Abuse Survivors Quotes

There certainly are some women who treat their male partners badly, berating them, calling them names, attempting to control them. The negative impact on these men's lives can be considerable. But do we see men whose self-esteem is gradually destroyed through this process? Do we see men whose progress in school or in their careers grinds to a halt because of the constant criticism and undermining? Where are the men whose partners are forcing them to have unwanted sex? Where are the men who are fleeing to shelters in fear for their lives? How about the ones who try to get to a phone to call for help, but the women block their way or cut the line? The reason we don't generally see these men is simple: They're rare.
I don't question how embarrassing it would be for a man to come forward and admit that a woman is abusing him. But don't underestimate how humiliated a woman feels when she reveals abuse; women crave dignity just as much as men do. If shame stopped people from coming forward, no one would tell. ~ Lundy Bancroft

Passive Aggression – Being covertly spiteful with the intent of inflicting mental pain. ~ Ashta-Deb

Clouds of confusion
rolled into illusion
He veils perversion
forcing her coercion
Her body he takes
while she flies away
unbelievable, she's invisible ~ Diana Rasmussen

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim's response. ~ David Yeung

Why Is It So Important to Remember?

When you were abused, those around you acted as if it weren't happening. Since no one else acknowledged the abuse, you sometimes felt that it wasn't real. Because of this you felt confused. You couldn't trust your own experience and perceptions. Moreover, others' denial led you to suppress your memories, thus further obscuring the issue.

You can end your own denial by remembering. Allowing yourself to remember is a way of confirming in your own mind that you didn't just imagine it. Because the person who abused you did not acknowledge your pain, you may have also thought that perhaps it wasn't as bad as you felt it was. In order to acknowledge to yourself that it really was that bad, you need to remember as much detail as possible. Because by denying what happened to you, you are doing to yourself exactly what others have done to you in the past: You are negating and denying yourself. ~ Beverly Engel

To my abusers, the act of setting appropriate boundaries was viewed as hostile aggression. They believed that I was denying them something that belonged to them if I resisted. I was a resource to be exploited for their personal use. I was property who didn't have any rights over my time, my energy, my body, or my possessions. I viewed myself that way too. I believed that they were justified in being angry with me for saying no but I wasn't justified in being angry with them for abusing me. ~ Christina Enevoldsen

My pain has always deserved a voice and I will not deny it that, but I won't devote my life to it either. ~ Trista Mateer

I thought that the world did not want me,
but the truth was that I did not want myself. ~ M.M. Van Der Reijden

The more we get attached to any relationship, the more we lose the grip on our emotional freedom. ~ Jacinta Mpalyenkana

If you carry around a lot of suppressed or repressed anger (anger you have unconsciously buried) you may lash out at people, blaming or punishing them for something someone else did a long time ago. Because you were unwilling or unable to express how you felt in the past, you may overreact in the present, damaging a relationship. ~ Beverly Engel

A short poem from my new book, The Lost Journal of my Second Trip to Pergatory,
Thorny Crowns
Of course the gold one was for special occasions, weddings, etc,
silver for family reunions, office-casual type affairs.
Bronze was a everyday choice; during yard work its burnished surface shone in sunlight.
There were various colors and holiday appropriate ones.
I could never find the hatboxes they were stored in.
But the wooden one was reserved for the long suffering caused by family.
Stevie's funeral, my hospital trips and sister's rebellion rated real wood.
One tip filed extra sharp produced a fine and dramatic line of blood droplets on her brow. ~ Michelle Hartman

One Decision Makes All the Difference ~ Kimesha Coleman

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

Your instincts may tell you that you can't survive if you experience feelings. But they are leftover child instincts. They're the ones that first told you to freeze your feelings. They themselves are frozen and haven't grown with the rest of you. These instincts don't know that you're far more capable of learning to cope with overwhelming emotion now than when you were a [child]. ~ Maureen Brady

In a series of three studies, the offenders who claimed they were abused as a child were 67 percent, 65 percent, and 61 percent without the threat of a polygraph. With polygraph (and conditional immunity), the offenders who claimed they were abused as children were 29 percent, 32 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The polygraph groups reported approximately half the amount of victimization as children as the nonpolygraph groups did.
Nonetheless, the notion that most offenders were victims has spread throughout the field of sexual abuse and is strangely comforting for most professionals. ~ Anna C. Salter

He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world; to fight it back from himself and from those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given the strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness. ~ Laura Florand

She took his verbal punches and she felt silenced under the mental prison that he had held her in. She looked perfect on the outside, but her body expressed her pain. Her soul was crystallized, permanently on survival-mode. He thought he was smart, but he had no idea that he was married to a lotus. She rose every time because she knew he could not take away her worth. She knew she was meant to have more. She loved herself through the horror, and regained her ability to keep walking, to keep breathing, to keep living. She rose peacefully like the lotus, elegant and full of class, untouched by his filthy, meaningless existence... and that had always left him powerless. ~ Karen A. Baquiran

