Quotes About Abuse

When a girl is sexually abused, layers of secrecy and shame are added to her self-blame. The incestuous aggressor always projects the guilt for his crime onto the child he is molesting. The girl then learns to see herself as dirty and worthless. Having accepted humiliation, and exploitation as the conditions of survival during childhood, the girl is likely to reenact that same abuser/victim relationship with men in her adult life.

She was battered incessantly, regularly, all the time. I'm not saying 24 hours a day, but the incidents of battering were extraordinarily high.

No matter how toxic your parents might be, you still have a need to deify them. Even if you understand, on one level, that your father was wrong to beat you, you may still believe he was justified. Intellectual understanding is not enough to convince your emotions that you were not responsible.

Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are normal and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Incest is almost always a devastating experience for the victim.

Love doesn't make you feel terrified or lost or alone. It doesn't punish you for no reason, or berate a little girl for acting like the child she is. You're right, Samantha, what you've been describing isn't love.

solid majority have suffered a damaged sense of self-worth because a parent had regularly hit them, or criticized them, or "joked" about how stupid or ugly or unwanted they were, or overwhelmed them with guilt, or sexually abused them, or forced too much responsibility on them, or desperately overprotected them.

Further proof of your love involves giving up your right to react to what your partner does. If you cry or get upset when he is abusive, his response usually is to get even angrier. He sees your reaction as an attack on him and as further proof of your inadequacies.

Never has a book been as sorely misused as the Bible to justify beatings.

For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

If, on the other hand, your experiences have been those of being harshly criticized, ridiculed, ignored, abused, or made to feel inadequate, then you're likely to experience low self-esteem.

While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.

Even after we grow up, many of us continue to believe that we have little control over our lives. We may see others as the decision-makers in our lives and come to view life as something that happens to us. This belief system, reinforced by childhood identification with mothers who model extreme dependency and helplessness, set many women up for abusive marriages.

You are not responsible for what was done to you as a defenseless child.