Emotional Flashbacks

[schrödinger's cat]

...oh dear. What did you do?

My mother isn't a narcissist, so she doesn't segue so much as use conversation stoppers. When I'm talking about something that's important to me, she'll often cut things off right away. If she segues, it's not into talking about herself, it's into talking about people who're important to her, or into talking about that whole area of doing one's duty. So instead of talking about my life, I listen to her talk about how she mowed her lawn and got rid of the cut grass. So there are those moments where I go "...wait, did she really just say that??", which... probably you know how that feels.

Maybe that's a bit too sarcastic, but I've sometimes thought I might be better able to live through meeting my mother if I had a bingo square. One box for the likeliest kicks to my mental shins. "Expresses aghast surprise that I don't share her preferences", that could go in one box, or "when I mention something that's important to me, abruptly segues into talking about something that's important to her"... simply as a way of telling myself that yes, it will happen again, and yes, it feels painful, but also: yes, we can poke fun at this. Not at her, simply at those mechanisms that keep on wrecking our talks.

[Kizzie]

...oh dear. What did you do?

My mother isn't a narcissist, so she doesn't segue so much as use conversation stoppers. When I'm talking about something that's important to me, she'll often cut things off right away. If she segues, it's not into talking about herself, it's into talking about people who're important to her, or into talking about that whole area of doing one's duty. So instead of talking about my life, I listen to her talk about how she mowed her lawn and got rid of the cut grass. So there are those moments where I go "...wait, did she really just say that??", which... probably you know how that feels.

Maybe that's a bit too sarcastic, but I've sometimes thought I might be better able to live through meeting my mother if I had a bingo square. One box for the likeliest kicks to my mental shins. "Expresses aghast surprise that I don't share her preferences", that could go in one box, or "when I mention something that's important to me, abruptly segues into talking about something that's important to her"... simply as a way of telling myself that yes, it will happen again, and yes, it feels painful, but also: yes, we can poke fun at this. Not at her, simply at those mechanisms that keep on wrecking our talks.

And isn't that just a loud and clear message about you as an individual?!  Love the "kicks to my mental shins" - it would go over really well at OOTF.  I once started a thread there about the silliest or strangest gifts member's PD FOO had given them and boom 5 pages before it was locked and so funny, sad too of course but it was great to poke some fun at the PDs for a change.  I also started one about predictions about what your FOO would do in certain situations - again, so funny and 5 pages in no time flat.  It's really good to be able to see some humour I've found, I couldn't do that for the longest time,  but now my H and I have a good laugh every few days at her Little Drummer Boy type emails or remembering some of the sillier antics.   

[spryte]

SC - I get where you're coming from.

For myself, I'm not sure that I can associate them with control. (I'm still in the observing stage, so I don't know.) Because, as I think I explained somewhere else, maybe in this thread I don't know...there are times when I DO have control when I've been triggered. I am not engulfed...or at least, not at first.

And, maybe it's because I've been dealing with this moments of what feel like insanity for so long, and patchworked a way to deal with them and I've sort of gotten to a point where a) I know when they're happening b)I know they're not real and c) I can hold a small part of myself apart from them enough to know what's going on -

Brown Acid - it's not a type of acid, that I know of...just an expression to mean "very bad acid trip". It would not mean much to anyone who isn't familiar with the experiences of a hallucinatory drug...but it's the moment where all the fun and games with visual, somatic and auditory hallucinations turn nightmarish.

This blog post that I read this morning was a great description of a "brown acid" moment for me.
http://www.gresik.ca/2011/11/the-night-i-almost-went-crazy/

I had one very similar the other day, and I wrote about it too.

Yesterday, I had a job assessment for a position that would actually be pretty great. I was nervous from the get go. All the way there, I was talking myself down off of the ledge. (This may or may not have been exacerbated by caffeine, I'm noticing the nervous "after" effects again) I get there, and see that there is another girl there, who is dressed way better than I am. When she speaks, her voice is clear and confident. She is...if I were a hiring manager, the one whom I would have my eye on. Meanwhile, I am under dressed, my hair is a mess and I don't have a brush, my cheeks were all red from being overheated from driving in my un-airconditioned car...then more girls show up, all dressed better than I am. I wonder, why didn't I put more effort into what I wore today? Why did I think this was appropriate for a job assessment?

