Jennifer Ashton Quotes

Children can only take so much, and they deal with it however they can.

I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.

In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family.

I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it but they did the best they could with what little they had.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.

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.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

Many great stories are father issues, mother issues or death.

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.

The thing about post-traumatic stress disorder, we know about one in five, about 20 percent of individuals that are exposed to a direct traumatic stress will develop this disorder.

My parents broke up when I was six. Before, I was a very active, naughty child, but after my father left me, I stopped talking. I became very good at hiding my emotions. I felt so ashamed of telling others that I didn't have a father, because that was not common in the 1960s.

Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think she's blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her.

I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.

As a person who has spent my career as a child psychologist and have dealt with many children who have struggled with many problems in families, I have seen families ripped apart by so many things that sometimes law has tried to deal with.

At age 12, I was put on tranquilizers when I should have gotten help. There was nothing major and awful, I just didn't feel my family was supportive and emotionally generous.

Just as the body goes into shock after a physical trauma, so does the human psyche go into shock after the impact of a major loss.

I always thought of myself as inadequate. Kids of divorced parents always feel that way - that, on some subconscious level, they're responsible.

My childhood was so traumatic.

Childhood trauma is the rocket fuel for addictive pathology, and this fundamental truth is laid bare in 'Patrick Melrose.'

People who have had severe childhood traumas lack the ability to regulate emotions and, as a result, gravitate toward whatever primitive means they can come up with.

Is there such a thing as a normal childhood?