Organized Abuse Quotes

During a period in which women and children's testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned "ritual abuse" as the new frontier of disbelief. The term "ritual abuse" arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of "recovered memories", "false allegations" and "moral panic".
Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief. ~ Michael Salter

Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. "Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators. ~ Alison Miller

My view is that the false memory campaign is a spent force. It failed to realize 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. ~ Michael Salter

One of the great things about anarchy is that it's hard to get it organized. ~ George Hammond

The things ... which are proper to the understanding no other man is used to impede, for neither fire, nor iron, nor tyrant, nor abuse, touches it in any way. When it has been made a sphere, it continues a sphere. ~ Marcus Aurelius

From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed. ~ Justina Chen

Everyone you meet should go into a people file (organized by categories) that you keep on your computer or phone. Include a few details about the person. Selected names should be placed on your "big-mouth" e-mail list. It should consist of former bosses, former coworkers whom you want to stay in touch with, anyone who has mentored you, people you've met who seem interested in your career. People on your big-mouth list then get sent an e-mail notification when you have important career news - for instance, you've switched jobs, been promoted, or started your own business. ~ Kate White

Organized religion is horseshit. Spirituality -- the spirituality that I've come to know and experience -- has nothing to do with religion. Were it not for my relationship with a God of my experience I would be dead. Actually I did die. Now I'm this other guy with a pencil in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. ~ Dan Fante

The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to "gamify" our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are "nothing more" than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose "game engine" can - and will - be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality - most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway - but because, in reflecting the "as if" character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear. ~ Erik Davis

This is not love. It is a crime ... You can't look the other way just because you have not experienced domestic violence with your own flesh. ~ Salma Hayek

Emily crawled down to the floor, sliding along the wall, in the corner of the room. The girl did not show anyone that her heart was crying; therefore, everyone thought that she just did not care. After encountering reluctance to understand her from the side of her family members and their typical prejudiced judgment for too many times, her pride would not let her show the storm of emotions taking place inside of her soul. ~ Sahara Sanders

The individual who violates the rules in a zealous search for an answer to the problem may overstep the bounds and thereby suffer the loss of his relationships to the organized medical profession. ~ Morris Fishbein

If you were the boss of a company and some of the employees of your company were known to sexually abuse children, you would fire them instantly. ~ Sinead O'Connor

Men should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question "Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?" These "witch hunters," as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35] ~ Ross Cheit

I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project. ~ Seymour Papert

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4 ~ Judith Lewis Herman

I realized the preserving a relationship at all costs was not as important as affirming the human right to be free from abusive treatment. ~ Rebecca Ann Parker

Nothing is more beautiful than an organized width, and nothing is worse than an unorganized lapidary. ~ David Berkowitz Chicago

By listening to the "unspoken voice" of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by "tracking" my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the "survival emotions" of rage and terror without becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation.

While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more "ordinary" events such as surgeries or invasive medical procedures. Orthopedic patients in a recent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery.

Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receiving shocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into an
auto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly common experiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to rebound from such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals, can subject us to PTSD - along with a myriad of physical and emotional symptoms. ~ Peter A. Levine

No woman in any of my cases has ever left a man the first time he behaved abusively (not that doing so would be wrong). By the time she moves to end her relationship, she has usually lived with years of verbal abuse and control and has requested uncountable numbers of times that her partner stop cutting her down or frightening her. In most cases she has also requested that he stop drinking, or go to counseling, or talk to a clergyperson, or take some other step to get help. She has usually left him a few times, or at least started to leave, and then gotten back together with him. Don't any of these actions on her part count as demonstrating her commitment? Has she ever done enough, and gained the right to protect herself? In the abuser's mind, the answer is no. Once again, the abuser's double standards rule the day. ~ Lundy Bancroft

When it comes to sports, women are big targets for abuse because the resentment is two-fold. Some resent us for our confidence and beliefs. But there also is an added resentment because we are supposedly infiltrating a space that has been decidedly male. ~ Jemele Hill

Whole night hanged with panic Sparking tears in those big wide eyes. ~ Patricia Dsouza

The opponents of perestroika had suffered a defeat, and then they organized the coup. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it. ~ Oliver Cromwell

I'm an HSP to the core. I avoid violent imagery (I abandoned reading Elaine Aron's The Highly Sensitive Person on my first try because - in typical HSP fashion - I couldn't handle the frequent references to sexual abuse). I'm very empathetic, and I feel as though my head will explode when two people try to talk to me at the same time. I have difficulty making dinner while the counter is cluttered with the morning's dishes. I lose my mind when someone is singing while the radio is playing a different song. Watching the news makes me want to assume the fetal position and never get up. ~ Anne Bogel

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

I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others. ~ Mary E. DeMuth

Certainly, words can be as abusive as any blow ... When a three-year-old yells, "You're so stupid! What a dummy!" it doesn't carry the same weight as when a mother yells those words to a child ... Even if you don't physically abuse young children, you can still drive them nuts with your words. ~ Mary Blakely

The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war. ~ George Mikes

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

Kid's, Life's too short to be organized. Follow your dreams first, then organize later. ~ Kendall Schmidt

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend. ~ Noorilhuda

The church is not a place for perfection. It is, and should be, a haven of protection. ~ Mary E. DeMuth

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn't take long because I want to believe it. It's comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power. ~ Tara Westover

You survived the abuse, you're going to survive the recovery. ~ Mariska Hargitay

But it is. It's something you need, and that's a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don't need is a man who can't let go of the useless baggage of his memories. ~ Stephen King

The lumbering bagos and topheavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black
motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for
the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like
overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,
portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,
they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a
blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,
altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't
what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse
abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-
drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving
just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty
years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their
bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense
lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will
melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the
bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. ~ Neal Stephenson

As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, "affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children." Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we're living to it. ~ William Deresiewicz

In speaking powerfully and eloquently for mercy and reconciliation to people divided by old hatreds and persecuted by abuse of power, the Holy Father was a beacon of light not just for Catholics, but for all people. ~ William J. Clinton

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction. ~ Terry Pratchett

Do the forgiveness and carry on going forward. Leave the worrying to the other person. Eat what is on your plate and leave the rest to them. ~ Stephen Richards

'My problem was comparatively simple,' Marcus said. 'One kiss was enough to solve it. But that doesn't mean one kiss is enough to wake everyone up and end every nightmare. [ ... ] That's okay,' Marcus whispered to him. 'One kiss doesn't need to be enough to let you know that the nightmare is really over.'
Liam swallowed rapidly, the world around him becoming embarrassingly misty.
'I'm not going anywhere,' Marcus promised. 'There'll be as many kisses as you need.'
Tilting Liam's head back, Marcus dipped his head and brought their lips together one more time. Liam sighed softly into the kiss and, very slowly, woke up just a little bit more. ~ Kim Dare

The minute we put aside our self-righteousness and move away from being the aggrieved, then we are on a healing process. ~ Stephen Richards

I like to get attention for the things I think are important. And I think it is important that entrepreneurs - especially young ones - not be abused. ~ Jason Calacanis

Not the brightest gem in the jewelry shop, but you've got to admire his single-minded dedication to drug abuse. ~ John Green

School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course. ~ John Taylor Gatto

Power is the great evil with which we are contending. We have divided power between three branches of government and erected checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. However, where is the check on the power of the judiciary? If we fail to check the power of the judiciary, I predict that we will eventually live under judicial tyranny. ~ Patrick Henry

I didn't want to turn into Martha Stewart. I wanted to turn into a more organized, more gracious me. And that truly has happened. ~ Jen Lancaster