To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused. Ellen Bass
I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?
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Jess C. Scott
Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud...
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Anne Lamott
She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
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Cynthia Voigt
When shame is met with compassion and not received as conï¬rmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it...
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Maureen Brady
More Quotes By Ellen Bass
To love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit...
In spite of the horror, in spite of the tragedy, in spite of the weeks of sleepless nights, I'm finally alive. I'm not pretending. I feel real. I'm not playing charades anymore. I wouldn't go back to the way I was for anything. I'm really...
So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault...
This choreography of ruin, the world breakinglike glass under a microscope, the way it doesn’t crack all at once, but spreads out from the damaged cavities. Still for a moment it all recedes. The backyard potatoes swell quietlyburied beneath their canopy of leaves. The wind...
Healing isn’t just about pain. It’s about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.
