Turn down the volume of your negative inner voice and create a nurturing inner voice to take it’s place. When you make a mistake, forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on instead of obsessing about it. Equally important, don’t allow anyone else to dwell on your mistakes or shortcomings or to expect perfection from you.

~ Beverly Engel

Beverly Engel Criticism Emotional Abuse Forgive Yourself Inner Critic Negative Self Talk Positive Self Talk Self Talk Survivors

I like being on my own. I mean, I'm sure a Pack’s best for some dogs, but I've walked alone since I left my Pup Pack. I can look after myself.

~ Erin Hunter

Erin Hunter Dogs Lucky Survivors

In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.

~ Carolyn Spring

Carolyn Spring Abuse Survivors Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Dissociation Dissociative Disorders Dissociative Identity Disorder Incest Mental Health Mental Health Stigma Multiple Personalities Multiple Personality Disorder Multiplicity Require Survivors Trauma Survivors

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25]

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Childhood Trauma Mental Health Mental Health System Metal Illness Physical Abuse Psychiatry Psychotherapy Survivors Survivors Of Abuse

The country has turned its loyal inhabitants into wanderers similar to the survivors of an apocalypse.

~ Rami Ollaik

Rami Ollaik Apocalypse Country Loyalty Survivors

The fact that most perpetrators of organised abuse are men, and that their most intensive and sadistic abuses are visited upon girls and women, has gone largely unnoticed, as have the patterns of gendered inequity that characterise the families and institutional settings in which organised abuse takes place. Organised abuse survivors share a number of challenges in common with other survivors of abuse and trauma, including health and justice systems that have been slow to recognise and respond to violence against children and women. However, this connection is rarely made in the literature on organised abuse, with some authors hinting darkly at the nefarious influence of abusive groups. Fraser (1997: xiv) provides a note of caution here, explaining that whilst it is relatively easy to ‘comment on the naïveté of those grappling with this issue ... it is very difficult to actually face a new and urgent phenomenon and deal with it, but not fully understand it, while managing distressed and confused patients and their families’.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Abusive Groups Gender Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Research Ritual Abuse Sadistic Abuse Survivors Victims

The people who were behind my abuse were very clever. They had created something which would be so difficult to explain, so difficult to make sense of, that it would be easier to dismiss it all out of hand as the ramblings of an over-imaginative child.Many people don't want to believe that child abuse exists, or are only willing to believe that certain kinds of abuse go on. They don't want to consider that something so horrific, and yet so widespread, is taking place in their community, perhaps only a door away from them, a few steps from their lives - or even in their lives if they would only open their eyes.I know this, not just because of my own personal experience, but through my work supporting and listening to survivors and those still experiencing abuse.To ask people not only to believe in the abuse but also to take on board all the details of what I'm revealing is a big step, and it has taken me many years to make the decision to tell my story, but it has to be done. This type of abuse is ongoing, as is the culture of disbelief to make people dismiss anyone who talks about it. This needs to be challenged. The things I'm telling you in this book have been kept close to me all my life; I have always known that talking of them, telling my full story, would make some people incredulous - but it's true. It's all true.Whatever the set dressing, they were rapists and abusers - just plain and simple/ The trappings that surrounded the abuse was just a way of creating something that would allow them to do what they wanted to, but which would also allow for confusion on our parts, and devotion on the parts of the 'followers'. I think this is what many people find so hard when they are asked to believe in this sort of abuse. It all seems so fantastical, so it's easy to dismiss. I'm not asking you to believe in any of that. I'm not asking you to believe in Satan, I'm not even asking you to believe in God. I'm just asking you to accept that there are some people who will go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the facts that they are abusing children.

~ Laurie Matthew

Laurie Matthew Abuses Challenged Child Abuse Child Sex Ring Child Sexual Abuse Coverups Cult Cult Abuse Culture Of Disbelief Culture Of Secrecy Denial Disbelief False Memory Syndrome Campaign Hiding In Plain Sight Media Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedobritain Paedophile Paedophile Protectors Paedophile Ring Pedophiles Rapists Ritual Abuse Rituals Satan Satanic Ritual Abuse Society Denial Sra Survivors Truth Valerie Sinason Victims

I am continuously struck by how frequently the various thought processes of the inner critic trigger overwhelming emotional flashbacks. This is because the PTSD-derived inner critic weds shame and self-hate about imperfection to fear of abandonment, and mercilessly drive the psyche with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Recovering individuals must learn to recognize, confront and disidentify from the many inner critic processes that tumble them back in emotional time to the awful feelings of overwhelming fear, self-hate, hopelessness and self-disgust that were part and parcel of their original childhood abandonment.

~ Pete Walker

Pete Walker Abandonment Abuse Survivors Complex Ptsd Flashbacks Healing Insights Imperfection Perfectionism Self Criticism Self Disgust Self Hate Shame Survivors

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

~ Laurie Matthew

Laurie Matthew Abuse Survivors Half Insights Healing Abuse Healing From Abuse Healing Insights Healing Journey Healing Quotes Healing The Past Healing Trauma Recovery Survivors

Another question I am frequently asked is, What do you mean by recovery? It has taken me a while to answer that one. I had been depending on other people's definitions of recovery until I developed one that worked for me (just as you must come to one that makes sense for you.) Mine is simple. For me, it is about fre

~ Mike Lew

Mike Lew Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Healing Insights Male Survivor Recovery Survivors

When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to “being crazy” and having had abusive parents, clients will choose “crazy” most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her the

~ Lisa Ferentz

Lisa Ferentz Abuse Survivors Abusers Abusive Parents Child Abuse Survivors Crazy Cutting Denial Dysfunctional Families Eating Disorder Causes Nuts Survivors Therapy

The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.

~ Christina Enevoldsen

Christina Enevoldsen Abandonment Abandonment Issues Abuse Deniers Abused Child Abusive Family Abusive Parents Accepting The Past Child Abuse Child Abuse Survivor Child Abuse Survivors Child Sexual Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Survivor Childhood Abuse Childhood Sexual Abuse Consequences Of Cruelty Controlling Parents Disclosing Abuse Dysfunctional Families Dysfunctional Family Escaping Abuse Family Abuse Fear Of Abandonment Fear Of Death Fear Of Rejection Incest Just Tell Moving On Revealing The Truth Self Sufficiency Survivors Telling Your Story Truth About Abuse

Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she does immediately thereafter is vitally important. She shakes and quivers every part of her body, clearing the traumatic energy she has accumulated.

~ Marilyn Van Derbur

Marilyn Van Derbur Fight Flight Freeze Play Dead Survivors Trauma Trauma Experiences Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatized

Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.

~ Rachel E. Goldsmith

Rachel E. Goldsmith Abuse Survivors Authoritarian Bias Child Sexual Abuse Controversy Credibility Delayed Reaction Denial Doubting Mind Incest Psychological Trauma Recovered Memories Recovered Memory Sexism Sexual Abuse Society Denial Survivors Trauma Trauma Memory Traumatic Experiences

TRAUMA STEALS YOUR VOICE People get so tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them. You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth. They start as fire in the pit of your stomach, but come out in a puff of smoke. You are not you anymore. And you don't know how to fix this. The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.

~ Nikitta Gill

Nikitta Gill Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Survivors Trauma Trauma Survivors Traumatized Voiceless

This world isn’t a fair place, because we never know how much time we’ve really got.

~ Zoe Cruz

Zoe Cruz Beastia Limited Time Never Know Not Fair Place Survivors The World Time Trauma

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Atrocities Ptsd Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Trauma Trauma Memories Traumatized

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a false negative recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

~ Janet Walker

Janet Walker Academic Research Child Sexual Abuse Elaine Showalter Epidemics False Memories False Negatives Feminists Hysterical Hysterics Incest Incestuous Misleading Pseudo Science Pseudoscience Recovered Memory Repressed Memories Repressed Memory Sexual Abuse Survivors Trauma Traumatic Stress Women Survivors

Somatic Symptoms:People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or as exaggerating their physical problems. But these problems are real, even though they may not be related to a specific physical diagnosis. Some dissociative parts are stuck in the past experiences that involved pain may intrude such that a person experiences unexplained pain or other physical symptoms. And more generally, chronic stress affects the body in all kinds of ways, just as it does the mind. In fact, the mind and body cannot be separated. Unfortunately, the connection between current physical symptoms and past traumatizing events is not always so clear to either the individual or the physician, at least for a while. At the same time we know that people who have suffered from serious medical, problems. It is therefore very important that you have physical problems checked out, to make sure you do not have a problem from which you need medical help.

~ Suzette Boon

Suzette Boon Complex Ptsd Dissociative Identity Disorder Hypochondriac Medical Physical Ptsd Somatic Survivors Trauma

People stagger, but they pick up a tattered thread and wind it back onto a spool.

~ Donia Bijan

Donia Bijan Hardships Perspective Healing The Past Persistence Survivors

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Change Grandparents Immortal Immortality Jacob Appel Jacob M Appel Life Posthumous Surpise Survivor Survivors Wonders

There are no winners in battle. Just survivors.

~ E.e. Knight

E.e. Knight Battle Survivors Winners

She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that – simple as it may sound – I hadn’t caused it. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. It was true. And it had not been obvious to me. And hearing it from someone else, a professional, someone who should know, helped me believe that soon I would believe it.

