Liz Walker, former WBZ-TV anchor, writes book about healing after exploring her own trauma
Liz Walker has devoted her professional life to writing, telling, and sharing stories. Now, in her first book, the former WBZ-TV News anchor crafts a true story of pain and healing.
Walker has experienced both in her personal life and as a minister at Roxbury Presbyterian Church.
"No One Left Alone"
In "No One Left Alone," Walker writes about trauma's toll on an individual, its stifling power to rob us of our joy and our health, and on a community.
After lifetimes of oppression and discrimination and too many young lives lost to violence, the collective grief Walker saw in Roxbury was a call to action. When church member Cory Johnson was killed in 2010, the congregation was devastated.
From that painful loss, Walker and mental health counselor Colleen Sharka created Can We Talk, the centerpiece of the Cory Johnson Program for Post-Traumatic Healing. What was designed to help one community respond to pain has grown beyond anything Walker imagined.
Eleven years after its founding, there are now 18 healing sites in five states and Washington D.C. In "No One Left Alone," Walker sheds light on the talking and listening that is helping people emerge from grief that held them hostage.
"Look deeper into their own stories"
"I hope that by telling my story and telling the story of people in this community, we will inspire people to kind of look deeper into their own stories," said Walker.
The idea, she explained, is we are all in this together.
"When you really grasp your own story in someone else's, that's when you really see how it works," said Walker.
Trauma and grief, she writes, are isolating. "We think we are going through something nobody else has gone through," Walker wrote. Talking and listening (sometimes just listening) remind us that, in fact, we are not alone.
Walker describes the empathy and self-compassion that develop when we share. Anecdotally, she said, it is destigmatizing mental health issues in communities where emotional needs were previously considered weakness.
Walker said writing the book, over four years, was the most healing experience of her life and the hardest.
"I was a little nervous and intimidated about writing about real people. And I wanted to honor their stories. But I learned a lot more about my own story," said Walker.
Liz Walker's personal story
For decades, Walker lived with the untended pain of her mother's death. She died giving birth to Walker, a family tragedy that no one ever talked about. Her late brother (he passed away in 2024 of complications from alcoholism) was three years older than her. She said that they only began talking, really talking, about the loss (that felt like "a hole") when she began writing the book. Growing up, there were no photos of her mother in their home, no stories about her.
Walker said her father remarried "a wonderful woman" and did not speak of his own lingering pain. The Rev. Charles Walker was his daughter's "everything." He died of a massive stroke when Walker was in high school.
"I grew up in a time when we didn't even know the word 'trauma,'" Walker explained.
Beyond the family pain were traumatic high school experiences. Walker's father had enrolled her in a predominantly-white high school in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas during desegregation. "An environment," she said, "in which people hated each other."
Walker writes about suppressing those painful experiences for a long time and the redemption she has found in finally talking about them.
"It does redeem you when you can face the worst thing you've been through. It doesn't mean that you're over it or that it's fixed. But you face it and then you move on. And I think you're a little stronger for that experience," said Walker.
Now, as she promotes "No One Left Alone," she sees the book a call to come together.
"It's a call to look at people as your neighbors. It's just love. It's not rocket science. It's not a new-age idea," she said, smiling. "But I think it's more important now than ever."
"Healing is a divine opening of the heart. It's the wideness of water, the openness of the sea. It's less a return than an arrival - a landing in a space that didn't exist before." (from Liz Walker in "No One Left Alone")
