Untamed

Untamed Plot Summary

Introduction

Glennon Doyle first captured America's attention as a Christian mommy blogger, sharing her struggles with motherhood, addiction, and faith. Then, at the height of her career as an inspirational speaker and bestselling author, she upended everything by falling in love with soccer star Abby Wambach. What followed was not just a personal transformation but a radical awakening that challenged conventional wisdom about womanhood, marriage, sexuality, and authenticity. Through her journey from addiction to sobriety, from a marriage defined by societal expectations to one aligned with her true self, Doyle emerged as a powerful voice for women seeking to break free from cultural cages. Doyle's story resonates far beyond her personal circumstances because it speaks to universal human longings - the desire to live authentically, to trust one's inner knowing, and to build a life based on truth rather than expectations. Her willingness to dismantle her public image and rebuild her life according to her own design has inspired millions to question their own compromises and conventions. In exploring Doyle's evolution, we witness how confronting personal pain can lead to liberation, how challenging societal norms can create new possibilities for family and love, and how learning to trust one's inner voice can revolutionize not just an individual life but spark wider social change.

Chapter 1: The Caged Self: From Early Struggles to Self-Betrayal

Glennon Doyle's journey begins with a childhood marked by sensitivity that felt overwhelming in a world that demanded conformity. By age ten, she had begun internalizing society's messages about how to be a "good girl" - quiet, pleasant, accommodating, and small. This cultural taming took a toll on her mental health, manifesting in bulimia by her early teens. Food became her way of expressing the hunger, anger, and wildness she wasn't allowed to show. "I became animalistic during my daily binges," she writes, describing how purging became her ritual of compliance - eliminating evidence of her unacceptable appetites. Her teen years and early twenties spiraled into deeper self-destruction. Alcoholism and drug abuse became additional mechanisms to numb her discomfort with living inside society's cages. She describes this period as being "half-dead" - physically present but emotionally absent, disconnected from her authentic self. By twenty-five, she had been arrested multiple times, damaged relationships with family and friends, and severely compromised her health. Yet even in this dark place, she maintained a veneer of functionality, earning a degree and navigating social expectations while internally falling apart. Everything changed when, at twenty-six, Doyle discovered she was pregnant. Staring at a positive pregnancy test on her bathroom floor, hungover and surrounded by empty beer bottles, she experienced a profound awakening. She describes this moment not as a sudden determination to "be good," but as a reconnection with something deeper inside herself - a voice that had been silenced since childhood. This voice, which she would later call her "Knowing," told her that she wanted to become a mother and that she would need to get sober to do so. Sobriety became Doyle's "painstaking resurrection" - not simply abstaining from substances but beginning the harder work of living with her feelings rather than numbing them. She adopted the mantra "We can do hard things" from a sign in a colleague's classroom, repeating it to herself throughout early motherhood and recovery. This phrase acknowledged the inherent difficulty of authentic living while affirming her capacity to endure it. Through sobriety, she began the slow process of remembering who she was before the world told her who to be. This period also marked Doyle's emergence as a writer. She started a blog called "Momastery" where she shared her messy truth about motherhood, marriage, and recovery with brutal honesty and self-deprecating humor. Her willingness to speak openly about the parts of life most people kept hidden - the tedium of parenting, the challenges of marriage, the daily struggle to stay sober - resonated deeply with readers, particularly women who felt isolated in their own struggles. Her blog grew into a community, which eventually led to her first book deal and speaking engagements at churches and conferences across America. However, even as Doyle built a platform based on authenticity, she was still living within certain cages - particularly the confines of conventional marriage and Christian expectations. She had traded her substance addictions for more socially acceptable forms of numbing: busyness, perfectionism, and people-pleasing. She describes this period as one where she was "living half-alive" - more authentic than before but still performing a role rather than fully embodying her truth. This tension would eventually reach a breaking point, setting the stage for her most radical transformation.

