My mom, no matter what shes been thru she keeps on going and has taught me its ok to ask for help! She has been thru even more severe abuse than me and two marriages as bad as my first, her second marriage with my bio dad he tried to kill her with us there i saw it all, because she told him she was taking us and leaving i was 4 and my brother 7, she never went back to him even when he threatened to kill him self if she didnt. she stood strong and now she stood up to my brother last year and has not let him around since sept 1 of last year and doesnt speak to him until he can grow up and change and show hes no longer abusive! She taught me the saying and raised us by it, there is no strength where there is no struggle, meaning we grow and become stronger from what we go thru and survive! She has done so much for me and when she found out i had been abused we had to talk her out of going to kill my bio dad, she finally calmed down and called the cops instead when i told her if she went after him whos going to help me get help? She never gives up! Sometimes needs help to keep going but never gives up ever! She has Fibro and other chronic pain as well so she understands my pain! Hers is not AS severe (she does not have the messed up back i have) but her fibro is as bad.

Also several people, both personally known and just known from reading books or on the news. I still strive to be more like them.

Carlos Martinez Moreno (CMM). I wrote my book Utopia Undone that got published years ago because I met CMM in exile in Mexico from Uruguay. He was the last lawyer in Uruguay to stand up in court against the dictatorship. Nobody else would take on opposition, pro-democracy leader Eleuterio Huidobro to defend in court as a client, but CMM did it knowing full well he was going up alone against the entire Uruguayan army.

He won in court, so the sore losers in the Uruguayan army planted a bomb at his house to kill him when he got home from court. An officer in the Uruguayan army had his conscience bother him, though, so he called CMM and tipped him off to run for the airport instead of going home. That's how CMM made it to Mexico alive.

I have a photo of me with CMM in his living room in Mexico where he went on to become a professor at the University of Mexico there. He never got to go home to Uruguay again, but because he inspired people after 12 years of dictatorship the country got democracy back again. The new Senate of Uruguay published all of CMM's old writings and speeches, and sent me a set of them to celebrate his memory.

His book about torture in Uruguay helped me find others who survived torture there like me during that period so I could get face to face support group help there in Uruguay. Sitting in a circle with other torture survivors fact to face in support groups so started my own PTSD recovery that's ongoing here at DS PTSD.
https://www.amazon.com/El-Infierno-Carlos-Martinez-Moreno/dp/0930523474

From Publishers Weekly
This last novel by Uruguayan writer and defense attorney Martinez Moreno, who died in exile in 1986, depicts the revolt of Uruguay's Tupamaro urban guerillas and their suppression by the military in the early 1970s. Using true accounts of kidnapping, torture and murder from political detainees whom he defended while living in Uruguay, Martinez Moreno fashions a dreamlike yet brutally realistic story of a police state.

His book borrows chiefly from The Inferno in Dante's Divine Comedy. In this modern-day hell, wealthy Uruguayan bankers and prosecutors are kidnapped by the Tupamaros; army colonels and police officers learn more effective ways to torture political prisoners from the "cold, calculating" North American "adviser." Readers confront crucial moral questions about the nature of dictatorships and guerrilla movements in Latin America, as well as average citizens' passive reactions toward them.

The author skillfully recreates his clients' experiences, although the women are stereotypical. Also, the momentum of the book is sometimes slowed by the characters' stream-of-consciousness thoughts. This is a terrifying book, written with chilling clarity and nightmarish precision. Although it is unremitting in intensity and attention to detail, readers never lose sight of the author's incisive, brilliantly evoked vision.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There are people in the world who do the right thing, no matter what. I knew one, and his name was Carlos Martinez Moreno.

I am really impressed by your responses. These are great stories of inspiration.