Wendy Hoffman Quotes

I imagine everyone wears layered masks, and parades around a variety or panoply of false selves depending on the occasion.

I see individuals whose lives have been so protected that they seem like pearls nestled in velvet jewelry cases. I cannot empathize.

This book is not for the delicate or for people who are convinced the world is fine just the way it is.

Had I not been dissociative, I never would have survived.

Scientists, doctors, and trained ordinary citizens use drugs and torture to render children machines that do others' bidding. The commands these perpetrators put in the victims are called "programming".
They take an isolated, barricaded piece from one stream in the mind and another and another and sometimes tie them together at the bottom and twist them together and tell them to act but not remember.

I never had the ambition to do what clinicians call "integrate". Many clinicians think that until your mind comes into one piece, then you have not healed. But I don't care that much about what the experts say.

I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward.
Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large.

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

I wanted my mother to love me. Despite all the torture and brutality.

People don't make decisions within these sorts of groups. They try to avoid more torture. Then they are tortured into thinking they made a decision of their own free will.

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.