Maisie Williams Opens Up About Her "Traumatic Relationship" Her Dad And Shares She Was In A "Child Cult"
She's known to the world as Arya Stark, but Maisie Williams has been opening herself up more and more to the world. She shared on a recent podcast episode that she endured a traumatic childhood that started with her mother leaving her father when she was only four months old.
On an episode of "The Diary of a CEO" with Steven Bartlett, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams revealed parts of her childhood that she had never talked about publicly before. Her parents split when she was an infant, and things only worsened from there.
Maisie Williams Opens Up about Her "Traumatic Relationship" Her Dad and Shares She Was in a "Child Cult"
Maisie shares the memory of a teacher pulling her aside to ask if she was eating breakfast. This was the moment the truth started to come out about her father, who was mistreating her from a young age.
"I had so many people who loved and cared about me so much, but I had never been asked the right questions where I could really say what was wrong," she said. The teacher's small act of asking about her well-being opened the door for her to finally get out of an abusive home.
She said her mother was able to "escape" her father when she was four months old, but for years to come, she was still abused by her dad. "I, as a young child before the age of 8, had quite a traumatic relationship with my dad," she shared. She didn't want to give too many details of what happened as a child because "it affects my siblings and my whole family," but she gave enough information to know that she was not in a safe, loving house.
"I was in a child cult against my mother," she said. "I was really fighting it at the beginning, but basically my whole world flipped on its head."
"I knew that I would look around at other kids and be like, 'Why don't they seem to understand this, like, pain or dread or fear? . . . Where does the joy, like, when does that come for me?'" she continued. "I think a lot of the traumatic things that were happening, I didn't realize that they were wrong."
She was finally able to realize that her mother wasn't trying to divide her and her father for no reason; she was just trying to protect her and save her from an abusive relationship. Maisie says she doesn't speak to her dad today, and she's still working on healing, but the hard part is convincing herself that it wasn't her fault what happened to her.
"It's not because of me that these bad things happened when I was a child," she said.