Building a Writing Career from Trauma with Tia Levings

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00] Welcome to Writing Your Resilience, the podcast for writers who want to write and live the story that sets them free. I’m your host, Lisa Cooper Ellison, a writer, transformational and trauma-informed coach, story alchemist, and fellow traveler on the winding road of healing and creativity. Each week I’ll share tools, practices, and conversations that will help you let go of what no longer serves you as you create stories that change lives, especially your own. Together, we’ll explore how to trust your creative voice, support your mental health and resilience, work with your nervous system and unique design, and stay connected to your deepest calling as a writer, even when life gets messy. It’s time, my friends, to write and live the story that sets you free. I’m honored to walk that journey alongside you, one story and one episode at a time.

Well, hello, Tia. Welcome back to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to talk with you today, and I am so delighted that you’re here.

Tia Levings [0:55] Yay. Happy to see you too.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:04] Well, last time you were here — I’m going to hold up the book that I have that has been published — this had yet to come out when we last talked, and yet it’s out, and you’re preparing for another book to come out, which is actually going to come out on May the fifth. We’re recording this just a few days in advance, but catch us up on what we need to know about you and where you are as you prepare for a second book launch.

Tia Levings [1:30] Yes, this is such a unique conversation, because you helped me develop A Well-Trained Wife before we sold it, and that was everything — the confidence in the journey, the polishing of the work, being really proud of the product that I was presenting, because that’s what happens when you sell a book: it becomes a product. It’s not so much the story anymore. And you had taught me so many skills that I call on every single day, like referring to the person who lived through that memoir as the narrator or paying attention to the word count and the writing craft and the quality — all of these things were such foundational lessons. And we were just talking off-camera about how I was so worried back then that the story wouldn’t be timely. And because of politics today, it is incredibly and increasingly timely. And so that has meant that my foot hasn’t left the gas pedal. Started promoting it in 2021, sold it in 2022, it came out in 2024, and I have just been full steam ahead constantly, which made for a very organic author platform that developed. It’s very harmonious — my marketing work isn’t different than my book work; it’s all the same. And I’ve learned a lot about content creation and platform work. I have a marketing background, so I thought I knew a lot then, but now I really know how to make a sustainable platform and about really hard things and about really current and timely things.

And one of the things that happened when Wife came out was that I started being flooded with DMs of “me too,” and I related to that so much more than I expected to. How did you heal? How did you get through this experience and that experience? How did you learn to name it? And I realized that the recovery from religious trauma — which I had already done; most of you know the back 25% of life is my healing and recovery — but I didn’t go into depth about what that experience was like. And their letters helped me understand that I had kind of blazed a trail at a time when language for this was evolving and the therapeutic modalities were being developed, and my commitment to heal and to be whole again wasn’t common. It was a little bit audacious on my part to even think I could dare to not be broken for life, because that was kind of the thinking in 2007 — that if you were heavily traumatized with the kind of things that I’ve lived through, you would just always be broken and never whole again. And I wasn’t okay with that. I didn’t know how I was going to fix it, but I wasn’t okay with it.

And so that informed my healing journey. And very quickly I realized, oh, the natural follow-up for A Well-Trained Wife is a book on healing and what it’s like to come through specifically as a layperson, and specifically with my kind of voice, which is: I’m coming alongside you. I’m a big sister, I’m a friend, I’m not an academic, I’m not a therapist, I’m not a guru of any kind. I can just tell you, here’s what I did, here’s how it worked out for me, here’s something you might encounter along the way, so that you feel less alone. And that’s what it was like. They bought it right away. I wrote it twice in two years, because the first time I was writing it as I was releasing Wife, which was a really bad idea, and so then I got to do it over again later in the year when I was clear-minded, and that was great. But yeah, it’s been a whirlwind, and also a grounding step into my purpose at the same time.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:42] Yeah, so your life has really exploded in a lot of ways that most writers are hoping will happen. And I have two follow-up questions, so we’ll do them one at a time. The first is, I want to go back to something that you just said, which is: now this book is a product. And what’s interesting in memoir is that now your life is a product. It can feel that way. Yeah, what is it like to know that the story is a product? How has that changed it for you?

