Best 465 quotes in «survivor quotes» category

And when hope returns to us, it will be with a passion and power to match every ounce of this crushing despair and pain, every fiery shred of determination that carried us when hope failed. It will claim us with a courage that will make the goddess herself quake and doubt herself.

Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom? Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.

A perpetrator may have hurt someone for a few minutes of his/her life and may even regret it, but the survivor lives with the pain, triggers, shame and fear for a lifetime.

A plain, brown paper-wrapped package came in the mail recently. Upon opening it, I saw that it was a patchwork quilt about four feet by five feet. Many little scraps of cloth, carefully joined by loving hands. Two squares have suggestions of a black cassock and Roman white collar. The maker of the quilt states, “In its variety, I feel it denotes confusion and the world “mixed” up. There are dark spots for the dark times and bright squares, so, hopefully, some good and brightness will come in the future. The other pieces of cloth were of happy times, mothers and children, peaceful settings, happy things.” A note inside stated that she felt we were “scraps,”—the “scraps” that the abusive priests treated us like. They would use us as a scrap is used and then simply toss us aside. I was moved to tears. Holding it in my hands, I could almost feel others' pain and suffering, as I touched each panel. It is a magnificent work, worthy of a prize. I was deeply humbled by the receipt of the quilt. This woman got it; she really got it. This woman got it; she really got it. She has a deeper understanding of what we have gone through. It is rare.

A politician is a man in his natural state

A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.

Are you attentive when your inner self-speaks to you?

Are you capable to truly distinguish the person you envision in the mirror?

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)

As I let it out, layer by layer, Dr. Driscoll helped with the bumps and valleys. He knew just how much to draw out of me and how much I could handle. He is such an expert in his profession. He told me that the guilt I was feeling was not guilt, but regret. Guilt is a good thing. It is a mechanism by which we shouldn't make the same mistake twice. If you do something questionable, then the next chance you get to do it, guilt should stop you. I had no guilt. I had regrets, many regrets, but no guilt. It took some convincing, but he prevailed. There was always a nagging in my head, that if only I had had the guts to kill Neary myself, it would have stopped him from harming others, but that was not to be as a small boy. It does hurt that, maybe, just maybe, if I had carried out one of my many plans to kill him and myself then I could have saved victims younger than I. As victims come forward from almost all the churches where he served—and some are twenty—five plus years my junior—I feel that they would have been spared, if only I hadn't chickened out as a boy. Therein lies the answer; I was a little boy, a ten—year—old boy. Other victims of Neary were as young as six.

As I explored my soul, now I know I have survived schizophrenia; hearing voices, reduced social engagement, emotional expression and lack of motivation.

As I started my personal voyage to unpack the childhood that I repressed for so long, everything unexpectedly made sense as to where some of the traits passed on inside me came from.

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn's stories could not be denied. She was not only a victim, she wanted badly to heal. As her experiences were told and worked through, as she slowly began to come to grips with her past, the personalities within her have slowly begun to heal.

As part of the healing process, change your perception of yourself from “victim” to that of “advocate” and “survivor.

As these abuse children grow, they oppose the lies (that they still trust and believe to be true) to the verity that they pick up and they get all thrown when they conflict and friction.

As we move away from the old role in which we were helplessly entrapped as a victim, we make friends with the people who affirm us. Their enthusiasm about us mirrors the positive experience we are having.

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.

A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.

At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?

A victorious person continues to learn in all given circumstances.

A victorious person knows to own his failure, he is aware how to bring out good, even in the worst form of failures.

A warrior is defined by his scars, not his medals.

A Victor never stops, if he had a failure, he will proceed to find out how to achieve this dream again.

Being survivors signifies that we have recognized that we have been through a lot that should never have taken place and we now hope to let our wounds heal and recuperate.

Be an empowertarian. A person who empowers their own life and that of others.

Being in a state of denial is a universally human response to situations which threaten to overwhelm. People who were abused as children sometimes carry their denial like precious cargo without a port of destination. It enabled us to survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.

Believe in yourself that you can create the change you seek, by accepting things as they are. By accepting the things as they are, you allow yourself to make the right choices.

Being highly sensitive does not at all rule out being, in your own way, a tenacious survivor.

Being Scared-off by Evil Lastly, we deny the presence of evil because we are terrified by the horrendously hurtful, cruel, and bloody kinds of evil people tell us about—if we are willing to listen. This was poignantly brought home during an interdisciplinary case conference involving a resident who was counseling for the first time a woman who had been sexually abused. As we worked with him, it became clear that he was resisting entering what he called the 'psychic cave" of her sealed—off experience from which she was shouting for assistance. Because of his resistance, he was not providing her the support and guidance she so desperately needed, and he was not facilitating her working through the abuse and hurt that were continuing to impact her life. As he was confronted about this at one point in the conference, he stated tearfully: "I'm afraid if I help her move into her memories. I will have to go with her, and if I go with her, my view of the world as a basically good and safe place will be shattered. I'm not sure I can handle that for myself, or be able to think about the fact that my wife and kids may be more vulnerable living in this world than I can be comfortable believing" (Means 1995, 299).

