Psychological Abuse Quotes

Psychological abuse is.. the sustained, repetitive, inappropriate behavior which damages or substantially reduces the creative and developmental potential of crucially important mental faculties and mental processes of a child, including intelligence, memory, recognition, perception, attention, imagination, and moral development. ~ Kieran O'Hagan

One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined.
(page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton) ~ Graeme Galton

He was part of her...like a tattoo ~ Luna Saint Claire

Invalidation is about dismissing your experiences, thoughts and above all your emotions. Indeed the intention is to not even allow you to have those thoughts, experiences and emotions. It‟s a way of invading your head and reprogramming it. It‟s psychological abuse (messing with your thoughts) and emotional abuse (messing with your feelings). ~ Danu Morrigan

It is not okay for someone you like to treat you poorly and then pretend it didn't happen, making you question your own grasp on reality. This dynamic is called gaslighting. It's a common tactic of abusers to shift the focus of the blame from their bad behavior onto the person they are victimizing. One important side effect of gaslighting is having your memory "black out" after a fight (because your brain is trying to protect you from the cruelty of the abuse), which results in not being able to remember how an argument started. You may start to internalize the idea that there is something wrong with you and that you did something to provoke the situation as you're increasingly beaten down and confused. ~ Shannon Weber

invalidation is crazy-making, and it is also at the root of gaslighting, where victims' feelings are purposely denied or manipulated in order to make them question their sanity. ~ Samantha Rodman

If you alter your behaviour because you are frightened of how your partner will react, you are being abused. ~ Sandra Horley

Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation. ~ George K. Simon

To deny someone's feelings or experiences it to literally deny their reality. ~ Danu Morrigan

There is tremendous trauma in the betrayal caused by a perpetual liar as they repeatedly commit psychological abuse. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

Sensory deprivation has a devastating psychological impact and can lead to the complete dissolution of the personality accompanied by hallucinations, delusional thinking and general incoherence. It is presently acknowledged as a form of torture; in fact, it is one of a group of "enhanced techniques" that are entirely psychological in nature and unique in that they do not conform to the general public understanding of what torture is. ~ Brian Moss

so often victims end up unnecessarily prolonging their abuse because they buy into the notion that their abuser must be coming from a wounded place and that only patient love and tolerance (and lots of misguided therapy) will help them heal. ~ George K. Simon

When I ask you who you are, you'd better say my fucking name. ~ Alicen Grey

Everyone secretly wants to be owned. ~ Alicen Grey

Remember, a fact is a fact, no matter how hard the liars amongst you might try hushing it up. ~ Billy Childish

When you're persistently deleted from history, media, and any other channel to access information – or that information is distorted – it's far worse than physically killing someone. It, instead, induces a form of psychological death. How can you truly be alive, how can you genuinely breathe, when everyone around you believes that you either don't exist or are dead? ~ M.B. Dallocchio

What makes Jessica Jones series so unique is that it really is an allegory for many different types of abuse, whether it be sexual abuse, physical abuse, or psychological abuse. That's what makes this such an incredibly bold show. ~ Rachael Taylor

Acts of psychological abuse include berating or humiliating the victim; interrogating the victim; restricting the victim's ability to come and go freely; obstructing the victim's access to assistance (e.g., law enforcement; legal, protective, or medical resources); threatening the victim with physical harm or sexual assault; harming, or threatening to harm, people or things that the victim cares about; unwarranted restriction of the victim's access to or use of economic resources; isolating the victim from family, friends, or social support resources; stalking the victim; and trying to make the victim think that he or she is crazy. ~ Donald W. Black

Just because it is not physical, it does not mean it is not abuse. Verbal and Psychological abuses are real things; their effect on the mind of the victim is perhaps more damaging on the mind of the abused than the open wounds that can be seen in physical abuse ~ Arti Honrao

