Do Pete Walker's emotional flashback steps help you with this?

[goblinchild]

I've used Pete Walker's 13 steps for managing flashbacks to help myself come out of emotional flashbacks before. But the first step is understanding that it's a flashback, it happened in the past, and that things are different and safe now.

With spiritual abuse, I was convinced that this was just... like the way the universe Is? Like, I was made to feel my abuse was part of how the dang fabric of reality is woven. I guess to people who are spiritual or religious, it's like your religion is The Actual Way Of Things, you know? So if it feels like the "unsafe" part is God or The Universe, it's kind of hard to convince myself that things are different and safe now when I'm in an EF because I am indeed still in the universe, you know? It's not gone? I can cut the people out of my life but the belief is still there when I'm flashing back. It's like being claustrophobic of existence itself.

How do you handle that? What do you tell yourself?

[goblinchild]

Update: I didn't realize I was experiencing some inner critic stuff along with this. I think maybe the flashback management wasn't working because it's wasn't only a flashback, and I needed to understand how the inner critic works a bit better and learn how to manage that too.

Still not 100% there but it makes more sense now.