Gayle Forman Quotes

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

I tended to faint when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood.

I think everything is going to be devastatingly sad - when the phone rings, I know somebody in my family's been hurt, somebody's going to die. I'm sure a therapist would go, 'That's not a good way to live,' but every time it's not that bad thing, I'm so thankful and appreciative.

My natural response to a stressful situation is to shut down. I do weird things, like, I don't cry, I get really cold.

Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

Stress is the negative whirlwind of emotions that gets imposed on top of our stimulation and engagement.

Since I had the baby I can't tolerate anything violent or sad, I saw the Matrix and I had my eyes closed through a lot of it, though I didn't need to. I would peek, and then think, oh OK, I can see that.

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.

I'm not affected by violence the way some people are. I don't know why, but I enjoy that intensity.

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.

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.

After I saw the first thing I ever did, I got a migraine.

I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time.

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 had my moments when I got very frightened that I would not recover.

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.

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.

Under so much pressure and the situation that I was in, that was the personality that came across with me.

I'm becoming more squeamish. I didn't use to be - nine years of 'Silent Witness' prepared me for most things one will have the misfortune to see in life. Before, I'd be wading up to my neck in gore, but now I tend to look away.

You do run and scream and cry and work yourself up into hysterics, and then you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, and you feel really off and really strange. And that's because rationally, even though you know everything is OK, you have put yourself through this traumatizing experience, and your body is still going.

The is an intensity of anxiety here greater than I ever saw during the [Civil] war.

What do you do when your world is falling apart? How do you hold onto the real and the rational? I think that's very relatable for people.

A breakdown involves getting to the point at which your mental state prevents you from doing the normal things of your everyday life. I remember from my own experience that I was completely ambushed by mine.

I have survivor's remorse.

I have a little bit of PTSD when I hear a big bang or a loud noise or keys - I jump out of my skin.