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.

- Judith Lewis Herman

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.…

- Judith Lewis Herman

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrat…

- Judith Lewis Herman

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivo…

- Judith Lewis Herman

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

- Judith Lewis Herman

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desir…

- Judith Lewis Herman

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: t…

- Judith Lewis Herman

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must …

- Judith Lewis Herman

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive contro…

- Judith Lewis Herman