The assessment itself wasn't terrible. Other than the fact that we were all seated together in a room, tested at the same time. There were five of us. There were two days, and two times offered for this assessment. So, assuming that perhaps there were five in each time slot (I have no way of knowing that) we can assume maybe 20 applicants? So, competition between 20 applicants, doing this assessment. I was not fantastic on the excel portion. And, the thing was...I could have spent yesterday brushing up on excel...because I called and asked the woman what was going to be on the assessment and she told me. I knew that I wasn't very good with Excel formula's. I even briefly looked it up online. And then got distracted by games.

Afterward, on the way home...there were tears. Partially because of the things that I rationally knew that I failed at...not dressing better, not brushing up on the Excel, not being better prepared to compete when I know how competitive these jobs are. The rest of it was just a slide into that awful, worthless head space. There was a moment when I just...gave up trying to "talk myself down" from the brown acid moment I was having wherein I was just absolutely worthless, had done terribly, had no chance at the job, had ruined everything, and on top of it all...was crazy, because I knew none of these things were actually true, except that I couldn't make them NOT feel true, and feeling...in that moment...absolutely alone because I didn't feel like I could explain any of that to anyone and Ron and my dad both wanted to know how it went. I felt like I could tell them the truth, that it went ok except in that moment, the truth felt like a lie that I was going to have to force myself to tell. I'd have to smile, and pretend that everything went ok, except that's not the way I felt, even though I knew it had gone Ok. <--the insanity of that is just...I don't know.

So, I mean...those moments for me...I've had them for a long time, and I've worked hard at trying to hang on through them, work to understand what's going on DURING them, but never thought to look at what proceeded them - which was obviously a lot of old tape worthless feelings that - it seems to me are flashbacks to when I was a kid - those criticisms are exactly the kinds of criticisms that I would have heard from both my mother and my father. Obviously, inner critic stuff...which is what I've been working on combating - but there's this other component that I'm not sure that I understood really until now...which is like...where I go in my head when the inner critic starts in on me - where those feelings originate from and why they have such impact.

[schrödinger's cat]

Sorry to hear about the job assessment.

I knew none of these things were actually true, except that I couldn't make them NOT feel true, and feeling...in that moment...absolutely alone because I didn't feel like I could explain any of that to anyone and Ron and my dad both wanted to know how it went. I felt like I could tell them the truth, that it went ok except in that moment, the truth felt like a lie that I was going to have to force myself to tell. I'd have to smile, and pretend that everything went ok, except that's not the way I felt, even though I knew it had gone Ok.

Oh good. Not just me then.

I'm still only starting to investigate my EFs, so I'm not one hundred percent sure about them yet. I can imagine that, as I get better at identifying them, that lack of control will disappear. Or maybe "control" isn't the best word for it. "Poise" works too. Pete Walker calls EFs "amygdala hijackings", and there's this element of being hijacked and taken over: as if my EF had decided that we WILL take the ride into the haunted house today and there's no stopping it. That reminds me of what you wrote:

The rest of it was just a slide into that awful, worthless head space. There was a moment when I just...gave up trying to "talk myself down" from the brown acid moment I was having wherein I was just absolutely worthless, had done terribly, had no chance at the job, had ruined everything, and on top of it all...was crazy, because I knew none of these things were actually true, except that I couldn't make them NOT feel true...

So there's this sense that some automated mechanism has started, and we're not pilots anymore, we're passengers. Or I'm reading too much into it, that's also possible.

For me personally, that's one sign of an EF: this sense that the whole world is narrowing down to this one trigger, and that my whole inner experience is narrowing down too, leaving me little or no wiggle room I could use to escape or take a step back from this. That's the worst. Simply just realizing afterwards that I had an EF has already been a relief.

[spryte]

Thanks, actually, the job assessment went just fine. I got called back for an interview, and got the job. That's the new job that I'll be starting here in a few weeks. I felt even sillier about my reaction to all of that when I got the call for the interview.

And it's funny, that was the first time that I actually used "anger" to snap myself out of that downward spiral. It was a liberating moment for me. I think Peter Walker's amygdala hijacking's is completely accurate...and the feeling to go with it. Hijacked.

