Whatever terrible things may have happened to you, only one thing allows them to damage your core self, and that is continued belief in them.
It's a successful feeling when someone tells you that you were instrumental in helping them heal from a great wound in their life.
Violence ravaged my life. I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.
It took me about 10 years to get rid of. I'm all right now, though, lovely, I'm throwing some nice darts at the moment, but every now and then I get a bit of a jump. I wish I could find a cure, I'd make a bloody fortune.
But every day I tell my story, and be comfortable with my story and be comfortable with what I've done, and what I did, and how I am today, it lessens the likelihood it will ever happen.
I don't know whether you ever get over things that cause you pain.
Getting past my past... was a process, a very serious process indeed.
For some, healing is too much to bear, and they hand it back, exchanging it for the fear they are accustomed to.
Trust is not very easy for me at all. I want to be a trusting person, but I've been bruised so many times - not to sound woe-is-me about my life.
There are some - called 'death fatigue' - people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.
What really interests me is how a woman who has had a bad experience with a man comes through it and gets a new life. I feel you have to be positive. You have to say, 'Look, okay, he's ditched you, but there's life after.'
In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.
I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.
It's harder to heal than it is to kill.
New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.
The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.
Zach found himself remembering something he'd heard Soledad and Leo saying the previous night, about healing. That it was mysterious. That it took time. And that Lucy was just at the beginning. That a terrible thing had happened - two terrible things, really - but they were now over. And that Lucy would be okay, in the end.
We want to turn victims into survivors - and survivors into thrivers.
You're as sick as your secrets, and my whole life was a secret, so it's just... it's been really healing, and I've found a lot of inner peace by just owning everything and moving forward from there.
The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.
You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
My philosophy is, "murder the rapist in your mind so you stop killing yourself." I've seen, in my lifetime, that sexual abuse has turned into self-abuse. When I kill the rapist inside of me, I will stop killing myself.
Instead of being ashamed of what you've been through, be proud of what you have overcome!
I don't know how to be hurt.
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
