Ask the Author: Liz Williams
Answered Questions (8)
Liz Williams
That healing is possible. Not as a slogan and not as a guarantee that it will be easy or fast or that it will look the way you imagined. But as a lived, documented, honest truth from a woman who did not believe it herself for a very long time. The diagnosis is not the end of the story. The trauma is not the definition. The God who met me in the hardest parts of the clinical process, in the EMDR sessions and the psychoanalysis and the slow, unglamorous work of learning to set a boundary and keep it, that same God is available to every woman who opens these pages. You are not too far gone. You are not too broken. And you are not alone.
Liz Williams
Staying in the room with the parts of the story I most wanted to leave out. There is a version of a healing memoir that is all resolution and very little raw material. I did not want to write that book because I had read that book and it had not helped me. The parts that helped were the ones that told the truth about how disorienting it is to receive a diagnosis that reframes your entire history. How strange it is to grieve a childhood while simultaneously raising your own children. How the healing is not linear and the faith is not constant and the Holy Spirit shows up in the most unexpected places. Staying honest about all of that was the hardest and the most important part.
Liz Williams
wrote them for the woman sitting in silence with wounds she does not yet have words for. For the woman who has been told she is too sensitive, too reactive, too much, and has quietly started to believe it. For the woman who loves God and goes to therapy and still wonders, somewhere in the back of her mind, whether she is allowed to need both. For the mother who is watching patterns she recognizes from her own childhood beginning to surface in her family and does not know how to stop them. I wrote them for the woman I was before I had the language for any of this. If she picks up one of these books and feels, for the first time, genuinely understood, then I have done what I set out to do.
Liz Williams
A. The wounded inner child is the part of you that experienced the original trauma and never fully received what she needed in response to it. She is not a metaphor. She is a real psychological presence in your nervous system, carrying the fear, the shame, and the unmet needs of the child you once were. Healing her matters because until you do, she is running a significant portion of your adult life. The reactions that feel disproportionate, the relationships that repeat the same painful patterns, the sense that no matter how much you accomplish you are never quite safe, those are often her. Meeting her with compassion rather than shame is one of the most transformative things I have ever done, and it is something I walk through in detail in Trampling the Snake.
Liz Williams
A. I would say she is not broken. And I would say she is not alone. What she is describing is something I lived for years. The sermons reach some parts of you and not others. The worship is real and the relief is temporary. The prayer is sincere and the wound is still there on Monday morning. That is not a faith failure. That is a trauma response. The parts of us that were shaped by early abuse, neglect, or chronic fear are not always reached by spiritual practice alone. They need to be met clinically as well as spiritually. That does not diminish the power of God. It honors the complexity of the human beings He made.
Liz Williams
A . Generational trauma shows up in the patterns you swore you would never repeat and found yourself repeating anyway. In the relationship dynamics that feel eerily familiar even when the people are different. In the ways you parent, react, attach, and disconnect. It is passed not through genetics alone but through the nervous system, through the modeling of emotional regulation or the absence of it, through the silences in a family that everyone learns not to break. Breaking the cycle begins with naming it. Not to assign blame but to assign responsibility, which is a very different thing. You cannot change what you cannot see. My books are, at their core, about learning to see clearly so that what was inherited does not have to be passed on.
Liz Williams
A . This is the question I get asked most often, and it is the one I most love answering. No. They do not conflict. What I discovered through EMDR therapy, psychoanalysis, and the slow work of attachment healing is that the Holy Spirit was present in all of it. Not waiting outside the therapist's office for me to finish. Not asking me to choose between the clinical truth about my nervous system and the spiritual truth about who God says I am. He was there in the room, in the process, in the breakthroughs that happened on the counsellor's couch as much as in prayer. Faith and clinical treatment are not competing paths to the same destination. They are the same path.
Liz Williams
A . Honestly, it was the moment I realized that the silence was part of the wound. For years I had carried what I now know is Complex PTSD in the way so many of us carry it, quietly, privately, assuming that if people truly knew the depth of it they would see something broken beyond repair. Writing about it publicly was an act of refusing that lie. I also knew, somewhere deep in me, that if I was sitting with these wounds in silence, other women were too. The book I needed when I was in the worst of it did not exist yet. So I wrote it.
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