~ Aspen Matis

Aspen Matis Rape Rape Recovery Rape Survivor Survivor Of Abuse Survivors

People may not realize the damage that they are doing by placing the blame on the victim ~ but that doesn't lessen the damage that they cause by doing it.

~ Darlene Ouimet

Darlene Ouimet Abuse Survivors Blame Blame The Victim Healing Insights Rape Rape Survivor Sexual Abuse Sexual Assault Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Victim Blaming

Over half a million women are raped in this country every year, and only a fraction of them report it because they're too ashamed. It’s a really screwed up world, but its not your fault, and what happened to you, it doesn't make you the monster.

~ Mariska Hargitay

Mariska Hargitay Mariska Hargitay Rape Sexual Assault Survivors

Many Survivors blame themselves for the abuse and continue to feel responsible and guilty for anything bad that happens to them or to other people they know. Survivors often feel bad about themselves and different from other people. They therefore isolate themselves from other people and avoid making close friendships.

~ Carolyn Ainscough

Carolyn Ainscough Blame Child Abuse Isolation Rape Sexual Abuse Survivors

Many survivors struggle to believe the abuse happened. They don’t want to believe it. It’s too painful to think about. They don’t want to accuse family members or face the terrible loss involved in realizing “a loved one” hurt them, they don’t want to rock the boat.

~ Laura Davis

Laura Davis Abuse Survivors Avoidance Child Abuse Survivors Denial Denial Of Abuse Denial Of Child Abuse Denial Of Incest Disbelief Facing Reality Parental Abuse Rock The Boat Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Trauma Memories

Sometimes buried memories of abuse emerge spontaneously. A triggering event or catalyst starts the memories flowing. The survivor then experiences the memories as a barrage of images about the abuse and related details. Memories that are retrieved in this manner are relatively easy to understand and believe because the person remembering is so flooded with coherent, consistent information.

~ Renee Fredrickson

Renee Fredrickson Abuse Survivors Avoidance Child Sexual Abuse Denial Healing Insights Survivors Trauma Memory

To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.

~ Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass Child Sexual Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Survivor Denial Dysfunctional Family Healing Abuse Incest Recovery From Abuse Survivors

A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.

~ Felicity De Zulueta

Felicity De Zulueta Abuse Deniers Abuse Survivors Child Abuse Childhood Abuse Complex Ptsd Denial Denial Of Child Abuse Dissociate Dissociation Dissociative Dissociative Disorders Dissociative Identity Disorder Genocide Hidden Pain Horror Of Incest Horror Of War Ignore What Is Wrong Invalidation Misdiagnosis Mpd Nazis Not Serious Psychiatrists Psychiatry Psychological Defence Psychologists Ptsd Respectable Men Respectable Women Society Denial Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Therapists Torture Survivors Traumatized Unethical

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

~ Janet Walker

Janet Walker Abuse Enablers Abusers Amnesia Anti Semitism Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Committee For Historical Review Denial Discredited Disinformation Dissociation False Memories False Memory Syndrome Foundation Fmsf Holocaust Incest Israel Jewish Pedophilia Perpetrators Politics Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Regious Hatred Society Denial Survivors Witnesses

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

~ Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand Captivity Captor Captors Dignity Held Captive Imprisoned Stocholm Syndrome Survivors

Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Abusive Parents Child Abuse Child Rape Child Sexual Abuse Incest Maternal Neglect Parental Abuse Survivors

Beyond telling and getting away however there are an awful lot of myths out there about how to move on or get justice. People may tell you to report the crime or confront you abuser- or even to forgive him. I don't necessarily advocate any of these things. I think counseling of some kind can be enormously useful, but the bottom line is that the main way to heal is to find people who will support you, to talk about what happened, and to ground yourself in the reality that the abuse was not your fault, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and that you deserve great love and happiness in your life.

~ Patti Feuereisen

Patti Feuereisen Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Sexual Abuse Survivors

My view is that the false memory campaign is a spent force. It failed to realise its key goals, failed to renew itself and has largely faded away. Of course, the false memory campaign has left behind the sedimentation of doubt and disbelief that we will have to keep chipping away at. However it is important to recognise that we are witnessing an increasing, not decreasing, number of investigations and prosecutions for cases of organised and ritual abuse. Adults and children who disclose sexual abuse are more likely to be believed now than they were ten or twenty years ago, and that includes victims who describe organised and ritual abuse.Source: Interview with Lynn Schirmir

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Child Abuse Disclosure False Memories False Memory False Memory Myth False Memory Syndrome False Memory Syndrome Campaign Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Ritual Abuse Ritualistic Abuse Satanic Ritual Abuse Sexual Abuse Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Victims