Maisie Williams has revealed she had a “traumatic” childhood fueled by her father’s behavior.

“As a young child before the age of 8, I had a traumatic relationship with my father,” the ‘Game of Thrones’ actress said on Monday’s episode of the ‘The Diary’ podcast. a CEO”.

“[That relationship] really consumed a large part of my childhood. Ever since I remember I really had trouble sleeping, and I think a lot of the traumatic things that were happening, I didn’t realize they were wrong,” she explained to host Steven Bartlett.

The former child actress, who is now 25, said she felt estranged from her peers growing up because of her experiences.

“I was looking at the other kids around me and thinking ‘why don’t they seem to understand this pain or fear or fear? Where does this joy come from – when does it come for me? “

During the interview, the ‘Pistols’ star described his childhood as someone who “felt very deeply about other people.”

Although Williams didn’t go into detail about the specific events surrounding her father because “it affects my siblings and my whole family”, she shared that her mother, Hilary Pitt Frances, was able to “escape” her father. when the TV star was just four months old.

“It was bad before that,” noted Williams, who is the youngest of her four siblings.

Despite her restraint on details, she described the moment a teacher asked her about her home life, planting the seed in her head that something was wrong.

When she was only 8 years old, her teacher asked her if she was hungry, to which she replied that she was. When the teacher asked her if she had had breakfast, she said no because “we just didn’t have breakfast”.

Williams eventually revealed to the teacher that she and her siblings usually don’t eat anything in the morning.

As she broke down in tears during the interview, Williams said, “They were asking the right questions. I had so many people who loved me and cared so much about me, but I was never asked the right questions where I could really tell what was wrong.

After the exchange with her teacher, Williams’ mother arrived at school with her siblings.

“It was really, really hard because I always wanted to fight and say ‘No! These things aren’t bad! You’re trying to take my dad away from me and that’s wrong! Because I was like, indoctrinated somehow.

Williams said she felt her “whole world flip on its head” that day, sharing that while it felt good to be away from her father, she knew it went against everything. that she “knew to be true”.

Describing her family situation as something of a ‘cult’, the actress expressed a change in perspective on her father and her childhood years later, and a desire to stop taking the things that happened in her life personally. .

“If I wasn’t there, it would have been someone else. Just because something is wrong with me doesn’t mean these things happened when I was a kid.