Few survivors experience spontaneous recall especially if they have no awareness of the abuse ever happening. Most are forced to endure months or years of fear, confusion, and doubt as their memories surface. Dreams, imagery, feelings, and physical symptoms must be painstakingly faced and pieced together into a meaningful whole that the survivor struggles to accept as reality. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Overcoming abuse doesn't just happen, It takes positive steps everyday. Let today be the day you start to move forward. ~ Assunta Harris

Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55 ~ Marlene Steinberg

Healing isn't just about pain. It's about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing. ~ Ellen Bass

During sexual abuse, children feel and incorporate the rage, pain, shame, and sense of perversion that the perpetrator is projecting. They take these feelings into the very core of themselves, and they are badly traumatized by the emotions surrounding the assault, as well as by the assault itself. ~ Renee Fredrickson

We each have our own ways of sabotaging & keeping ourselves down…Do we need to remain the victim so strongly that we pull the ceiling down upon our own heads? There is a comfort in the familiar. Also, it is important to us to be in control because as children being abused we were not at all in control. In self-sabotage we can be both the victim & the victimizer. ~ Maureen Brady

You can avoid the issues from abuse for only so long. Sooner or later, the problems in your life cause you to either face it or go deeper into denial. Most of you will eventually be forced into admitting that it is indeed the sexual abuse that is the root of your problems. Even then, the tendency will be to 'forgive and forget' in the belief that by doing so the pain will be assuaged. ~ Beverly Engel

The maltreated child cries 'I hurt.' Unheard or unheeded, that cry becomes prophecy. ~ Andrew Vachss

We can't start over again, and it wouldn't "be perfect" if we could. We can only continue. ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

We are all born same, we are completely cute, innocent, sweet, and we need that reflection of ourselves as little human beings to live, and I was not receiving that from my mother but there was a caretaker who did give me that. ~ Anneke Lucas

When you feel at sea in an abyss of emotions, reconnecting to the beauty of your soul can be difficult, but it is never impossible. ~ Lorraine Nilon

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

Over the years, I had come to understand many things, but one was the clearest of all: you can survive anything if only you have one true friend. ~ Meara O'Hara

You alone can create the change you seel. But how? By accepting things as they are, you allow yourself to make apt choices. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Often it isn't the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Then, suddenly, the work became dangerous, not only for clients but for therapists as well. A well-funded, highly organized opposition appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the early 1990s. Its goal was to discredit the existence of ritual abuse, and one of its tactics was to actively undermine any effort to discover what had been done to these clients and anyone who attempted to help them recover. ~ Alison Miller

She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished. ~ Naomi Alderman

After what she's been through, there really should be crime scene tape around her heart. ~ John Mark Green

The days of my youth can be described as my innocence hitting every obstacle along the way while plummeting into the abyss. ~ Oliver Oyanadel

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

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Closeness was the promise of suffering and pain ~ Alice Jamieson

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

Shouldn't there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers? ~ Colleen Hoover

He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been. ~ George R R Martin

It gave their families at home great comfort to see them chatting, looking radiant, doing well. 'We are fine, mothers. Look how happy we are, now we free from our bad bosses. ~ Louise Burfitt-Dons

I'm a survivor. And I say this with so much pride I could burst into a million tiny pieces at your feet. ~ Trish Kaye Lleone

the gravity of wound to fist ~ Karen Russell

The bridge out of shame is outrage. Suddenly the obvious becomes stunningly clear - we have been carrying shame for the crime of the offender…In a clear flash we may see ourselves standing in a fierce stance, grounded by our knowledge, ready to throw off any wrongdoer. Our outrage can be a fueling energy, capable of making us as steely as we need to be. ~ Maureen Brady

Some Survivors think that getting angry is inappropriate and a sign that a person is out of control. Others are afraid of anger, that of others, as well as their own. They are afraid that if they get angry, they will be rejected or abandoned, afraid they will lose control and hurt someone. But, allowing yourself to get angry and express your anger in constructive ways is one of the most healthy and empowering things you can do. ~ Beverly Engel

The experience of childhood sexual abuse leaves some survivors with a high tolerance for pain. Dysfunctional environments require endurance and thick skin. Child survivors sometimes have to commit to sticking things out in order to survive. This pattern of tolerance follows you into adulthood. Instead of using pain as a signal to evaluate and change direction, you may use pain as a signal to try harder. Try harder to please someone. Try harder to control your children. Try harder to be a good friend. Try harder to be successful at a job that you hate. You remain in survival mode that you picked up as a child. Your high tolerance for pain keeps you committed to dysfunctional experiences and relationships that recycle pain from the past. Sometimes, the only way out of this cycle is time in isolation to learn what peace feels like. Sometimes you have to be willing to let go of everything in order to learn how to hold onto anything. ~ Rosenna Bakari

Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama ... you may be running from yourself. ~ Ellen Bass

Begin to nurture yourself…Some grew up expecting their romantic partners to give them the nurturing they hungered for, only to be disappointed. But our partners are not our parents, no matter how much we try to make them into parents. No one can make up for the deprivation you experienced, and no one should be expected to. ~ Beverly Engel

The internal system of an abuse victim differs from the non-abuse system with regard to the consistent absence of the effective leadership, the extreme rules under which the parts function, and the absenve of any consistent balance or harmony. Typically, the parts operate around outdated assumptions and beliefs derived from the childhood abuse, believing, for example, that it is still extremely dangerous to reveal secrets about childhood experiences which were endured. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse. ~ Renee Fredrickson

We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

An important documentary that sheds light on one of the most terrifying realities in the U.S. today - the commercial sexual exploitation of young girls. TRICKED is a comprehensive portrait of all the players in this human rights abuse: survivors, traffickers, johns and cops. Everyone should see this film. ~ Rachel Lloyd

I am small.
So are stars from a distance. It's all a matter of perspective. ~ C. Kennedy

Childhood trauma can range from having faces extreme violence and neglect to having confronted feelings of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. You may have grown up in an environment where your curiosity and enthusiasm were constantly devalued. Perhaps you were brought up in a family where your parents had unresolved traumas of their own, which impaired their ability to attend to your emotional needs. Or, you may have faced vicious sexual or physical attacks. In all such situations, you learn to compensate by developing defenses around your most vulnerabe parts. ~ Arielle Schwartz

If all of human knowledge is like a library that we can borrow from or add to, then when men don't put these kinds of stories [(their abuse from others)] on the shelves, nobody can borrow them--we all miss out. ~ Oliver Thorn

It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation. ~ Harold Schechter

Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth. ~ C. Kennedy

Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out and eventually began to be listened to and believed. Ritual abuse survivors, when they try to speak out about their experiences, face denial and disbelief from society and often fear for their lives from the abusers. ~ Laurie Matthew

As a child you received messages from your family to keep your mouth shut and remain invisible. You also learned to become invisible in order to protect yourself. You no longer need to be invisible to survive. If people do not notice you, they may not abuse you, but they also will not love you or attend to your needs. Make yourself and your needs known. ~ Beverly Engel

The more I focus my time and energy on withstanding a real life, I am able to overcome and come out victorious. ~ Patricia Dsouza

In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

There was a moment of hesitation in which Joe looked into her eyes, and she looked back without flinching. Many a time, he had been at the same game with her, and she had always crumbled, bowing to his will. Now, he must have realized he was looking into the eyes of a stranger. She was someone he could not recognize, a foreigner inhabiting the body of that old Clairey, the girl he had abused, intimidated, and broken. Clairey decided then and there she would no longer cower before him. It was almost as if she were daring him to strike her in their unspoken exchange. ~ Tracy Winegar

Programming is the act of installing internal, pre-established reactions to external stimuli so that a person will automatically react in a predetermined manner to things like an auditory, visual or tactile signal or perform a specific set of actions according to a date and/or time. ~ Alison Miller

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

She could do this. She was stronger now. This was her chance to prove it. ~ Talena Winters

Every child apprehends, feels and changes with age and developmental stage, as they also learn to develop. Nevertheless, if you recognize what to expect and predict with a child's behavior, you will be less annoyed and less destructive. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless, but to develop strategies of acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them. ~ Maureen Brady

I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I'd told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit. ~ Olga Trujillo

Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

It is important to learn about being multiple, and what works for their healing, from your client. To work with the alters, rather than trying to get the ANP to control the rest of the personality system. ~ Alison Miller

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

a mind is only as limited
as it's capacity to
embrace his greatest enemy ~ M.M. Van Der Reijden

Once the individual has learned to dissociate in the context of trauma, he or she may subsequently transfer this response to other situations and it may be repeated thereafter arbitrarily in a wide variety of circumstances. The dissociation therefore "destabilizes adaptation and becomes pathological."[6] It is important for the psychiatrist to accurately diagnose DDs and also to place the symptoms in perspective with regard to trauma history. ~ Julie P. Gentile

Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you - seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! ~ Bryant McGill

You pray for forgiveness. You pray for it to stop, for life, and even death. You pray for rain to wash away your sins and drown your soul. Till you finally just stop asking. Cause nobodies listening. ~ Lynne Mcallister

Abuse doesn't define you. ~ C. Kennedy

The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers. ~ Warwick Middleton

Maybe I needed that somebody else could cry over my pain, to become able to cry over it myself. Nobody ever cried or was moved when I suffered as a child. (Lisa) ~ Giovanni Liotti

Her voice is soft and kind. "Danny, do you feel safe at home?"

