“Healthy people understand that others have the capacity to choose to end relationships and it serves as motivation for them to learn to relate in healthy and loving ways. However, when we are driven by shame, we don't just fear losing a relationship, but we live in terror that if we let anyone really get to know us, we would never be desired, pursued, or loved. In us, that fear can be worked out in the development of unhealthy denial, workaholism, perfectionism, chameleon-type behavior, and sadly, even revictimization... When we live in denial or present a false self out of fear... we will do anything to be accepted by people... When we begin to tell the truth about what happened to us we also begin the process of turning about from this type of idolatry... When we begin to tear away our layers of illegitimate shame... When our own vision is not distorted by our shame we can discern what was our responsibility and what wasn't.”
― Wendy Mahill, Growing a Passionate Heart

“I spent many years trying to make up reasons about why I had the flashbacks, memories, continuous nightmares. When I finally decided to quit trying to hide from truth, I began to heal.”
― Karen Marshall, Amongst Ourselves: A Self-Help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“What are you hiding? Is it something from others, or from yourself. Find your truth. The more you show up, the more you'll be found.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“The shrinks call it Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I call it hell. The demons are waiting in each corner, ready to drag me back to the battlefield.
- Puncture Wounds (2014)”
― James Coyne

“We just didn’t want to go home, where we would be surrounded by what we truly are and all that we pretended to be, facing what we might never reach.”
― Rasmenia Massoud, Tied Within

“I understand more than most the need to become another. To bury the past along with who you were, to create a new life completely different from it, and forget, or try to, the person who came before.”
― Lori Austin, Beauty and the Bounty Hunter

“Why must we hide,
Behind walls built high?
N' blame our lives,
On him, her, I?”
― Kari L. Greenaway, He Had You at Belief