Best 925 quotes in «recovery quotes» category

The more I connected with myself, I studied and found out more about myself, through help and on my own as well.

The more I focus my time and energy on withstanding a real life, I am able to overcome and come out victorious.

The most important progress and success can't be seen. If you can validate yourself internally, then external validation becomes a byproduct.

The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child’s life. A man sticks his hand in his daughter’s underpants, or strokes his son’s penis once, and for that child, the world is never the same again.

The most powerful energy on earth is the power of creation. Create a new life is you want to truly leave the old one behind.

The most treasured gift you can present yourself today is a hand of assistance to liberate you from the prison of anxiety, fear, & stress so that you can set free.

The novel had metabolized recovery with so much rigor that it had already asked all my questions and weathered all my intellectual discomforts. It documented what Wallace called the “grudging move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, clichéd A.A. thing — so unlikely and unpromising … this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” might actually offer hope, in its simplicity and its slogans, in its church-basement coffee and its effusion of anonymous and unqualified love.

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle - a jab into a vein... ("For The Rest Of Her Life")

The notion that life could be any different - that it could be better - becomes inconceivable. You forget how good it was to be normal. Worst of all, you come to believe that you prefer it this way.

The only person You shouldn't be able To live without Is you.

The only signs she would need to read would be in the sky, rather than the shadows and clouds that passed over her father's face, alerting her to whether he was the monster, or the man who turned a gum tree into a writing desk.

The only thing that gave me comfort in the attic was thinking about my family. Now I'm home, but it's not the home I imagined. Not the family I imagined. I'd convinced myself that they'd continued on with their happy, carefree lives without me, that they were doing it double, because I couldn't do it at all. I was wrong.

The only way to get over the pain is to face it, embrace it, hug it and learn the lessons embedded within it.

The only way to move forward is to focus on the good in your life and the good that you are doing for others and yourself. My past has shown me things in life, others and myself that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but I can choose to pick up the pieces and build a beautiful life for myself and help others to do the same.

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. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. 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. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

The past of childhood abuse is not possible to forget; however, it is achievable to thrive

The Pain is too much to bear She weeps within; As she grinds her teeth with a grin

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

There is a certain kind of darkness that seeps into our lives if we are not actively engaged in creating light.

There are no happy faces above 15,000 feet. (From Robert's "Taking the 12 Steps Up-and Down-Kilimanjaro)

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.

There is a fine line between what’s the disease’s fault and what’s the drinker’s fault.

There is an intensified risk for a child living in a household experiencing domestic violence, because their basic childhood requirement is not being met, in addition to the demand for care and protection by their parents.

...there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that "Relapse is part of recovery." It's another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery.

There is life after abuse. This is mine.

There is no greater gift than realizing the constant presence of the Divine and His Absolute Power to create and restore all things.

There is no pillow, no comforter, no room for the night at rock bottom. Once you hit there, get up and get out!

There comes a time for healing no matter how broken you are right now; no matter how heavy your heart is right now. There comes a time when you will go outside and let the sun shine on your face and let the wind touch your hair and you will not be tired by just simply being awake. There comes a time when you will be happy to be alive again and that day you will appreciate your own being because now you know the other side. Now you know the opposite. Now you know what it’s like to not be sure if you really are; who you really are; if you simply are, anymore. And that day will be the beginning of everything.

There is a rise after every fall.

There is no one way to recover and heal from any trauma. Each survivor chooses their own path or stumbles across it.

There is nothing more courageous than change, it requires all you've got to give, that's why they say, "Courage to change.

The responsibility to end Child sexual abuse is yours and mine!

There's a hard law, mejuffrou, that when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.

There's more to healing than what the eye can see.

The road to recovery may be tough, but I've closed all the doors that lead to giving up With only one choice in hand, I am focused on healing

There were times in my life when I had no strength left for one more day.

The sacred wandering is a healing journey. It gives us the courage to face old wounds. We bravely face our past hurts. If we don't give ourselves permission to feel the pain, we cannot heal the pain. We must feel it to heal it.

These kisses hurt--not from roughness, but because she could feel all his pain.

The sole reason I stand to open it up now is that lots of people who are in pain just like I was, and when they see that there is still hope, they will discover that it is possible to come out of their prison.

The shame, embarrassment, feeling of low self-worth, and scores of "labels" we give ourselves are not fitting. I am beginning to see how I had no control over the situation. He was a big man, I was a little boy.

The sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories, but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk tick tick tick me not making a sound and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind, but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.

The truth is, the experience of forgiveness is a momentary release. We don't and can't forgive forever. Instead, we forgive only for the present moment. This is both good news and bad. The good part is that you can stop judging yourself for your inability to completely and absolutely let go of resentments once and for all. We forgive one moment and get resentful in the next. It is not a failure to forgive; it is just a failure to understand impermanence. The bad news is that forgiveness is not something that will ever be done with; it is an ongoing aspect of our lives and it necessitates a vigilant practice of learning to let go and living in the present.

The spiritual malady that we speak of so often in recovery circles requires a spiritual solution. Nothing else will ever be enough and nothing else will last.

The test we must set for ourselves is not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways. She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances. And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered...

The truth is misrepresented, distorted, altered, tampered and changed in the mind of the child.

The way in which the child is manipulated pulls them into considering the lies.

The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up--but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us.

The winds of tribulation blow out some men's candles of commitment.(Maxwell) Our job in recovery is to protect our candle from those winds.

They illustrate that since no one really loves or cares for them, why should they love or care for themselves?