Best 66 quotes in «abusive relationships quotes» category

Robert reflects: I go weak at the knees when she turns against me. I forget what it's like to feel courage. I try to remind myself that the worst of it will pass, that she won't be like that forever. She's mad now, but there will come a time when she's not mad. When I was growing up, I tried all sorts of things to get me through these times. I used to think "It won't be so bad if she doesn't hit me." And then I got to noticing that whether or not she hit me didn't matter. What I was afraid of was that she was going to explode and disappear.

She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain Clark. The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mouth and speak, and do this and do that. She would not really be there. And what was strange about it was that she was doing all this, she was riding on this bus in the hope of recovering herself. As Mrs. Jamieson might say––and as she herself might with satisfaction have said––taking charge of her own life. With nobody glowering over her, nobody's mood infecting her with misery. But what would she care about? How would she know that she was alive? While she was running away from him––now––Clark still kept his place in her life. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? What else––who else––could ever be so vivid a challenge?

She preferred to be numb. And mostly these days she was. She played dead, sleepwalking her way through her life on autopilot, hardly caring whether he hit her or kissed her - it was all the same in the end.

Shout out to everyone transcending a mindset, mentality, desire, belief, emotion, habit, behavior or vibration, that no longer serves them.

Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!

Sometimes, some of you speak about god, and I mistake him for an abusive lover you're trying to escape.

Sometimes I cry, wondering how it was possible that I could have been so goddamn weak, so f*cking spineless. Without you around, I can finally see all the ways you'd kept my heart shackled to yours.

The abuser’s mood changes are especially perplexing. He can be a different person from day to day, or even from hour to hour. At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. As so many partners of my clients have said to me, “I just can’t seem to do anything right.” At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable. Looking at him in this deflated state, his partner has trouble imagining that the abuser inside of him will ever be back. The beast that takes him over at other times looks completely unrelated to the tender person she now sees. Sooner or later, though, the shadow comes back over him, as if it had a life of its own. Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.

The abuser does not believe, however, that his level of authority over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of effort or sacrifice on their behalf, or to how much knowledge he actually has about who they are or what is going on in their lives. He considers it his right to make the ultimate determination of what is good for them even if he doesn’t attend to their needs or even if he only contributes to those aspects of child care that he enjoys or that make him look like a great dad in public.

So while I was busy saving you from Hell, you were pushing me further to it; the poison murdering me well.

•The abusive partner continually denies any responsibility for problems.

The confusion of love with abuse is what allows abusers who kill their partners to make the absurd claim that they were driven by the depths of their loving feelings. The news media regrettably often accept the aggressors’ view of these acts, describing them as “crimes of passion.” But what could more thoroughly prove that a man did not love his partner? If a mother were to kill one of her children, would we ever accept the claim that she did it because she was overwhelmed by how much she cared? Not for an instant. Nor should we. Genuine love means respecting the humanity of the other person, wanting what is best for him or her, and supporting the other person’s self-esteem and independence. This kind of love is incompatible with abuse and coercion.

There came a time in my life when I had to admit to myself that I have some very clear narcissistic tendencies. Ironically, it occurred during the writing of my book The Emotionally Abused Woman. As I listed the symptoms of narcissism, I was amazed to find that I recognized myself in the description of the disorder. It should have been no surprise to me because I come from a long line of narcissists. My mother and several of her brothers suffered from the disorder, as did her mother. For some reason, though, I imagined that I’d escaped our family curse. I should have known that it’s not that easy to.

The first time he had hit her, he had been so wracked with remorse, she had actually felt sorry for him. Consumed by guilt and self-loathing, he had sobbed in her arms like a child, swearing it would never happen again and begging for her forgiveness. Her stomach turned over now at the thought of how she had comforted him, assuring him that she trusted him and promising that she would never leave. She saw now with sickening clarity that she had been setting a precedent - giving him permission to do it again; reassuring him that she would tolerate anything. If only she had walked out there and then.

The quiet but inexorable breaking down of self-esteem is much more sinister - it’s violation of the soul.