Tia Levings [5:07] I don’t think about the story as a product. I think of the tangibility of the published thing, which isn’t always a hardcover book. My book is available in all the formats now, because it has come out in paperback this year, I recorded the audio, it’s been an eBook in Kindle Unlimited — so we have really good sales, and the audiobook outsells the hardcover two to one. The audiobook, by far, has been the most successful format. And that’s what I mean — it’s the same story in each one of those, but it’s the publisher’s end to market it, to position it, to present it. My work was living it, but then also crafting it into the message. So, I feel like there’s this difference, this boundary around what the narrator experienced and learned, what the writer created and presented, and then what sales and marketing gave me to market. I mean, I think I do most of my marketing at this point rather than the publisher, so I don’t want to make it sound like they’re doing all this marketing work for me — they do some; they do some amazing things that I can’t do for myself. But it’s a book with its own life now. It’s out in the world. I’m not in control of it. I can’t take seriously every single response and feedback and review — that’s not my business. My business was to make it, and I did that. My business is to help distribute it and get it to the people who want to read it. And that’s what I do. So, it’s really being clear on what I can do and what I can’t do, what’s mine to touch and what’s not mine, and not being entrenched in all of the outcomes or taking to heart what perfect strangers think about my life. My book is not for everyone. That’s okay. It’s here for the people who it’s here for. And really being at peace with that helps — every day, every day.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:50] How do you keep that peace? Because I read this online all the time — someone has worked so hard on their book, and it’s out in the world, and then either it’s a troll writing something nasty on Goodreads or Amazon just for the sake of doing so, or someone really doesn’t like the book, and they leave a negative review. How do you handle that?

Tia Levings [7:11] Well, first and foremost, I don’t read those. A very wise coach —who I’m speaking with today gave me some indelible advice to have my top ten posse: my most important people who help and support me in my life and in my work and who I trust. And you’re definitely on that list, and it’s a tight list. But one of my people reads my reviews, and they tell me the ones that help. Now, it also does help that A Well-Trained Wife has been enormously and overwhelmingly well received. It is impactful for people — they pour out their hearts when they respond to it, they write me thank-you notes just for sharing it. So, all of that does help. But I know there are negative takes out there too, and I just don’t look at them. That’s fine — it wasn’t for you.

I do appreciate something I learned in this process: the respect that a lot of reviewers have, to not rate or review memoir, because it’s someone’s life experience. It’s not the same thing as rating and reviewing a fiction novel that they conjured — this is someone’s lived experience, and so that’s not the thing that you review. And I learned that through this process, so I was like, oh yeah, that’s very gracious of them, actually.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:17] Yeah, that’s a huge gift. And not everyone realizes the difference or thinks about that when they’re reviewing something. So, I love that you have that boundary. And that nugget of wisdom stuck, because it’s very hard, right? It can be like — do you remember Ren & Stimpy, way back in — I don’t even know — the early 2000s? There was this one episode that I think of. And you know, Ren & Stimpy, like all things, is not for everyone. But they had this one episode — they were up in space — and there was this “destroy the world” button. And it said, “Do not touch. Do not touch.” And then there was this voiceover about the candy-like, beautiful button, the button that your hand just keeps wanting to go towards.

Tia Levings [9:08] That’s important because what that is — at least in this context — is: my ego would love to argue back with people, get defensive, feel protective. But I did the ego work to not have it be part of this process. And that is, again, some of that differentiation between what’s my story, what’s my work, and what’s a product. Really being clear on that helps me keep ego out of it. I don’t need to change their minds or convince them that this was not what they thought.

I’ll give you a really practical example. Some people get very upset that my book doesn’t have any content warnings on it, and it’s a harrowing, violent read. Now, if you’re perceptive and you have media literacy, you can check the reviews and you can see content warnings — you can see other readers’ feedback, this is what was in there. I am very open about spoilers online; I talk about it all the time, and a lot of people, for example, know that there’s an infant death, or animal death, or marital rape in the story. But I’ve seen a few reviews like, “Why didn’t she put a content warning on it?” And I have a reason for that — it was an intentional choice — but I don’t need to argue with somebody who feels like they needed that. They weren’t part of that conversation. I’m happy to answer that question if they want to come to me directly, but I’m not going to hop on Goodreads and have a public argument with strangers on the internet. It’s not happening.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:25] Yeah. I think all you can do is keep your side of the street clean. I was talking with a group of writers about that, and then you just have to trust that that’s enough, right? If you’ve done the work, you don’t have to do someone else’s work for them.

So, we’ve talked a little about the book, but everyone’s going to be interested in what is Tia’s life like now, now that she’s famous and has sold four books in three years and has another one coming out? Do tell!