Chapter 2: Love's Revolution: Meeting Abby and Confronting Truth

The moment that altered everything in Glennon Doyle's carefully reconstructed life came unexpectedly at a literary conference in Chicago. Her memoir about saving her marriage after her husband's infidelity was about to be released, positioning her as a champion of traditional family values and marital perseverance. Yet when soccer star Abby Wambach walked into the room during a pre-event dinner, Doyle experienced a recognition so profound it physically moved her. "There She Is," her inner voice declared, as she found herself standing with arms outstretched toward a stranger. Their first conversation lasted only minutes, yet contained a level of authenticity Doyle had rarely experienced. When Wambach mentioned her recent DUI and struggles following retirement from soccer, Doyle felt an immediate connection. She describes their brief interaction as electric - not just romantic attraction but a mutual recognition of another soul who valued raw truth. That night, Doyle took the stage and spoke directly to Wambach in the audience, abandoning half her prepared remarks to instead address themes of shame and freedom. Back home, Doyle found herself caught between two realities: the public narrative she'd crafted about her healed marriage and the undeniable awakening she'd experienced with Abby. She compares this period to standing on shifting ground - her former certainties dissolving while new possibilities emerged. "I'd spent thirty years covering and injecting my face with potions and poison trying to fix my skin. Then I quit. And my skin was good," she writes, describing not just her physical appearance but her approach to life - the realization that what she'd been told needed fixing was actually her true self trying to emerge. The decision to pursue her feelings for Abby wasn't made lightly. Doyle sought counsel from friends, therapists, and spiritual advisors. Many cautioned her against upending her family and career. A therapist dismissively suggested, "These feelings aren't real." But Doyle began to recognize that these external voices were pushing her back into a cage of others' expectations. She had spent her life abandoning herself to please others, and now faced the ultimate test of self-trust. Could she honor her inner knowing even when it contradicted every external measure of success she'd achieved? When Doyle finally made her decision to end her marriage and pursue a relationship with Abby, she framed it not as leaving her family but as modeling authenticity for her children. "My children do not need me to save them," she realized. "My children need to watch me save myself." She told her husband with tenderness but without apology that their marriage was complete - that they had been the healing partners they were meant to be for each other, but that phase of her life was ending. Though initially devastating, this conversation eventually led to a new kind of family arrangement where both parents prioritized their children's wellbeing while pursuing their own authentic lives. The most profound aspect of this transformation wasn't just finding new love, but Doyle's discovery of her capacity to trust herself. After decades of deferring to external authorities - religion, society, experts, even her mother - she had finally accessed her own inner wisdom and acted upon it despite enormous potential consequences. "I'd rather disappoint the whole world than disappoint myself," became her guiding principle. This wasn't selfishness but radical self-honoring - the recognition that she could not truly serve others until she stopped betraying herself.

Chapter 3: Motherhood Reimagined: Building Brave Children

When Glennon Doyle became a mother at twenty-six, she was newly sober and still discovering who she was beyond her addictions. Motherhood became both her anchor and her crucible - the role that kept her committed to sobriety while also exposing her deepest insecurities. She entered parenthood carrying the weight of cultural expectations about "good mothers" - women who sacrifice everything for their children, who make childhood magical and painless, who protect their children from all discomfort. These expectations, she later realized, were as confining as any cage she'd experienced. Doyle's eldest child, Chase, was an easy-going baby who validated her early parenting approach. But her second child, Tish, arrived with an intensity that challenged everything. Where Chase was accommodating, Tish was defiant; where Chase was cheerful, Tish was intense. Initially, Doyle tried to "fix" her daughter, creating whiteboards with messages like "We will be pleasant today!" She later recognized this profound mistake: "When I realized that Tish was me, I remembered that acting happy was what had almost killed me. I quit trying to make Tish happy or pleasant and decided just to help her be Tish." This realization transformed Doyle's understanding of motherhood. She began to see her role not as protecting her children from pain but as helping them develop the capacity to face life's inevitable hardships. "I'd quit using my children as an excuse not to be brave and start seeing them as my reason to be brave," she writes. When she later divorced their father, she told her children directly: "I am about to break your hearts. Over time we will rebuild our hearts, and they will be bigger and stronger. But for now, it's just going to hurt. Sometimes we have to do hard things because they are true things." Rather than shielding her children from the complexities of her evolving identity and new relationship, Doyle included them in the process at age-appropriate levels. When creating a blended family with Abby Wambach, she prioritized honesty and emotional processing over pretending everything was perfect. She allowed her children to express grief, anger, and confusion while assuring them of unwavering love. Nightly, she would tell her daughter Tish, "You're never gonna lose me," even recognizing this as a "bold-faced lie" since death eventually separates all of us. The deeper truth she hoped to impart was resilience: "You're never gonna lose you." Doyle rejects what she calls "cream cheese parenting" - the modern tendency to provide children with every possible advantage, comfort, and option while sheltering them from struggle. When her athletic wife suggested that introverted, sensitive Tish try out for an elite soccer team, Doyle initially resisted, fearing failure would crush her daughter. But she deferred to Abby's instinct, and watched in amazement as soccer transformed Tish - giving her physical confidence, emotional resilience, and team connection. "Soccer saved my daughter," Doyle reflects. "The fact that I didn't save my daughter from soccer saved my daughter." This reimagined motherhood centers on building children's capacity for bravery rather than ensuring their comfort. Doyle redefines brave not as "feeling afraid and doing it anyway" but as "living from the inside out" - teaching children to turn inward, feel for their knowing, and speak it out loud regardless of external pressure. She aims to raise children who remain whole rather than becoming fragmented between their inner truth and outer performance. Her most radical maternal act may be allowing her children to witness her own imperfect, evolving humanity - showing them that growth requires change, that authenticity demands courage, and that love means supporting each person's becoming rather than controlling their path.

