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b633500 and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive fear poem silence speaking-of survival survivors Audre Lorde
6d7db0e When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker ... but as survivors. Survivors who don't get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like. depression fear mental-health mental-health-stigma mental-illness recovery recovery-quotes shame stigma stigmatized survivors Jenny Lawson
8e402be To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest. abuse abusers innocent inspirational lies perpetrators poetry survivors victims Flora Jessop
c3a4bfb I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, . No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships--gone. She went on living, but with a as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. anonymity born-again clean-slate extinction family genocide germans misery nabokov nazis rwanda rwandan-genocide short-stories signs-and-symbols survivors Christopher Hitchens
652509d Survivors can't always choose their methods. inspirational survivors Patricia Briggs
0cb9c11 War--war was coming. And they might not all survive it. survivors war Sarah J. Maas
f0dfa86 To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered. abuse-survivors child-sexual-abuse perpetrator ptsd sexual-abuse society-denial survivors trauma victim witness Judith Lewis Herman
be0c072 "Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep." assault assaults behavior catcalling communication culture disrespect feminism gender gender-roles harassment men-and-women men-s-behavior misogynist misogyny not-listening personal-autonomy personal-experience personal-experiences personal-space predators predatory-behavior problems-in-the-world problems-of-today problems-with-men problems-with-society rape rape-culture rapists saying-no sexism sexual-abuse sexual-assault sexual-violence sexuality street-harassment survivors verbal-abuse victims women women-and-men women-s-experiences women-s-issues women-s-rights Jon Krakauer
f486b09 One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist. arrogance atheism bible biblical-covenant children christianity divine-retribution edith-stein exile false-modesty gentiles grandmothers hellenism hiwi-al-balkhi holocaust jealousy jerusalem jesus judaism martyrdom masochism passover passover-seder punishment rabbis rationalisation religion secularism self-respect six-day-war suffering survivors theodicy war western-wall will-of-god wine Christopher Hitchens
7e33ae3 Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew--Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie--all bail out successfully from and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future. alternate-universe butterfly-effect dead ending fractals kate-atkinson ripple-effect survivors twist-ending Kate Atkinson
50106bf "Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. grief-and-loss omens survivors Joan Didion
83a635f I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise. death dispair humans jigsaw-puzzle lefovers realization surprise survivors witnesses Markus Zusak
bc01c37 "To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account." child-sexual-abuse elaine-showalter epidemics false-memories false-negatives feminists hysterical hysterics incest incestuous misleading pseudo-science pseudoscience recovered-memory repressed-memories repressed-memory sexual-abuse survivors trauma traumatic-stress women-survivors Janet Walker
ae23b74 When shame is met with compassion and not received as confirmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it go, we will see ourselves as clean where we once thought we were dirty. We will remember our innocence. We will see how our shame supported a system in which the perpetrators were protected and we bore the brunt of their offense -- first in its actuality, then again in carrying their shame for it. If the method we chose to try to beat out shame was perfectionism, we can relax now, shake the burden off our shoulders, and give ourselves a chance to loosen up and make some errors. Hallelujah! Our freedom will not come from tireless effort and getting it all exactly right. abuser abusers burdens-of-the-past child-rape child-sexual-abuse false-guilt freedom guilt healing healing-from-abuse healing-insights imperfect incest innocence innocence-lost offense peptrator perfectionism perfectly-imperfect perpetrators recovery recovery-from-abuse sexual-abuse shame survivors Maureen Brady
7240f03 When we first begin to take power more directly, after long having kept our relationship to it underground...it is natural that we experience anxiety, even guilt, at putting ourselves first. These feeling let us know we are taking action; they do not need to stop us. anxiety assertiveness child-sexual-abuse-survivor empowering false-guilt guilt healing healing-insights power survivors Maureen Brady
491c703 We can ill afford to wait until we have worked through all our memories & feelings about incest before learning to rest & play. While it may seem to be a natural impulse to get to the bottom of things & purge ourselves fully, we need to regularly examine the full picture of our lives for balance along the way...Learning to rest & play is an essential part of our healing. child-sexual-abuse-survivors healing healing-abuse healing-insights healing-the-emotional-self incest recovery-from-abuse survivors Maureen Brady
5ff9694 Though our childhood abuse left us feeling someone ought to make reparation to us, if we wait a lifetime for that, we may never receive what we need. We choose instead to face the idea that from now on, we are going to take responsibility for caring for ourselves. ask-for-forgiveness healing healing-insights no-apologies recovery-from-abuse reparation survivors Maureen Brady
d7bba5c It is a childish notion that once established, our boundaries will never be transgressed again...We shall have to stand for ourselves repeatedly for the rest of our lives. As we practice doing this, we come to greater ease...Eventually it may float over entirely into the positive realm--becoming only another chance to demonstrated our worthiness. boundaries boundaries-quotes boundary-violations healing healing-abuse healing-insights recovery-from-abuse survivors Maureen Brady
e8929b2 If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods. ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture. cataclysm destruction legacy message mission re-creation resurrection survivors Graham Hancock
6660d29 My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the 'Early Primeval Age.' I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a lost civilization and that it was at this time that structures such as the Great Sphinx and its associated megalithic temples and the subterrranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid were created. I have further proposed that something resembling a religious cult or monastery, recruiting new initiates down the generations, deploying the memes of geometry and astronomy, disseminating an 'as-above-so-below' system of thought, and teaching that eternal annihilation awaited those who did not serve and honor the system, would have been the most likely vehicle to carry the ideas of the original founders across the millennia until they could be brought to full flower in the Pyramid Age. civilization deep-human-history megalithic paleoclimatology seed survivors Graham Hancock
fd1baaf Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished. deep-human-history deluge flood myths survivors Graham Hancock
5bf79b6 The Noah figure in this version of the story is named Xisouthros (instead of Zisudra). A god visits him in a dream, warns him that humanity is about to be destroyed in a terrible deluge, and orders him to build a huge boat of the usual dimensions in the usual way. So far this is all very familiar, but then comes a feature not found in the other versions of the tradition. The god tells Xisouthros that he is to gather up a collection of precious tablets inscribed with sacred wisdom and to bury these in a safe place deep underground in 'Sippar, the City of the Sun'. These tablets contained 'all the knowledge that humans had been given by the gods' and Xisouthros was to preserve them so that those men and women who survived the flood would be able to 'relearn all that the gods had previously taught them'. gods knowledge preservation survivors tradition underground Graham Hancock
b6ea451 "Like the legends of Kon-Tiki Viracocha [...], the South American civilizing hero, white-skinned and bearded like Quetzalcoatl and the Apkallu sages [...], who was said to have come to the Andes during a terrifying period, thousands of years in the past, "when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into darkness by the disappearance of the sun." (Exactly like Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, and the Apkallu sages in Mesopotamia, Viracocha's civilizing mission in the Andes had been to bring laws and a moral code to the survivors of the disaster, and to teach them the skills of agriculture, architecture and engineering." cataclysm civilization flood kon-tiki-viracocha quetzalcoatl south-america survivors Graham Hancock
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. affirming empowerment friends friendships healing healing-from-abuse moving-on recovery recovery-from-abuse survivor survivors thriver victim victim-role Maureen Brady
06b7371 Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished. death grief human-connection loneliness survivors Joan Didion
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