Abuse Dynamics Quotes

I know he was definitely beaten by her. I saw it many times. But we had a different way of dealing with her. He'd let her have more and more booze until she passed out.

When Glenda Jackson reveals that she has never been in a relationship with a man in which he hasn't raised his fists to her, I don't know whether this tells us more about the contemporary male or about Glenda Jackson.

I felt beauty was a magnet for abuse, and I had suffered greatly for it.

Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

I keep wondering how to explain the experience of child abuse from the inside. I'm going to try to explain what my world was like when I was sexually abused. The thing you have to remember is that this was the thinking of a child.

I won’t snatch, harm, or scare to death people with you or use checking up on you as an excuse to cause trouble. You’re worse than my mother, Rachel.” “Mine, too,” Jenks muttered.

I know some women's rights activists have seen so much abuse that they can't stand men, but I have a sense of empathy with the men. Without excusing the abuse they are capable of, many of them are trapped within these communities and bound by expectations they didn't necessarily ask for.

Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.

I think any time you have any kind of social ill, not just domestic violence...as much as it's about the act, the obvious theme of domestic violence, Domestic Violence Awareness Month is also about how men deal with their emotions. It's not just like who gets brutalized; sometimes it's women that are abusing men, too. I think it's just an opportunity for us to look at ourselves. How do we treat each other? Why do we treat each other that way?

My brothers used to beat me up, but I used to fight my sisters 'cuz I couldn't hit them back, so I had to find specific severe ways to punish them.

My dad was abusive. And so he would say, 'You're my favorite.' Being a favorite of an abusive parent is not really a good thing, necessarily.

when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.

Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can.

I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn't made, intentions I'd never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.

I think I wanted to write a book about the relationship between the victim and perpetrator in which the victim agrees to remain silent.

Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing.

People always say the abused abuse and it is not true. I am totally the opposite.

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.

I hope I presented what I felt the woman seemed to be about, but I couldn't give any reason as to why she remained in the relationship other than that their relationship was very special.

Abuse is an indirect species of homage.

A lot of the messed-up stuff that men inflict on women is kind of a symptom of the messed-up stuff that they should be dealing with themselves.