No.

There it is. I don't feel safe at home. I open my mouth to say something, and as I do I realize that like my other, I can't give it a name. Not out loud. Not even to Valkyrja. Because if I admit it, if I call it what it is, then I can't hide from it anymore either. It becomes real in a way I am not ready for. Might never be ready for. Ther will be no illusions of safety, no peaceful times alone in my room.

There will only be times when he's not hurting me. ~ April Daniels

About the expression "Hurt people, hurt people".. Hurt people are not going to stop HURTING other people until they receive the memo that it is WRONG, (or if there are actual consequences for their behaviour.) Feeling sorry for them and understanding where they 'came from' is not helping to stop the cycle of abuse. ~ Darlene Ouimet

If you have the tendency to repress your anger, you have lost touch with an important part of yourself. Getting angry is a way to gain back that part of yourself by asserting your rights, expressing your displeasure with a situation, and letting others know how you wish to be treated. It can motivate you to make needed changes in a relationship or other areas of your life. Finally it can let others know that you expect to be respected and treated fairly. ~ Beverly Engel

Survivors who don't stand up for themselves often develop physical and emotional illnesses. Many become depressed because they feel so hopeless and helpless about being able to change their lives. They turn their anger inward and become prone to headaches, muscle tension, nervous conditions and insomnia. ~ Beverly Engel

Nobody has ever killed themselves over a broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much worse than physical pain. ~ Oliver Markus

We can ill afford to wait until we have worked through all our memories & feelings about incest before learning to rest & play. While it may seem to be a natural impulse to get to the bottom of things & purge ourselves fully, we need to regularly examine the full picture of our lives for balance along the way…Learning to rest & play is an essential part of our healing. ~ Maureen Brady

Also, look for "floating alters." These are not deliberately created parts of the system, but alters that were accidentally split off at the same time as others. ~ Alison Miller

If as we see nightfall,
we become capable of accepting love,
let's celebrate an alliance with our unbroken delusions.
Who ever knew we would say goodbye to oblivion?
Who ever knew we would accept hope? ~ Mya Robarts

Don't you love your mother, dear?"
"I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else. ~ Dean Koontz

I believe that we belittle survivors by assuming that they will fail. ~ Toni Bernhard

Although Megan "knew" she was not in danger, her body told her that she was. If sensorimotor habits are firmly entrenched, accurate cognitive interpretations may not exert much influence on changing bodily orgamzation and arousal responses. Instead, the traumatized person may experience the reality of the body rather than that of the mind. To be most effective, the sensorimotor psychotherapist works on both the cognitive and sensorimotor levels. With Megan, a purely cognitive approach might foster some change in her integrative capacity, but the change would be only momentary if the cowering response were reactivated each time she received feedback at work... However, if she is encouraged to remember to "stand tall" in the face of criticism, her body and her thoughts will be congruent with each other and with current reality. ~ Pat Ogden

Since her time in the necromancer's clutches, she was still recovering lost memories from the quicksand of her mind. They'd drop like nuclear bombs, freezing her at the worst time as visuals which should've stayed forever buried bubbled to the surface. ~ Katherine McIntyre

Remembering things or processing memories can be a charged, or frightening, or uncomfortable time. It can help to imagine yourself being a reporter. This can take pressure off of needing to remember 'all the details' or not wanting to 'be wrong about something', if you simply just write down whatever comes to you down on paper without editing it, censoring it, or passing judgment - for the time being - on either its content, or on whether it is l00% accurate in every way. Simply write it down and come back to it later, when things may make more sense, or as additional information comes to you... ~ A.T.W.

If I were free, as a physician, to say what I pleased, I would tell every abused person I see that there is an entire world out there that is nothing like the one you're living. Go discover it. ~ C. Kennedy

Life on earth has sharp teeth. ~ Lecrae Moore

People expect all stories of abuse
to be loud and angry
but they're not.

Sometimes they're quiet and cruel
and swept under the rug. ~ Trista Mateer

You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options - to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now. ~ Ellen Bass

Stop looking for that person you were in the past. She has changed. Look for the person she has grown into. She is wiser and stronger than than ever before. Don't go back to who you were. Cherish who you are." --Without a Voice by Chris Pepple ~ Chris Pepple

As you heal, you see yourself more realistically. You accept that you are a person with strengths and weaknesses. You make the changes you can in your life and let go of the things that aren't in your power to change. You learn that every part of you is valuable. And you realize that all of your thoughts and feelings are important, even when they're painful or difficult. ~ Ellen Bass