Judith Lewis Herman quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Judith Lewis Herman on Wise Famous Quotes.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies. Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control. They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.

Most of our informants [incest survivors] remembered their mothers as weak and powerless, finding their only dignity in martyrdom.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it.

The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love. p4

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.