Judith Lewis Herman Quotes

Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.

Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.