Domestic Violence Quotes

Use the darkness of your past to propel you to a brighter future.

Life is full of challenges. In the end, it's getting up that pulls us through the dark days. So we can admire the sunset.

The central attitudes driving the Drill Sergeant are:I need to control your every move or you will do it wrong.I know the exact way that everything should be done.You shouldn’t have anyone else — or any thing else — in your life besides me.I am going to watch you like a hawk to keep you from developing strength or independence.I love you more than anyone in the world, but you disgust me. (!!)

I admired so many things about you. Almost everything. But I don’t want to wind up like you. I don’t want to starve to death, all alone on some island inside my own head. Hopeless.

The abuser does not believe, however, that his level of authority over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of effort or sacrifice on their behalf, or to how much knowledge he actually has about who they are or what is going on in their lives. He considers it his right to make the ultimate determination of what is good for them even if he doesn’t attend to their needs or even if he only contributes to those aspects of child care that he enjoys or that make him look like a great dad in public.

An abuser isn't abusive 24/7. They usually demonstrate positive character traits most of the time. That's what makes the abuse so confusing when it happens, and what makes leaving so much more difficult.

Domestic violence is frequently excused when alcohol and other substances are involved.

ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCEAlcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine — but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

When we hear these kinds of excuses from a drunk, we assume they are exactly that—excuses. We don’t consider an active alcoholic a reliable source of insight. So why should we let an angry and controlling man be the authority on partner abuse?

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?

The lack of culpability of the perpetrator and his or her transference of blame onto alcohol or other substances only perpetuates the violent behaviors.

The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn’t want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land—and he owns them.

Jemima Jane Erickson was one drunken pass away from jumping Ethan Weston's bones. He just didn't know it.

I know betrayal can unravel a man. I learned early on from watching my parents that men are capable of doing terrible things to women when they feel deceived. When the bubble of trust and honesty bursts, nothing is off-limits.

If we are to fight discrimination and injustice against women we must start from the home for if a woman cannot be safe in her own house then she cannot be expected to feel safe anywhere.

Men who hit do so because they can...someplace they enjoy or need to humiliate another. There is no love in violence, only control and domination.

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.

The problem with depicting abusers as full-time monsters is that when a person is actually experiencing abuse in their own life, they'll think "oh but he's the sweetest guy most of the time so he can't be an abuser " or "but he's not ALWAYS horrible, he's usually amazing, so he's not an abuser", and they'll make the mistake of thinking they mustn't really be being abused when they actually are.

THE MYTHS ABOUT ABUSERS1. He was abused as a child.2. His previous partner hurt him.3. He abuses those he loves the most.4. He holds in his feelings too much.5. He has an aggressive personality.6. He loses control.7. He is too angry.8. He is mentally ill.9. He hates women.10. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.11. He has low self-esteem.12. His boss mistreats him.13. He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution.14. There are as many abusive women as abusive men.15. His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner.16. He is a victim of racism.17. He abuses alcohol or drugs.

In a healthy relationship, vulnerability is wonderful. It leads to increased intimacy and closer bonds. When a healthy person realizes that he or she hurt you, they feel remorse and they make amends. It’s safe to be honest. In an abusive system, vulnerability is dangerous. It’s considered a weakness, which acts as an invitation for more mistreatment. Abusive people feel a surge of power when they discover a weakness. They exploit it, using it to gain more power. Crying or complaining confirms that they’ve poked you in the right spot.

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

The central attitudes driving Rambo are:Strength and aggressiveness are good; compassion and conflict resolution are bad.Anything that could be even remotely associated with homosexuality, including walking away from possible violence or showing any fear or grief, has to be avoided at any cost.Femaleness and femininity (which he associates with homosexuality) are inferior. Women are here to serve men and be protected by them.Men should never hit women, because it is unmanly to do so. However, exceptions to this rule can be made for my own partner if her behavior is bad enough. Men need to keep their women in line.You are a thing that belongs to me, akin to a trophy.

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. tThe list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? tOff the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. tThe same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. tYou want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. tYou are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame.

Simon leveled the gun at Will again. 'Now,' he said casually, 'someone's gonna die here in the next minute.'On the other side of the two-way mirror, Sammy took aim.'That's exactly right,' she whispered.

There is life after abuse. This is mine.

It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing anything he tells you about that relationship and instead recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women.

Consider these traditional theories of domestic abuse:-tLearned helplessness suggest that abused women learn to become helpless under abusive conditions; they are powerless to extricate themselves from such relationships and/or unable to make adaptive choices-tThe cycle of violence describes a pattern that includes a contrition or honeymoon phase. The abusive husband becomes contrite and apologetic after a violent episode, making concerted efforts to get back in his wife’s good graces.-tTraumatic bonding attempts to explain the inexplicable bond that is formed between a woman and her abusive partner-tThe theory of past reenactments posits that women in abusive relationships are reliving unconscious feelings from early childhood scenarios. My research results and experience with patients do not conform to these concepts. I have found that the upscale abused wife is not a victim of learned helplessness. Rather, she makes specific decisions along the path to be involved in the abusive marriage, including silent strategizing as she chooses to stay or leave the marriage. Nor does the upscale abused wife experience the classic cycle of violence, replete with the honeymoon stage, in which the husband courts his wife to seek her forgiveness. As in the case of Sally and Ray, the man of means actually does little to seek his wife’s forgiveness after a violent episode.Further, the upscale abused wife voices more attachment to her lifestyle than the traumatic bonding with her abusive mate. And very few of the abused women I have met over the years experienced abuse in their childhoods or witnessed it between their parents. In fact, it is this lack of experience with violence, rage, and abuse that makes this woman even more overwhelmed and unclear about how to cope with something so alien to her and the people in her universe.

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

Children have rights outside their mother's womb without having to be victim's of Domestic Violence inside their mother's womb.

There are as many violent women as men, but there's a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States -- millions of dollars. It isn't a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women's refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren't total victims.

Truth: Rape does indeed happen between girlfriend and boyfriend, husband and wife. Men who force their girlfriends or wives into having sex are committing rape, period. The laws are blurry, and in some countries marital rape is legal. But it still is rape.

An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.

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.

Life is full of challenges. In the end it's getting up that pulls us through the dark day's. So that we can admire the sunset

Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women’s march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

Alcohol does not a change a person’s fundamental value system. People’s personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People’s conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.ABUSERS MAKE CONSCIOUS CHOICES EVEN WHILE INTOXICATED

A man’s beliefs about the effects of the substance will largely be borne out. If he believes that alcohol can make him aggressive, it will, as research has shown. On the other hand, if he doesn’t attribute violence-causing powers to substances, he is unlikely to become aggressive even when severely intoxicated.

All that existed was the blinding imperative to not think, to leave it all behind. To have it all fade to black in the throes of a truly good orgasm. To thrust and rock and pound until he came long and hard. To reach the pinnacle as fast as he could, to leap off the edge and truly leave all his earth-bound worries behind.He was a cave man. He was a Neanderthal. He was fucking Cro-Magnon.

When others witness or comment on abusive behaviors, the little voice that the upscale abused wife once heard inside her and ignored or muffled becomes amplified. Slowly she starts to recognize that she must stop enduring the abuse. . . . each woman comes to grips with her situation at her own pace. However, talking to others is key to her growing capacity to recognize and label her experiences, reclaim herself, target important turning points, and ultimately leave her tormentor.

These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view. I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.

Physical aggression by a man toward his partner is abuse, even if it happens only once.

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.

It's important that you don't continue to ignore or accept rages. Realize that extreme rage directed at you or your children is verbal and emotional abuse. Even if you think you can handle it, over time it can erode your self-esteem and poison the relationship. Seek support immediately.

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.

We have this judgmental way of looking at the idea of leaving a home or a family, and our society has reinforced this idea that if we "run away," we are "running away from our problems." In some cases, though, to face certain problems (in this case, two family members who are not mentally stable and who are not going to face up to their issues) the family members who are capable of facing reality must realize that leaving is a viable option. Some environments are harmful. As fellow humans it is our job to judge less and encourage more when others choose to remove themselves from harmful environments.

A man or a woman can't be defined by the pain inflicted in them by others or by someone else's issues, but by their own character and actions.

What are you going to do? Are you going to live in the dark, locked in here? Afraid to look out, answer the door, leave? Yes, he's out there, and he's clearly not going to leave you alone until one of three things happens: he hurts you and gets arrested, or he makes a mistake and gets arrested, or you stop him.

Above all, he loathed men who beat women; for, real men didn’t exercise their strength on frail creatures, they joined the army and put Shazaria’s enemies in their graves.

It is important to note that research has shown that men who have abusive mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons.So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle—though often quite pervasive—sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don’t show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship.

For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.

Young Bride had a scratch on her neck from the knife, but no other external injuries. It seemed she was killed by the shock the drunks gave her.After sixty-odd years, reliving the trauma of that fateful night was too much to bear.There was no funeral procession. She was buried on the unlucky hill on the outskirts of the village.The crickets, however, remained around her shack and continued to sing until the first snow fell.

I realise I'm behind on this but Rebekah Brooks was married to Ross Kemp of Gangs fame?! And she assaulted him? That explains so much.

No, Karl, not now. Take it easy. It’s our happy day.”Poul-Erik’s MotherThe Informer by Steen Langstrup

Has he ever trapped you in a room and not let you out?Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit you?Has he ever thrown an object that hit you or nearly did?Has he ever held you down or grabbed you to restrain you?Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed you?Has he ever threatened to hurt you?If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he’ll ever be violent; he already has been.

Please don´t drown into his fears, his concrete fists don´t let him again, break the bridge of your nose with his cruel born hits. Then disappear into that mask of misery.

We all know the protocol. But more powerful than our protocol is our grooming to believe in something more.