 Tia Levings [10:52] Yeah, what’s my day like? Okay, so I just got done working on a novel that — you know, you have to write novels ahead of time, so I don’t even know if it’s going to sell; I had to create it if I want to sell it. And so, I just came off three months of working seven days a week. That’s a marathon — that’s not my day-to-day all the time, but that was a push for this project. Most of the time I work a nine-to-ten, sometimes twelve-hour day. I’m online a lot. Every Sunday I get a little screen report that says you were on your phone five and a half hours today, six and a half hours today. And for somebody who would really like to just go be in the dirt and be outside and enjoy the seasons, that’s hard. But that is also not going away, because that is my primary way to engage with readers and get the word out about this work, and this work has extremely significant consequences in American society today. This conversation I’m participating in is the thing. So, for now, this is what we’re doing.

I read a lot, I blurb books a lot, I answer a lot of emails. I constantly feel like I’m not juggling all my plates well enough, because Substack and reels and content — I have learned how to streamline some of that, and I’ve learned how to take kind of a break without taking a visible break. But I’m in pretty desperate need of a vacation right now. I’m going on book tour in May, so that’s not happening.

June will be the first time I take some time off, and then I’ve sold the next book, so I need to get started on that pretty pronto. So, it’s a grind, but it’s passion. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m just a slave to my work — I’m in my purpose, I’m in my calling, and I’m doing it at a time in my life when my children are grown and gone. I had a swap of partners in that situation because, you know, Husband 2.0 didn’t want to be married to a writer, so we said bye, and I spent some time alone walking off that situation in Europe. And then John — and John is trauma-informed, and he knows the care and keeping of a writer, and he understands what a marathon is when I’ve got my nose down in a book. So yeah. I mean, I do get recognized in public — that happens. You have to be prepared for it. I do get constantly activated with the news and have to actually practice what I preach on a daily basis. That’s part of it. And there’s lots of nervous system regulation and grounding and ongoing healing. That’s just part of Tia’s life.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:02] Yeah, so it’s both wonderful and challenging at the same time, absolutely. And something that’s making me think — I’ve done some podcast episodes on human design, and I have a sense of what your human design probably is.

Tia Levings [13:15] Manifesting Generator.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:17] Yes! Yeah, I was like, I can figure this one out — I don’t need any information. But you bring up something really important. So, for people who don’t know this, Manifesting Generators can work very quickly, they can juggle multiple things at the same time, and they do it well, and they actually like to do that — that’s how they’re built. And working and doing the work is a piece of it, and it’s the same for me. I’m not a Manifesting Generator, though — sometimes I play one on TV or move around a bunch of them. But when you love your work, it energizes you. You can do so much more when you love what you’re doing, and one of the keys to being able to do that sustainably is to not push yourself so hard that you burn out. Right?

Tia Levings [13:56] I worked over the weekend to finish this book, and I’d hit the 85,000-word mark somewhere a week or so ago, which — it turns out I’ve started to get enough experience to know that 85,000 is a generous book shape. You either have a disaster at that point or you’re pretty close to the end. So, this momentum hit me, and I had four days, and I wrote 30,000 words in that four-day period. And someone online asked me, “Did you sleep?” And I was like, oh yeah, actually, I slept fine, I ate fine, I got my walk in — all those things. But I was in flow, and it was just so wonderful. And it was also opening my manifesting energy, which I’ve not had a lot of lately. I’m like, I know these nonfiction titles, but my dreams are fiction — how do I get there, and what does that look like? And so, this spurt that I had, which felt like a fever dream of wonderful work, came out so clean. That was the other part — it came out so polished already. I was like, what is happening? It gave me a vision for the future which I had really been working and trying to make space for. And I love to spend time envisioning a better future forward and what it actually looks like.

And I did so much of that before I sold Wife — that has come to pass and has helped equip me for the amount of pressure that I carry. And I need to do that again for the next five years. And I had been struggling with it, and I feel like this week, in that very frenzy that you just described of what it’s like to be a Manifesting Generator — that is exactly what happened. And I was like, oh, I see it now. I see the future. And it’s going to help me do the next Well series, because I think what I wrote was an origin story.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:25] I love that. And I think, you know, one of the things that I’ve known about you the entire time is that when you have a clear vision of what you want and you can really see the outcome, you can make it happen. That’s who you are, and that’s what happened with A Well-Trained Wife — you always knew what that was, and then you just did the hard work to get there. And so, it’s exciting to see how that works. But I love that you’re also talking about the fact that you can create a career in a genre, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it translates to another genre exactly. And I think that’s really important for listeners who want to have a career as an author to hear, because I’ve talked to so many people who are like, well, I want to write a memoir, and then I want to write fiction, so my next book is going to be fiction. And there’s this assumption that if I sell this book, it automatically means I’m going to be able to sell the next one in a different genre. What have you learned about that?

