survivor

Never apologize for how you chose to survive.

If you survive, you've got to live with the guilt, and that's more difficult than looking someone in the eye and pulling the trigger. Trust me. I've done both.

All of the wars in the world are fueled by power struggles either at individual, national or international levels

They only let us live in millions for the sake of the economy. I don't know what will happen by the time they figure out how to run the economy without the people

Politicians are a higher breed of men. They know that this world is ruthless and that they must live accordingly to cope with it

Nobody wants to admit that mermaids who survive the dangers of the ocean can still be defeated by their own pain." He links his fingers through mine. He squeezes my hand until I look back. "A mermaid's heart is the most fragile thing in the sea. You've somehow managed to keep yours beating. The shield doesn't matter. What matters is you're a survivor.

Rising from the ashes, I am born again,powerful, exultant, majestic through all the pain.

Only the strong will remain, all the weak will be consumed by fire

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought. Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.

As part of the healing process, change your perception of yourself from __ictim_ to that of __dvocate_ and __urvivor.

God is my strength and my defense. When I am weak, he makes me strong. When I am broken, he makes me whole.

Kiss your scars. Fall in love with them. They ought to serve as life-affirming reminders__ lingering trace of hope. The only reason we have these scars is because we survived and are still here.

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.

I was amazed, shocked, and sickened by what I heard throughout the day, over and over, by many victims' stories. I can think of no one with whom I didn't recognize a common thread. These monsters, these evil priests, used the same words and methods on all of us. With each session, I would find something that sent a cold chill down my spine. It amazed and frightened me that the actual words used on me, to rape me, to rape me, were the same as the words used on so many others from all over the United States. You would think that all these priests either were educated in how to concur and rape us, or they met privately with each other to compare notes and develop their plan of attack on us. The pattern was so much the same, with the same words, that you would swear it was scripted and disbursed to these priests. Do they secretly have closed-door meetings on how to abuse us? A chilling thought. Neary's routine of saying the __ur Father_ during the rape and making me say it with him, repeating the __hy will be done_ over and over, the absolution given me after he __inished,_ the threats of having God take my parents away, the lectures about offering my suffering up to God, etc., etc., etc. My experience was identical, word-for-word, to that of many others. The exact words during the abuse were not just close, but exactly the same, as if it were some kind of abuse ritual. Ritual abuse is not limited to the religious definition and can include compulsive, abusive behavior performed in an exact series of steps with little variation. How could these similarities occur without the priests taking the same __buse seminar_ together some place, somehow? Was it taught in the seminary? In some dark corner? It goes beyond coincidence__he similarities in deeds and verbiage that these predators use on us. It truly chilled me to the very marrow of my bones.

They like to use those fancy words. They don't like to say __aped,'_ he said. __hey say __isdeed,' __nappropriate touching,' __istake.' That's insulting. I'm not a mistake.

Many professionals have to sign gagging clauses or face the sack if they speak out. The social worker and therapist was familiar with the scare that revelation brings to the survivor. [_]We are in this story. It isn't ours, but we are in it nonetheless, not least because of the viscous campaign which has followed us over the last ten years. Any organisation with which we work may receive correspondence from the accused adults_ and __alse memory_ movements. Some of these propagandists are confidentially dominating the professional and political arguments using new information technology to spread what we consider to be smears, innuendo and misinformation. P8(refers to authors Beatrix Campbell & Judith Jones _ a journalist and a social worker/therapist)

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain__ great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that they were seeing more children who were being buggered than battered. About 300 cases were corroborated. The children were young _ two-thirds were pre-school children _ and anal abuse was more common than vaginal penetration. They also noted that __oys and girls seem to be at similar risk_. Almost half of the children who suffered anal abuse also showed a sign written up in the forensic textbooks as __nal dilation_, an anus opening when it was supposed to stay shut; opening and expecting entry. What the paediatricians were observing was not an acute sign, the effect of a single intrusion _ a spasm or seizure _ but a sign that was telling a story about everyday life; the anatomy of adaption. Anal dilation seemed to describe the architecture of abuse: it allowed the body to receive an incoming object, regularly.

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn__ happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it__ a really popular narrative _ I think it__ absolutely fair to say that__ the conventional wisdom. It__ what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that__ not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.