Hit the bottom and get back up; or hit the bottle and stay down.

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child’s tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It’s not funny and it’s not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience...

Psychological and emotional wellness is an ongoing process for everyone.

Some people think it’s a jungle out here. It’s not… It’s a fucking zoo!” – excerpt from: freefalling

I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.

Time and talents are the most expensive gifts God gave to us at no cost. However, they are the main things that are easily abused. To abuse something time and talents is to take them...

My father wrote: “Always question where your loyalties lie. The people you trust will expect it, your greatest enemies will desire it, and those you treasure the most, will, without fail, abuse it.

… you don’t have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like...

The worst abuse of freedom is to deny that it exists.

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.

For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those...

He loves me so he hurts meTo try and make me good.It doesn’t work. I’m just too badAnd don’t do what I should.My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are...

ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCEAlcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack...

Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems...

For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone...

The fact is, the man who’d begotten me didn’t want me. In his eyes I should never have been born. And perhaps that would’ve been best. As it was, my existence had proven to be...

For anyone who wonders what it’s like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it’s like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It’s...

Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.

There’a a phrase, “the elephant in the living room”, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could...

If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

Like Jocelyn, Survivors often think: * That’s just the way I am * I’m not lovable, that’s why I keep having disastrous relationships * I’m not very clever, that’s why I didn’t do well at...

There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don’t touch me! as he...

You’re a survivor because everyday you make a choice not to be governed by their harsh words or actions. No one has the right to take away your happiness.

This isn’t a romance. You’re not a damsel in distress and I’m not the handsome prince come to save you.

When we began researching the film on behalf of Channel 4, which had commissioned and paid for it, the response from individual child protection workers inside and outside Cleveland was universally positive. Everyone we met...

The main factor that makes leadership potentials to become abused often is ignorance. Many people can merely spell their names in alphabets, but cannot pronounce their brands!

Clouds of confusionrolled into illusionHe veils perversionforcing her coercionHer body he takeswhile she flies awayunbelievable, she’s invisible

Basically you got a guy that is cycling through the process. You are watching him relive his abuse process in front of your very eyes not as a victim, but as a perpetrator. What you...

Dear Mrs. Black: On seven prior occasions this company has denied your claim in writing. We now deny it for the eighth and final time. You must be stupid, stupid stupid, stupid!

The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the...

Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!

Inviting someone to work for pay is a sacred privilege and a trust. It must be regarded a high honor to be able to give another person work, and neither employer nor employee should abuse...

He’s mean and crazy, and he’ll never change. All he wants is to hurt you. Leave him now before he does something even worse.” All of these people are trying to help, and they are...

When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.

Strange how mean words can return to ones thoughts, years after they’ve been callously thrown at you. They replay in your mind, spiking a sense of remembered pain. Nasty name calling can be an ugly...

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be...

The true test of a warrior is how your ‘stance’ holds up after any ‘circumstance’. Meaning, even after the stormiest weather, a true warrior will still reflect the brilliant rays of the magnificent sun through...

Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents...

stars are the scars of the universe

I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and...

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the...

bombs” in the stomach, a trick to convince survivors that their abusers monitor them continuously. The presence of an object does not mean it is capable of collecting complex information and sending it back to...

You can have a pet zebra and put that zebra into a small cage every day and tell the zebra that you love it, but no matter how you and the zebra love each other,...

He gets more verbal abuse than any coach I’ve ever seen.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states,each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized...

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening...