Judith Lewis Herman Quotes

#1. Though all the daughters eventually succeeded in escaping from their families, they felt, even at this time of the interview (while in their 20s and 30s) that they would never be safe with their fathers, and that they would have to defend themselves as long as their fathers lived.

Judith Lewis Herman

#2. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.

Judith Lewis Herman

#3. The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love. p4

Judith Lewis Herman

#4. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

Judith Lewis Herman

#5. Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies. Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control. They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.

Judith Lewis Herman

#6. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event.

Judith Lewis Herman

#7. The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure.

Judith Lewis Herman

#8. It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival.

Judith Lewis Herman

#9. As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.

Judith Lewis Herman

#10. Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.

Judith Lewis Herman

#11. MOST PEOPLE have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh.

Judith Lewis Herman

#12. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

Judith Lewis Herman

#13. After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

Judith Lewis Herman

#14. The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

Judith Lewis Herman

#15. Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.

Judith Lewis Herman

#16. Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it.

Judith Lewis Herman

#17. Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

Judith Lewis Herman

#18. Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

Judith Lewis Herman

#19. Most of our informants [incest survivors] remembered their mothers as weak and powerless, finding their only dignity in martyrdom.

Judith Lewis Herman

#20. THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.

Judith Lewis Herman

#21. As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.]

Judith Lewis Herman

#22. Though both partners may wish for reconciliation, their unspoken goals are often sharply in conflict. The abuser usually wishes to reestablish his pattern of coercive control, while the victim wishes to resist it.

Judith Lewis Herman

#23. Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

Judith Lewis Herman

#24. In practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

Judith Lewis Herman

#25. Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where all questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.

Judith Lewis Herman