When I thought about how much time I had already put into a relationship without reciprocation from the other person and how I spent YEARS recovering and trying to recover from the damage of her verbal, emotional and physical abuse and neglect, I realized that I was the only one trying and I wasn’t the problem! That understanding changed everything!

This is the hardest part— That boy is not made of fists. That boy learned how to braid my hair. These things do not un-truth themselves when the first door slams. I did not stop loving him all the months I was holding my breath.

To make matters worse, everyone she talks to has a different opinion about the nature of his problem and what she should do about it. Her clergyperson may tell her, “Love heals all difficulties. Give him your heart fully, and he will find the spirit of God.” Her therapist speaks a different language, saying, “He triggers strong reactions in you because he reminds you of your father, and you set things off in him because of his relationship with his mother. You each need to work on not pushing each other’s buttons.” A recovering alcoholic friend tells her, “He’s a rage addict. He controls you because he is terrified of his own fears. You need to get him into a twelve-step program.” Her brother may say to her, “He’s a good guy. I know he loses his temper with you sometimes—he does have a short fuse—but you’re no prize yourself with that mouth of yours. You two need to work it out, for the good of the children.” And then, to crown her increasing confusion, she may hear from her mother, or her child’s schoolteacher, or her best friend: “He’s mean and crazy, and he’ll never change. All he wants is to hurt you. Leave him now before he does something even worse.” All of these people are trying to help, and they are all talking about the same abuser. But he looks different from each angle of view.

Trying to make sense of other people's responses to us is a basic human activity. Accepting a mother's [or anyone's] anger by concluding that i is justified is a way of making sense of a difficult relationship. But this acceptance comes at a great cost, for it means that we see their cruelty as our shame.

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury.

When my skin had gone back to its even tone I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I'm responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack; it's been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm.

Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day.

An abusive person may look innocent, but it doesn’t mean they are.

...you turn and grab my chin--not hard, but the way you do with a child when you want them to focus on you. It feels strange, being touched this way by you. Parental. A siren goes off in the back of my mind, but I ignore it. (Oh god, Gavin, why did I ignore it? Why couldn't I see through you?")

ABUSIVE MEN COME in every personality type, arise from good childhoods and bad ones, are macho men or gentle, “liberated” men. No psychological test can distinguish an abusive man from a respectful one. Abusiveness is not a product of a man’s emotional injuries or of deficits in his skills. In reality, abuse springs from a man’s early cultural training, his key male role models, and his peer influences. In other words, abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology. When someone challenges an abuser’s attitudes and beliefs, he tends to reveal the contemptuous and insulting personality that normally stays hidden, reserved for private attacks on his partner. An abuser tries to keep everybody—his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives—focused on how he feels, so that they won’t focus on how he thinks, perhaps because on some level he is aware that if you grasp the true nature of his problem, you will begin to escape his domination.

You are aggressive", says the emotional abusive.

You can have a pet zebra and put that zebra into a small cage every day and tell the zebra that you love it, but no matter how you and the zebra love each other, the fact remains, that the zebra should be let out of that cage and should belong to someone who can treat it better, the way it should be treated, someone who can make it happy.

... you may seek out a partner who psychologically resembles your mother and found that you have walked right back into a difficult relationship. Perhapse you chose to be close to someone who turns out to be as volatile as your mother and who inflicts discomfort all too familiar to you. Or perhaps gradually, over time, your partner or close friend becomes like your mother; that may be because you unconsciously behave in ways that encourage others to treat you as your mother did.

YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR ANGER. One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him. No matter how badly he treats you, he believes that your voice shouldn’t rise and your blood shouldn’t boil. The privilege of rage is reserved for him alone. When your anger does jump out of you—as will happen to any abused woman from time to time—he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are. Abuse can make you feel straitjacketed. You may develop physical or emotional reactions to swallowing your anger, such as depression, nightmares, emotional numbing, or eating and sleeping problems, which your partner may use as an excuse to belittle you further or make you feel crazy.

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts draining their wallets for toxic substances to inject into their veins. Scraps of love are food for an abusive relationship.

Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems result from mistreatment by his parents? The answer is both yes and no; it depends on which problem we’re talking about. His hostility toward the human race may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct.

