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

Ana never saw the rotten apples littering the ground as she continually reached for the rare golden apple on the tree. Ana had stepped in a lot of rotten apples in her lifetime. She should have learned by now.

— Travis Luedke

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God." Aristotle

— Bruce Wayne Sullivan

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

Dermatitis: door-mat-i-TIS noun; low self-worth. A learned behavior where the infected person allows others to walk all over them, blame them, treat them terribly, always giving the boundary crosses the benefit of the doubt. They make excuses for them, They will give in to guilt and intimidation and give the boundary crosses what they want again and again." P.A. Speer's Dictionary

— P.A. Speers

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

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

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

— Judith Lewis Herman

It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing anything he tells you about that relationship and instead recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women.

— Lundy Bancroft

It's never ok to hit a girl. Never. Not even if she cheats on you. A girl is not your property. She's a human being. She is just as important as you. Furthermore, she is your equal. And her wishes and feelings are just as valid as yours. All you can do is treat her nice, and hope she wants to be with you. If she chooses to be with you, great! If not, or if she chooses to leave you at some point, you have to let her go. You have no right to stop her. You don't own her, and you don't have the right to tell her what to do. She's your partner. Not your servant, not your sex slave, and not you're punching bag.

— Oliver Markus