Sil > Sil's Quotes

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#1

“True revolutionary change begins by first challenging yourself -- not the world. Until you own your story and the complexities of your experience, no matter how much you may strain against it, you will still be enslaved -- if not by your oppressor, by your past.”
― Sil Lai Abrams, Black Lotus: A Woman's Search for Racial Identity

tags: empowering-quotes, freedom, storytelling-quotes

2 likes

#2

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: abuse, abuse-survivors, abuser, abusers, attack-on-character, attacking-people, backlash, break-the-silence, child-sexual-abuse, child-sexual-abuse-survivor, crazy, credibility, denial, false-memories, false-memory-myth, false-memory-syndrome-campaign, healing-from-abuse, hysterical, incest, insane, just-tell, lack-of-accountability, lying, perpetrator, perpetrators, pschological-abuse, rape-culture, rape-myths, rape-survivor, secrecy, sexual-abuse, sexual-assault, sexual-violence, survivor, survivors, unstable, victimized, victimizing

369 likes

#3

“... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.”
― Judith Lewis Herman

tags: abuse-of-power, abused-women, coercion, coercive-acts, crime, criminal, dominance, feminist, feminist-theory, inequality, law, male-dominance, male-domination, male-thinking, patriarchy, power, rape, rape-convictions, rape-culture, rape-survivor, raped, sexism, sexual-assault, sexual-violence, violation

134 likes

#4

“Stanford was offering $150,000 total, which would cover therapy for my sister and me for a handful of years. Victims receive heat when given any sum. Few acknowledge that healing is costly. That we should be allocating more funds for victims, for therapy, extra security, potential moving costs, getting back on their feel, buying something as simple as court clothes. As Michele pointed out, Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

tags: sexual-assault, stanford

2 likes

#5

“Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap. You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.”
― Myriam Gurba, Mean

tags: coping, mental-illness, ptsd, rape, sexual-assault, trauma

7 likes

#6

“It’s one thing to deconstruct and analyze and condemn the institutions of patriarchy and their flaws.

It’s another one to feel their bruises on your skin, and their grasping hands pulling your hair and covering your mouth as you scream.”
― Alice Minium

tags: feminism, metoo, rape, rape-recovery, rape-survivors, sexual-assault, sexual-assault-quotes

3 likes

#7

“Why Is It So Important to Remember?

When you were abused, those around you acted as if it weren’t happening. Since no one else acknowledged the abuse, you sometimes felt that it wasn’t real. Because of this you felt confused. You couldn’t trust your own experience and perceptions. Moreover, others’ denial led you to suppress your memories, thus further obscuring the issue.

You can end your own denial by remembering. Allowing yourself to remember is a way of confirming in your own mind that you didn’t just imagine it. Because the person who abused you did not acknowledge your pain, you may have also thought that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as you felt it was. In order to acknowledge to yourself that it really was that bad, you need to remember as much detail as possible. Because by denying what happened to you, you are doing to yourself exactly what others have done to you in the past: You are negating and denying yourself.”
― Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence: Healing the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Therapeutic 7-Step Self-Help Program for Men and Women, Including How to Choose a Therapist and Find a Support Group

tags: child-sexual-abuse-survivors, cold-sexual-abuse, healing-abuse, healing-from-abuse, minimizing, not-that-bad, rape, sexual-abuse, sexual-assault, sexual-violence, trauma-memory, truth-about-abuse

13 likes

#8

“Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don't assert our truth, it may again be relegated to fantasy. But the truth won't go away. It will keep surfacing until it is recognized. Truth will outlast any campaigns mounted against it, no matter how mighty, clever, or long. It is invincible. It's only a matter of which generation is willing to face it and, in so doing, protect future generations from ritual abuse.”
― Chrystine Oksana, Safe Passage to Healing: A Guide for Survivors of Ritual Abuse

tags: abusers, child-abuse, child-protection, child-sexual-abuse-lies, deny, fantasy, invalidate, invalidation, media-campaign, media-distortions, perpetrators, propaganda, rape, ritual-abuse, sexual-abuse, society-denial, survivors, truth-violators, victims

161 likes

#9

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: abuse, abuse-of-power, abuse-survivors, abusers, allegations, attacking, attacking-people, backlash, child-abuse, credibility, criminals, false-memory-syndrome-myth, lack-of-accountability, perpetrators, power, rape, rapists, recovered-memories, repressed-memories, secrecy, sexual-abuse, silence, silencing-children, silencing-dissent, society-denial, survivor-of-abuse, survivors, survivors-of-abuse, trauma-memories

97 likes

#10

“Beyond telling and getting away however there are an awful lot of myths out there about how to move on or get justice. People may tell you to report the crime or confront you abuser- or even to forgive him. I don't necessarily advocate any of these things. I think counseling of some kind can be enormously useful, but the bottom line is that the main way to heal is to find people who will support you, to talk about what happened, and to ground yourself in the reality that the abuse was not your fault, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and that you deserve great love and happiness in your life.”
― Patti Feuereisen, Invisible Girls: The Truth About Sexual Abuse

tags: child-abuse, child-sexual-abuse, sexual-abuse, survivors

4 likes

#11

“Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.

But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.

She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: child-abuse, childhood-suffering, childhood-trauma

439 likes

#12

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

47 likes

#13

“In refusing to hide or be silenced, in insisting that rape is a public matter, and in demanding social change, survivors create their own living monument.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: feminism, ptsd, trauma, trauma-survivors, violence-against-women

8 likes

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