He was six years old this time, and ancient.

We don’t yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping,...

The Kinsey staff asked questions of children, learning about sexuality in the family. And other psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians, including Benjamin Spock, explored this burgeoning field. As a result, it was known that children will...

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.

It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds’ public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own...

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...

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don’t think it’s the children who need to be adjusted.

The most precious thing that we as humanity hold, is the innocence in that of a child’s smile, and we have a moral obligation to preserve it.

Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood...

Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange...

Mind control is built in lies and manipulation of attachment needs.Valerie Sinason, from the Forward of the book

Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional...

There is an intergenerational reoccurrence rate of 30% in incest.

One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization....

Mother said, haven’t you seen older boys of your age, that you should take your rotten hands and play with my son’s penis? I held my mouth, and i really stiffled a giggle. Now i...

The people who were behind my abuse were very clever. They had created something which would be so difficult to explain, so difficult to make sense of, that it would be easier to dismiss it...

I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain – not deal with reality

Recently I interviewed a psychopath. This is always a humbling experience because it teaches over and over how much of human motivation and experience is outside my narrow range. Despite the psychopath’s lack of conscience...

Overcoming abuse doesn’t just happen, It takes positive steps everyday. Let today be the day you start to move forward.

forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

And as she held me, I suddenly realized that my lifelong search for love and acceptance had finally ended in the arms of a foster parent.

If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his...

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious.

He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it.

THOSE WHO SAID IT CAN’T BE DONE…SHOULDN’T GET IN MY WAY WHILE I’M DOING IT!

Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order...

Not only do skeptics such as Lanning choose to ignore eyewitness/victim accounts of ritual criminal activity, they apparently also choose to overlook the significant number of cases of ritual abuse in which perpetrators have confessed...

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both...

I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.

Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of...

There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well...

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they’re merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically...

from: The Portrayal of Child Sexual Assault in Introductory Psychology Textbooks – Elizabeth J. Letourneau, Tonya C. LewisOne of the central questions surrounding the debate on memories of CSA is how often false or repressed...

I spent most of my life believing lwas crazy because all the crazy things I experienced in childhood were treated as nonexistent or normal. This belief colored every decision made, from something so basic as...

In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail...

Since the 1980s, therapists have reported encountering clients or patients who had experienced extreme abuses featuring physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive aspects, along with a premeditated structure of torture-enforced lessons. The phenomena was first...

Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D....

Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.

One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question “Do people actually forget traumatic events such as...

I opened my louvres and looked at Comfort, walking in the heavy rain, crying bitterly. I heard mom saying, Anywhere you want to go, you can, but don’t come back again to this house. Comfort...

Social anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are.

From Colin A. Ross, 1995: The writer is the brother of the man who co-founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. He is writing to WGBH about a program called ‘Divided Memories’, which you may have...

the abuser’s desire to abuse is not created by the child – it is there before the child appears

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.

I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I...

How much our society values its children can be measured by how well they are treated and protected.

The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up...