Saturday, May 28, 2016

Quotes for Abuse Survivors & Abuse Recovery


“Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.” 

 ― Danielle Bernock, Emerging with Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, and the Love That Heals 

“In a healthy relationship, vulnerability is wonderful. It leads to increased intimacy and closer bonds. When a healthy person realizes that he or she hurt you, they feel remorse and they make amends. It’s safe to be honest. In an abusive system, vulnerability is dangerous. It’s considered a weakness, which acts as an invitation for more mistreatment. Abusive people feel a surge of power when they discover a weakness. They exploit it, using it to gain more power. Crying or complaining confirms that they’ve poked you in the right spot.” 

 ― Christina Enevoldsen, The Rescued Soul: The Writing Journey for the Healing of Incest and Family Betrayal 

“To deny someone‟s feelings or experiences it to literally deny their reality.” 

― Danu Morrigan, You're Not Crazy, It's Your Mother: Understanding and Healing for Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers 

“Because we were treated neglectfully and abusively in our young years—when we most needed self-love to be mirrored—it was difficult to hold onto…We take up the challenge of learning to love ourselves, through our highs & our lows, when we are finding acceptance from others and when we are being closed out and rejected.” 

 ― Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse 

“If someone is inconsiderate or rude to you, risk telling them how it made you feel or that you didn’t appreciate being treated that way. If you tend to talk yourself out of anger by telling yourself that you don’t want to make waves, try telling yourself instead that it is okay to make waves sometimes and risk letting people know how you really feel.”

― Beverly Engel, The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself 

“As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not ‘stupid,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘ugly,’ or a ‘liar’. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is underneath.”

― Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence 

“To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.” 

― Andrei Lankov 

“I think this point is so important, I'm going to repeat it: You should never listen to criticism that is primarily intended to wound, even if it contains more than a grain of truth.” 

― Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life 

 “when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others’) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied. 

 - Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001 Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis” ― Kathy Steele 

“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.” 

― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse  


“so often victims end up unnecessarily prolonging their abuse because they buy into the notion that their abuser must be coming from a wounded place and that only patient love and tolerance (and lots of misguided therapy) will help them heal.” 

― George K. Simon 



“One of the first steps in freeing yourself from a gaslighting relationship, then, is to acknowledge how unpleasant and hurtful you find this Emotional Apocalypse. If you hate being yelled at, you have the right to insist that yelling not be a part of your disagreements. Maybe some other woman wouldn't mind the loud voice, but you do. If that makes you sensitive, so be it. You have the right to set limits where you want them, not where some mythical other, "less sensitive" woman wants them.” 

Robin Stern


“Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation.” 

George K. Simon



“LOVE is the greatest weapon for the ones who don't believe in it and for the ones who do its an emotional exploitation.” 

Amit Abraham

“With emotional abuse, the insults, insinuations, criticism, and accusations slowly eat away at the victim’s self-esteem until he or she is incapable of judging a situation realistically. He or she may begin to believe that there is something wrong with them or even fear they are losing their mind. They have become so beaten down emotionally that they blame themselves for the abuse.”

― Beverly Engel, The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing  

 “Mind control is built on lies and manipulation of attachment needs.

Valerie Sinason, (Forward)”
 

 Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 

“IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.” 

Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men 



No comments:

Post a Comment