20 Quotes by Wendy Hoffman

I see individuals whose lives have been so protected that they seem like pearls nestled in velvet jewelry cases. I cannot empathize.

I imagine everyone wears layered masks, and parades around a variety or panoply of false selves depending on the occasion.

I never had the ambition to do what clinicians call "integrate". Many clinicians think that until your mind comes into one piece, then you have not healed. But I don't care that much about what the experts say.

As an adult, it shatters me that the child parts of my mind froze at those ages, didn't develop, and continued to believe the outrageous deceptions the abusers used on me.

People don't make decisions within these sorts of groups. They try to avoid more torture. Then they are tortured into thinking they made a decision of their own free will.

Scientists, doctors, and trained ordinary citizens use drugs and torture to render children machines that do others' bidding. The commands these perpetrators put in the victims are called "programming".They take an isolated, barricaded piece from one stream in the mind and another and another and sometimes tie them together at the bottom and twist them together and tell them to act but not remember.

I leave the message that you can break away from the inheritance of murder, rape, evil, the greed of violence. That you have a choice, that the enemy is not insurmountable. That there is anyway some protective help in life.

To psychotherapists, I say, don’t just leave us abandoned because you think you don’t know enough to help us, or because the world doesn’t believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.

As an adult, it shatters me that the child parts of my mind froze at those ages, didn’t develop, and continued to believe the outrageous deceptions the abusers used on me.