Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam...

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After...

In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.

To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty...

Gratitude is a conscious choice and survivors owe it to themselves to accept this as one of their greatest tools used to rebuild their life.

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn’t be scared’… Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with...

Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been...

Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors’ lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated...

And often the worst thing wasn’t the victims–they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on,...

It is during a time of failure we bury a past and resurrect a future. Becoming righteous, discerning, and wise are our most prized possessions and across every cultures-this is the greatest feat of all...

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...

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...

I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise.

People stagger, but they pick up a tattered thread and wind it back onto a spool.

I should have told.” The legacy of a helpless, vulnerable, out-of-control, and humiliated child creates an adult who is generally tentative, insecure, and quite angry. The anger is not often expressed, however, as it is...

Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.

You’re not worthy” is one of them.

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

I like being on my own. I mean, I’m sure a Pack’s best for some dogs, but I’ve walked alone since I left my Pup Pack. I can look after myself.

Sensitive people care when the world doesn’t because we understand waiting to be rescued and no one shows up. We have rescued ourselves, so many times that we have become self taught in the art...

instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she...

It is important to learn about being multiple, and what works for their healing, from your client. To work with the alters, rather than trying to get the ANP to control the rest of the...

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma’s essential insult....

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we’ve known closely, and equally by those we’ve never known at all – and that we too can change...

You’re going to die, you know.” However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror...

Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the...

It appears that DDNOS is the intentional goal of these abusers, but DID sometimes results from a failure of programming. In DDNOS, the ANP is always present, even when another part is in control of...

Sometimes we need to feel bad to know what it’s like to feel good…

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...

It will all work out, Inas. You come from a long line of survivors and strong women. So everything will be fine in the end. And we are always with you in spirit, to guide...

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that...

and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which...

I don’t the life of a thug. I live the life of a sinner.

Over half a million women are raped in this country every year, and only a fraction of them report it because they’re too ashamed. It’s a really screwed up world, but its not your fault,...

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew...

Somatic Symptoms:People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or...

people do not emphasize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection

My view is that the false memory campaign is a spent force. It failed to realise its key goals, failed to renew itself and has largely faded away. Of course, the false memory campaign has...

There are no winners in battle. Just survivors.

Survivors can’t always choose their methods.

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from … It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as...

The fact that most perpetrators of organised abuse are men, and that their most intensive and sadistic abuses are visited upon girls and women, has gone largely unnoticed, as have the patterns of gendered inequity...

Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don’t assert our truth, it may again be...

Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit...

I’d long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors–there are studies that show it–are those blessed with an inordinate ability...

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how...

Mum was pregnant, then there was Sharron. […]I wanted to keep him away from her – but for the wrong reasons. In my head he was mine, he was my special person but, of course,...

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...

The country has turned its loyal inhabitants into wanderers similar to the survivors of an apocalypse.