A woman who survived 9/11 has revealed she couldn't look at photos of the attack for over a decade after it happened.
Lisa Ridd was just 22 when two planes plunged into the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September, 2001.
She was just yards from the Twin Towers when the planes hit - and recalls she originally thought the fuss around her was down to a parade nearby.
Speaking to FEMAIL, Lisa said she only realised the true horror of what was happening when she saw a plane flying towards her.
She recalled: "Somebody said something about a bomb I thought "That's ridiculous", but quickly the older, more seasoned people on the trading floor told me to get off the phone - we are evacuating."
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After coming out onto the street, Lisa and hundreds of others started running as they saw the second plane heading for the North Tower.
Somehow amid the chaos, she managed to find her sister who also worked in the World Trade Centre, and retreated to her apartment for safety.
Although she survived the massacre, her best friend Lindsay, who worked on the 89th floor of the South Tower, did not.
The pair had made friends four years earlier while studying at university in Massachusetts. According to Lisa, Lindsay was "the biggest light in the room."
But Lisa didn't find out her best friend's fate until days after the attack, while she was recovering from the shock at her parents' house in Virginia.
As more stories emerged of survivors being pulled from the rubble, Lisa became convinced Lindsay would be one of them. For days she continued to call Lindsay's phone, willing her to pick up.
But on 14 September when Lindsay's mum called to discuss her daughter's funeral arrangements, it sunk in for Lisa that her university pal was gone.
Over the next few months, Lisa was offered counselling at work to process the trauma of being caught up in the terror attack, but she refused it.
In fact, she recalls she "avoided the topic entirely."
For the next decade, she couldn't read about the attacks in the newspaper, look at photos of the Twin Towers or talk about what she'd lived through.
While she suppressed her memories, Lisa met her now-husband and had three children, aged 12, six and two.
But when her eldest child came home one day and asked her about 9/11, Lisa realised she needed to make peace with her trauma.
"I was like 'Okay I guess I need to tell my kids my story''," she said.
Since sitting her children down to tell them about her experience, Lisa has also gone back to the World Trade Centre and spent time at the memorial to the victims of 9/11.
She said: "You have no idea when you see photos how powerful it is. There are holes that will never be filled up. All you can hear is the water rushing through, water is so therapeutic anyway and the way they designed it it feels like cleansing an endless cycle of energy. All of your senses are just alive and I really could not think of a more beautiful way to memorialise that spot."
Lisa has also appeared in a documentary about the attacks, Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 in which she tells her story.
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She believes speaking about it on TV has further helped her process her trauma.
She said: "It's not a story that belongs to just me, it's a story that deserves to be passed down for future generations and I would say it's probably unlucky to be part of history in that way but that's the reality."
Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 is available on Sky and NOW TV
