Sexual Abuse Survivors Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many Survivors blame themselves for the abuse and continue to feel responsible and guilty for anything bad that happens to them or to other people they know. Survivors often feel bad about themselves and different from other people. They therefore isolate themselves from other people and avoid making close friendships. ~ Carolyn Ainscough

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

If someone thinks you're being dramatic or selfish, then they obviously haven't walked a mile in your shoes. It's not important for you to explain yourself. You get a pass here. Don't let anyone else try to saddle you with guilt or shame. If you need your space, take it. ~ Sarah Newman

Assault survivors respond differently. There's no right or wrong way to react after being sexually abused. The assault can be so overwhelming that we may respond in three ways - fight, flee, or freeze. ~ Dana Arcuri

Nevertheless, being weak or showing vulnerability is essentially a sign of inner strength. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Victim-stancing - whereby the offender claims and believes that s/he is the real victim (one of the most prevalent sophistries in the false memory controversies) ~ Harvey L. Schwartz

With every book I write, I give the Hera Leick Promise. I will never weave into my stories: cheating; sex outside the main characters; sexual abuse; cliffhangars; years of separation; man whores; and lastly my worst pet peeve, insta-love. If one sneaks in, I give you permission to shoot me. Please make note, however, guns are not legal in England. Neither is murder. I hope. ~ Hera Leick

Protestant congregations. These surveys found that, out of about one thousand churches who had been asked about sexual abuse since 1993, allegations of child abuse averaged 70 per week. ~ Joe Klest

Christy isn't a case, he's a person. ~ C. Kennedy

Are you capable to truly distinguish the person you envision in the mirror? ~ Patricia Dsouza

Because for her, money isn't the issue. This is about revenge, payback, even worse, justice. ~ Mark M. Bello

The second time I try to kill a man I'm fourteen. Killing a man seems a very grown-up thing to do - like writing in Biro. ~ Damian Barr

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

The skin on her upper arms prickled like it'd done so many times back in Jeddah, a sign to be careful. ~ Louise Burfitt-Dons

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

I can't remember the words she spoke when they finally opened the garage door and yanked me inside, but I was petrified. It wasn't sound Mom's screams or the jolt of her grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me like a rag doll that plagues my memory, but the look of her eyes- wide, wild, and unrecognizable. ~ Maggie Young

It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn't know it. ~ Gloria Steinem

Psychological and emotional wellness is an ongoing process for everyone. ~ C. Kennedy

I think the issue of clergy sexual abuse sparked people to look at their faith in a different way. ~ William P. Leahy

Some people think it's demeaning to victims if you ever say anything out-loud about sexual abuse of children. I don't know if that's true. ~ Louis C.K.

: Their acts violated our trust. : The secrecy told us we were alone. : The shame swirling through our experience convinced us we didn't deserve the best for ourselves. : Our circumstances twisted our beliefs about what to expect out of life. : Surviving our unpredictable, disempowering childhood left little opportunity to explore our talents or creativity. It's been said, living through childhood sexual abuse is like living in a war zone. Each of us survived by doing the best we could. Now we have the opportunity to celebrate the child we were and all we did to reach this place in life when healing is possible. Now we get to update our information. And this will bring encouraging, empowering, joy-filled changes into our lives. Each time you go back into a memory, you have the opportunity to 'see' what you learned in that moment of trauma. When I was six-years old, playing with my doll with abandon that blocked out all other noise, I found ~ Jeanne McElvaney

Soul Abuse is the destruction of a victim's awareness of the strength within their soul. It stems from the abuser's intention to corrupt another's understanding of their own significance. ~ Lorraine Nilon

Just one person. It really honestly just takes one positive person. One positive person can help you. And that can go a long, long way. - Alexis ~ Robert Uttaro

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no
black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and
shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you
think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can
imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as
'black-on-black' violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever
been referred to as 'white-on-white' crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war,
the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of
murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite
hundreds of millions of 'white' people killing each other throughout European
history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite
the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost
entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a
rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused
black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but
simply because they are 'black', and sometimes because they listened to too
much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase 'black-on-black
Akala

You are unique, special and exceptional as you have made it. ~ Patricia Dsouza

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

Preliminary research-most of it published outside the medical literature-indicates that a significant number of our patients have experienced some form of violence and abuse during their lifetime, including elder abuse, child abuse, gang-related violence, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. ~ David Schneider

I'm not looking at them, Jamie says softly. "I'm looking at you." When I bring up my eyes, I'm looking at him too. Like, really looking at him. It's hard to breathe when all the colors of his face are so rich and intoxicating-pale blue eyes, a honey tan, and dark chocolate hair. How could someone so beautiful be looking at me the way he is, with half of a smile and affection in his gaze? What does he see? And then I realize. He sees the same thing I see when I look at him. He sees something beautiful. ~ Akemi Dawn Bowman

Commit to the healing path and trust the process. ~ Rosenna Bakari

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

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry ... is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse. ~ Martin Gardner

Once you'd been with Freddie, you wouldn't go anywhere else.' (How true this was to prove.) This incessant bragging by Fred West was at best, annoying and at worst, sickening. According to him, he was God's gift to women. ~ Stephen Richards

The shared secret and the shared denial are the most horrible aspects of incest. ~ John Bradshaw

One Decision Makes All the Difference ~ Kimesha Coleman

Narcissistic abuse is a form of psycho-emotional abuse that takes place when a pathological narcissist targets another individual and exposes them to trauma. It can also manifest as physical, financial, spiritual and sexual abuse. ~ M. Wakefield

Over centuries, organised perpetrator groups have observed and studied the way in which extreme childhood traumas, such as accidents, bereavement, war, natural disasters, repeated hospitalisations and surgeries, and (most commonly) child abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) cause a child's mind to be split into compartments. Occult groups originally utilised this phenomenon to create alternative identities and what they believed to be "possession" by various spirits. In the twentieth century, probably beginning with the Nazis, other organised groups developed ways to harm children and deliberately structure their victims' minds in such a way that they would not remember what happened, or that if they began to remember they would disbelieve their own memories. Consequently, the memories of what has happened to a survivor are hidden within his or her inside parts. ~ Alison Miller

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

You pulled through it, you are not just a survivor, but a Victor. ~ Patricia Dsouza

You may never be able to keep up with someone else's steps, either you may end up being far behind or far gone. Pick your path, not someone else's ~ Patricia Dsouza

Zachary notified the local newspapers and all pertinent radio and television stations. He called a press conference at the home of his client, Jennifer Tracey, to announce the filing of a major multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a major religious institution. The dye had been cast. A long, tough road lay ahead. For Zachary, Jennifer, Kenny, and Jake, there was no turning back. ~ Mark M. Bello

It took a strong you to live through the abuse and the secrets. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Yes, she fears the cuffs, the cross and the whip, but she will get past this. Such problems, even with time, do not go away on their own. They must be addressed.
André Chevalier ~ Nikki Sex