I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma

by Tia Levings

What does it mean to heal from trauma caused by the people, beliefs, and practices of your faith? And to rebuild a sense of self, when high-control religion said you shouldn’t have one?

Indoctrinated from early childhood to obey, conform, and want what others wanted for her, Tia Levings learned love and acceptance meant being someone other than herself.

After years of abuse in a violent marriage and high-control religion, Tia Levings escaped with her children (a story told in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife) and thought the hardest was behind her.

But leaving was just the beginning.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year quest to psychological peace. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman who is able to tell her harrowing story without retraumatizing herself —a woman who can reach back to help others claim what’s theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn't get your present and future too.

Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources, Tia Levings guides readers through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind, soul, and body after religious trauma —so that you can too.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

400 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

About the author

Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of religious trauma and the Trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture. Her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter and TiaLevings.Substack.com. Her second book releases with St. Martin’s Essentials May 5, 2026.

Reviews

[Anne Jisca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tia understands religious trauma. She has lived in. She has worked through therapy to learn to cope and live well despite it. It's obvious in her writing that she has done the work. Her words, her advice, her resources are from a place of understanding and love. Tia writes from a caring, empathetic heart, and it shows through her writing.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tia Levings new book "I Belong to Me" was filled with encouragement, validation, and support for those who have suffered abuse. Tia did a great job explaining the connections of emotional and religious trauma, and how it impacts a person's autonomy and agency. She shares the different aspects of abuse, naming spiritual, emotional/psychological, physical, sexual, and financial as clear indicators of abusive traits. How this type of abuse, especially spiritual, can impact a person is very damaging, and she spent a great deal of time in her book giving many wonderful therapeutic tools on managing the trauma effects from abuse. The book was very validating, and she focused on the truths that God made each person with love and value. We are all worthy. Being told by patriarchal systems or personalities, such as in marriage, that you are less-than, and using scripture as a weaponization/tool, is clearly one of the very worst types of abuse. I would recommend this book to anyone who has suffered under a high-control religion or in a marriage/family that skews and twists scripture for personal benefit, as the destruction done to those who have suffered such abuse is a long journey of healing and requires compassion, grace, and understanding to reclaim who you were meant to be in the image of God.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advanced review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

[Amanda Ingram · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Belong to Me was a really validating read for me. This book felt like it was written with a lot of care for people who are still trying to understand how deeply religion can shape, harm, and linger in your body and mind long after you leave. Tia Levings approaches this work slowly and thoughtfully, and I appreciated that she never tries to rush the reader toward healing or offer tidy conclusions.

This is much more of a self-help book than a memoir, though it does draw on her personal experiences throughout. If you’ve read A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, you’ll recognize some of what she references, sometimes without much detail. I didn’t feel like reading the memoir first was required, but having that background does help fill in some gaps and add context to what she’s discussing.

She very clearly connects trauma to religion, especially emotional trauma, which was something I found really helpful. It’s easy to minimize or overlook emotional harm when it isn’t physical, and this book does a good job explaining the how and why of that damage without dismissing it or spiritualizing it away. I also appreciated the focus on therapeutic stages and the reminder that healing doesn’t happen on a clean or predictable timeline. This wasn’t a book that challenged me in a confrontational way, but it did make me feel seen. It felt validating more than anything else, like a reminder that what you went through mattered, even if it didn’t always look dramatic from the outside.

Overall, this book felt like a checkpoint on a longer healing journey. I would recommend it to people who are newly out of high-control religion, long-term survivors who are still unpacking beliefs they didn’t choose, and also to therapists or loved ones who want a better understanding of what religious trauma actually does to a person. It’s a steady, compassionate book that reminds you that reclaiming yourself is allowed, and that you belong to you.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Sarah Fowler Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tia opens with what she would tell the reader if we met for coffee: "It's a lie that you'll be alone. There are thousands, if not millions, of survivors out here." I too have learned how true this is.

Tia feels like a big sister to me, one who walked through (and came out of) extremely similar traumas just ahead of my doing the same. This is the recovery book of hope I would have written if I could. The real, hard, but so GOOD reality of healing.

I highlighted a good 40-50% of this book because so much deeply resonated with me. Some I need to hear now, much of what I needed to hear then, and more that dear friends still in the earlier stages of escape need that Tia words much better than I do! Neither too sentimental nor too harsh, with honesty and grace but firmness in truth, this book is a wonderful guide.

"We are more than our hard stories" (ch 1), and so much of this is about learning who you are without others' rules and expectations. A revelation, for sure. For survivors and people who love them, I cannot recommend this book enough.

{I read a digital ARC provided by St. Martin's Press via NetGalley}

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read all or part of many self-help books. Most of them had some helpful ideas, but very few are memorable as I've aged.

Tia Levings has written a book that describes the layers of overcoming religious trauma that resonated with me for just short of 400 pages. The dominance of the culture of Christian religion has seen a drop in attendance since I was a child, and the sense of belonging to a church community has fallen with it. The surviving organizations are a minority but attempting to take over our nation. This book is a valuable resource for understanding what that means.

As a white male, overcoming what I was taught in a relatively liberal theology has haunted me for decades, and does not compare to what Levings has lived through. But her journey of recovery has been extremely helpful in understanding the methods used for control over the believers. Basically, a spiritual hazing instead of a spiritual journey.

For confronting and moving past dangling unanswered questions I don't have a better modern example to recommend than I Belong to Me!

[Jordan Gauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was clearly written with a lot of love, wisdom, and care. Tia Levings does a beautiful job of outlining what strategies helped her through her own recovery from abuse and high demand religion. I recommend reading her first book, The Well Trained Wife, first. However, if you feel that her story might be too much for you emotionally, she spends time going over the relevant events in her story in a less traumatizing way in this one. At times, it felt as though she was just rehashing events of her memoir. However, I can understand that for many in her audience who are looking for advice, a way forward, or a manual on recovery from high demand religion and/or abuse, reading a somewhat graphic retelling of someone else’s trauma might be too much. I think she’s done a beautiful job, that I hope reaches and helps those who have the courage to leave these terrible situations.