Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

— Lundy Bancroft

An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.

— Lundy Bancroft

As he had kissed her neck, she could not repress the feeling she was a lamb making time with a wolf.

— Thomm Quackenbush

Bullies do not just wake up and decide to be one. They are people who have or are experiencing emotional or verbal abuse. All you can do is not retaliate but show them love. Doing so, allows them see what they are missing and need. You can let them see the other side of life when you show love not hurt. After all, we are all products of love, and we must choose to demonstrate that above all else.

— Kemi Sogunle

Disrespect also can take the form of idealizing you and putting you on a pedestal as a perfect woman or goddess, perhaps treating you like a piece of fine china. The man who worships you in this way is not seeing you; he is seeing his fantasy, and when you fail to live up to that image he may turn nasty. So there may not be much difference between the man who talks down to you and the one who elevates you; both are displaying a failure to respect you as a real human being and bode ill.

— Lundy Bancroft

Have you ever heard a woman claim that the reason why she is chronically mistreating her male partner is because a previous man abused her? I have never run into this excuse in the fifteen years I have worked in the field of abuse. Certainly I have encountered cases where women had trouble trusting another man after leaving an abuser, but there is a critical distinction to be made: Her experiences may explain how she feels, but they are not an excuse for how she behaves. And the same is true for a man.

— Lundy Bancroft

I again invoke my favorite analogy for eating disorders: abusive lovers. And what do you do when someone is in an abusive relationship? You don’t allow visitation rights, weekly dates. You don’t put them in the vicinity of or let the abuser flirt with them. Furthermore, you keep them the fuck away.

— Kelsey Osgood

I dreamt I crawled on top of you and kissed your hips, one at a time, my lips a smolder. I straddled your waist and pressed both shaking hands against your torso. Spongy, like an old tree on the forest floor. I push and your flesh sinks inwardly, collapsing with decay, a soft shushing sound. A yawning hole where your organs should be. Maggots used to live here until your own poison killed them off. I laid my cheek into the loam and three little mushrooms brushed over my eyelid. Peat, decomposing matter, all of it, whatever you wish to call it, rested in the cavity of your chest. And there I planted seeds in the hopes something good would come out of you.

— Taylor Rhodes

I guess it's the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they're strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.

— Lauren Oliver

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. Furthermore, he wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you rack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.

— Lundy Bancroft