An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.

(a quote from a survivor) Information was key. Once you begin waking up to what has been happening around you the whole time you can begin stopping the cycle which angers the Narcissist to an interesting boiling point

Being a victim is supposed to set you free; it acquits you of any agency, any sense of responsibility to the person who did you harm. It's not your fault, they say. Leave him, they say. Nobody ever tells you what to do if leaving isn't an option. They just call you stupid. A dumb bitch. Sympathy is only meted out if you follow all of society's rules for how a victim is supposed to behave.

Bound by Blood, Marked by the Dragonfly.

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father. It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

Have the courage to walk away, those that value you will want you back, & those that do not won't hold you back.

Each time he came he would twist my defenceless body into a different pose, as if I were his very own doll

Forgiving lavishly does not mean that we continue to place ourselves in harm's way. The Bible takes great pains to address the dangers of keeping company with those who perpetually harm others. Those who learn nothing from their past mistakes are termed fools. While we may forgive the fool for hurting us, we do not give the fool unlimited opportunity to hurt us again. To do so would be to act foolishly ourselves. When Jesus extends mercy in the Gospels, he always does so with an implicit or explicit, "Go and sin no more." When our offender persists in sinning against us, we are wise to put boundaries in place. Doing so is itself an act of mercy toward the offender. By limiting his opportunity to sin against us, we spare him further guilt before God. Mercy never requires submission to abuse, whether spiritual, verbal, emotional, or physical.

Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It's a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that's not how people are.

Have you read my emails before?" I ask. I try to keep my voice casual but I can hear the anxiety in it. The What the f*ck in it. When you're a stupid girl in love, it's almost impossible to see the red flags. It's so easy to pretend they're not there, to pretend that everything is perfect.

Do not be blind in love and try not to suffer in silence. -Alba Castillo

He had to get inside. It was essential that he know everything, the routes she took, her schedule, and the lay of the land. The silver moon glowed overhead, mocking him. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted its laughter at his failure. Randy--from Spring Cleaning--Coming Summer 2012

He guided me into the house and walked me to the shower. He ran the water and cared for me as if I was an upset toddler or an elderly person who could no longer care for herself. He washed me hair and gently washed my body, while I cried as if the world was ending. For me, it seemed it was. -The Art of Leaving

HE ISN’T ABUSIVE BECAUSE HE IS ANGRY; HE’S ANGRY BECAUSE HE’S ABUSIVE.

Hey!” The male voice sliced through the noise. Terri ignored him, determined to get back to the bar for her next order. A harsh hand gripped her arm, jerking her back into a firm chest. “I asked your name.” Hot breath reeking of stale beer permeated her sinuses, making her stomach turn, as the tenor of his voice burrowed into her ear. Fear gripped her. Memories of the way Randy would grab her, and where it always ended, slammed into her, making her head spin. Shaking it off, Terri narrowed her eyes and whirled around, jabbing a red lacquered nail into his powder blue polo. “Back off,” she warned, snatching her arm back. He advanced on her, his large frame towering over her. “Just wanna know your name, sweetheart,” he said with a sleazy smile. “No need to get testy.” “You haven’t seen me testy.” As she turned her back on him and continued on her way, he called out to her. “Yet.” Terri--from Spring Cleaning--Coming Summer 2012

I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: “It depends.” Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman’s aggressiveness.

i dreamt i crawled on top of you and kissed your hips, one at a time, my lips a smolder. i straddled your waist and pressed both shaking hands against your torso. spongy, like an old tree on the forest floor. i push and your flesh sinks inwardly, collapsing with decay, a soft shushing sound. a yawning hole where your organs should be. maggots used to live here until your own poison killed them off. i laid my cheek into the loam and three little mushrooms brushed over my eyelid. peat, decomposing matter, all of it, whatever you wish to call it, rested in the cavity of your chest. and there i planted seeds in the hopes something good would come out of you.

I'd lost myself in the abyss of someone else's tyranny...again.

It is important to note that research has shown that men who have abusive mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons. So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle—though often quite pervasive—sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don’t show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship.