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123efe8 But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield. human humanity inspirational cassie survivor powerful Rick Yancey
5f9383d REMEMBER YOUR GREATNES existence giant living-achievement loss struggles suffering suzy-kassem poem courage poetry human achieve beauty confidence strength success life wisdom inspirational winners born great affirmation eye loser egg sperm winner big attitude survivor winning obstacles small competition odds greatness successful birth pains race warrior victory losing fears win Suzy Kassem
a3b4560 It is important for people to know that no matter what lies in their past, they can overcome the dark side and press on to a brighter world. past overcoming-past-weaknesses survivor Dave Pelzer
da91b68 It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened. sexual-assault victim survivor trauma Jodi Picoult
a7cbdc5 The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive. rape tenth-circle sexual-assault victim survivor Jodi Picoult
6870918 this is the upside of already being eternally damned survivor Chuck Palahniuk
62dbc59 The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time. Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tress falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven This wasn't a question of whether I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention. survivor Chuck Palahniuk
54050d8 [...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive. life survivor survival Jonathan Safran Foer
aac8a24 I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn't be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn't feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror's reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. 'Who are you?' I'd ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn't me. I'd watch my lips moving and say it again, 'Who are you? emotion identity change amnesia dissociated-state emotionals identity-alternation identity-switch lookalike personality-switch trigger triggered impostor identity-confusion dissociative split-personality identity-crisis unreal survivor unreality dream-like dissociation dreaming child mirror memory-loss incest sexual-abuse dissociative-identity-disorder multiple-personality-disorder trauma mental-health Alice Jamieson
3353816 It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for. rape loss relationships love survivor trauma Jodi Picoult
500d825 The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter life inspirational haruki-murakami survivor growing-up hard trees growth survival strong Haruki Murakami
19db57b "You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it," she said. "And it's the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death." death life survivor preservation Frank Herbert
92be70d Power is confusing for us, perhaps even terrifying, because our relationship with it had an unfortunate beginning. Someone in a position of power over us used and abused us...It seems as if power were something to be wielded, always at someone's expense, usually our own. abuse-survivors abuse-of-authority abuse-of-power abuse-of-trust abusive-parenting misuse-of-power parental-authority survivor-of-abuse child-sexual-abuse-survivor child-abuse survivor healing powerlessness powerless power child-sexual-abuse Maureen Brady
c0ce2aa "I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD." alters mpd multiple-personality psychiatrist split-personality multiple-personalities survivor alcoholism therapy mental-illness dissociative-identity-disorder psychology mental-health Robert B. Oxnam
ec52b84 When we are ready to let go of our old controls, we admit that we were powerless over the incest or abuse...We have often thought, 'If only I could have stopped it,' but we could not have stopped it. We let go of the 'if only' now and sit still with our stark powerlessness...In our surrender to powerlessness, we touch ourselves with the gift of truth. abuse-survivors letting-go truth survivor-of-abuse survivors-of-abuse child-sexual-abuse-survivor if-only child-abuse survivor healing abuse-recovery powerlessness powerless child-sexual-abuse incest Maureen Brady
c648946 The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled. suicide released stamp survivor Chuck Palahniuk
ead270a "Our need to be "greater than" or "less than" has been a defense against toxic shame. A shameful act was committed upon us. The perpetrator walked away, leaving us with the shame. We absorbed the notion that we are somehow defective. To cover for this we constructed a false self, a masked self. And it is this self that is the overachiever or the dunce, the tramp or the puritan, the powermonger or the pathetic loser." ashamed coverup defective defective-humans false-self feeling-bad hidden-feelings hidden-pain hidden-self overachiever power-trip toxic-shame child-sexual-abuse-survivor recovery-from-abuse dunce loser healing-insights survivor puritan healing true-self shame child-sexual-abuse incest Maureen Brady
711af7b I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest. The agent said that sounded pretty realistic. survivor Chuck Palahniuk
71757ad [...] [T]here was no quota on misery for people, no quantifiable threshold that once reached, got you miraculously taken out of the distress pool. pain limit survivor J.R. Ward
4be4a96 My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy. romancing survivor wish girl dead Chuck Palahniuk
6662c16 I was in a race to see if I would die from the outside in or the inside out. rape survivor substance-abuse Laurie Halse Anderson
eb1894c I look upon the gift of my life as a wondrous journey. healing-old-fears wondrous-journey soul-journey psyche integration survivor innocence child-sexual-abuse Maureen Brady
05291d6 Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right - that he could always SURVIVE - because he felt GUILTY about surviving. survivor Art Spiegelman
23bd733 Bu omur boyu sahip oldugum alti yuz kirk birinci balik. Tanri'nin yarattigi baska bir canliya bakmayi ve sevmeyi ogrenmem icin ailem yillar once ilk baligimi almisti. Sahip oldugum alti yuz kirk baliktan sonra ogrendigim tek sey, insanin sevdigi her seyin bir gun olecegi oldu. O ozel kisiyle karsilastigin ilk anda, onun bir gun olup topragin altina girecegine emin olabilirsin... ... Gercek, parlayip isik sacmaz. ... Oyle sikici isler vardi ki, calismamak icin insan kendini sakat birakabilirdi. ... Zamanin sinirli oldugu, kanunlar ve emirlerle dolu ve mulkiyete dayali bu dunyada insanlarin yasayabilecekleri tek gercek macera uyusturucu. ... Birinin zayif oldugunu hayal etmek, onun guclu olduguna inanmaktan cok daha kolay. ... tender-branson survivor Chuck Palahniuk
7da9a85 I am a real survivor because I survived, even if some days it feels like I didn't survive at all. zoe-medeiros survivor Roxane Gay
3fd26cb George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks--the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living. They don't know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his--for a little while at least--because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is to join. I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body--even this beat-up carcass--that still has warm blood and semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight Levi's, shirt and cowboy boots and take a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout of his pleasure. But George doesn't want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body--the tough triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris. the-living survivor Christopher Isherwood
81f9dd0 As we move away from the old role in which we were helplessly entrapped as a victim, we make friends with the people who affirm us. Their enthusiasm about us mirrors the positive experience we are having. moving-on friends empowerment affirming recovery-from-abuse healing-from-abuse thriver victim-role victim survivor healing friendships recovery survivors Maureen Brady
a482af6 If you survive, you have to prove it was that bad; or else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently ecorchee, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint. survivors-of-abuse survivor rape-culture Roxane Gay
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