Top 40 Judith Lewis Herman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

2. “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

3. “In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

4. “The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

5. “Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

6. “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

7. “Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

8. “Like revenge, the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture, because it remains out of reach for most ordinary human beings. Folk wisdom recognizes that to forgive is divine. And even divine forgiveness, in most religious systems, is not unconditional. True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

9. “Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies. Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control. They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

10. “Over time as most people fail the survivor’s exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

11. “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

12. “Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

13. “To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

14. “People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

15. “Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance. The therapist is called upon to bear witness to a crime. She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim. This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

16. “By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child’s personality structure.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

17. “Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where all questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

18. “In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

19. “The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

20. “When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

21. “The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

22. “It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

23. “MOST PEOPLE have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

24. “In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem. The combat veteran Tim O’Brien describes this pervasive sense of doubt: ‘... There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.’...”

— Judith Lewis Herman

25. “It has become clear that, as Janet observed one hundred years ago, dissociation lies at the heart of the traumatic stress disorders. Studies of survivors of disasters, terrorist attacks, and combat have demonstrated that people who enter a dissociative state at the time of the traumatic event are among most likely to develop long-lasting PTSD.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

26. “Though both partners may wish for reconciliation, their unspoken goals are often sharply in conflict. The abuser usually wishes to reestablish his pattern of coercive control, while the victim wishes to resist it.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

27. “In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else. Battered women may lose their homes, their friends, and their livelihood. Survivors of childhood abuse may lose their families. Political refugees may lose their homes and their homeland. Rarely are the dimensions of this sacrifice fully recognized.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

28. “Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

29. “As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

30. “For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity. There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories have blurred together. Usually, however, a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out. Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

31. “Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

32. “I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

33. “Authoritarian, secretive, sometimes grandiose, and even paranoid, the perpetrator is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive to the realities of power and to social norms. Only rarely does he get into difficulties with the law; rather, he seeks out situations where his tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired. His demeanor provides an excellent camouflage, for few people believe that extraordinary crimes can be committed by men of such conventional appearance.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

34. “In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

35. “Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

36. “The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

37. “Therapy requires a collaborative working relationship in which both partners act on the basis of their implicit confidence in the value and efficacy of persuasion rather than coercion, ideas rather than force, mutuality rather than authoritarian control.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

38. “Fragmentation in the inner representations of the self prevents the integration of identity. Fragmentation in the inner representations of others prevents the development of a reliable sense of independence within connection.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

39. “The desire for total control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

40. “Survivors do not want their injuries to be trivialized or ridiculed, and they do not want to be blamed for them. They do not want to be dismissed as overly emotional or told to “get over it.” They want their communities to recognize and respect their suffering and to acknowledge the seriousness of the harm they have endured.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

41. “Some extraordinary survivors, recognizing that their suffering is part of a much larger social problem, are able to transform the meaning of their trauma by making their stories a gift to others and by joining with others to seek a better world.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

42. “In the face of common prejudices that blame survivors for whatever happened to them, they want assurances from the community that they did not deserve to be abused.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

43. “The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening.”

— Judith Lewis Herman