Best 1773 quotes in «abuse quotes» category

Ignorance of one’s life mission leads to one’s life being used improperly

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?

I grew up missing my mom while she was right in front of me.

I guess it's the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they're strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.

I had victory and knew I was going to be fine, no matter what was adding up in my direction. This forever kind of freedom is amazing.

I have found out the hard way that the path from victim to victory hinges on one word…Choose.

I have had the freedom and peace of forgiving my abuser, it helped me to stop resenting and no longer feeling hurt.

I have sometimes said to a client: “If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.

I have options, I can be whoever I want to be!

I have seen a lot of ugly things as a trainee and as a nurse, but they don't bother me very much. It's not that the familiarity hardens one; it is rather that one learns the knack of channelling one's emotions around the ugly thing.

I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

I knew that he wanted me dead. He wasn't the type to accept that he had made choices to get where he is.

I know personally that when a child is abused the trajectory of that child's life is changed forever. That doesn't mean the path to happiness is impossible, but it does mean there will be detours and side roads that were never intended. Come back from those places, my friends, with lessons and compassion those on the straight road might never have the chance to learn. You are now equipped to help hurting children because you've navigated down those dark courses and made it back. Cudos to you, but also let your shoulders feel the weight of the responsibility to help others who are still lost and struggling to find their way to safety.

I know the difference between right and wrong. Right is when I do everything he tells me to. Wrong is when I question why. But every now and then a simple slap across the side of the head is a good way to remind me." - excerpt from: freefalling

I know who you are...I've fallen hard for that person, and I sure as hell am not going to let you fade into your past.

I lie awake in my bed, clinging to the brightness I have known, fighting back the tide of darkness, the memories of blood and branding and horror, and the legacy of cruelty that runs in my own veins, shaping my own secret vow and wielding it like a brand against the darkness, whispering it to myself, over and over. I will try to be good.

I let go of false hope. I let go of the hope that they would transform in favour of working on my own transformation. I let go of the hope that they would HEAR me. I let go of the hope that they would SEE me. Instead of my hope being in THEM, I listened to me. I heard me, I saw me, I validated my own pain and I began to emerge from the broken life I had been living.

Ili kupambana na matumizi mabaya ya madawa ya kulevya katika jamii ya Tanzania, ni muhimu kutoa elimu kwa Watanzania juu ya madhara yanayoambatana na matumizi ya madawa hayo. Tusipambane na madawa ya kulevya peke yake. Tupambane na elimu ya madawa ya kulevya pia.

I look around at everybody laughing and joking together and struggle to understand my life has become a living hell that nobody present could even begin to imagine

I love you, Skye. You’re in my heart, in my head, under my skin. You’re my present and my future.

I loved Trevor wholly. In all the good ways that made me feel alive and special and important. But also, in the bad ways. The ways that shut me off from others and left me alone with my pain. The ways that had me keep secrets. I loved Trevor in all the ways that I thought mattered, even though I knew that I didn’t.

I LOVE YOU FROM THE WAIST DOWN, I DON'T DEAL IN DAMAGED GOODS.

I made that happen to you, Letty. I made you take the road marked FOREVER WARY OF OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, instead of the one you should have taken.

I'm a buried kind of beautiful. Bring a shovel and a shooting star I may be a night's work.

I love you but I got to love me more.

I'm not capable of being casual with you, Lily.

I'm never going to say male rape and abuse victims don't deserve as much care and support as female ones, but look at who is hurting them, and look at who built this system of hurt

I'm not a victim. I'm not a survivor. I'm a fighter.

I moonlight as the greatest actor. I smile. I choose the comedy mask every time. I tell those who worry that I am fine, that I always will be. There is nothing to gain from these lies. I win no awards, yet I bow. On that stage I tell my life story with the lightest of words, the heaviest of hearts. I bleed for the people who stay and watch. Behold: the comedy, the tragedy. They smile and cheer. They clap for this. And I bow, and I bow, and I bow.

I’m the guy who knows how you can hurt so much that your insides feel like they’re cut and bleeding.

I'm Used To, Being Used, Not Abused.

In addition to reaching out for help, you will also need to reach within yourself. Your biggest ally will be your emotions. Through them, you will learn more about what really happened to you, how the abuse affected you, and what you need to do in order to heal. Your emotions will enable you to reclaim the self you long ago hid away.

In all my years on earth, I have seen that there is nothing else in the entire world that is as abused as much as the female gender is. If there is anything of value that the world treats with much disdain and contempt, it is the female gender, called woman.

In an isolated space, humans would submit to power and authority, while those in dominant positions would wield it without restriction. Analysis of this phenomenon, known as "obedience to authority," yielded shocking results. Surprisingly, this deference had nothing to do with a person's rationality, sensibility, or personality but instead the product of remarkable deindividuation triggered by the assignment of roles.

Incest, rape and abuse is rampant everywhere, even in our churches, but society is silent. It is a silent epidemic. One in three women will experience a sexual assault in her lifetime and one in six males, yet we don't speak of it, even in our churches!

In cases of organized and multi-perpetrator abuse when the abuse occurs in the context of rituals and ceremonies, some elements of the experience may have been staged specifically with the intention of encouraging the disbelief of others if the victim were to report the crime. For example, someone reporting such a crime may mention that the devil was present, or that someone well-known was there, or that acts of magic were performed. These were tricks and deceptions by the abusers-often experienced by the victims after being given medication or hallucinogenic drugs - that render the account unbelievable, make the witness sound unreliable, and protect the perpetrators. (page 120, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)

Individuals who put underground their grief stay trapped in it. You will forever have your breakthrough!

Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand. And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands. We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries. It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies. That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow. Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.

...Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child's very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her.

In my family, you can rot to hell on the inside as long as you’re flawless on the outside, which is really sick, but also hard to unlearn.

In general, the more dysfunctional the family the more inappropriate their response to disclosure. Never expect a sane response from an insane system.

[I]n his last few moments of humanity, he was just a boy. A boy who had taken a stand against everything he feared, and had finally been set free.

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.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

In some cases abusive or damaged relationships cannot and should not be saved.

In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would be me who broke the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags”, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps.

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered.

Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.