1,745 Quotes About Abuse

you remind me of someone i knew. looked just like you but kind.

Sometimes from trauma we seek familiar danger

Few things are worse than being disbelieved when the darkest stuff that ever happened to you creeps out to the open. New shame on top of the old shame, rage too, so urgent it wants to suck the bone marrow out of you.

Trauma is trauma. Your brain and body don't differentiate between physical and emotional abuse. They only respond to attack.

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

When you go through the moments where you are questioning yourself whether or not it was abuse, remember the way it made you feel. Push away the nostalgia that is trying to minimize it, trying to trick you like a bad magician at a children’s party that the rabbit did come from the hat, that love and abuse come from the same hat.

The COVID-19 crisis has fueled the rise of domestic violence. The abuser and the victims of abuse are now left alone, isolated and forced to spend more time together.

I begin to wonder if her Bible-thumping Jesus-loving is an act to provide her with the illusion of certainty and stability in the world. Deep down, if she has sat on the ceiling before, she must know there are other ways, other truths, other powers. My mother runs from this power and these truths with the alcohol and the white rocks. Ms. Jannie runs with her Jesus and a religion she knows is not always the answer. Right now, she knows it is not the answer.