Chapter 4: Beyond Boundaries: Creating a New Family Dynamic

When Doyle's marriage ended and her relationship with Abby Wambach began, she faced the daunting task of creating a family structure with no blueprint to follow. Society offered plenty of narratives about broken homes and failed marriages, but few positive models for intentional family reconfiguration. Doyle rejected these limiting narratives, writing: "I decided that a family's wholeness or brokenness has little to do with its structure. A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in. A whole family is one in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free." This philosophy guided the creation of what she calls an "evolving ecosystem" rather than a rigid structure. Doyle, her ex-husband Craig, and Abby committed to prioritizing the children's wellbeing above their own comfort or ego. When telling the children about the divorce, Craig demonstrated extraordinary grace by saying, "It's going to be okay. Abby is a good woman. We are going to be a new kind of family, but we are still going to be a beautiful family." This statement gave the children permission to love Abby without feeling disloyal to their father - what Doyle calls "the greatest gift he's ever given me." Creating this new family required continual improvisation and adaptation. Holidays became opportunities to practice inclusivity rather than tradition. When Craig began dating someone new, the family expanded again to include her in their gatherings. Doyle describes the initial awkwardness of standing in the foyer with her ex-husband's girlfriend as she played with her daughters' hair: "When Craig and his girlfriend leave, I pull my girls close again. They look well mothered, and they smell like a flower I can't identify." Rather than seeing this as competition, Doyle gradually recognized it as additional love enriching her children's lives. Communication boundaries evolved with experience. Doyle and Craig moved from emotionally charged post-divorce interactions to a more business-like co-parenting approach. Meanwhile, Abby established her own unique relationship with each child, offering them new perspectives and skills. The kids began spending time in two different homes, each with its own rhythm and rules. While this arrangement created logistical challenges, it also provided children with expanded resources - more adults who loved them, more approaches to problem-solving, more models of authentic living. The most radical aspect of this family reformation was its rejection of possession and control. Doyle writes about her ongoing struggle to relinquish the desire to control outcomes, particularly regarding her children's well-being: "Maybe my role with the people I love is not imagining the truest, most beautiful life for them and then pushing them toward it. Maybe I'm just supposed to ask what they feel and know and imagine." This represented a fundamental shift from viewing family members as extensions of herself to seeing them as sovereign individuals with their own inner knowing. This expanded family system became a living example of what Doyle calls "both/and" thinking - rejecting false binaries to embrace more complex truths. The children weren't forced to choose between parents but encouraged to love them both. Transitions weren't framed as losses but as different expressions of connection. Most importantly, the adults modeled that living truthfully doesn't require abandoning responsibility - that honoring oneself and caring for others can coexist. As Doyle puts it: "Family is: Whether we're falling or flying, we're going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride."