Tia Levings [16:19] A lot. And some of the decisions I made in the past were with that in mind. I do this thing where I reverse-engineer my end goal, so I know what kind of decisions I need to make in order to get there reasonably. And I also do this other exercise where I write the future I want in past tense, as if it already happened. And so, I was spending time journaling about what my life was like after I was a bestselling author, and I hadn’t sold the book yet — that’s the headspace I was in. And I realized: if you want to change genres, your number one need is an agent who’s going to support your author career, not just one book. That was important, because some agents only do one wheelhouse — they don’t want to represent your whole career. So now I have an agent who has represented my TV deal, represented self-help and memoir, and she’s getting ready to rep me in fiction. So that’s wonderful, because I made that decision years ago, and it’s going to help me here.

Another thing is that when you have a successful book, there is an organic follow-up that asks to be written. And for me, the way I looked at it: it’s my commitment to Wife — it’s my commitment to Wife to write whatever needs to come after this. And the third book is about how to leave any kind of situation, because I think one of the things we notice in leaving stories — cult escapes, like all these cult podcasts and things that are out — the stories are all similar, using the same exercises and the same muscles and the same skill set. And we are attracted to them because they inspire us in the situations we need to leave. It could be a bad room, a toxic relationship, a bad job — but it’s the same muscles. And so, I want to write a book that exercises that, but it’s also a reflection of the moment when I knew I had to run: what was I doing in that moment, and how have I used that lesson in multiple situations going forward. So, all of that is in support of Wife — that’s a natural trilogy of escape that supports itself. And my fiction is in my heart, but it’s had to wait until I honor the first work. And that also helps my publishers, because they know I’m going to have a marketable, related product that supports the original decision.

I’m also creating a back catalog of books that complement one another. So, I think it’s been really important for me too, as a fiction hopeful, that my themes and the things that are important to me and my voice have been developing all along. So, my fiction is going to feel really seamless for a lot of readers — they’re going to be like, oh, she wrote it, I’m going to read it — because I’ve spent that time nurturing it. So, all that to say, there’s some surrender to the process involved with genre-hopping.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [18:48] Yeah. I love what you just said about your commitment to A Well-Trained Wife and to that journey, and how sometimes when we’re thinking about the next book we may have this desire to move in another direction, but really understanding what else there is to say about this specific topic can be really beneficial to your career as an author. Versus a person who has written one book and sold one book — to think strategically creates that backlist, and it also helps you sharpen your voice so that when you get to this other kind of writing, you’re going to have all those skills built, and all this knowledge about marketing, so you can reach your readers.

Tia Levings [19:32] Yeah. I want to carve a new category. I really want to write something I call true religious horror. I don’t want to manufacture more pain — I want to work with what’s already there and help readers envision other outcomes and skills, and that’s completely in keeping with Wife. So those are very synonymous things. It won’t feel like a dramatic genre hop when it’s actually there.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:53] Yeah, and I love that you’ve kept that dream, because I remember when you first talked about A Well-Trained Wife before it had a completely different name, you talked about it in terms of religious trauma, like a religious horror. So, I love that you’re keeping that torch alive as you also market these other books.

I think that leads nicely to the question I want to ask you about I Belong to Me, which is your second book. A Well-Trained Wife was a memoir; I Belong to Me is self-help — kind of. Sure, kind of, right? I think that’s a good way to talk about it, because it does thread the needle that many people want, which is: how can I use my story to help other people, and do that in a more direct, overt way, as happens in self-help. So, as a person who’s written across the genres, what would you tell someone who is saying, “My memoir is memoir self-help”?

Tia Levings [20:49] I would say, back away from that pony right now. You have to pick a lane. That, again, goes back to the book as a product — the book needs to sell on a shelf in a category, your shelf mates matter. I find A Well-Trained Wife all over the bookstore, and it’s funny to me every time, because I put so much forethought into what we were going to call it. And there was one point where they were debating, at my book deal point, whether they were going to put it in St. Martin’s Essentials with the self-help books. And people fought for it, and they said, no, it’s a memoir. And I’m so glad they did, because that is what it is. It’s a memoir, and it does have self-help-ish things in it; it has inspiration in it. That was my first glimpse of, oh, other people see this too.

