Best 15 quotes of Wendy Hoffman on MyQuotes

As an adult, it shatters me that the child parts of my mind froze at those ages, didn't develop, and continued to believe the outrageous deceptions the abusers used on me.

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

Had I not been dissociative, I never would have survived.

I am hyper alert to people turning away from me. I have a perennial sense of being an outsider.

I imagine everyone wears layered masks, and parades around a variety or panoply of false selves depending on the occasion. Normal people do that out of their own insecurities and ambitions. Mind-controlled people are hollow because their minds were taken away from them. Their controllers instruct these shells of people about what to do and when. Theirs is institutionalized, manufactured falsity.

I imagine everyone wears layered masks, and parades around a variety or panoply of false selves depending on the occasion.

I never had the ambition to do what clinicians call "integrate". Many clinicians think that until your mind comes into one piece, then you have not healed. But I don't care that much about what the experts say.

I see individuals whose lives have been so protected that they seem like pearls nestled in velvet jewelry cases. I cannot empathize.

I wanted my mother to love me. Despite all the torture and brutality.

I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward. Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large.

People don't make decisions within these sorts of groups. They try to avoid more torture. Then they are tortured into thinking they made a decision of their own free will.

The concentration camps were a laboratory for the Nazis. They put the minorities and intellectuals in there because the general population wouldn't mind losing those people. The Nazi leaders knew people needed targets for their own self-hatred.

This book is not for the delicate or for people who are convinced the world is fine just the way it is.

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.

What better weapon than the human brain? The human brain was Mrs Twartski's and Wiezenslowski's domain. The children who were used were the castaways of the United States government, like dogs abandoned and a vet's office. Mrs. Twartski read the letter out loud, slowly and carefully enunciating every word in her thick Polish accent. The German scientists were looking for children who could learn quickly, were between ages four and twelve, and could withstand being famished without dying. Deutschland were paying dollar $50,000 per subject. Everyone in living room exactly Mrs. Twartski and all my aunts let out a huge "Ahhh". My sister's and my eyes grew wide because we had no idea what this meant or why the adults were so excited. Then my sister's eyes narrowed as if she knew something that I didn't yet, as if she had just figured something out.