Kim

“I want to make one thing perfectly clear. When I talk about victims and survivors, I am not blaming victims -- so many of whom never had a chance.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“This is when I start to see that it can always be so much worse. That every moment harbors a potential for violence. We never know when or how we will break. Doing what you’re told might not save you.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“For most of the twentieth century, it was the study of combat veterans that led to the development of a body of knowledge about traumatic disorders. Not until the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are not those of men in war but of women in civilian life.

The real conditions of women's lives were hidden in the sphere of the personal, in private life. The cherished value of privacy created a powerful barrier to consciousness and rendered women's reality practically invisible. To speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life was to invite public humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief. Women were silenced by fear and shame, and the silence of women gave license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation.

Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life. It was difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“This embarrassment, this feeling of exile, even in my own community, didn’t come from without. It came from within. It was the self-imprisoning part of me that believed I didn’t deserve to have survived, that I would never be worthy enough to belong.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible