Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain...

…my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks,...

Leave him.” But she knows it won’t be that easy. He will promise to change. He’ll get friends and relatives to feel sorry for him and pressure her to give him another chance. He’ll get...

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

There certainly are some women who treat their male partners badly, berating them, calling them names, attempting to control them. The negative impact on these men’s lives can be considerable. But do we see men...

My mother’s outh drops. ‘Emmy…don’t say those things Emmy. Remember, we don’t talk about those things.”Yes Mom. I remember. That’s why I’m here, looking like this.’An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting...

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...

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...

normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training...

illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the...

The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not asobvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half...

After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a...

Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society...

what is being forced upon her.

YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR ANGER.One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him....

Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a “black heart” – seeing the abuser holding an...

There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when...

An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how...

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...

Scorned and torn, former love mates aim and shoot childish devastating daggers that penetrate beyond target to pierce the heart of their offspring.

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person oridea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit,indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as...

With emotional abuse, the insults, insinuations, criticism, and accusations slowly eat away at the victim’s self-esteem until he or she is incapable of judging a situation realistically. He or she may begin to believe that...

The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are:You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually. I know better than you do, even about what’s good for you.Your opinions aren’t...

Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.

I think this point is so important, I’m going to repeat it: You should never listen to criticism that is primarily intended to wound, even if it contains more than a grain of truth.

I hope you see what you’ve done to me.

It is not the the bruises on the body that hurt. It is the wounds of the heart and the scars on the mind.

The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are:You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing.I can easily convince other people that you’re the one who is messed up.As long as I’m calm, you...

All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during...

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life?...

Forcing your love on someone who doesn’t love you is an emotional rape, because your victim’s heart was not aroused, you jumped into it without foreplay.

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

The central attitudes driving the Drill Sergeant are:I need to control your every move or you will do it wrong.I know the exact way that everything should be done.You shouldn’t have anyone else — or...

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen...

when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will...

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as ‘fragments’. which are ‘relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the...

The central attitudes driving the Terrorist are:You have no right to defy me or leave me. Your life is in my hands.Women are evil and have to be kept terrorized to prevent that evil from...

She looked at him like it physically hurt her not to speak, and yet she stayed silent.

Fight! Rabbit! Fight!

Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle....

The symptoms of abuse are there, and the woman usually sees them: the escalating frequency of put-downs. Early generosity turning more and more to selfishness. Verbal explosions when he is irritated or when he doesn’t...

My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.

I just can’t seem to do anything right.”At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open...

When I ask you who you are, you’d better say my fucking name.

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the...