How I escaped ‘trad wife’ hell: Abuse survivor hopes other victims find her book and run
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There was something frighteningly different about the violent energy that night – the way her husband abruptly left the house, the forces she felt telling her to run – that made Tia Levings finally bundle her four kids into the car and flee a man who hid abuse under the cloak of strict religion.
It was only as she passed her husband’s vehicle, his headlights pointing in the opposite direction – back towards the family home they’d just fled – that she realized he’d left to get the gun stored in his office.
“I was still driving; it was the middle of the night,” Tia tells The Independent, recalling with knife-edge clarity “the adrenaline of knowing that we just narrowly escaped the murder-suicide that I’d always feared.”
It was 2007, and Tia had lived for nearly 15 years in an increasingly fundamental Christian marriage. By the time she worked up the courage to escape, they were living in an unheated, isolated urban homestead in Tennessee – and her controlling spouse was forcing her to obey orders while calling him “my lord.”
Fast-forward a little more than a decade and a half, and Tia, now 50, is telling her story in a bone-chilling book – while simultaneously watching, with great concern, the continued glorification of the “trad-wife” lifestyle on social media and in pop culture.
Content retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trad-wife-escape-abuse-christianity-fundamentalism-b2607861.html.
