Lori Williams | A Liminal Space Coaching

Category: religious trauma

  • The Lure and the Magnet: Why You Keep Getting Pulled Toward the Wrong Rooms

    Sometimes we get lost trying to find our way home. If you’ve ever walked away from a community wondering what was wrong with you — this is for you. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re just someone who was paying close attention.

  • My Faith Wounding Is Not Intended to Harm You

    If I had a physical injury — like walking with a limp after a serious car accident — you might understand my faith wounding differently. My story isn’t about threatening your faith. It’s about working through what happened to me.

  • Already Home

    What if home isn’t somewhere you finally arrive at? What if it’s a moment you notice — and then another, and then another? A post for anyone exhausted from trying to heal their way home.

  • The Roundabout: Why Religious Trauma Keeps Us Circling

    Isn’t it strange that the same religion teaching about the unconditional love of Jesus attaches a long list of expectations to those who follow him? Toxic religion is like having a parent who says they love you unconditionally but expects you to perform in a certain way to get what you need.

  • Understanding Spiritual Trauma and Its Impact

    When the ground you thought would always hold becomes unstable—that’s spiritual trauma. After a decade of trying to heal in places that retraumatized me, I learned what survivors actually need. It’s not what most churches think.

  • Finding Joy and Hope Beyond the Emotional Highs: A Journey from Manufactured to Authentic

    After losing the intoxicating emotional highs of church community, I discovered that true joy and hope aren’t dramatic peaks to chase, but subtle moments that accumulate like stalactites—building lasting strength one drop at a time in the darkness.

  • 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…

  • Walking in Shadows: A Journey from Darkness to Light

    The toxic faith I grew up with convinced me that looking inward was dangerous—that if I dug beneath the surface, I’d discover nothing but the rot of an irredeemably sinful heart. But what happens when someone already drowning in that internal darkness looks outward and sees nothing but more of the same? When it finally…

  • 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…