Words are incredibly powerful weapons. Who amongst us has not felt both their warming glow and cold icy sting… or companionship and abandonment… or how majestically they make us soar to the greatest heights of paradise or how mindlessly they fling us into the deepest, darkest, recesses of hell? Words are incredibly powerful weapons. And in the hands of the master abuser, words become the precise instruments of psychological abuse. And without so much as lifting a finger, the words you use have the power to bring about the complete destruction of another human being. Words can be weapons of mass destruction. ~ Dr. Mallika Nawal

To any survivor who may be doubting whether what they've experienced is truly abuse, remember that emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse will never be, and should never be, considered part of the messy equation of a normal relationship. As both metal health professionals and survivors can attest to, the traumatic highs and lows of being with a narcissist, a sociopath, or a psychopath are not the natural highs and lows of regular relationships. That suggestion is quite damaging to society and to survivors all around the world. ~ Shahida Arabi

Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.
There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years.
If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived.
The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them o ~ Laurie Matthew

Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us. ~ Danu Morrigan

The seriousness of emotional deprivation:
It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care in their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined ... From a psychological viewpoint this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought ... The ... elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. ~ Albert Einstein

Wickedness or evil, devilry or hell. In total darkness, I sit real still. ~ Lori Krause

It is behavior, not words, that has the greatest impact on a child. When a mother tells her daughter not to allow a man to control her or abuse her and then models the opposite in her own relationship with her husband, the girl will respond only to the behavioral message, not the verbal one. ~ Susan Forward

Not everybody believes in the possibility of political persuasion. Many people see political positions as expressions of innate personality traits - hard-wired into us either by our genes or by an irreversible process of socialization. Why should we waste time trying to be persuasive when people never really change their minds? This is a reasonable concern.

The idea that persuasion doesn't work comes from a bad application of good science. A substantial body of research suggests that our political beliefs are shaped by more or less fixed psychological characteristics ... Research like this, however, tells us about the difficulty of conversion, not persuasion. These are not the same things. We too often misrepresent the task of political persuasion by thinking of the most strident partisan we have ever encountered and imagining what it would take to turn that person into an equally strident partisan for the other side. This sort of Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus conversion rarely happens in politics. Most people don't change their fundamental values, and if we expect them to, we are going to be very disappointed.

But we usually don't need people to change their fundamental values in order to convince them to adopt a particular position. The fact that people have fundamental values makes it possible to persuade them by appealing to those values. But we have to find values that we really share. ~ Michael Austin

Children in dysfunctional homes at risk of abuse are kept in danger for too long because politically correct rules mean we won't challenge unfit parents. ~ Michael Gove

The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence. ~ Joseph Campbell

More recently, studies by social scientists have emphasized that most people in modern Western society go through life with strong positive beliefs that the world is basically a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. Moreover, these beliefs are a valuable aid to happy, healthy functioning. But suffering and victimization undermine these beliefs and make it hard to go on living happily or effectively in society. Indeed, the direct and practical effects of some trauma or crime are often relatively minor, whereas the psychological effects go on indefinitely. The body may recover from rape or robbery rather quickly, but the psychological scars can last for many years. A characteristic of these scars is that the victims lose faith in their basic beliefs about the world as fair and benevolent or even in themselves as good people. Thus, evil strikes at people's fundamental beliefs. ~ Roy F. Baumeister

[Imeachable conduct is] misconduct by public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. ~ Alexander Hamilton

We must distinguish between military and political power.
Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of these. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

It was a country ... that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve. ~ Wendell Berry

The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know ... From my cell, I'd hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I'd witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom. ~ Jacobo Timerman

The idea was women on boats. Lifeline Cruises pitched itself to women seeking adventure, whether a daylong adventure in the waters of the San Francisco Bay or a twelve-day adventure from San Francisco to Alaska and back. Passengers did not have to be survivors of breast cancer or domestic abuse, nor was any of the profit of Lifeline Cruises given to such causes, but the language of its radio ads, slippery and clear, managed to convey that this might be so. 'Empowerment' was one of the words. It's daylong cruise boat was named The Wild Lady, from a poem by Emily Dickinson that Lifeline Cruises had made up. Tote bags sold on board broadcast the words of the ad
The wild lady may seem
adrift to those who cannot dream
but within her uncharted wand'ring eyes
a heart beats healthy, strong and wise!
- and below this were the words 'Emily Dickinson. ~ Daniel Handler

