Lori Williams | A Liminal Space Coaching

Category: Religious PTSD recovery

  • A Table for My Enemies

    “I have spent so much of my life closing and barring the door to the parts of myself I find unacceptable. I’m realizing as I get older how much energy it requires to continue to push on this door to prevent it from breaking open. Sitting on my desk is a little golden table—a sacred…

  • The Ground Beneath My Feet

    All I’d ever done was pretend—first in the family that raised me, then in the church. I didn’t even know I was pretending. Then I finally faced the truth, and people were talking about me. What followed was almost a decade of wandering. But what I’ve found in peer support groups isn’t another savior—it’s shared…

  • When the Shell Cracks: Finding Truth Beyond Religious Performance

    Truth always finds a way to surface. Our ego tries to keep everything together, but eventually the shell cracks and what’s inside starts leaking out. If we’re brave enough to look at what seeps out instead of frantically patching the holes, we might find what we’ve been searching for all along.

  • The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Finding Truth Beyond Collective Narratives

    We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. But what happens when those shared stories—our collective narratives—become barriers to the very connection they promise to create? Growing up with parents whose lives were like apple carts filled to capacity, I learned early how fragile our shared stories can be. One uncomfortable truth…

  • Why Systems Choose Silence Over Survivors

    When you’re a survivor and hardly anyone believes you, it becomes almost impossible not to question yourself. Even with a therapist saying over and over “this isn’t your fault,” even with the friends and family who stuck around telling you the same thing, that part of me that was wired to believe I needed the…

  • You’re Not Crazy: Psychology Finally Recognizes Religious Trauma

    “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson For years, those of us who walked away from toxic religion were told we just had a ‘bad church experience’—but a groundbreaking American Psychological Association article is finally validating what we’ve known…

  • When Stars Fall: Finding the Light Within

    “Sometimes life feels almost too heavy to bear. I find myself turning off the news or closing social media after yet another story of a bright star crashing into darkness—someone whose light had guided so many of us through our own difficult days. But why do their lights go out? Why do they sometimes choose…

  • Finding My Way Back to Myself

    Why did I so readily follow a dangerous man wherever he went? Why did it all feel like the right thing to do? Looking back on my time in church, I’m still trying to understand what made me believe a rigid belief system and a broken pastor could fill the gaps in my life. The…

  • When Breaking Apart Sets You Free

    Autonomy isn’t selfish—it’s about staying true to yourself, no matter what others say you “should” be. How often do people tell you who to be or what to believe? Sometimes they push so hard because they’re unsure of themselves and need you to mirror their choices to feel comfortable. When we abandon ourselves to become…

  • You ARE A Lot Stronger Than You Think You Are

    I struggle with the expectation that I should be stronger when facing people who think I’m sinning for disagreeing with their doctrine. My abuse happened in a mainstream evangelical church—not something people call a cult today. Many people I care about still attend churches with similar beliefs. I often wonder: am I traumatized by the…