Panos Cosmatos Quotes

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

You have to understand that PTSD has to be an event that you experience, a very traumatic event. And actually, there is evidence that brain chemistry changes during this event in certain individuals where it's imprinted indelibly forever and there's an emotion associated with this which triggers the condition.

Watching Jaws just scared the living daylights out of me when I was young. I know a lot of people my age who are still petrified of sharks because of that film.

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.

I had paralyzing fear as a kid. I couldn't watch horror movies, nothing. The funny thing is I got so sick of being afraid that I started doing it deliberately and instead of being afraid in my bed I would sit up on my bed and say, 'ok, come on, show yourself, do it.'

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.

When you grow up with a significant amount of trauma, you are realizing it as you get older, and you're realizing the ways you can recover from that trauma. The things that I have witnessed and that I have been through, it's going to take a lifetime to undo.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I'm scared of scary movies.

I am actually a big sissy, and growing up, I never used to watch horror movies. 'Bambi' gave me nightmares.

I don't watch horror movies because they scare me!

My dark secrets are life threatening. Pockets of unhappiness set in aspic that build and build. I have this primitive feeling that if something good happens, it is going to be followed by something bad. There is always a price to pay.

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.

My inner child is not wounded.

Here in Israel, we want the boys back home, we demand it from our government, who often pay a steep price to get hostages back. But we need a happy ending. We don't want to deal with those days after release, their post-trauma or reintroduction to society. Yet coming home is only the start of their journey.

All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you.

The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.

After I watched 'The Exorcist' I refused to watch any other movie that had anything to do with ghosts or demons. I didn't even watch 'Ghostbusters' until I was much older.

Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.

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.

There's something called latent PTSD. It manifests itself in different ways. I want to be free of it, but I'm not.

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.

'Beetlejuice' used to scare me.

As the wife of a retired Navy commander and the representative of the district covering Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, I see firsthand the permanent effects of war - both physical and psychological - on those who serve our country.