing her insights of life behind closed doors as a Christian Fundamentalist. She knew the way the Christian patriarchy ran their homes is the way they want to run America, making it more important now more than ever for the truth of that reality to be known. Tia produces content that reveals the fundamentalist influence on our culture and headlines today; find her reels on social media and her column, The Anti-Fundamentalist, on Substack.
Tia appeared in Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets on Amazon Prime in 2023. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, comes out August 2024.
Tia’s Links
Website: www.tialevings.com
Instagram: @tialevingswriter
TikTok: @tialevingswriter
Facebook: facebook.com/tialevingswriter
Substack: www.tialevings.substack.com