See, I'm at the point with these things where one of four outcomes happens:

a.) I can spot dangerous territory and avoid it all together (still happens rarely)
b.) Once I feel the hijacking, I can thought block, or reframe, and manage to "talk myself off the ledge" altogether (slightly more than rarely)
c.) I can desperately hold onto the "rational" part of my mind, like I wrote about where I'm having two different realities...the one in which I "know" what's real, and the one that "feels" crazy and all I can do is hang on for the ride. (this is usually where I'm sitting right now, it's emotionally exhausting)
d.)it becomes too much effort to hang on and I just...let go and let myself slide into the feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, out-of-controlness

This last one was kind of a combo platter between the last two.

this sense that the whole world is narrowing down to this one trigger, and that my whole inner experience is narrowing down too, leaving me little or no wiggle room I could use to escape or take a step back from this. That's the worst. Simply just realizing afterwards that I had an EF has already been a relief.

I wonder what you'd need to do to create that wiggle room for yourself? Some kind of "hook" into reality that you could hold onto for comfort even if you ended up being swept away by it.

So like, with a bad acid trip, sometimes the way you get through it is just reminding yourself (or, having someone else remind you) that you took a drug, that reality is still there, that it will end - eventually. And that's kind of what I do when it's getting to the "I'm too tired to hang on to reality" point. Sometimes, I'll talk to my bf about it, and be like...Hi...I'm crazy right now, can you tell me what's real and true? Or, another trusted friend. Assuming of course that you have someone that you could say that to safely.

[schrödinger's cat]

You got the job? Whoo-hoo! Congratulations! So at least all that heartache wasn't for naught...

...I used "anger" to snap myself out of that downward spiral. It was liberating...

Yes, same here. I'm beginning to wonder if Peter Levine doesn't have a point when he says that trauma symptoms happen if our normal, natural trauma reaction gets interrupted or hindered and can't be completed. The way he puts it, traumatic events release tremendous amounts of energy within us. If and as long as our natural reactions to trauma can flow naturally from start to end, that energy gets released and dissipates, no problem. If our reaction gets interrupted, that energy is trapped and sloshes about in us, creating all kinds of problems. Back then, when we were traumatized - maybe we were meant to react with anger, but for some reason this wasn't possible. And we were meant to look at the situation around us, to really see what was going on, and to blame our abusers for abusing us. But that wasn't possible either. Maybe that's why moving out of denial and anger are so liberating: things are finally clunking back into place. Things are the way they're meant to be.

I don't know how plausible this is. What I do know is, if I'm properly angry at what happened (in a healthy way), then there's a distinct sense that something's finally just the way it should be. A sense of rightness.

A good idea, trying to use anger on purpose to get myself out of EFs. I'll keep that in mind and see if I can use this. Thanks.

Sometimes, I'll talk to my bf about it: I'm crazy right now, can you tell me what's real and true? Or, another trusted friend. Assuming of course that you have someone that you could say that to safely.

Yes I have, actually. My husband rather enjoys being the voice of reason. No, I'm kidding - there isn't one patronizing bone in his body, thank goodness. I usually ask him afterwards, once I'm already halfway down whatever ledge I happened to find myself on. Asking for help while I'm in distress still feels too risky for me. Always has been, even when I was little. That's an area I need to work on.

We had to read Hinton's "The Outsiders" for at school, and there was an advert in the back for her other book, "That Was Then, This is Now". That's something I sometimes say to myself during an EF: that was then, this is now.

[Butterfly]

Lack of control, poise = EF that's how it feels, just off. Here's the book definition:

Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts. . . . A sense of feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also commonly experienced in an emotional flashback, and all symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing toxic shame.

That's how it feels, I'm feeling small and I actually shrink physically, caving in a bit on myself instead of standing tall, feeling rather invisible or wishing to be invisible.

[Kizzie]

Butterfly, that's exactly how I feel too when it's a shaming EF, little and ashamed and humiliated, as though my insides are hanging out for all to see. 

[Kizzie]

Spryte - congrats on the job - always good to hear good news! 

[spryte]

Thanks Kizzie!

[Kizzie]

So folks we're at our 5 page limit so I'm going to lock this thread as it will get too unwieldy to read if we let it go on.  Cat had an excellent idea of summarizing threads and perhaps we can use that as a springboard into further discussion about EFs as it is such a central topic.

Tks everyone for all the good points and sharing