Child Abuse Memoir Quotes

Behind the door was where bad things happen. No matter how many blankets I used or extra pairs of panties I wore. None of it mattered. The monster always came. His face obscured in the shadows, partially hidden behind the cloak rack. Hot breath breathing over my face as soon as I closed my eyes. ~ Hannah Baston

Badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it. ~ Rudyard Kipling

When I was with my mother, I sometimes thought of myself of a trophy - something to be flaunted before friends. When out of public view, I sat on the shelf ignored and forgotten. ~ Joan Frances Casey

when these little ones don't receive the love, they need in their homes, they seek attention outside. ~ Patricia Dsouza

We're going to Hell. Soon. You'll see. We're going to Hell. Let it be. We continue to ignore the children, you see? We ALLOW these monsters to do what they do with impunity. So to Hell with you AND me. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

I regard taking healthy sea level adapted children to the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea as a form of child abuse. ~ Steven Magee

When I felt as though I had reached land, it was like I was on a deserted sandy beach, feeling isolated and afraid to share with anyone the memories that haunted me. ~ Erin Merryn

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Still, it's never about staying a prisoner in your childhood, it's about your childhood occurrences, incidents and episodes staying fastened and chained inside of you. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one's own choices as one was growing up. ~ Jared Diamond

The patterns learned as a child, repeat as an adult. Those with an abusive childhood are very often oh-so blind to this inescapable truth. - André Chevalier ~ Nikki Sex

The abuser's desire to abuse is not created by the child - it is there before the child appears ~ Carolyn Ainscough

He hated them all. They didn't understand his higher calling. Gerry was answerable only to God. God loved him and approved of his efforts with children. In fact, his first experiences with the children were encouraged by a visit from the Lord. In his vision, the Lord told him to "teach them diligently unto thy children." He told him young boys needed encouragement near puberty to experience the physical pleasures their young bodies were capable of feeling. Shortly after that, Gerry 'educated' his first child . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

.....everything unexpectedly made sense as to where some of the traits passed on inside me came from. ~ Patricia Dsouza

I wanted to go to a few therapy sessions and be back to normal. As I saw it, the panic attacks were the problem. What I really wanted was to stop having them. I genuinely thought I could do that. I didn't want to think about the past. ~ Olga Trujillo

The reality is, no matter what you were told, whatever happened to you as a child was not legally or morally your fault. Abused children are instilled with guilt regarding their "participation." It's an especially complex issue if the abuser is a family member. The child is told and believes that by his word his family will disintegrate, or harm may descend upon other loved ones. He fears he will lose more by telling than not. ~ Sarah E. Olson

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster.
We weren't completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We'd had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine.
We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same.
We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities.
In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares.
At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. "This is too much!" she said. "You can't dump all the ~ Sharon Creech

Many survivors insist they're not courageous: 'If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.' 'If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared'... Most of us have it mixed up. You don't start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear. ~ Laura Davis

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted body image and feelings of body shame.
For some women, eating disorders are related to the loss of control over their bodies during the sexual abuse and serve as a means of feeling in control of their bodies now. Eating disorders can also be indicative of the developmental stage and age at which the sexual abuse began. Women with anorexia and bulimia report that they were sexually abused either at the age of puberty or during puberty, when their bodies were beginning to develop and they felt a great deal of body shame from the abuse. By contrast, women with compulsive eating report that the sexual abuse occurred before the age of puberty; they used food for comfort. ~ Karen A. Duncan

She'll be angry," Kenny argued. "She'll be mad at me for not protecting Jake. That's my job."
Tough job for someone so young . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit - to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak - beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them. ~ Carolyn Spring

Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour 'play the race
card', it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese
imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of
non-white people in films or plays in which a character was 'supposed' to be
white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning
actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End
production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K.
Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play
the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue
in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg.
Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, 'fans'


of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl
to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role
ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and
abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time:

All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in
love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was
an image of Rue that they'd created in their minds. ~ Akala

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones. ~ A.C. Grayling

As survivors, we've been conditioned to be victims sexually. Many of us have never learned to say no or to set limits on our sexual activities ... To heal, it's important that we take control, that we make active choices concerning if, when, and how we want to explore sexuality. Especially in the beginning, you need to put your own needs about sex ahead of anyone else's. ~ Ellen Bass

As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not 'stupid,' 'lazy,' 'ugly,' or a 'liar'. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is underneath. ~ Beverly Engel

Memory repression thrives in shame, secrecy, and shock. The shame and degradation experienced during sexual assault is profound, especially for children who have no concept of what is happening to them or why. Sexual abuse is so bizarre and horrible that the frightened child feels compelled to bury the event deep inside his or her mind. ~ Renee Fredrickson

I hated meatloaf. It was like something that Satan pooped out after an eternity of constipation. So I told Mom because I was honest that way. I sat back, squared my shoulders, and met her eyes, all confident-like.
Mom, meatloaf's like something that Satan pooped out after an eternity of constipation. It should be outlawed, frankly, and serving it for dinner is like child abuse and should carry with it some pretty stiff penalties. ~ Hayden Thorne

From a young boy's viewpoint this could not get any worse, especially when you were told that you belonged to the devil, and this bullying of me went on for a long time. ~ Stephen Richards

The Catholic Church wants to see child abuse by priests and nuns as simply an issue of some very bad priests and nuns. What it needs to understand is that the nature of religion compounded the problem. It allowed priests to have a status that placed them above suspicion. It fostered a myth that celibacy meant purity. It had schools that enforced authority by beating children and taught that authority figures should not be questioned. Men like Smyth and Steele will have understood the esteem in which priests were held and seen themselves as untouchable. They had every reason to, as the Catholic Church did a great deal to defend and enable them. ~ Noel McGivern

Each person recovers at their own pace. Healing does not occur with a formula ~ Patricia Dsouza

A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life ... ~ Asa Don Brown

I love like a beaten child and I trust like an addict. ~ Kris Kidd

I was just thinking that I started off OK," Jo said. "There wasn't anything different or wrong with me when I was born. I wasn't inherently bad or freakish."
That's right, Jo," Lynn said.
"Other people - my mother and father - did things to me that made me feel all wrong about myself," Jo said, another warm wave of new, sure knowledge washing over her. ~ Joan Frances Casey