Carol Guzy Quotes

As a journalist, it is so easy to get hardened when you see so many stories that are disturbing. Sometimes it's just your survival mechanism that makes you hardened to some of it.

We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.

I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'

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

After 'Oz,' I've learned how to check out and not let that stuff get in.

I try to cope with everything through humor.

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

I never thought about being a cop. I'm kind of sensitive. I don't know if I could handle that job. It's hard to go home every day and be able to still live your own life because some of the stuff you see really affects you.

I think we all have mechanisms that we use, each of us individually, to deal with pain that we've had or just dealing with life or whatever. Everyone's story is different, but we all have some kind of mechanism that we use to deal with stuff, that we create pretty young.

People always ask me, 'I don't know how you could watch that, how that affects you,' and I just tell them, 'I went through it in real life, so it's like pilots watching a 'Top Gun' movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,' something like that.

People always say time heals. Time doesn't necessarily heal anything. It allows you to manage things. There are occasions where you feel the pain as if it just happened, but you know that it's a fleeting moment.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

I often get too emotionally involved in my cases.

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.

I think what's always been interesting to me than the science and the criminality with this job is what happens to your persona, your disposition, after day in and day out dealing with life and death.

Once you just tell yourself, 'OK, I'm going to have a breakdown right now, and I'm going to cry for an hour, put my phone away. I'm going to go swimming, and then I'm gonna make my family dinner and lay on the couch and watch 'Ru Paul's Drag Race,'' once you accept that it's not the day and you can just have a breakdown, you're over it.

De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself.

Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.

I used to get out of bed sometimes and feel depressed and watched a lot of reruns on TV to get over it. I should have allowed myself to be a little more human and not worry about trying to be a superwoman.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.