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See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence QUOTES

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence QUOTES

1 " Whether perpetrators abuse strategically or on impulse, however, they usually have one thing in common: a supercharged sense of entitlement. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

2 " Abusers are notorious for rushing the first stage of intimacy, something that's often described by survivors as a kind of 'love-bombing'. This phase is electric and full of promise. Survivors commonly recall being swept off their feet by a man more passionately interested in them than anyone had ever been before. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

3 " This is what's known as the Cycle of Violence, where an explosion is followed by a period of remorse, then promises and pursuit, a false honeymoon stage, then a build-up in tension, a standover phase, and another explosion. Then kindness expressed during the false honeymoon stage may feel genuine to the abuser, but this reward phase - like every other part of the cycle - is still all about maintaining control.

Periods of kindness, no matter how short, bond the victim to her abuser. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

4 " His unpredictable responses lead her to 'walk on eggshells', endlessly hypervigilant, alert to the need to adapt her behaviour to prevent further abuse. Needless to say, the victim is left exhausted by constantly having to monitor her abuser's emotional state. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

5 " In chronic abuse, incidents are just fragments: they rarely give precise shape to the whole. It's the atmosphere victims live in that keeps them in a state of high alert. Over time this climate of constant abuse and threat can end up shredding the nervous system. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

6 " The reason she stayed with her abuser, said Walker, was because she was blind to the opportunities she had to leave.12 "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

7 " As Herman explains, a victim of domestic abuse doesn't have this advantage. She is 'taken prisoner gradually, by courtship'. Before she feels trapped by fear and control, it is love that first binds her to her abuser, and it's love that makes her forgive him when he says he won't abuse her again. Abusers are rarely simple thugs or sadists - if they were, they'd be far easier to avoid or apprehend. Instead, like all men, they can be loving, kind, charming and warm, and they struggle with personal pain and uncertainty. This is who the woman falls in love with. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

8 " Survivor theory’ arises from a study of 6000 women who sought refuge at fifty women’s shelters in Texas.24 The study found that these women were precisely the opposite of ‘helpless’: most had been extremely assertive in their efforts to stop the abuse. Other studies that followed25 showed that not only were victims commonly assertive, they also had sophisticated coping strategies and frequently sought help. The obstacles these women had to overcome in order to leave weren’t psychological – they were social. In case after case, it was the state authorities – in particular, police and welfare services – that had failed these women and made it harder for them to leave. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

9 " We think of domestic abuse as something that happens ‘behind closed doors’. But it’s actually happening all around us – we just don’t know what it looks like. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

10 " Whether perpetrators abuse strategically or on impulse, however, they usually have one thing in common: a supercharged sense of entitlement. * "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

11 " What's even more confusing is that perpetrators commonly believe with all their heart that they are the victim, and will plead their case to police even as their partner stands bloody and bruised behind them. Their victimhood is what makes them feel their abuse is justified. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

12 " I don't bash you with my fists, I bash you with my emotions, to keep you under control. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

13 " Since most women derive pride and self-esteem from their capacity to sustain relationships, the batterer is often able to entrap his victim by appealing to her most cherished values. It is not surprising, therefore, that battered women are often persuaded to return after trying to flee from their abusers. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

14 " Give me a black eye any day. The bruise is gone in a fortnight. It’s the words that hurt, the words that stay, "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

15 " Resistance is a human instinct. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

16 " You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being.’25 "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

17 " the act of calling out domestic violence in public and bringing consequences for offenders is a huge cultural change in itself. ‘In my opinion, psychological and culture change is calling a domestic violence offender into our City Hall and having all of these people say, “Your violence is unacceptable. She may love you and she may be afraid of you, but we are not. She may feel like she is powerless against you – we are not. This is no longer about her – this is about us and you.” That is very powerful. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

18 " Generations of men are frustrated, angry and ashamed that, despite following the rules - and despite sacrificing the tender, emotionally connected boys inside of them - they're not getting what was promised to them. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

19 " As a group, men are dominant and privileged in relation to women. But as individuals, men pay a price for this privilege: to be considered 'real men', they have to live up to patriarchy's standards and abide by its rules. These standards and rules are regulated - through fear, control and violence - by other men. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

20 " the perpetrator redirects his partner’s attention away from his abuse to her faults: if she wasn’t so this, he wouldn’t be so that. "

― , See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence