Scarred Quotes

“The ones who truly love you will always love you, and that’s by far been the greatest lesson in all of this.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“He never paid bills, never provided for these women, never even cooked for himself. They had all done everything for him, right down to driving. And now, equipped with this truth about him, I was ready to fight back.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“For as long as I could remember, I’d held some suspicion that there’d always been something fundamentally wrong with me. I also knew this belief made me more uptight and judgmental of myself than almost anyone I knew.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“have learned I can’t please everyone—I am not perfect and I am OK with that now.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“know that no matter what anyone else says, you are loved, you are whole, and you are already complete.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“Now I was going to live my life and find true happiness and not feel bad or guilty about it. I’m learning to navigate everyday situations without second-guessing every emotion, and I understand that no person—not Keith Raniere, and not me—can know, do, or be everything. I don’t put anyone on a pedestal anymore. No one can determine my worth.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“We talked to cult experts, therapists, and a few people we knew in the media to figure out how to manage it.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“Right then I knew that the universe was supporting me in my exit from NXIVM.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“Lauren told one of our sisters to inform us that if we failed again, she was going to get paddled and locked inside a cage.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“your job is to create the illusion of hope.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“but as the truth started to emerge, we now had this private space inside our life together to examine what would begin to expose itself. In my every experience, there you are.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“you wrestle with a pig you both get dirty, but the pig likes it.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“controlling food intake is a common practice in many cults. In particular, restricting intake of protein and/or sugar leaves participants in a literal brain haze.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“Any reaction can be spun as one’s own issue.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“But it was very systematic—what cult experts call a “closed-loop system of logic.” ESP contended that the way you live and view the world comes through the filters of your experience. So while this process of inductive reasoning appeared to have been designed to empower us, it also left room for us to be set up for manipulation.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“We learned how to quickly access, anchor, and self-trigger different states, such as motivation, excitement, power, and magnificence.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“All this clicked for me: if I had blamed David for making me feel unloved because he hadn’t come to bed when I did, then I had asserted that he was a more powerful individual than I was, giving him potency over my feelings and state of being.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“They explained one of Keith Raniere’s principal beliefs: that all we humans really need to survive are food, water, shelter, and air. Anything else—clothes, connection, love, money, relationships—were pure “desires,” or “nonintegrated fixations”—things we thought we needed to be happy, whole, and complete, but that were ultimately just cover-ups for our inner deficiencies.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“In fact, as these women worked closely with one another over the years to develop new education, sales, and enrollment strategies, every single one of them thought that Keith had chosen her as his one-and-only lifelong soulmate while he thought of them all, collectively, as his “spiritual wives.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life

“She told us that NLP was considered to be more effective at changing an individual’s behavior than years of therapy or even hypnosis, which she had also mastered after studying Milton Erickson’s unconventional approach to psychotherapy.”
― Sarah Edmondson, Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life