Torture Survivors Quotes

“...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.”
― Felicity De Zulueta, From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness

“Something deep inside of me speaks with the voice of the psycho: For who could ever love a beast?”
― Zoe Cruz, Beastia

“To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“Mind control that uses torture turns the situations around and makes relief of pain, a reward. If a person is hurting you physically in an extreme and painful way, they say to you, "The pain will stop if you do what I tell you," which works to establish the type of disciplined response.”
― Angel Ploetner, Who Am I? Dissociative Identity Disorder Survivor

“Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“People don't make decisions within these sorts of groups. They try to avoid more torture. Then they are tortured into thinking they made a decision of their own free will.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“There’s an innocence to her still that amazes me. Sometimes I forget she’s older than me. Then, I remember that she hasn’t gone through what I’ve gone through.”
― Zoe Cruz, Beastia

“Each day was a struggle, life's meaning veiled in sorrow's plight,
Drowning in my own tears, embracing the darkest nights
Hunger was my constant companion, I lived on dry bread and tea,
Yearning for relief, wondering if tomorrow's hope I will see.”
― Hagir Elsheikh