Mental Abuse Quotes

how many times had I begged Mom to divorce him already?

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.

Lundy Bancroft

Her mother always told her, “If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.

Shannon Celebi

When I ask you who you are, you'd better say my fucking name.

Alicen Grey

The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are:You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing.I can easily convince other people that you’re the one who is messed up.As long as I’m calm, you can’t call anything I do abusive, no matter how cruel.I know exactly how to get under your skin.

Lundy Bancroft

The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are:You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually. I know better than you do, even about what’s good for you.Your opinions aren’t worth listening to carefully or taking seriously.The fact that you sometimes disagree with me shows how sloppy your thinking is.If you would just accept that I know what’s right, our relationship would go much better. Your own life would go better, too.When you disagree with me about something, no matter how respectfully or meekly, that’s mistreatment of me.If I put you down for long enough, some day you’ll see.

Lundy Bancroft

The central attitudes driving the Terrorist are:You have no right to defy me or leave me. Your life is in my hands.Women are evil and have to be kept terrorized to prevent that evil from coming forth.I would rather die than accept your right to independence.The children are one of the best tools I can use to make you fearful.Seeing you terrified is exciting and satisfying.

Lundy Bancroft

The symptoms of abuse are there, and the woman usually sees them: the escalating frequency of put-downs. Early generosity turning more and more to selfishness. Verbal explosions when he is irritated or when he doesn’t get his way. Her grievances constantly turned around on her, so that everything is her own fault. His growing attitude that he knows what is good for her better than she does. And, in many relationships, a mounting sense of fear or intimidation. But the woman also sees that her partner is a human being who can be caring and affectionate at times, and she loves him. She wants to figure out why he gets so upset, so that she can help him break his pattern of ups and downs. She gets drawn into the complexities of his inner world, trying to uncover clues, moving pieces around in an attempt to solve an elaborate puzzle.

Lundy Bancroft

The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not asobvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.

Lundy Bancroft

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.

Steven Magee

...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.

Gillian Flynn

Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls.

T.F. Hodge

The abuser’s mood changes are especially perplexing. He can be a different person from day to day, or even from hour to hour. At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. As so many partners of my clients have said to me, “I just can’t seem to do anything right.”At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable. Looking at him in this deflated state, his partner has trouble imagining that the abuser inside of him will ever be back. The beast that takes him over at other times looks completely unrelated to the tender person she now sees. Sooner or later, though, the shadow comes back over him, as if it had a life of its own. Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.

Lundy Bancroft

The woman knows from living with the abusive man that there are no simple answers. Friends say: “He’s mean.” But she knows many ways in which he has been good to her. Friends say: “He treats you that way because he can get away with it. I would never let someone treat me that way.” But she knows that the times when she puts her foot down the most firmly, he responds by becoming his angriest and most intimidating. When she stands up to him, he makes her pay for it—sooner or later. Friends say: “Leave him.” But she knows it won’t be that easy. He will promise to change. He’ll get friends and relatives to feel sorry for him and pressure her to give him another chance. He’ll get severely depressed, causing her to worry whether he’ll be all right. And, depending on what style of abuser he is, she may know that he will become dangerous when she tries to leave him. She may even be concerned that he will try to take her children away from her, as some abusers do.

Lundy Bancroft

We invent what we need to get us by, but in doing so we are really continuing to hold on to the pain of yesterday.

Stephen Richards

You can learn to heal yourself, learn to understand that the pain you feel today is the strength you feel tomorrow!

Stephen Richards

Pain can cause us to learn no end of lessons, but without resolution there can be no healing!

Stephen Richards

The pain you have gone through will give you the strength of character to come through it all, so long as you learn from what you have suffered then it was not suffering at all.

Stephen Richards

What you have suffered after you have healed will make perfect sense.

Stephen Richards

You are not, though, forgiving so as to let others off with things. You are forgiving so that you can empower yourself to get over it and become strong.

Stephen Richards

The practice of forgiving is a sequential practice that begins with excusing someone.

Stephen Richards

As human beings, we are custom made to be happy. Why then would we want to change the order of things by not being happy?

Stephen Richards

The pain you feel is simply because you do not yet have the strength to forgive. But you will grow strong again, that is for sure.

Stephen Richards

Due to the need to co-exist with these inhuman and inconsiderate people, we will obviously be disturbed by their acts; something which if we look at closely actually means that we too could be affecting some other people negatively every once in a while.

Stephen Richards

One way you can trace your way back to real and true happiness and joy is through forgiveness.

Stephen Richards

By understanding the basic impediments to forgiveness, the repercussions of failing to forgive and the fruits of forgiveness, this will lead you gently to the shoreline of a distinct new and more powerful YOU.