But Jane Friedman is the one who told me first: you cannot hybrid this. You need to pick one or the other. And so that’s what we did — it’s memoir; it was crafted as memoir. And I Belong to Me is riding a different fence. It’s being sold as self-help, but I can’t write in a prescriptive voice; I can’t tell people what to do. So, it’s not a self-help book that tells you what to do — it’s a self-help book that is, in fact, hybrid. It’s got my experience in it, it’s told through my lens, and I lean into that as well. Here’s what it was like for me. And sometimes it really helps people to hear what someone who went first, or who was a few steps ahead on the journey, did and experienced and encountered. And so, it serves as that camaraderie-style self-help. I call it a self-help book that will really help you help yourself, because I’m not going to tell you what the magic formula is — I’m going to give you skills and encouragement, and you’re going to go do your own work, and you’re going to have your own outcome, and a different outcome in a lot of cases. So, I’m not promising an outcome; I’m promising a fellow traveler on the journey and some information.

But we can’t sell it like that, you know — that’s all too touchy-feely for sales. Sales is going to sell it as self-help; it’s going to go on the self-help shelf. The cover design was according to self-help requirements and what’s expected in that genre. Cover design is a whole other tangent, because Wife pushes that envelope too, between fiction and memoir. But it worked, and now there are copycats, and that’s exactly what they were hoping for. It’s great, but yeah, you have to be clear on that end of it — sales are actual data, and it’s actual things, with the ISBN and who your competitors are going to be.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:01] Yeah, you definitely need to know how that works. And I think just even thinking about A Well-Trained Wife — it reads like a novel, right? It maintains one point of view; it’s the “I” point of view throughout the entire story. And there’s not a lot of editorializing — there’s no point where we break away from the story so I can deconstruct this for you. Very little of that, right? That’s not how it’s written. And yet, what I noticed about I Belong to Me is there are exercises — there are these places where you’re pulling away from the story. I mean, you do tell a deeper level of that story of healing and change in I Belong to Me, but you also switch points of view. So, you’ll be telling your story for a little bit in the “I,” and then it’s like you turn to the reader and shift into the “you” — like, you may know this, and you may have had this experience. And that feels like a paradigm shift in terms of how you’re telling that story. How did you approach that?

Tia Leavings [23:59] Honestly? My mom voice came out, and my friend voice, and my doula voice — because I’ve helped women through childbirth, and I did raise four children to adulthood, and I do talk to survivors all day, every day. And so, I just wrote to my ideal reader and spoke to them as if they were sitting in the room with me. So, when it’s “you”-directed, it’s to a person, and that made it intimate.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [24:23] And I definitely felt that way. I was like, oh, I’m with Tia, and Tia’s voice again — yay.

Tia Levings [24:28] I’m glad. I was really hoping my voice would come through, and not some — you know, my work is discouraging against gurus and formulas, so I couldn’t put that on for a book. I needed to sound authentic and open, and I’m glad that came across.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [24:43] Yeah. When we think about memoir, sometimes we’ll talk about the terms confiding versus confessing, right? When you’re confessing, you’re hoping for absolution — you want something from the reader. But when you’re confiding, you’re sharing your experience. And I feel like as I was reading — you were sitting across from me, confiding, telling me: here’s how things work. And one of the things that stuck with me was the coffee. Can we have a cup of coffee?

Tia Levings [25:11] Yeah, which is incredibly triggering to a lot of religious trauma survivors, because it’s code — it’s a dog whistle for: you are in trouble; I’m going to ask you out to coffee so that I can correct you and scold you. And so, right off the bat, I had to deal with that. I want to reclaim the coffee date. I want to be able to have time to talk to you honestly — it’s none of that. So, we’re going to take that back, because they made it nasty, as far as — they took coffee away from us. So, we’re going to reclaim it. There are coffee chats in here, and I open with the coffee store — we’re in the coffee shop together, and we’re going to have some real talk. And you might be feeling some things about that, and that’s exactly why we’re doing it. It’s information.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:55] Yeah. And I love how you’re decoding some of these things. And I think this is one of the reasons why this book is specifically for people who have experienced religious trauma, who are deconstructing their faith. But it goes beyond that, because you could be leaving anything and not understand the code, right? But once you see, oh, that is the code here —I don’t have that same level of religious trauma. I did leave a religion when I was younger that I would say — and you’re going to agree with me, because we’ve talked about this — bordered on the cult, right? It was cult-adjacent, and it was extremely painful to leave. And at the time, when I was in it, I didn’t see a lot of the code, and now I can. And yet I never had the coffee date — no one asked me that question. When you were saying that, I was thinking, oh, someone wants to negotiate a business deal, right? Because that’s my conditioning — they want something from me; that’s what I’m bringing to the table. You brought something different. But what it did is open my eyes to: let me think about the code, or the meta-messages behind things that people say. And I thought you did that really effectively.