Be sensitive to those around you, sometimes they could be silent but screaming for help from within

Breaking free is only the beginning. Then begins the painful process of reversing the indoctrination. The longer someone stays in a cult the harder it is for them to remember who they were before the cult took control of their mind. Or in the case of someone like me, a cult-born child, my entire personality was made and created by them. When I left I had no idea who I was. My whole existence, everything I thought I knew, had been a lie. But it is the psychological aftermath of life in a cult that is all too often the silent killer.

Bound by Blood, Marked by the Dragonfly.

Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

Burst out and triggers are valuable curing gears.

Cancer is not a single disease, and it almost certainly can't ever be addressed with a single magical potion. It has to be approached with a variety of protocols. So when well-meaning peopleーor, more infuriatingly, certain cancer organizations that ought to know betterーtalk about finding "the cure" for "this disease", it's a good bet that they are talking a lot of nonsense.

Bu ömür boyu sahip olduğum altı yüz kırk birinci balık. Tanrı'nın yarattığı başka bir canlıya bakmayı ve sevmeyi öğrenmem için ailem yıllar önce ilk balığımı almıştı. Sahip olduğum altı yüz kırk balıktan sonra öğrendiğim tek şey, insanın sevdiği her şeyin bir gün öleceği oldu. O özel kişiyle karşılaştığın ilk anda, onun bir gün ölüp toprağın altına gireceğine emin olabilirsin... ... Gerçek, parlayıp ışık saçmaz. ... Öyle sıkıcı işler vardı ki, çalışmamak için insan kendini sakat bırakabilirdi. ... Zamanın sınırlı olduğu, kanunlar ve emirlerle dolu ve mülkiyete dayalı bu dünyada insanların yaşayabilecekleri tek gerçek macera uyuşturucu. ... Birinin zayıf olduğunu hayal etmek, onun güçlü olduğuna inanmaktan çok daha kolay. ...

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web. The names and pictures Cheryl found were at once familiar and yet not part of her conscious memory: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Louis 'Jolly' West, Dr. Ewen Cameron, Dr. Martin Orne and others had information by and about them on the Web. Soon, she began looking up sites related to childhood incest and found that some of the survivor sites mentioned the same names, though in the context of experiments performed on small children. Again, some names were familiar. Then Cheryl began remembering what turned out to be triggers from old programmes. 'The song, "The Green, Green Grass of home" kept running through my mind. I remembered that my father sang it as well. It all made no sense until I remembered that the last line of the song tells of being buried six feet under that green, green grass. Suddenly, it came to me that this was a suicide programme of the government. 'I went crazy. I felt that my body would explode unless I released some of the pressure I felt within, so I grabbed a [pair ofl scissors and cut myself with the blade so I bled. In my distracted state, I was certain that the bleeding would let the pressure out. I didn't know Lynn had felt the same way years earlier. I just knew I had to do it Cheryl says. She had some barbiturates and other medicine in the house. 'One particularly despondent night, I took several pills. It wasn't exactly a suicide try, though the pills could have killed me. Instead, I kept thinking that I would give myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up the next morning. Maybe the pills would kill me. Maybe the dose would not be lethal. It was all up to God. I began taking pills each night. Each-morning I kept awakening.

Changes in Meaning: Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past, or that they will not live long enough to experience a good future. People who have a dissociative disorder may have different meanings in various dissociative parts. Some parts may be relatively balanced in their worldview, others may be despairing, believing the world to be a completely negative, dangerous place, while other parts might maintain an unrealistic optimistic outlook on life

Changes in the Perception of Self: People who have been traumatized in childhood are often troubled by guilt, shame, and negative feelings about themselves, such as the belief they are unlikable, unlovable, stupid, inept, dirty, worthless, lazy, and so forth. In Complex Dissociative disorders there are typically particular parts that contain these negative feelings about the self while other parts may evaluate themselves quite differently. Alterations among parts thus may result in rather rapid and distinct changes in self perception.

Childhood abuse is the misuse of power and control which leads to wrong.

Children do not have reasoning capability or emotive development; thus, they are unable to precisely gauge what is going on with them.

Changes in Relationship with others: It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts.

Children do not lie about sexual abuse, Speak out now!

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows: Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and Impulses Changes in Relationship with others Somatic Symptoms Changes in Meaning Changes in the perception of Self Changes in Attention and Consciousness

Come face to face with yourself and know that you are finally home where you must dwell.

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

Closeness was the promise of suffering and pain

Competition may help us create better products and services but in the end competition really seeks to destroy the opponent. To put him out of the power to compete against you.