Today we’ll talk about one of the most disorienting experiences Christian women in emotionally abusive marriages face: gaslighting.

But we aren’t going to just define what gaslighting is. I’m going to break it down into all the tiny parts and give you some specific stories so you can see exactly what’s going on and WHY.

You’ll learn three specific tactics gaslighters use, why they use them, and what you can do to stay grounded in your own reality when someone is working hard to pull you out of it.

Key Takeaways:

• Why someone can sound completely loving and caring while actually doing something deeply harmful to you
• The hidden reason your concerns keep disappearing from conversations before they ever get resolved
• What a "joke" has to do with control, and why your body's reaction is not a character flaw
• The psychological mechanism you share with a slot machine, and what it's actually costing you
• The one shift that strips a gaslighting tactic of all its power, without you having to win a single argument

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🧐 Are you wondering what is happening inside your own painful and confusing marriage? I wrote a book just for you called Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage. Get a free chapter by going to isitmebook.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife and her newest book, I Belong to Me. She survived a Christian patriarchy cult, escaped a near murder-suicide, was excommunicated for telling her own story, and spent 15 years in intensive trauma therapy doing the work to put herself back together. Now she's handing you the map to healing from religious trauma.

In this episode, Tia and I dig into the real mechanics of religious trauma recovery: why your body refuses to believe you're safe even when your brain knows it, what "aftermath" actually means (it's an agricultural word, and it will change how you see your own devastation), why grief work is not optional, and what agency has to do with the entire trajectory of your healing.

Key Takeaways:

• What does it actually mean to "belong to yourself" after religious trauma has dismantled your sense of identity from the inside out?
• Why trauma survivors often write, speak, and even think about themselves in the passive voice, and what that reveals about the agency that was quietly stolen from them
• What the agricultural origin of the word "aftermath" tells us about why the most painful, raw season of your healing is also the most generative
• Why anger and bitterness after religious trauma aren't signs that something is wrong with you, and what they're actually trying to show you
• How complex PTSD can keep a survivor locked in survival mode for years, making life-altering decisions in a state of ongoing shock without ever realizing it

Get Tia’s books:

A Well Trained Wife

I Belong to Me

Follow Tia everywhere on social media! Her handle is @tialevingswriter

Get Today’s Free Resource:

📒 Take a free Emotional Abuse Assessment by going to emotionalabusequiz.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.

Let’s talk about something called “the subjugation schema.” It's a clinical pattern that secular psychologists are actively trying to help women heal from, and the conservative Christian church has rebranded the exact same wound as godliness, biblical womanhood, and a high calling.

If you've spent your life apologizing for taking up space, smiling when you wanted to scream, or feeling guilty about basic human needs like rest, preferences, and an opinion of your own, this episode is going to feel like someone finally turned the lights on.

Key Takeaways:

• Meet Rachel and Megan: two composite women, two very different engines driving the exact same wound. Find out which one might be running you in the background right now without your permission
• The four specific ways the conservative Christian church installs this pattern in little girls and quietly reinforces it in grown women
• Why "mutual submission," "complementarianism," and "servant leadership" might be the same old subjugation wearing a friendlier nametag
• The story of Sapphira in Acts 5 that quietly dismantles the "always submit to your husband" theology you've been handed
• The one journal question at the end of the episode that might wake up the woman who has been hiding underneath your schema for decades

Get Today’s Free Resource:

🎁 I want to give you a free gift. It’s the audio version of my book, All the Scary Little Gods. It’s a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming. You can listen to it FREE by going to scarylittlegods.com

I will also send you my weekly Hope Letters for Christian women in emotionally and spiritually abusive marriages.