Chapter 5: The Knowing Within: Trusting Inner Wisdom

At the heart of Glennon Doyle's transformation lies her reconnection with what she calls "the Knowing" - an inner wisdom she describes as more reliable than external guidance. During her marital crisis, Doyle found herself frantically searching for answers, even googling "What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?" This desperate external seeking represented her lifelong pattern of trusting everyone's judgment above her own. She writes, "Why do I trust everyone else on Earth more than I trust myself? WHERE THE HELL IS MY SELF?" This question led her to a practice of deliberate stillness - sitting alone in her closet for ten minutes daily, breathing and listening inward. Initially, this practice was excruciating, as she felt restless, distracted, and unable to quiet her thoughts. But gradually, she began to access what she calls "a new level inside me that I'd never known existed. This place is underneath; low, deep, quiet, still." In this space, Doyle discovered a sense of certainty that eluded her in her daily mental chatter. The Knowing communicates differently than analytical thought. Doyle describes it as a "nudge" rather than words - a physical sensation of rightness that, when acknowledged, fills her with "warm liquid gold." Unlike the anxiety-ridden calculations of her mind weighing pros and cons, the Knowing provides clear direction without explanation. When faced with the decision to leave her marriage for Abby, her body's response was telling: staying with her husband felt "cold, actually. It feels icy. It makes me feel like I'll die of cold," while being with Abby felt "warm. Soft. Spacious." Trusting this inner guidance required Doyle to question foundational assumptions about authority and truth. Raised in religious environments that emphasized external expertise and obedience, she had been taught that self-trust was dangerous. "We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous," she writes. "They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves." Reclaiming trust in her own wisdom meant confronting this deep conditioning and recognizing how it served societal control rather than personal flourishing. The Knowing offers a different relationship to decision-making. Rather than exhaustively researching options or seeking consensus, Doyle learned to sink beneath the surface chaos into stillness, feel for the Knowing's nudge, then act decisively without explanation or apology. This approach freed her from the paralysis of perfectionism and people-pleasing. "This way of life is thrilling," she writes. "The most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation." Importantly, Doyle doesn't claim her inner wisdom is infallible or that it produces comfort. Following the Knowing often led her into difficult terrain - ending her marriage, risking her career, confronting family disapproval. But even when the path was painful, she found that honoring her inner truth brought a sense of integrity that external approval never could. "I would disappoint everyone else before I'd disappoint myself," she writes, describing self-trust as a commitment to "abandon everyone else's expectations of me before I'll abandon myself." This practice transformed not just her personal decisions but her approach to parenting, relationships, and activism. Instead of imposing her vision on others, she became curious about their inner wisdom. She stopped trying to fix people's problems with advice and instead asked what they knew in their depths. By honoring her own Knowing and encouraging others to access theirs, Doyle models a radical alternative to both authoritarian control and relativistic confusion - a path of embodied discernment where truth is not external dogma but lived experience.

Chapter 6: Activism Born from Heartbreak: Together Rising

When Glennon Doyle first began writing openly about her struggles with addiction, motherhood, and marriage, she inadvertently created a community. Women who felt isolated in their own difficulties found solidarity in her vulnerability. They began sharing their stories through comments, emails, and eventually handwritten letters sent to her post office box. These raw testimonials of struggle, resilience, and hope became what Doyle calls "firsthand accounts" of humanity - a perspective far more nuanced than headlines or statistics could provide. As these stories accumulated, patterns emerged. Doyle noticed that many letter-writers were facing crises that seemed insurmountable: medical bills they couldn't pay, housing insecurity, domestic violence with no escape route, children with special needs lacking resources. The sheer volume of suffering described in these letters could have been overwhelming, but Doyle and her sister Amanda recognized something else in them: an opportunity to connect those who had too much with those who had too little, those seeking purpose with those needing support. This realization led to the founding of Together Rising, a nonprofit organization with a revolutionary approach to philanthropy. Rather than focusing on large institutional donors, Together Rising harnessed small individual contributions - often just $25 each - and directed them to specific needs identified through their community. The organization's name embodied its philosophy: that when one person rises from suffering, all rise together; that giving lifts the giver as much as the recipient; that collective action can transform both individual lives and systemic problems. The organization's early work focused on meeting immediate needs - what Doyle calls "pulling people out of the river." They provided emergency financial assistance to families facing eviction, funded medical treatments for uninsured patients, purchased essential equipment for children with disabilities, and responded to natural disasters with targeted relief. These efforts taught Doyle and her team about both the power and limitations of direct aid. While they could resolve individual crises, the same patterns kept emerging, raising deeper questions about why so many people were "falling into the river" in the first place. This question marked Doyle's evolution from philanthropy to activism. "When I started looking upstream," she writes, "I learned that where there is great suffering, there is often great profit." She began connecting individual hardships to systemic issues: medical bankruptcies to healthcare inequities, housing crises to economic policies, domestic violence to inadequate legal protections. Together Rising expanded its mission to address both immediate needs and underlying causes, becoming what Doyle calls "the people of And/Both" - those committed to both relief and reform. This dual approach led to increasingly ambitious initiatives. When the Trump administration implemented family separation policies at the southern border, Together Rising raised millions of dollars for legal representation and family reunification efforts. Doyle personally traveled to detention centers and witnessed both the devastating impact of these policies and the dedicated work of frontline advocates. The organization evolved to work with partners ranging from grassroots community groups to international humanitarian organizations, always prioritizing those closest to the issues at hand. Throughout this work, Doyle maintained her commitment to storytelling as a catalyst for action. Rather than presenting abstract statistics, she shared individual stories that made distant suffering immediate and personal. She recognized that empathy often begins with imagination - the ability to place oneself in another's position. By bridging the gap between comfortable donors and those in crisis, Doyle created what she calls "a connection economy" where resources flow not from obligation but relationship. "Each of us was born to bring forth something that has never existed," she writes, describing activism not as self-sacrifice but self-expression - the natural extension of allowing one's heartbreak to guide one's contribution.

