Jaye

“Some individuals have what can be considered to be an ‘abusive personality.’ Although they can be somewhat charming at times and sometimes manage to put on a false front in public when it is absolutely necessary, their basic personality is characterized by:
1. A need to dominate and control others
2. A tendency to blame others for all their problems and to take all their frustrations out on other people.
3. Verbal abuse
4. Frequent emotional and sometimes physical outbursts, and
5. An overwhelming need to retaliate and hurt other for real and imagined slights or affronts
They insist on being ‘respected’ while giving no respect to others. Their needs are paramount, and they show a blatant disregard for the needs and feelings of others.
These people wreak havoc with the lives of nearly every person they come in contact with. They verbally abuse their coworkers or employees, they are insulting and obnoxious to service people, they constantly blame others when something goes wrong. When this type of person becomes intimately involved with a partner, there is absolutely nothing that partner can do to prevent abuse from occurring. Their only hope is to get as far away from the person as possible.”
― Beverly Engel The Emotionally Abusive Relationship How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing

“Many of us have this view of ourselves being "captains of our ships", and just like the old adage, "the captain goes down with his ship"; we sit on our adamant moral high horses and would rather go down with our ships than let go of something to give it, and ourselves, a chance at something better. But I'm a mermaid. We don't go down with ships. We don't try to conquer the ocean; we swim and flow with the waves. We sink the ships that need to be sunk and we save the people that need to be saved.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“It wasn't so much about breaking free of him, as it was about breaking free of me.”
― Grace W. Wroldson, So You Love an... Alcoholic?: Lessons for a Codependent

“The fact of the matter is, if you haven’t been in an abusive relationship, you don’t really know what the experience is like. Furthermore, it’s quite hard to predict what you would do in the same situation. I find that the people most vocal about what they would’ve done in the same situation often have no clue what they are talking about – they have never been in the same situation themselves.
By invalidating the survivor’s experience, these people are defending an image of themselves that they identify with strength, not realizing that abuse survivors are often the strongest individuals out there. They’ve been belittled, criticized, demeaned, devalued, and yet they’ve still survived. The judgmental ones often have little to no life experience regarding these situations, yet they feel quite comfortable silencing the voices of people who’ve actually been there.”
― Shahida Arabi, Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself