EF's Triggered By Cold Weather

[zazu]

Hi all.

Emotional Flashbacks are a many and varied thing with me, but there is one particular, dreaded kind I am suffering lately, related to the weather.

The winter that I was 10 years old, a series of disturbing and traumatic events happened in my family. This period was marked by a certain kind of weather and atmosphere - frigid wind, a leaden gray sky, a bleached-out landscape that seemed hopelessly bleak. For 20 years (thankfully) I lived far away from the place where the events happened, and the weather and geography were quite different. Winter could still be depressing, but it wasn't always triggering, in and of itself.

Now, however, I'm living back in my childhood hometown, and the EF's that accompany cold, dark weather are unbearable. It feels....um...it's hard to describe how it feels. "Creeping horror" is a phrase that comes to mind. Vulnerable, unsafe, sensing a growing threat that I can't see, can't predict, can't prevent. Because the feelings come with the cold, it seems to get inside my bones the way cold does, and it's impossible to keep it away. It's nauseating.

The music that was popular at the time also affects me, though generally only if the weather is the same. I can listen to those old songs if the day is hot and sunny without too much effect, but if the weather is dark and cold, oh, boy...it's just awful. I know this because last year I thought I'd try some self-created "exposure therapy" by listening to that music during the dreaded time of year. Huge mistake!! This is obviously not something I can deal with through getting used to it. 

I've tried writing about it, too. Because the events took place over a series of weeks, it seemed important to try to get the whole story (or at least my experience of it) down in detail, how it all fit together. Another mistake. That caused an emotional crash that lasted a couple of months. I've even tried to make an art project about it, even before we moved back to this town.
Again, that ended in distress.

There were other kids, family members who experienced these events along with me, but it's no good talking to them for relief - they were just as traumatized as I was. Whenever it's come up, we just say "that winter" and shudder. It's not that the events are too horrible or complicated to talk about, just that something about it created such a deep disturbance in us that, for our peace of mind, we don't want to bring those feelings to the surface again.
Except when the weather is like this - then it can't be helped.

So I know what not to do.  Is there any advice on what might help?

[Rain]

Oh zazu.   I so relate to what you are sharing.   This physical experiences you feel, hear, breathe with your five senses open up memories as if you were right back in time.   The emotions are also "held in time"

I have not done Somatic Experiencing, body work, but maybe that would help.

[schrödinger's cat]

I get some mild EFs when the sky is overcast for months - just greyness without discernible clouds, and without much light. It numbs me and makes me feel depressed. But from what you wrote, my distress is only a kind of dimmer switch, while yours seems to be an explosion that leaves you devastated. For me, it makes a difference how much light my room gets, so I never move into a ground-floor flat, I make sure that our living room is the room with the most light, and I have a LOT of lamps and a LOT of colour.

Do you think that might make a difference? I mean this: the cold itself can't be changed - but what about other circumstances? Do you think there are ways you can make your daily life as radically different from the past as you're comfortable with? Examples I can think of now are... let's see... painting your walls a colour your FOO would never have chosen, listening to music that wasn't around back then, making a point of cooking foods that are "fashionable" now and wouldn't have been served back then...? Just little signposts that keep telling you: this is now, that was then? I don't know how practicable this is and whether it would make any difference at all...

And oh my goodness, yes, music can be immensely triggering. Around me, people my age are so nostalgic for the Eighties, and there are all these Eighties playlists --- brrr. Just the thought makes me shudder. Just no. No, no, no, and no.

[alovelycreature]

I have the opposite problem. I get triggered by the beginning of summer. I spent all my summers in a secluded hunting camp in the middle of nowhere (there was a gas station 45 minutes away). The feelings of being isolated, trapped, and alone all come up for me.

Music always sets me off too. If I'm out with friends or in public and hear a song that triggers me I try to do deep breathing and focus on the here and now. I've found that helpful trying to associate new memories with certain songs. I don't know if that's repressing my feelings or not. I just figure that I'm probably going to hear the songs out of my control in public and that's how I try to manage the anxiety. For example, there are a couple Monkee's songs that trigger me and my partner loves them, and when Davey Jones died he kept watching reruns and listening to their music. I used the opportunity being safe at home to remember that I'm a safe place and that I can enjoy this song with my partner in a new way.

[Kizzie]

Hey Zazu - Wow, your description of "a leaden gray sky, a bleached-out landscape that seemed hopelessly bleak" is exactly what I feel sometimes when I first wake up or wake up during then night which I think is the abandonment depression Walker talks about. It seems that as I move forward in recovery, I am tapping into it more and I do NOT like it 

Something new though, is that feeling of a "creeping sense of horror" you describe and it happens now when the weather is actually gray and bleak. It's  like it mirrors the fear and depression I feel. We now live in an area where it's mostly sunny with few gray days thankfully, but when it is gray I feel I must find colour, warmth, fun - anything that keeps me from that place where child me lived a lot of the time.

Now that I've realized this is happening my H and I try and get out on sunny days as much as possible and to go places where there is colour and sound (e.g., an art gallery, a movie, out for a lovely brunch - anything that stimulates more parts of the brain). We have talked about going somewhere warmer for a few weeks next winter to soak up the Vitamin D and warmth as one antidote, and I've been wondering if one of those Seasonal Affective Disorder light machines might be another. 

I do not like these feelings at all obviously, but I can sure understand why I stuffed them down and avoided them all these years now that I can feel them more clearly. Now that I have read Walker's book, am participating at OOTF and OOTS, and have gotten into therapy I feel like I have the tools to deal with them. So when that bleak, gray internal landscape feelings still fills me with dread I try to hold onto the notion that the more I can sit with the feelings and work through them, the more they will dissipate.  It does seem to be working.

Anyway, thanks for the thread and I hope you find ways of defueling/working thru your triggers.

[Rain]

Hi Kizzie, I notice you and Cat talking about color.   Thanks.   Lots to think about here.   

I notice I change through the years, and throughout a year as to the colors I need.

The forums overall have made me realize that ALL, literally everything in my life impacts me.   Home décor time.

[zazu]

Hi everyone. Thanks for your great replies and advice. 

The last couple of days have been difficult - more frigid weather and howling winds - so I just borrowed my son's ipad and huddled in the bedroom playing meditation videos on youtube. I went though all kinds - Tibetan monks chanting, singing bowls, chakra balancing, you name it. lol. It did bring some relief, but these EF's seem determined to tell me something...I ended up having some extremely vivid dreams related to the traumatic incidents. Plus some eerie synchronicities regarding the events keep cropping up.
It seems determined not to let me go so easily.

Rain, I think you are correct - it must be a body thing, not a head thing. I can think about it all day, for all the good it would do, but it seems there is far more at work here. I tell myself... yes, I felt threatened and helpless back then. I felt responsible (when I was definitely in no way responsible). My young cousins and I all saw firsthand how the adults let us down, and then shamed us for it. Ugh. None of that is very nice, but it's not all that hard to process. It was pretty straightforward. I was reading Pete Walker's advice on EFs, and how one should allow oneself to feel all the emotions, but really, I can't help but feel them - they overtake me against my will! That said, sometimes I have the sense that there is something I can't remember from that time, and that's why I'm so afraid. Talking briefly with my cousin about it, she has a similar sense of "creeping horror" about those memories. It's not entirely clear why this has affected us this particular way.

Yes, the feelings may very well be lodged in my physical body somewhere.   
Good advice about the snow, but unfortunately, we rarely have snow. My dreaded landscape is covered with pale dead grass and empty fields, a bleak moonscape that goes on and on. Sigh. But if we did have snow, I would certainly play in it. 

Schrodinger's Cat - good advice. Actually, I've already been doing much of that. You should see my bedroom! For the last year, I've been trying to work through my feelings using art, trying to give positive and hopeful messages to my unconscious mind and inner child through art so the walls are covered with colorful and cheerful (if somewhat odd) paintings. 

I came up with the idea to do that for a rather weird reason, actually. When we first moved in, I hung up some pictures that were attractive, but rather grim in subject matter. One day, I looked around and realized that my life had begun to mirror those pictures. It was uncanny. *shivers*  It became clear that I had to be careful what I put into my environment, because it was affecting me in unintended ways.  It really has been helpful to do all that painting and decorating.

And yes, I tell my kids that I lived through the eighties once, I don't want to have to do it again.

Alovelycreature - thanks for sharing your story. That sounds so terribly lonely. 
It's interesting you mention focusing on the here and now to try to calm the flashbacks. That's something that's helped. My here and now isn't always so great, but I find if I can focus on just one neutral (or pleasant, if available) element of the here and now, it can bring a certain sort of comfort.

I don't know if it's repressing feelings either, but since this is used in mindfulness meditation, which has been shown to be helpful for trauma victims, it can't be all bad. It's also great you're able to start trying to form new, positve memories with the triggering songs.

Kizzie, it does sound like one of SAD lightboxes might help you. You really may be suffering a lack of light. I know doctors don't really consider a diagnosis of SAD if one has a diagnosis of  depression, but that doesn't mean it can't affect us, IMO. In my case it's not "depressed in winter" it's depressed year round and freak out  in winter. Light helps - a lot of light. (my electric bill is ridiculous, but I just can't do without the extra wattage.)

To the point of the EF's themselves - it does sound like there is something we need to know, or at least, need to feel about them in both our cases. No one wants to live with "creeping horror" longer than they have to.  Personally, I don't know how I could feel more than I do (any suggestions from the board?) but if you are able to do so and it's helping, more power to you. 

[Rain]

Levine also stress the need to titrate ...a little bit at a time.   In other words, a "bearable amount" each day. 

Titrating the creeping horror.   Think of it like a sideways glance.  Just what you can bear, like Peter Levine describes in his books.   A Somatic Experiencing person can guide.

[zazu]

Thanks for the advice, Rain.  I did try to approach it sideways today (yes, it's too much to jump into headlong, that's for sure). It helped a bit, or at least it made the flashbacks different, in some way.

I ended up remembering something I'd forgotten for more than 30 years. I'd often had the sense that the uneasy feelings did not start on the day of the first *obviously* traumatic event (a death in the family), but had actually begun prior to that day. So rather than trying to examine the period in which I knew terrible things had happened, I tried to look at the time before, to see what was going on. I have a freakishly long and detailed memory, so this would not usually be a problem.

It came to me with a shock that I could not remember anything at all between October 31 and December 8 of that year, even though there was an important holiday in between, and holidays are especially easy for me to remember. No, it was a total blank.  But this I know for a fact - I did have a major life change (let's say it was akin to moving house) in between October 31 and December 8 of that year. That's indisputable. But I can't recall a thing about it. Not when it happened, not how, nothing. Not until the news of the death came - then the memories begin again. That's so odd as to be remarkable.

Well, I'm thinking, this life change took me out of a familiar comfort zone, where there had been other adults around who had been a buffer against trouble. Instead, I was now in an isolated environment with no one but my NPD Mother. The life I'd previously known was gone. I must have been in an extremely vulnerable state at that point.

When the disasters started rolling, they kept coming for a month, so it's hard to pin down any one thing that's causing the EFs. But I suspect my (perhaps) already vulnerable state allowed it all to make a very deep impression.

Jeepers. I wish I could sort it out in my head just enough to know where to focus next, without retraumatizing myself!
 

[Badmemories]

Hi All,

Something new to think about for Me. Winters have always been bad for Me. I live in the Northern plains where it is very cold and dreary.   I have been diagnosed with SADD so just thought it was me.

Possible trigger....

Mostly as a child I remember being cold All winter. I never had proper winter coats, boots, etc. I distinctly remember in 4th grade the teacher giving me a pair of winter boots.. They were
Like old ladies wore in those days, to big, and the teacher made me wear them outside...I lived in the central plains then. I would have froze to death living here! Of course I was bullied terribly..
In 7th grade I got a pair of hand me down boots about 10 years out dated and very ugly Mom made me wear them!

I also remember running out of fuel as a child... Also cold!!!  How responsible is it to run out of fuel as an Adult? As I am looking at it now, that is pretty irresponsible! 

Thank You for bringing this up something more to think about!

Keep on keeping on! :huh:

[Trees]

I find myself really unhappy when the weather stays below freezing for days and nights at a time, even if it's sunny.   This year I wondered if having my muscles sort of tensed up all the time was triggering my brain, like maybe my brain thought the new tension was from fear rather than cold.  So I tried wearing a lot more clothes, long johns, heavy sweaters, even a hat inside the house.   And it did help me, though of course I looked like the Pillsbury doughboy.

[schrödinger's cat]

Trees, that's a VERY interesting point - that sometimes something totally normal can just so happen to be something associated with our trauma, and our mind mistakes it as a sign that the trauma is happening again. I'll have to think about that. Thanks for pointing it out.

Badmemories, now I definitely want a trime travelling machine. I'd come with SO many warm things. Not to have enough clothes and boots to keep you warm - I'm sad just thinking about what this must have been like! And then your only choice was between freezing and looking strange?   

Zazu, in case you're reading this: I'm thinking of you and hoping things are relatively bearable for you this year.