Tia Levings [27:04] Thank you. It’s exactly that — it’s for the unique journey from religious trauma and high-control religion and cults, but it’s also from any kind of high-control dynamic. That can be a mother-daughter situation, that can be a relationship — it can be almost anything that was high-control and left you with discomfort in your body when you get near anything related. And I can see how going to coffee with somebody and assuming they’re going to want something from you would make you say no to coffee, because you don’t want to be coerced. That’s relevant fodder right there. But language — language is the key to so much of my healing. Discovering language, unpacking language, and really sitting with what the accurate definitions are — which is why I Belong to Me is full of definitions. I couldn’t have healed without the proper names for the things I’d experienced.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:52] Yeah, language is so important because it can be a form of awakening in and of itself. When you know the name of something, you can begin to understand it. What was the most surprising thing that you discovered or wrote into as you were working on this book?

Tia Levings [28:07] It wasn’t so much surprising. I will say, exacerbating my imposter syndrome was pretty high — and the awareness that I am using the lens of my own experience on a very broad human experience that’s bigger than America, bigger than right now, bigger than the deconstruction movement. And I didn’t want to get into territory where I was being presumptive, or too broad-brushed, or was inadvertently alienating somebody. So, I worked hard against those things. It’s not to say that might still not be someone’s take on it — which probably points to a lot of their own trauma, because they’ve had those experiences before. So just being cognizant of that was a very constant struggle as I worked through the book, because there was a lot of “who do you think you are to write this?” language in my head. And what I am is a survivor who can tell you what it’s like, and at the end of the day, that’s my authority and my expertise — my own life. And if it helps you, I’m really grateful.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [29:03] Yeah. And when we think about twelve-step programs, just as an example, when people sit in that circle with peers who have gone through a similar struggle, what they’re offered is experience, strength, and hope, not advice. And you get to read or listen through that and decide what is important to you, what you want to take from that. And that is a very powerful form of help that we all need.

And I’ll just give you a short example. When I went into therapy for the first time, one of the first questions I asked my therapist was: have you gone through things? You don’t have to tell me what you’ve gone through, but do you understand my experience? And specifically, when I was trying to heal from my brother’s suicide, I asked: what experiences have you had personally with suicide? Because I didn’t want someone who could tell me academically about it. Like, if you got this from a book, just let me know now so I can leave and go read it myself.

Yeah. So that experience, strength, and hope — I know it’s going to help a lot of people. And if you could give us a taste of that, what’s an exercise or a way of thinking about things that you developed, or realized was really helpful to you — what would that be?

Tia Levings [30:19] Yeah, so a lot of I Belong to Me is focused on what’s happening for you when something comes up, when you feel uncomfortable. And so, every chapter deals with a question that you might be experiencing or feeling. Some of them I had to kind of fight for editorially, because outsiders don’t always understand — for example, why somebody might worry they’re going to get in trouble if they talk about what happened to them. And I said, no, we need that exact language, because their inner child feels like they are getting in trouble when they share what really happened.

So, there are a lot of exercises in I Belong to Me for when you just know something’s wrong, you just know something’s uncomfortable — you know that something happened to you, but you don’t know what. You don’t know if it’s trauma. You don’t know if you’re exaggerating. And so, I have inquiry processes in here for how you can work through that. I advise that people start by writing down what they’re feeling, the sequence of events, and then start asking questions — who, what, when, where, and why — so that you’re identifying: how old were you when this happened? Who were you then, in terms of role — were you a child, were you a student? Where were you? What was that place like? What kind of expectations were put on you? So, it’s a question-and-answer inquiry process, but it’s very basic — it’s the five W’s. Can you think of anything else that would name what that experience is?

So, for me, I knew that I had had sex on my wedding night, and I had said no a lot, and I didn’t want it to continue. And that’s how I talked about it for almost twenty years. And then I was in a therapist’s office one day and she said, well, non-consensual sex is known as rape. And I had to hold that word. And then that word has an actual definition. And so, it changed everything about the way I looked at that night and how I handled it in healing. And so, a lot of I Belong to Me — there’s a whole big section designed to help you learn how to name things, so that you can accurately describe what happened, what systems were involved, what motivations, what other players were there who owed you protection and didn’t give it. Every single one of those answers is going to be its own journey in therapy — it’s a lot of information you get from that.