Chapter 7: Embracing Wholeness: Challenging Cultural Expectations

Throughout her journey, Doyle gradually recognized that her personal struggles were not merely individual failings but symptoms of deeper cultural pathologies. The perfectionistic striving, self-doubt, and exhaustion she experienced as a woman were not random afflictions but predictable outcomes of a system designed to keep women small, compliant, and disconnected from their power. "We weren't born distrusting and fearing ourselves," she writes. "That was part of our taming." This realization led Doyle to examine the cultural messages bombarding women from childhood. She describes watching her young daughter Tish stare at magazine covers featuring impossibly thin models, using the moment to help Tish recognize these images as propaganda rather than truth. When Tish later created a petition declaring "ALL women should be treated EQUALLY," Doyle recognized the revolutionary difference between their responses: "TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ME: That's the truth about women. I will match it. TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: That's a lie about women. I will challenge it." Doyle extends this critical analysis to religion, particularly examining how certain interpretations of Christianity have been weaponized against women and LGBTQ+ individuals. She traces the relatively recent emergence of evangelical opposition to abortion and homosexuality, revealing how these positions were strategically developed in the 1970s for political mobilization rather than representing longstanding theological traditions. This historical context helped her separate authentic spirituality from political manipulation, allowing her to maintain a connection to Jesus's teachings while rejecting institutional control. The concept of integrity - being undivided between inner truth and outer expression - emerges as central to Doyle's vision of wholeness. She rejects the common self-description as "broken," writing: "I will not call myself broken, flawed, or imperfect anymore. I will quit chasing ghosts, because the chase left me weary." This represents a profound challenge to the self-improvement industry and religious teachings that position humans as fundamentally flawed and in need of external salvation or transformation. Perhaps most radically, Doyle challenges the glorification of female self-sacrifice. "Mothers have martyred themselves in their children's names since the beginning of time," she writes. "We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most." This cultural programming trains women to view self-abnegation as virtue and self-trust as selfishness. Doyle inverts this equation, arguing that self-abandonment ultimately harms everyone: "What if a mother's responsibility is not teaching her children that love locks the lover away but that love frees her?" In reclaiming wholeness, Doyle also reconsiders sexuality, gender, and identity beyond binary categories. She describes sexuality as "water" and sexual identities as "glasses" - human-made containers attempting to hold uncontainable forces. Rather than focusing on labels, she advocates for authenticity: "What if I demand freedom not because I was 'born this way' and 'can't help it' but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment—because I'm a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?" Throughout these explorations, Doyle returns to the metaphor of wild versus tamed - arguing that our truest selves are not constructed through cultural conditioning but uncovered by removing it. She challenges women to reclaim their anger, hunger, desires, and ambition not as flaws to be tamed but as sacred guidance. "The blueprints of heaven," she writes, "are etched in the deep desires of women." By trusting these desires rather than suppressing them, women might not only transform their individual lives but collectively create a more just and beautiful world.

Summary

Glennon Doyle's journey embodies a profound paradox: that the path to freedom often begins with acknowledging one's cages. Through her evolution from bulimic teenager to Christian mommy blogger to unapologetically authentic activist, Doyle demonstrates that true liberation requires both the courage to confront painful truths and the imagination to envision alternatives. Her story reveals that when we dare to question the cultural systems that have shaped us - from gender expectations to religious dogma to family structures - we discover our capacity to create more authentic, compassionate ways of being. The radical honesty that initially seemed like it would destroy her life instead became the foundation for a more expansive existence. The ultimate wisdom of Doyle's narrative lies in her recognition that self-trust is not selfish but essential - that abandoning ourselves to please others ultimately serves no one. By reclaiming connection to her inner Knowing, she models a way of living that honors both personal truth and collective responsibility. Her approach to family, activism, spirituality, and identity all flow from this central insight: that we cannot offer others what we deny ourselves, that our full humanity is not a threat but a gift to the world. For anyone struggling to reconcile societal expectations with inner truth, Doyle's story offers both validation and challenge - an invitation to break free from whatever cages constrain us and build a life that reflects our most authentic vision, even when that means disrupting everything we once believed defined us.

About Author

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Glennon Doyle

Glennon Doyle is the CEO and Founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. She is an author, podcaster, producer, and philanthropist. Her books include the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed, which has sold more than three million copies; the #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; the New York Times bestseller Carry On, Warrior; and Get Untamed: The Journal. Glennon, named one of the “50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,” is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. She is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light. Glennon was Founder and President of Together Rising, a nonprofit organization which distributed more than $55 million to women, families and children in crisis. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as “the guidebook for being alive.”

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