Stephen Richards

If we studied the issue of forgiveness with a wider perspective, we are bound to opt for it after all.

Stephen Richards

Forgiveness does carry with it numerous obstacles and one may well be surprised why many people find it a very difficult hurdle to jump over.

Stephen Richards

The most basic method one can use to let go of the past is by looking at it as a learning experience.

Stephen Richards

Do not be deceived that you are weak because you have forgiven; instead be rest assured that you are now showing great strength - after all, forgiving is one of the most difficult things to do.

Stephen Richards

Remember, forgiveness is not a millstone but a milestone!

Stephen Richards

The truth is, forgiving is a rather simple concept to grasp. It is often imagined that when you forgive, you have to reconcile with someone and yet this is a larger team in which forgiveness is just a player.

Stephen Richards

The world is full of victims; don’t add to the growing culture of “I’ve a story to tell”, well not unless it’s a story to help others overcome situations or as a warning.

Stephen Richards

Do not allow yourself to be pulled into the role of embracing victimship as some sort of badge of honor to wear or flash around at any opportunity.

Stephen Richards

Before making a snap judgment, ask yourself if it really is something that has hurt you or simply just made you angry at yourself for allowing it to happen. It’s amazing what ‘sleeping on it’ can do. A new day sees a new beginning.

Stephen Richards

This pain you are avoiding is a very necessary pain that will make you strong again.

Stephen Richards

We are often so convinced that we are so hurt and in pain, so much so that we opt not to forgive. Yet, as a consequence, that is what will make you weak!

Stephen Richards

Just because you have been through a bad experience does not give you the ticket to keep going back to that situation over and over again and dramatizing it out of proportion.

Stephen Richards

Overly playing the role of the victim can debar you from accepting responsibility for your actions and emotions.

Stephen Richards

Being joyous or happy is not something you should feel guilty about.

Stephen Richards

The idea of always wanting to be the victim in circumstances where you have been offended is a common human trait. Each person wants to be viewed as the aggrieved party.

Stephen Richards

Do the forgiveness and carry on going forward. Leave the worrying to the other person. Eat what is on your plate and leave the rest to them.

Stephen Richards

In the process of forgiveness, you can only control your own actions and decisions.

Stephen Richards

The purpose of forgiveness is not to make sure that someone ends up changing into what you expect them to be, as this is dominance. The purpose is actually to make your own life better, more worthy and less stressful. Forgiveness reduces the hold that the wrongdoer has over you and empowers you.

Stephen Richards

Assuming you are still lost in thought about when exactly you should forgive someone, well the time is NOW.

Stephen Richards

Distancing yourself from some painful event is probably the ignition for the process of forgiveness.

Stephen Richards

Failing to forgive yourself for certain wrongs you committed in the past can create self-dislike.

Stephen Richards

Other people may well not find it relevant that you have forgiven yourself, but you need to know that it is not for them anyway. Everything at the moment is wholly about you.

Stephen Richards

A broken and mended relationship turns out to be stronger than one that has never been broken, almost like how bones can become even stronger once broken and then healed.

Stephen Richards

Take a walk through the garden of forgiveness and pick a flower of forgiveness for everything you have ever done.

Stephen Richards

You are simply naturally inclined to make mistakes just as everyone else is, whether male or female, black or white, young or old. These mistakes are your school of learning, therefore forgiveness is your greatest teacher in this school of learning.

Stephen Richards

Forgiveness is not simply a single act, it is a full process.

Stephen Richards

If there ever was someone who had a control over you, someone who could cause you the greatest pain, someone who could ignore your most necessary requirements and someone for whom forgiveness were truly difficult to render, that person is none other than YOU.

Stephen Richards

All the resentment that lies in your heart is simply causing damage to you mostly.

Stephen Richards

Just because someone wakes up one morning and says, “Today I am going to be rich,” does not automatically make them rich. So the same is true with forgiveness, it has to come from the heart with meaning, that is when it works best.

Stephen Richards

The moment we see beyond our personal desires to be felt sympathy for, that is the time we can actually start the journey to that final destination of true forgiveness.

Stephen Richards

Sometimes we are very convinced that what we went through needs to be re-lived so we end up going back and forth to the demons of the past and eventually we fail to get over them.

Stephen Richards

Forgiveness does not change the past, that’s for sure, but it does change the future.

Stephen Richards

The minute we put aside our self-righteousness and move away from being the aggrieved, then we are on a healing process.

Stephen Richards

The only thing that will make us remain glued to being the victim is our failure to handle the emotions that we go through and the pain that overcomes us.

Stephen Richards

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Mental Abuse Quotes

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