I go like this with my hands, because it is like the spokes of a wheel. You have this central experience — it hurts, it makes you uncomfortable. When someone says something like, “Would you come to coffee with me?” — something that sounds innocent — and you feel this wave of emotion. So much of I Belong to Me is helping you find out what’s in that wave, what’s going on.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:41] Yeah. And as I’m listening, what comes to mind is a grounding exercise that I have used and shared with others, which is the five W’s — where am I? What do I see? What do I hear? What do I feel, meaning what can I touch? All those things. And this is a story version of that, right — understanding and unpacking an experience. And I think it’s so important, especially for women in high-control religion, because they are infantilized. That idea of “I’m going to get in trouble,” “I’m going to get in trouble if I tell” — I can relate to that as someone who experienced severe child abuse, because that control was there. But in high-control religion, it’s so indoctrinated that your silence is expected; it’s part of the system. So, you’re breaking that for so many people.

Tia Levings [33:31] I also really like your use of it, because it works really well in tandem — when you’re going through an excavation process and an inquiry process that’s in the past, bringing yourself back to a safe present is that grounding you describe, like: what’s happening right now? And it’s very easy for your brain to conflate. That’s what happens in a trigger — your body thinks it’s still in that danger. And so, to remind yourself that, actually, no — I always do it with my hand right here on my chest. If you’re listening, you can’t see it, but it’s on my chest, and I just feel my heartbeat and I bring myself down. I’m usually sitting on the floor, because I literally ground my body. And I remind myself what day it is, what year it is, how old I am, who I live with — just so that my system hears audibly that I am not back there. And drawing that distinction has been helpful for me to heal, because you can pick up and leave off from the past. You can set it aside for a little while. You can interact with one part of it — not the whole thing — if you’re rooted in your safe and present condition. Also, if you’re not safe right now, you’ll find out, and you’ll be able to remedy that, because some people are not safe in their current situation.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:47] Right, right. Yeah, I often have people wiggle their toes — a simple thing like that can make all the difference in helping you remember that you are here. And then, yes, if here is a safe place, you can relax into that. And if it’s not, then you can take action.

Tia Levings [34:55] Yeah. Knowledge is power, and dissociation, abuse — all that keeps us out of our knowledge. And you can’t do anything if you’re just floating, or surviving, just getting through. You can’t carve the same life with intention. I’m all about trauma integration. If I Belong to Me has a holistic goal, it’s this: fully grieving and fully understanding our experiences so that we integrate them into our system and actually metabolize them. That enables us to do the kind of work that I do every day — where I’m talking about my really hard experiences and how they’re dangerous to our country — but I’m not re-traumatizing myself every time I talk about it. And that’s really, really important on a sustaining level. What is it like to build a career out of your hard story? Well, you better have it metabolized, because you cannot talk about it day in and day out if it’s going to send you to the depths every time.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:43] I think that’s a lovely segue to one of the other things I wanted to talk with you about, which is navigating a large author platform. Because you have what many people consider the dream platform, right? 110,000 followers on Instagram, it’s just the starting place, and you were in the recent CNN documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism, and you’ve been in Shiny Happy People. You have all these things that make you almost a household name, especially within the realm of high-control religion — people know who you are. And to maintain that, you do have to talk about challenging things. What advice would you give to someone who’s starting out and wants to build a big platform? Or has a bigger platform and is struggling with it, feeling overwhelmed or like they’re drowning in it? Or — this is the third thing that I see — people who are, I would say, exploiting their trauma by sharing it, and sharing more and more aspects of it as a way to build platform.

Tia Levings [36:45] Oh yeah. Self-exploitation is a very common thing, especially among people who want a quick payoff. They’re looking for validation because their trauma is not integrated and healed, and so they’re very hungry for external validation and feedback. It’s hard to watch, because they’re abusing themselves. They’re opening themselves to abuse from strangers who have nothing invested — they’re not going to buy books; they’re not invested in your recovery. And it’s really painful to watch.

So, you helped me understand what a cooked story was, and that helped me so much — it continues to help me. “Cooked” is what I’m talking about when I say integrated. I had understood the scope of this story, the situation and the story. I had understood what end and what lane each piece did. My book and my work online are different, but they’re related to one another, and they feed one another — they’re in the same universe, but they’re separate entities.

So, what do I do with the platform? I’ll start with the first part — how to grow one or how to start one. I will transparently tell you that I stuttered in 2016, 2017. I had never spoken to my camera and held it in front of my face and gone online live — it was completely new. I had been on Instagram for a long time, but it was with static pictures and hiddenness. I did have a marketing background, so that helped. And I have a natural curiosity and knack for technology, so that also helped. And I think that the more anyone can invest in marketing lessons and workshops, those are skills you’ll use the entire time. So, it’s really beneficial to sharpen them. This is part of your career — you will wear that hat; you will self-market forever. So, take it seriously. Take the LinkedIn Learning courses. Get on LinkedIn. Do whatever you have to do to learn Canva really well. Learn the difference between influencing and thought leadership, because you don’t want brand deals — you don’t want to be dancing in front of your camera. Someone selling makeup for TikTok Shop is different from someone developing a platform around their book. Being really clear on those distinctions helps you know what you’re building.

There are a ton of practical things that go into that, but it’s a lot of confidence-building. So, I really encourage people to keep their social media as fun as possible, as long as they can, and to create little content buckets — like, here’s something fun that I add to my platform, because it will help sustain you through the harder stuff. I have titty parties, I celebrate foxes, I make really sarcastic jokes. And I’m allowed to do that because I know those are my three lighthearted content buckets. And then I have these serious ones — smash the patriarchy, what’s happening in politics, really serious survivorship issues. So that’s all very helpful. Keep it clearly articulated, and don’t put all your eggs in one basket — don’t have it all on one single platform: that’s really critical for growth.

The “why me, why now, why this work” question that you do in a book proposal, that you do when you’re thinking about bringing a book to life — it applies to your platform too. Why should they care about your reels? Why are your reels related to what you’re doing with your book? What current events and trending topics can you pull in and show: this is relevant right now, this is timely right now, and this applies to you right now? Because consumers are curating their own algorithms.

Why does this matter to them? It’s our job to tell them why it matters. And my story matters to you because it’s coming for your country — it’s right here in government; it’s changing your laws. You’re going to lose the right to vote because of the Christian patriarchy taking away women’s right to vote. You need to know what it’s really like to be a trad wife, because they’re going to try to make us all trad wives, and they sell it with ideals.

So, I’ve done that work of why this matters. Burnout is a different kind of concern. I’ve advised people in the past about sustainable platforms, because it is really easy to get caught up in the content machine — the never-ending demand for content, the reward system of companies that want you posting every day, all day, multiple times. And I can’t, and sometimes I have more bandwidth than others, sometimes I need to step away. But there are all kinds of tricks of the trade you can learn for repurposing content across platforms, resurfacing older content, making one piece of content that can cross all of them. My reel, my slides, and my Substack posts are all on the same topic — versions of the same thing. And I do one a week, if that, and I’ll get really good results from that one. But I am not burning myself out doing it every single day — that’s not going to work. So, you really have to have the big picture in mind. And if you’re burned out, stop. Take a break. Because you’re not going to create and be successful from a burned-out place, and you’re only self-harming at that point. I think people don’t look at burnout as self-harm, but I encourage them to. You’re hurting yourself by working in the negative.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [41:30] Yeah, I agree with you — it is self-harm. And it’s so easy to do, because we are rewarded for it, right? The more you do externally, the more people go, wow, look at what you can do, you’re such a powerhouse. But if you don’t take care of yourself, no one else is going to do that for you. The bigger your platform gets, the larger your reach is, the more important that is to remember — because you’re going to have more people who want a piece of you.

Tia Levings [42:00] Yeah. So, I’ve made some conscientious choices early on that I think have helped me in that regard. I have a no-troll policy — if anyone’s going to argue with survivors, they’re out. Sometimes, if I think that a comment and my reply will be beneficial, I will welcome that troll to my space and say: welcome to my work, here’s what we do here, here’s what we don’t do here, you’re welcome to scroll on by. If they argue, they’re gone. That cleanliness — cleaning my space, cleaning my house — has paid off, because I don’t have a lot of troll activity, and I don’t have critics in the space arguing with survivors, and I don’t have a lot of spam and noise to deal with. That’s just a distraction of time. But that’s a decision people make — some people want those views, they love the controversy, they’re inviting that kind of energy into their space. You build it, it will come, and it will burn you out. So, I don’t recommend it. Be about building something, not burning something.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [42:57] I love that. Yeah, that is an important thing to think about — be building something rather than burning something, because the energy is very different. Once something is burned down, there’s nothing left. You can continue building and having additions, lots of add-ons. And that is one way to be self-sustaining.

Well, thank you so much for being here today, Tia. It has been a joy, and I’m so excited for I Belong to Me and to see where that takes you.

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