Lucille Roybal-Allard Quotes

Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

I was an abused kid.

My father was predisposed to drunken rages. I would hide under the bed. My sister and I were talking just the other day about the terror a drunken man in a rage can create in a child.

But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.

I had nightmares after being with the national team. You shouldn't have things like that.

Domestic violence was a way of life in my home growing up, my brother and I watched helplessly numerous times as my mother was beaten and knocked unconscious while we dialed 911.

It's a struggle every day, to stay present, not to become that...eight year old who was bullied and chased home from school. Some days I wake up and it's like I'm eight years old again. And I'm scared for my life, and I don't know if I'm going to be beaten up that day.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

I pretended I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me.

One in four children being victimized? That's about seven children in every classroom. That's a significant proportion of the population.

We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic.

I spent four days and four nights just covered in blood, falling in the water.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

I live in a state of hypersensitivity, and I've always had this feeling that something bad is going to happen to myself, or my wife and children. This manifests itself in different fears and visions.

So many things can drive you mad as a child, not only music.

You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.

You know, what we do know is that there is a high frequency of violence in the home of those who bully.

In some ways I'm still recovering from the trial. My health is not as good as it ought to be. I've gone back to practicing law and it seems to have taken a toll for whatever reason.

The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.