My self-esteem had been crushed through years of childhood bullying and serious abuses, which would take me decades to overcome. ~ Bryant H. McGill

It is the natural disposition of all men to listen with pleasure to abuse and slander of their neighbour, and to hear with impatience those who utter praises of themselves. ~ Demosthenes

I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave. ~ Jane Campion

Even child abuse specialists do not routinely screen for domestic violence. This shows how much more education we need to do, even among experts, to understand the known links between violence of the child and the parent. ~ Jocelyn Brown

Didn't anyone ask you where your parents are?"
"They asked. Especially about my parents."
"What did you tell them?"
"I said I ate them."
"Jesus, Rosa. ~ Justine Larbalestier

I need one psychological expert to help me concentrate. ~ Dana Hussein

After forty years of working on prevention of a wide range of common and costly psychological and behavioral problems, I am convinced we have the knowledge to achieve a healthier, happier, and more prosperous society than has ever been seen in human history. ~ Anthony Biglan

And it's a preference, a long-held preference, what you might call a 'habit of mind' - putting words into other people's mouths. And those people are played by people whose profession is to pretend to be other people. For which purpose, they adopt gestures, voices, intonations, even sexual attitudes not their own. On stage, they affect to be ravished and amused by someone whom they will, afterwards, run a mile to avoid having dinner with. Likewise, they spit torrents of abuse against an actor who later, later, in the softness of the night, they will share their bed with. ~ David Hare

Soul work is the 'more' that we need to do to heal our souls.

Soul retrieval is one more step toward balance and wholeness. The trauma of major illness, death, financial devastation, abuse, terror, and other stressors in our lives will not cease while we live and breathe. But, knowing they can rob us of our soul allows us to address those loses before or as they occur, so that we do not have to struggle to survive without that which makes us who we are. ~ Barbara Lieberman

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . .

In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves.

A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment.

However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more ~ Don Richard Riso

My mind is quiet now. There is no fire or ash, no sulfur or shattering glass. Only silence, empty and cold. ~ Christine Fonseca

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

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

A particularly difficult line to navigate is the one between fear and love, especially for parents, who want more than anything to protect their children from suffering. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I want people to realize that the domestic abuse charges happened in 1989. I didn't meet any of them until 1993. ~ Kato Kaelin

If a girl gets sexual pleasure from riding a horse, does the horse suffer? If not, who cares? If you French kiss your dog and he or she thinks it's great, is it wrong? We believe all exploitation and abuse is wrong. If it isn't exploitation and abuse, it may not be wrong. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue. ~ E. O. Wilson

Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

Don't ever feel bad for making a decision about your own life that upsets other people. You are not responsible for their happiness. You're responsible for your own happiness. Anyone who wants you to live in misery for their happiness should not be in your life anyway. ~ Isaiah Hankel

The somatotype of the cat or any animal from quadruped to biped partially determines the perspective of the creature. The physiology of any given creature will alter its understanding of its environment. A close look then at the physiology of cats and dogs and one biped, in particular, the primate, should give anyone a clear reason for the biological and psychological shaping of religion. This examination of cats, dogs and then other primates, humanity's cousins, in comparison with some religious ideals, will show just how physiological perspectives would and have influenced religious dogma or cat-ma as the case may be. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

Healing was a terrifying and painful experience and my life was as full of struggle and heartache as it had always been. Several years after I started therapy, I began to feel happy. I was stunned. I hadn't realized that the point of all this work on myself was to feel good. I thought it was just one more struggle in a long line of struggles. It took a while before I got used to the idea that my life had changed, that I felt happy, that I was actually content. Learning to tolerate feeling good is one of the nicest parts of healing. ~ Ellen Bass

The pictures are of a psychological culture, a Jungian culture, if you will. It emanates from my own psyche ... It's a hard place to get to, honestly. It has taken me many years to get to that place and to define it visually. ~ Roger Ballen

No country is 100 percent free of human rights abuses. ~ Raul Castro