Allison Anders Quotes

Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.

Post-traumatic stress disorder didn't surface as a condition until 1980... that fact was very relevant when I remember back to how these men behaved. A lot of walking on eggshells was required for wives and children.

When I started talking to my therapist, we hit the source of my PTSD and the trauma that came from the things that occurred when I was younger - issues with my father and how that may have affected me.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

I'm not a doctor - so I can't describe flashbacks well - but it is like you're living it again.

Everybody is not completely traumatised by their life.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

My uncle's house burned down when I was 6 years old. We got out safely. But ever since, I've had a nightmare of dying in a fire.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.

I think my character's getting to the point where he can't even eat spaghetti with red sauce anymore, where he has horrible nightmares, he can't sleep anymore.

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

I don't know if I actually am good at the sight of blood. An accident on the street gets me very, very upset.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.

All my life, I've had these flashbacks, these dreams, nightmares, daymares, like visions, where I relive certain plays. Only the bad plays. I see them over and over, as if somebody's rewinding a tape and forcing me to watch.

I have survivor's remorse.

I'm asked daily about how and why I don't have PTSD. I'm probably the last person on Earth you should ask about this stuff.

PTSD occurs following a trauma that was so awful that in retrospect you don't understand how you survived. What that causes is an extreme feeling of vulnerability that you get past but that doesn't go away.

I'm almost positive I have some type of PTSD. Almost a decade of my life was consumed by the prison system.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.