Paramore’s Hayley Williams joins the list of famous women speaking out about toxic exes

Having a toxic ex is not uncommon (unfortunately), and too many people have suffered in silence. But now it It seems that many famous women are making efforts to change this, and many have recently spoken openly about how these situations have affected their lives. In January Anna Kendrick collapsed the complicated situation of having embryos with a “toxic” ex, and last week Lily Collins appeared on a podcast discussing how an verbally and emotionally abusive ex from more than a decade ago still trigger panic and fear in her today. And in one interview with The New Yorker Posted on Sunday, Hayley Williams opened up about her own toxic marriage, her divorce and how she channeled both experiences into her music.

Williams and New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert dated for eight years before wedding in February 2016. They were divorced in July 2017 and in 2020 Rolling Stone interview, Williams admitted she was very ashamed that their relationship started when Gilbert was still married to someone else. She thought marriage would smooth over the rocky beginnings of their relationship, but eventually called that they shouldn’t have married at all.

But it took Williams a long time to process all of that, and though Paramore’s 2017 album After laughterwas widely understood by listeners as a “depression album,” Wiliams said New Yorker that she had no idea at the time that she was incorporating depression into her songwriting. “I was in such denial! I was very ignorant of what depression really looks like in your day-to-day life,” she said.

“I wasn’t really aware that I had more than a few bad days,” Williams added.

“It was my physical health that woke me up,” she said The New Yorker. “It helped me get out of a toxic, bad relationship, but it didn’t answer any other questions for me.”

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But during going through her divorce, Her body showed the reality of the trauma she was going through: “It was my physical body that sI demanded that I be mindful of choices I make and how I live my life: people I’ve been with, my past relationships,” she explained. “All those things I ignored – my body didn’t want me to let go of it. So it kind of broke for me. It looked like an adrenal crash and I needed to check my cortisol levels.”

she was diagnosed with PTSD in an intensive care center in 2018, and it was only then that she realized she still had so much to process from her relationship with Gilbert.

she told THe New Yorker:

I really needed someone who wasn’t part of my family but was an older, wiser figure to hold me in that moment and say, ‘That really touched you. Not just your marriage, but things you’ve been through that you’ll never really talk about.’ I casually joked about my family’s divorces and running away and all that shit. Those are huge things! I know that now, but it wasn’t really a topic that I felt I needed to research very much into until I got into a really good relationship that I wanted, and we weren’t healthy enough for that.

While I wish having crappy ex-boyfriends was a far rarer experience, seeing popular artists speak so openly about trauma and healing gives me hope that others will do the same feel empowered to do what is best for themselves.