Tag: quotes

“We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters
and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and
destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners
mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid… We have been
socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and
definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of
fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”


— Audre Lorde, quoted in Loving to Survive

“An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not
necessarily
indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for
the loved ones of the eating disordered person but also for the person
herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly
contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A
gesture of strength
that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need
nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and
becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find
an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save
the sorry identity of “sick.” It is a grotesque mockery of cultural
standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you.
It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end
makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all
women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, con-
tained—and in the end, of course, you find it’s doing quite the op-
posite. These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and
mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an
eating
disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion
that an eating disorder may fester and thrive.”

— Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation.

[…]

Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom,
merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not
because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had
been found out, but because they realised their fragility and
insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal
ones.”

— The Genesis of Blame, Anne Enright

“Children are initially wired to respond angrily to
parental abuse or neglect until they learn that protesting parental
unfairness is the greatest and most punishable crime possible. This then
renders their anger silent and subliminal where it percolates as an
ever accumulating sea of resentment, that fuels the critic’s prodigious
habits of fault finding and seeing danger in everyone. Viewing all
relationships through the lenses of parental abandonment, the outer
critic never lets down its guard. It continuously projects old unworked
through childhood anger onto others and silently scapegoats them by
blowing current disappointments out of proportion. It then cites these
insignificant transgressions as justification for relentless fuming,
silent grumbling and long resentful rumination. To bastardize Elizabeth
Barrett Browning: “How do I find thee lacking? Let me count the ways.”
When the displaced blaming of the wrong person becomes habitual, it
manifests as passive-aggressiveness. Common examples of this are
distancing oneself in hurt and irritable withdrawal or pushing others
away via backhanded compliments, hurtful teasing, poor listening and the
withholding of positive feedback and appreciation. Chronic lateness and
poor follow through on commitments can also be an unconscious,
passive-aggressive way of expressing anger to others.”


— Pete Walker, “Shrinking the outer critic in complex PTSD”