Loving to Survive Quotes

“Anger is a matter of saying no, of drawing a line, of saying "this is not acceptable." And if we cannot say no, we cannot say an honest yes either. In patriarchy, women are taught to make connection with others at the expense of asserting our own needs, wishes, and boundaries. Feminists, though, see that women can arrive at connection with others through respect for our own limits.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Generalized Stockholm Syndrome results from having one’s physical and/or psychological survival threatened by one or more individuals and then being shown kindness by other individuals who are perceived as similar to the threatening individuals in some ways. Generalized Stockholm Syndrome is explained in its simplest form by two psychological concepts: Graham’s Stockholm Syndrome theory and stimulus generalization. Graham’s theory predicts that, because the victim is suffering despair and needs nurturance as a result of terror created by the threat to survival, he or she bonds to the first person who provides emotional relief. The bond is particularly likely to develop if the person who provides emotional relief is the abuser, because kindness by the abuser creates hope that the abuse will stop.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Whenever women hold men accountable, we invoke a reality that stands outside the artificial, though powerful, dominance-relation of men as a group to women as a group. Whenever a woman holds a man responsible for his behavior, she defies patriarchy's claim to define reality, she calls the universe to witness, she says, "Power is power, but it is not truth. You are as human as I--no less, and no more. You cannot escape the work of being human even if you punish me or kill me for reminding you of that work.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Women must hold men accountable for their behavior. Women do men no favors in terms of their growth as responsible, caring human beings if women allow men to abuse us. It is not genuine love that causes women to put up with men's destructive behavior; it is the fear-induced love produced by Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome hurts men's development as well as women's.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Men benefit from women's repression of our terror and the psychic distortions underlying our love for men, since slaves who love their masters are easier to dominate.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“The feminist movement has provided women with a context that legitimates speaking of the previously hidden violence in our lives--the incest, rape, battering, and harassment that shapes our days. And reveling the pervasiveness of this violence exposes the falsity of the patriarchal myths that such incidents are isolated; are committed only by a few deranged, aberrant men; are only fantasies or delusional, hysterical, or "crazy" women; or are fantasies originating in women's desires.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“As part of creating or reclaiming ourselves, women need to learn what we want, and we need to assert our needs and wishes. In doing this we not only hold men responsible for their actions, but we also hold ourselves responsible for our own behavior. Women should not take responsibility for having been victims, but once we develop awareness of our victimization, we must take responsibility for our choices and actions with respect to our oppression. We must decide what values are worth living for and, if necessary, dying for, and we must choose to let those values guide our actions.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Citizens of countries we view as weaker than us are thought of as feminine. A man who is raped (victimized) by another man is viewed by others as having been made feminine. The more we perceive the raped man as submitting as opposed to actively resisting throughout the rape ordeal, the more femininity we attribute to him. Femininity, then, is attributed to those who are weaker, those who are victims, and those who submit.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Yet another long-term effect of chronic interpersonal abuse is either a loss of sense of self or the lack of a sense of self (if one had not developed prior to the abuse). In an effort to survive, the victim takes on the perspective of the abuser, coming even to experience her or his own sense of self through the eyes of the abuser. Thus, the victim’s sense of self comes to be experienced as the abuser's sense of the victim. Obviously, such a “self” is likely to be experienced as deserving of abuse, as that is apparently how the abuser sees the victim. In the absence of the abuser, the victim will no longer know who she or he is, exposing the lack of a real sense of self in the victim.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“While most people view physical violence as a more serious offense than psychological violence, both battered women and prisoners of war report that threat of physical violence is more psychologically debilitating than actual physical violence. Emotional abuse, such as the threat to maim or kill, is often perceived as a threat to physical survival. For these reasons, psychological violence may promote the development of the syndrome as much or more than physical violence. This makes sense. A person who threatens to shoot you may be the one knocking on your door, calling you on the phone, turning into your driveway, or waiting around the next corner. Every moment is filled with fear until you are finally shot. Once shot, you can relax because you now know where and how the shooting occurred, how seriously you were hurt, what you need to do to take care of the wound, etc.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“There is nothing like femininity to dignify one’s indignity as one’s identity.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Thinking globally while acting locally is the habitual practice of many women all around the world. It is a habit we can preserve, revive, and practice consciously and articulately so that we and the women around us will take heart, develop pride in womanhood, and thrive.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“All women resist patriarchy, and all women are punished, whether or not we resist. The issue, then, is not whether we should resist but how we can resist most effectively. In advocating feminist action, then, we are not calling for a revolution but are pointing out that the revolution is in progress and we're all in it. So let's engage with it the best we can.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“A woman who speaks to herself about the gap between the abuser's language and her reality has begun to create a chink in the wall of isolation that keeps her captive. A woman who speaks to other women about her reality and theirs has begun to move toward collective as well as individual action.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Just as political tyrannies censor communications and religious tyrannies condemn fiction, the abuser feels threatened by any reading or daydreaming in which the victim may engage and will oppose these forms of communication with the self just as he moves to isolate the victim from other people. However, for those of us not under 24-hour surveillance, reading work (such as feminist science fiction) that nourishes the imagination and therefore moves us toward change, is possible.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“All children are hostages of parents in the sense that they are totally dependent on their parents for survival. Children's survival is threatened by their underlying fear of parental abandonment as well as by actual and threatened physical violence. In approximately 50 percent of overt incestuous families, the father is physically abusive. Thus, children's submission to the father's overt sexual abuse is virtually guaranteed. Beyond the threat to survival that ensures submission, the incest itself is experienced as a threat to psychic survival. It is not uncommon for victims to dissociate during overt incestuous acts. (Dissociation is a psychic process, involving the breaking off of a group of mental activities that then function as if they belonged to a separate personality, which comes into play whenever events threaten to overwhelm the psyche of the victim.) Examination of long-term outcomes associated with incest (for instance, drug abuse, suicide, self-mutilation, borderline personality disorder, multiple personality disorder) reveal the severity of this threat to survival.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Incest is a form of sexual violence that is primarily directed at female children by adult male perpetrators (Finkelhor 1908; Herman, with Hirshman, 1977). Herman and Hirschman found that 92 percent of the incest victims are females and 97 percent of the offenders are male. On the average, incest begins when the victim is between 6 and 11 years of age (Browning and Boatman 1977; Giarretto 1976; Maisch 1972), and most cases last for one to five years (Tormes 1968). Herman (with Hirschman 1981) found that the daughters, not the fathers, ended the incest, whether by running away, marrying early, or getting pregnant at a young age. However, once incest has occurred, even if it does not recur, the victim harbors the fear that it will recur at any time and thus is never again able to feel safe from abuse. Therefore, in a sense, for the victim, once begun, incest never ends.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“History reveals that groups of human beings are capable of systematically killing members of other human groups. Humans have killed other humans: six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, and over 110,000 Japanese, the latter within a matter of seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Hodge (1975) estimates that 150 million lives were lost in the slave trade of blacks from Africa. More than 5,000 blacks were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1939. Just as a child who witnesses her mother being battered by her father feels physically threatened, women who witness male-male violence also feel physically threatened. The observation of violence among others creates fear of physical violence and thus constitutes emotional violence.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“If one (inescapable) group threatens another group with violence but
also—as a group—shows the victimized group some kindness, an attachment between the groups will develop. This is what we refer to as Societal (or Cultural) Stockholm Syndrome) and it is expected to develop under Situation 3 Generalized Stockholm Syndrome conditions. That is, it is expected to develop in a culture in which it is socially mandated and socially predictable that members of the oppressor group will both victimize and be kind to members of the oppressed group. However, the identity of the particular member of the oppressor group who metes out the violence or shows kindness to any particular member of the oppressed group is random and may be determined by variables such as physical proximity.
Because the transactions between oppressor and oppressed group members are pervasive and the traumatizers are omnipresent, members of the victim group perceive that they cannot escape the abuse and therefore look to their traumatizers for nurturance and protection. A Stockholm Syndrome psychology is expected to generalize to any and all interactions with members of the violent group, even members of that group who are not themselves violent, or who are less violent, toward members of the victimized group.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Victims with the syndrome do not stay with their abusers because they have bonded with the abusers; rather, they bond with their abusers because they see no way to escape. A hostage who sees a safe way to escape does so. A hostage who physically leaves the abuser and then returns does so because of fears of retaliation for not returning (even though the victim may think otherwise).”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Splitting is a process that occurs at an unconscious level wherein the victim sees her or his partner as all good and herself or himself as all bad, or alternately sees the partner as all good or all bad. If splitting did not occur, the victim would simultaneously see the abuser as both good and bad, and the bad would overwhelm the good. Recall that the victim sees the abuser as good because the abuser has shown the victim some small bit of kindness, but this small bit of kindness was shown within a context of terror. If the bad overwhelms the good, the victim may be overcome with terror and will likely lose hope of surviving.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Associated with bonding to an abuser in humans, and possibly pro-
moting or strengthening the bond, are cognitive distortions embodied in beliefs that the abuser is not responsible for his or her abuse, abuse is a sign of the abuser’s love, the abuser is also a victim, and if given enough love the abuser will stop abusing. It is not clear whether these cognitive distortions are responses to the victims’ misattributions that love, not terror, is responsible for their high arousal and hypervigilance to the abuser, or if they are noncausally related to or cause the misattributions.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“A number of mechanisms make it difficult for the victim to separate psychologically from the abuser following prolonged captivity. Two such mechanisms are fear of losing the only positive relationship available to the victim during this prolonged period of isolation—marked by terrorization and the resultant craving for nurturance, protection, and safety—and fear of losing the only identity that remains, namely, her or his self as seen through the eyes of the abuser. These fears are expressed variously: fear of abandonment, of being lonely, of not being able to live without the abuser, and of not knowing who one is without the abuser, feeling empty, and so on. The greater the victim’s fears, the greater was her or his isolation from perspectives other than the abuser’s, and the greater the damage to the sense of self. In the case of child victims, this view of self may be the only sense of sell' they have ever experienced; in
the case of adult victims, this view of self may have replaced a previous sense of self. In any case, living without the abuser, and thus without a sense of self, is experienced by the victim as a threat to psychic survival. Loss of their only “friend” and of self as experienced through the abuser’s eyes requires victims to take a leap into a terrifying unknown, which is difficult even for people in healthy environments. It is considerably more difficult for someone whose survival depends on the fragile feelings of predictability and control produced by cognitive distortions and the whims of a terrorist.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Despite fear narrowing hostages’ perceptions of options available to them, their perceptions are probably more accurate than outsiders’. Being there, hostages both have more information than do outsiders and are forced to live with terrifying contingencies that outsiders probably cannot even imagine. Outsiders’ perceptions are often distorted by a need to believe that, if they were taken hostage, they would be able to escape.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“The point being made here is that hostages and outsiders view the hostages’ ability to escape differently. What looks to outsiders as an opportunity for escape may look like a test (a trick) or a death trap to hostages. It is hostages’, not outsiders’, perceptions of hostages’ ability to escape that determines whether or not hostages develop Stockholm Syndrome.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person’s psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child’s psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“The treatment of unusual mental powers in feminist science fiction gives women a sense of what it could be like for our simply human empathy to be honored, seen as the skilled work it is, studied in ourselves with care, and provided with safeguards because it is understood and accepted rather than coveted. When women begin to imagine such a thing, we are better able to leave or to demand change in situations where our empathy is treated as a limitless natural resource to be mined by others.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“Power is power, but it is not truth. You are as human as I—no less, and no more. You cannot escape the work of being human even if you punish me or kill me for reminding you of that work.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“While many claim that there is a feminine principle which must exert itself to counterbalance masculinism pervading world cultures, what they seem to ignore is that the feminine has its origin in masculinist ideology and does not represent a break from it.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives

“At MacKinnon’s (1987) request, and based on a random selection of 930 San Francisco households, Russell calculated the likelihood of a woman not being sexually assaulted or harassed in her lifetime. It was only 7.8 percent.”
― Dee L.R. Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives