“Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious.”

“Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexuall...”

“Everything you need to heal is inside yourself. You only need support and encouragement to listen to yourselfto your thoughts, feelings, imagery, and inner spiritual urgings. A book, like a therapi...”

“The unconscious mind always operates in the present tense, and when a memory is buried in the unconscious, the unconscious preserves it as an ongoing act of abuse in the present of the unconscious ...”

“Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpededYour ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminishedAll feeling are blocke...”

“Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuseThe abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The w...”

“They will hate you if you are beautiful. They will hate you if you are successful. They will hate you if you are right. They will hate you if you are popular. They will hate you when you get attent...”

“But even when I stop crying, even when we fall asleep and I'm nestled in his arms, this will leave another scar. No one will see it. No one will know. But it will be there. And eventually all of th...”

“Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her step-monster's house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make...”

“A statue stands in a shaded placeAn angel girl with an upturned faceA name is written on a polished rockA broken heart that the world forgot”

“If you are really doing all this for your kids, then why are you so mean to them?”

“A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.”

“Harvey wanted to dive into his ugliness; he intentionally reached for those long hours of soul desolation. He waited. He paced, ready to face down whatever was to come.Paulettes, though, busted loo...”

“Paulette awoke with an ache in her heart, a grinding in her gut. If there really was a God, why would He have let anyone put a child through that? She had survived, but at what cost? She was an iti...”

“Narcissism: It's Primal. No Productive Control of Energy: Seeks constant fresh sources of stimulation and is highly energized running from human-object to human-object, activity to activity, but do...”