Judith Lewis Herman Quotes

In the past I was very open and very generous, and I found that it just exploded in my face. A lot of people weren't there for me when I needed them. So I have become a little shell shocked. Subsequently almost paranoid and frightened of people now. Maybe I'm losing out in meeting some marvelous people, but I am doing the only thing I can to save my spirit.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.

What you start learning is that to get over a breakup, you kind of have to live through the emotions and not run away from it because then it lasts longer.

We can't stop living because other people are dead.

People have let me down in the past. I've loved something, and it's become a disgrace. I'd rather start again.

[H]ow do I pity those who (assuming the name of friends) surround themselves with maxims importing the wisdom of doubt and suspicion, 'til they impose on themselves that very hard task of laboring through life without ever knowing a human creature to whom they can make the proper use of language and freely speak the dictates of their hearts!

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.

There are times when people that you put in those positions make mistakes, they disappoint you, you lose their - you lose your confidence in them, or they lie to you. And when you find that out, the test of leadership is what do you do?

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.

I'll probably always love him. Doesn't mean I can ever trust him again. That doesn't make a relationship.

There is nothing more humiliating than loving someone so much that you forgive the infidelities.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've been married once and he left and I don't want to feel this way anymore. Like I can't be vulnerable. Can't relax. It's exhausting, always being on the defensive, keeping my guard up. I feel like Cuba.

I know it is possible not only to restore trust but to actually enhance it. The difficult things that we got through with the important people in our lives can become fertile ground for the growth of enduring trust - trust that is actually stronger because it's been tested and proved through challenge.

I'm a survivor. But I'm also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you've been through it, you lived through it and that's wonderful - but a victim is what I was. "Survivor" is the more healing way to look at it.

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

There were a thousand secrets in her eyes, a thousand wounds. A lifetime of distrust and betrayal. Isolation. How did one overcome such things?

This was what true fear was--that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.

This show [Jessica Jones] was exploring the aftermath, and that is unique. You're sitting there going, "I know what happens. This is the aftermath." You watch her daily life and how she dealt with people, like new prospects for love or friends that were close to her, but she didn't know if she could trust them or if they were enemies.

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

The hardest thing to do is to trust people. Even if you know them from way back when, it's hard to trust people. There's a lot we have to deal with, and it's the price of fame.

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.