Lucinda Berry > Quotes

“Children of trauma are experts at triangulation.” “Triangulation?” I asked. “The child will act a certain way with one parent and a different way with the other parent. They try all kinds of things to drive a wedge in the parents’ relationship.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“She crawled up on my lap and whispered in her sweet voice, “I like hurting people. Do you?”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“I wished I were as optimistic as I pretended. I used to be. Not anymore.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“We fear what we don’t understand, so it’s easier to think of them as monsters. It makes us feel safe rather than having to think about the possibility that some people are just born that way, and it could be any of us or someone we love.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“We forgave murderers, not pedophiles.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“No matter how many times I was questioned by the police, it never got easier. My nerves jumped into high gear automatically. They always made me feel like I was lying, even when I was telling the truth.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“You can’t just give your kids away when it’s rough.” “You can if your kid is a monster.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“It gave us an opportunity to miss each other, and sometimes you needed that in a relationship even when you loved each other as much as we did.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“When kids go through trauma, they do incredible things to survive their situation. Sometimes it means their brains create different stories and other realities to help them cope, elaborate fantasies to make something horrible make sense.”
― Lucinda Berry, Appetite for Innocence

“He was my heart, living and breathing outside my body.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“It was too much to hope for a light at the end of the tunnel. I gave up on that long ago, but if I looked hard enough, there was always light on my next step.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“The problem with having a fairy-tale relationship story was how much other people were invested in keeping the fairy tale alive. It wasn’t just our story—it was everyone’s.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned

“Parenting a traumatized child is horribly difficult. Most of them suffer from severe attachment issues, and mothers are usually the targets of their rage. It can get pretty awful.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“I didn’t want to die, at least I don’t think so. I just didn’t want to feel anything. Everything was just too heavy.”
― Lucinda Berry, Appetite for Innocence

“Nobody told me grief became so unpredictable over time. I never knew when it was going to hit, so there wasn’t any way to prepare for the attacks. The attacks had grown farther apart, but they’d never be gone, and I’d never be prepared. It didn’t help to remind myself I’d survived them before and would survive them again because, in the moment, I was sure it was the one that would kill me.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“I wished I lived in a world where I didn’t know violence intimately, but I’d seen more than my fair share, given the work I did.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“It never crossed anyone’s mind that someone else might be in trouble. I wished it would’ve. Maybe then things would’ve ended differently.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“Why did the universe allow people who hurt kids to have them? Why couldn’t it give them to people like me, who wanted them?”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“If you did everything right and it still turned out wrong, then what was the point?”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“No one was more proud of me than I was of myself.”
― Lucinda Berry, Phantom Limb

“It's just the small-town mentality of people not liking change and being resistant to anything that doesn't fall within their traditional ideologies.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned

“He gave me a halfhearted smile. “You’re right. I’ve got something worse. At least when you have cancer people still love you.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Denial was a powerful protective mechanism and I felt naked with mine stripped away.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Christopher scoured Amazon, overnighting books to the house so we could take a crash course in working with traumatized children.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“I didn’t need to have a background in mental health to see she’d been brainwashed and indoctrinated with their propaganda. She’d obviously been coached. She was like an automaton trained to respond to certain trigger words.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned

“One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliche because the intensity of the loss was too big.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned

“Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you simply doesn’t kill you, and you spend all your time wishing it had.”
― Lucinda Berry, Off the Deep End

“Once you’ve told a story so many times, it just becomes the truth.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned

“The house was dark when I got home. Stillness enveloped it. I opened the door quietly and stepped over the spot on the wooden floor where it creaked. I tiptoed through the living room and into the hallway. Janie was already sleeping. It was too early for her to be asleep. Hopefully she wasn’t sick. Our bedroom door was shut. I put my ear up to the wood, straining to hear anything. I wasn’t going to wake them if they were asleep. I’d sleep on the couch. It was worth a terrible night of sleep if Hannah got a chance to rest. My heart sank when I heard whimpering.”
― Lucinda Berry, The Perfect Child

“It was tortuous to want to die yet still be alive.”
― Lucinda Berry, Missing Parts