Quotes from Susan Forward

The incest victim's need for self-punishment often leads her into self-abusive behaviors like alcoholism, drug abuse, or prostitution.

The misogynist's control over his partner is like the roots of a plant: it spreads into many areas of her life. Her work, her interests, her friends, her children, and even her thoughts and feelings can be affected by his control. Her self-confidence and self-esteem can be so damaged as to bring about significant changes in the way she feels about herself and how she relates to the rest of the world.

The more she sees him as the primary source of her good feelings, the more she will need him to be the center of her life. Remember, the misogynist's jealousy and possessiveness have already seriously limited her world, which further enhances his importance to her. It is a vicious cycle. The more dependent she becomes, the more important he becomes. The more important he is, the more she is willing to give up for him, so that there is less left in her life that is free of him.

Money has always been the primary language of power.

But the misogynist can get very mad over virtually nothing. He explodes over the most insignificant events. He exaggerates, he maximizes—he makes mountains out of molehills. Perhaps his partner forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning, or the toast came out too dark, or maybe they ran out of toilet paper. He treats her momentary fall from grace as if it were a federal crime.

Most people expect that a woman who is being mistreated by her partner will pull away from him. However, in a misogynistic partnership, just the opposite happens. Nothing bonds a woman to a misogynist more addictively than his swings back and forth between love and abuse.

Unfortunately, there is no magic key. The misogynist's outbursts as well as his tenderness generally have little to do with how his partner is behaving. He is driven by his own inner demons. Therefore, there is no way to guarantee his good moods or eliminate his angry ones.

When a woman believes that there is a magic key, she is likely to expend all her energy in the fruitless task of trying to find it, and in the process she relinquishes her right to good treatment. Because her emotional well-being is tied to her partner's mercurial moods, she loses her ability to act in her own best interest's, to be assertive, and to have confidence in her decisions.

The hope that he'll change, the search for the magic key, and the intensity of her love all combine to place the woman in a very vulnerable position. Her acceptance of her partner's insults, humiliations, and scare tactics has given him enormous power over her: he can now control her behavior and feelings by the mere switch of a mood. This can be a terrifying position for her.

I have a horrible time trying to figure out who I am, what I want, or what I need. I'm just beginning to figure it out. The hardest part is for me to like myself. Every time I try, I hear Daddy telling me what an awful kid I was.

Fear in intimate relationships operates on several levels. On one level there are the survival fears—fear of making it financially on your own, fear of being poor, fear of being the sole provider and nurturer for your children, and fear of being alone—which keep women from leaving abusive relationships. But fear is present in the misogynistic relationship long before the woman begins to think of leaving.

The physical and emotional distress that result from incurring the misogynist's displeasure can be so painful that women will do virtually anything to avoid it, including tolerate their partner's irrational behavior.

Or, paradoxically, they may swing to the other extreme and become overly trusting, feeling so desperate to find someone who cares for them that they may ignore warning signs and find themselves involved with people who will victimize them again.

In addition to threatening to physically harm his partner, the misogynist may threaten to harm himself or his children. He may threaten to cut off all the money, or he may threaten to find someone else and leave if his partner doesn't do what he wants her to. The more a woman gives in to these threats and intimidations, the less power she has in the relationship. Once she feels helpless, her fears become even more overwhelming.

The only way emotional assaults or physical abuse can make sense to a child is if he or she accepts responsibility for the toxic parent's behavior.

You are accepting painful feelings as a part of your life, perhaps even rationalizing them as being good for you. It's time to stop.

I came to realise that there are two facets to forgiveness: giving up the need for revenge, and absolving the guilty party of responsibility.

In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child's development, because children need the security of boundaries.

Remember, accepting blame is a survival tool for abused children. They keep the myth of the good family alive by believing that they - not their parents - are bad. This belief lies at the core of virtually all self-defeating behavior patterns in adults who were abused as children.

Alla barn längtar att känna sig trygga, skyddade och älskade av sina föräldrar. De behöver också få lov att växa upp och bli oberoende. Paradoxalt nog kan människor bli oberoende vuxna bara om deras behov av beroende blev fyllt när de var barn. Om deras behov av beroende inte fylldes finns det en värkande tomhet inom dem, och den känslan bär de med sig in i vuxenlivet.

A little girl wo was criticized or ignored or abused or stifled by an unloving mother becomes an adult who tells herself she'll never be good enough or lovable enough, never smart or pretty or acceptable enough to deserve success and happiness. Because if you really were worthy of respect and affection, a voice whispers inside, your mother would've given them to you.

A woman who submits to her husband's abusive treatment is living out the role of victim and behaving more like a helpless child than an adult. She relinquishes the entire adult field to her husband, leaving her children with only one grown-up to deal with: Father. As we have seen, Father can be a very scary person. When Mother abdicates her adult role, she not only deprives her children of a strong maternal figure, but she leaves them with no one to protect them from their father.

When a child is not permitted to express her pain, one of the important, destructive messages she gets is that if she is feeling bad it is due to her own deficiencies. Coupled with this is likely the message that if she needs comfort, then she is ugly and repulsive to others.

An even darker side to the behavior of the needy, victim mother is that she may use her son as a sacrificial lamb. In addition to not protecting him from his abusive father, she may actually place him between herself and her husband in order to deflect some of his wrath away from her.