Survivors Of Abuse Quotes

#1. Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ...

Asa Don Brown

#2. Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#3. There are tons of kids out there who endure chronic abuse and suffer in silence. They can't trust anyone, they can't tell anyone, and they have no idea how to get away from it.

C. Kennedy

#4. After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324

Alison Miller

#5. You're too sensitive' victims of sexual abuse are told over and over by those whose reality depends on being insensitive. Most adults who have been in the victim role cringe when anyone tells them they are sensitive. In fact, sensitivity is a lovely trait and one to be cherished in any human being.

Renee Fredrickson

#6. It's all interrelated, these destructive things I do. I latch on to people, like I'm collecting them. I'm always looking for a hero, you know?

Jenna Brooks

#7. 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

#8. Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones.
Now you tell me if I'm crazy or if I've always been blessed.

Bob Thurber

#9. I grew up missing my mom while she was right in front of me.

Maggie Young

#10. I can sit in denial of my life because in looking around I see how lucky I am to have survived it.

K. Farrell St. Germain

#11. ...there is a particular focus of the problem faced only by men. It arises from our culture providing no room for a man as victim.

Mike Lew

#12. As part of the healing process, change your perception of yourself from "victim" to that of "advocate" and "survivor.

Don Easton

#13. She thought of the Good Shepherd with His sheep. Of the Man hanging upon the cross. And the understanding bubbled up within her soul: He makes all things new.

Alicia G. Ruggieri

#14. the gravity of wound to fist

Karen Russell

#15. We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#16. It appears that DDNOS is the intentional goal of these abusers, but DID sometimes results from a failure of programming.
In DDNOS, the ANP is always present, even when another part is in control of the behavior and feelings.

Alison Miller

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

Judith Lewis Herman

#18. Simon leveled the gun at Will again. 'Now,' he said casually, 'someone's gonna die here in the next minute.'
On the other side of the two-way mirror, Sammy took aim.
'That's exactly right,' she whispered.

Jenna Brooks

#19. Healing isn't just about pain. It's about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.

Ellen Bass

#20. I am small.
So are stars from a distance. It's all a matter of perspective.

C. Kennedy

#21. Nobody has ever killed themselves over a broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much worse than physical pain.

Oliver Markus

#22. People may not realize the damage that they are doing by placing the blame on the victim ~ but that doesn't lessen the damage that they cause by doing it.

Darlene Ouimet

#23. Children who feel unloved and unprotected are like a half-filled cup. They become incapable of 'filling up' because they have come to believe they are unworthy of love. They try to please others, give to others, and care for others in a desperate hope that they may make themselves worthy.

Beverly Engel

#24. The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. we can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more honestly at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing that knowledge closer to our awareness.

Alice Miller

#25. Closeness was the promise of suffering and pain

Alice Jamieson

#26. During sexual abuse, children feel and incorporate the rage, pain, shame, and sense of perversion that the perpetrator is projecting. They take these feelings into the very core of themselves, and they are badly traumatized by the emotions surrounding the assault, as well as by the assault itself.

Renee Fredrickson

#27. The repulsive actions of the person who abused you do not identify you.

Tanya R. Liverman

#28. I sometimes continue to see myself in split ways; it causes me trouble and contributes to a lack of satisfaction with myself.

Maureen Brady

#29. One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.

Stefan Molyneux

#30. The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.

Warwick Middleton

#31. As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.

Aphrodite Matsakis

#32. Abuse is a parasite that feeds off hate and shame, growing in size and strength with silence.

Nikki Sex

#33. There's an innocence to her still that amazes me. Sometimes I forget she's older than me. Then, I remember that she hasn't gone through what I've gone through.

Zoe Cruz

#34. I am filled with truth at my center where I once held shame.

Maureen Brady

#35. Whenever I talk to survivors [of a domestic abuse relationship] who have lived through that and are on the other side and their whole perspective on life is a complete 180, I'm just so inspired.

Kerry Washington

#36. Clouds of confusion
rolled into illusion
He veils perversion
forcing her coercion
Her body he takes
while she flies away
unbelievable, she's invisible

Diana Rasmussen

#37. All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently.

Heyward Bruce Ewart III

#38. I look upon the gift of my life as a wondrous journey.

Maureen Brady

#39. Programming is the act of installing internal, pre-established reactions to external stimuli so that a person will automatically react in a predetermined manner to things like an auditory, visual or tactile signal or perform a specific set of actions according to a date and/or time.

Alison Miller

#40. Also, look for "floating alters." These are not deliberately created parts of the system, but alters that were accidentally split off at the same time as others.

Alison Miller

#41. Don't you love your mother, dear?"
"I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.

Dean Koontz

#42. Since her time in the necromancer's clutches, she was still recovering lost memories from the quicksand of her mind. They'd drop like nuclear bombs, freezing her at the worst time as visuals which should've stayed forever buried bubbled to the surface.

Katherine McIntyre

#43. My mom called Grandma today and told her we would no longer be attending family parties. My mom told her we have had enough of being blamed for something Brian did and everyone brushing it off like it was no big deal.

Erin Merryn

#44. It is important to learn about being multiple, and what works for their healing, from your client. To work with the alters, rather than trying to get the ANP to control the rest of the personality system.

Alison Miller

#45. While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.

Lee Ann Hoff

#46. Many survivors insist they're not courageous: 'If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.' 'If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared'... Most of us have it mixed up. You don't start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.

Laura Davis

#47. For change to occur in us, we must be willing to enter the wilderness of the unknown and to wander in unfamiliar territory, directionless and often in the darkness....We do not need to keep every little thing under control. In fact, we find ourselves only by allowing some falling apart to happen.

Maureen Brady

#48. Sexual abuse injects poisonous lies into its victims' hearts and minds. "You're not worthy" is one of them.

Carolyn Byers Ruch

#49. It is strange ... the reasons one feels he doesn't deserve things.

C. Kennedy

#50. The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

Dave Eggers

#51. He doesn't hurt us anymore."
Of course he doesn't hurt you anymore, I think. You're not defenseless anymore.

Melanie O'Shea

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

Judith Lewis Herman

#53. Often it isn't the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after.

S. Kelley Harrell

#54. He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been.

George R R Martin

#55. By opening the door to my life, it is my hope and mission to shed light on the hidden wounds of abuse, to end the stigma and shame associated with abuse, and to show survivors true courage, strength, inspiration, and determination.

Erin Merryn

#56. Willem had tried to approach the subject through various directions - through stories of friends and acquaintances, some named, some not (he had to assume some of these people were creations, as surely no one person could have such a vast collection of sexually abused friends).

Hanya Yanagihara

#57. Fearing the unknown within myself has kept me crouching in a corner. I look to see who I am and discover much that is worthy.

Maureen Brady

#58. In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

Aphrodite Matsakis