Lori Williams | A Liminal Space Coaching

Tag: church hurt

  • Overcoming Religious Trauma: The Theology of Self-Trust

    Self-distrust doesn’t arrive all at once. It gets installed — quietly, systematically, by systems that need you not to trust yourself in order to keep you close.

  • When Appeasement Becomes a Way of Life

    I didn’t have words for what happened to me for a long time. Laura Anderson’s Religious Power and Control Wheel gave me a map. Here I walk through each category — and share what I lived inside each one.

  • The People Who Stay: Why Friendship Is the Love Story We Keep Missing

    **Slug:** the-people-who-stay-friendship-love-story — **Excerpt:** We were taught that romantic love is the answer — the thing that will complete us, save us, prove our worth. But what if the most nourishing love story of your life has been unfolding quietly beside you all along, in the people who simply stayed? This is a post about…

  • Beyond the Bubble: What Two Halftime Shows Taught Me About Belonging

    I’m not a football fan, but I watched the Super Bowl for the halftime shows. What I saw revealed something far more important than entertainment: two visions of belonging in America. One triggered memories of my evangelical past—the thin bubble of shared beliefs that burst when I stepped outside the lines. The other showed people…

  • 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…

  • When Authority Becomes the Enemy of Truth

    “Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” — Albert EinsteinThe ambulance lights cut through the darkness at the convenience store. Someone had played Russian roulette and lost. As I drove past that night, seventeen and heartbroken after my boyfriend left me for my best friend, I looked up at the empty sky…

  • 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…