What do your flashbacks feel like (part 2)?

[schrödinger's cat]

It would be a pity if we missed people's input, so I thought I'd start a new thread straight away. Below is the up-to-date version of our list.

[schrödinger's cat]

This is a list of possible signs that you're having a flashback. Many of these points are symptoms (panic attacks, armoured muscles, tunnel vision,...). Other things are simply just signs that you're stressed. Still other things may even be coping strategies (such as exercizing a lot to burn off excess adrenaline, or seeking warmth if flashbacks always make you feel cold).

The purpose of this is to help us find out about signs of flashbacks that we've had all along, but haven't really been conscious of. Flashbacks are so overwhelming that it's hard to monitor yourself for signs and symptoms while you're in the middle of it all. Moreover, people around us might have shamed or blamed us for showing signs of distress, making us feel that our own feelings and physical reactions were best ignored.

For this reason, we've collected as many possible symptoms as we could. Some of these are mutually exclusive, and none of us have ever experienced all of those at the same time. (Or so I hope.) This isn't a list of diagnostic criteria. It's not a tool meant to let you decide whether or not you have CPTSD. It's just there as a kind of map to our collective flashbacks, meant to help us become more aware of our own reactions. What kinds of symptoms each of us has depends on many factors - whether our trauma is somaticized or not, whether we're in touch with our feelings or have gone completely numb, whether our preferred response to crises is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, etc. Everyone's different. Flashbacks can be mild and very hard to spot, like a grey fog settling over everything. They can be strong, sudden, and debilitating. They can come in several stages that you cycle through (for example: feeling agitated and restless --> elevated Fight response --> Freeze response plus shame).


PHYSICAL

Dehydration: being very thirsty, drinking lots of water; maybe also dry mouth, slight headache, feeling tired, feeling dizzy

Feeling like one is adrenalized, has lots of chemicals flooding the body; feeling almost hungover or drugged

Feeling sick and nauseated, feeling ill, feeling physically weak

Craving certain foods - especially sugary, fatty, and/or salty foods; creamy textures; comfort eating; never feeling you're full; craving more sustaining foods (if you usually eat lots of vegetables)

Loss of appetite, not feeling hungry, not eating

Heightened awareness - hypervigilant, easily startled, racing thoughts, a "tunnel vision" focus on potential threats (or on "unsafe" people in the room) coupled with being less able to concentrate on other things

Cold - feeling like you can't get warm; seeking a place near the heating system, longing for a hot bath, holding cups of hot beverages - anything that has warmth

Tense - tight jaw, shoulders, and chest; muscle tension, "armoured" muscles; feeling a tightening around your throat as if you're tensing up so you won't cry; butterflies or a knot in your stomach

Sleep - difficulty sleeping (if EF lasts a few days), or waking up at night and staying awake for several hours; insomnia; feeling a need to sleep to reboot your brain

Breathing - shallow; unconsciously holding your breath; shortness of breath; feeling like you aren't getting enough air, wanting to always keep a window open because there isn't enough air in the room
   
Senses - very sensitive to light, sound, movement: things easily seem too loud, too bright, too hurried
   
Restlessness - feeling adranlized; unease, heightened alertness, feeling like you're never fully relaxing comfortably into a situation, instead always sitting perched on the edge of your seat (as it were); talking quickly

Fight response - feeling flushed, having a red face, feeling hot, feeling adrenalized

Freeze response - shaking in fear but being frozen and unable to do anything
   
General malaise - feeling itchy; existing conditions may get worse (food intolerance, stomach troubles, arthritis,...); sudden illness; general exhaustion; being more illness-prone (sinus trouble, head colds, infections,...); reacting more strongly to things like caffeine, cold meds, chocolate,...

Panic reactions - shallow breathing; palpitations; your heart races; strong urge to hide and find a safe place, to be held and comforted; starting to cry uncontrollably; panic attacks (a discrete period of intense fear or discomfort, accompanied by physical symptoms such as trembling, an accelerated heart rate, sweating, feeling choked or smothered, nausea or abdominal distress, derealization, depersonalization, feeling dizzy / unsteady / lightheaded / faint, chest paint that can make you think you're having a heart attack, sense of impending death, fear of losing control or going insane, numbness or tingling sensations, and chills or hot flashes).


EMOTIONAL, BEHAVIOURAL, AND COGNITIVE

"Overreacting" to a certain situation - becoming extremely defensive or very angry, "seeing red" as the anger wells up from deep inside you, or feeling flooded with fear; your fear or anger is overwhelming, and you have difficulty calming yourself; feeling like a child who has been hurt

Cognitive distortions aka thinking fallacies - especially filtering, polarized thinking, overgeneralizations, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, personalization, the fallacy of internal control (=we feel responsible for the happiness and welfare of everyone around us), blaming ourselves for every problem around us, "should"s, emotional reasoning, and mislabelling (more here: http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/0002153)

Strong urge to hide - hiding in a closet; choosing a seat where people won't see you; closing the curtains (if you usually don't); wearing nondescript clothes that let you blend in and / or hide most of you; not wanting to leave the house. If seated or standing, adopting positions that are tense and don't take up much room, and/or let you get up again at a moment's notice, and/or copy what everyone else is doing so you don't stand out (even when doing so is physically uncomfortable for you - for example, crossing your legs even though it's * on your knees)

Social anxiety - feeling afraid that people will notice your distress and mock/reject/judge/abuse you, wanting to avoid people, wanting to not leave the house

Strong urge to do something - for example, watching a child being yelled at and feeling a strong need to call the police or put yourself in the middle of it to protect the child

Fear of standing out of the crowd: not daring to disagree, feeling a pressure to go along with what others are saying, feeling that it's safest to not contribute to the conversation (except by making vague agreeing noises or letting others talk about themselves); feeling pressured to correspond to people's expectations, to be average and ordinary so one won't attract attention; urge to withdraw

Fear and unease - fear that someone will notice that you're barely holding it together, worrying that you're having a breakdown, worrying how long this is going to tak
   
Lack of control - feeling threatened, feeling helpless and at the mercy of forces beyond one's control; urge to hyper-control everything, feeling that everything must be just right or it's a disaster, escaping into activities one can control

Lack of poise - feeling off centre, feeling unsteady and unsure of yourself, feeling awkward and self-conscious

Diminished sense of self - feeling little, insignificant, small, vulnerable, ashamed, etc.; feeling that people around you are all of them to be a lot more powerful / important /handsome than you, feeling that they matter and you don't, feeling powerless

Emotional armouring - the walls go up as you try to shore yourself up emotionally; being emotionally distant

Echoes of your trauma - aches and pains in specific places (that were hurt back then), avoiding certain places (that are strongly associated with your trauma)

Toxic shame - feeling disgusting, worthless, stupid, ridiculous, etc

Urge to self-harm, self-sabotaging behaviour, ignoring your needs, suicidal ideation

Urge to drink or engage in other kinds of addictive behaviour

Confusion - feeling confused while trying to figure out what's going on; something isn't quite right, but you don't know what; a vague sense that you're to blame for something, you just don't know yet what for; similarly, a sense that there's danger around, you just haven't found out yet what it is

Hyperfocused - "tunnel vision" on the issue that triggered the EF, scanning the environment for signs that it's happening again

Absent-minded - being less able to concentrate, being scatterbrained, constantly forgetting things, attention constantly drifts off (into worrying or a freeze-response kind of daydreaming)

You sense how someone else might be feeling about you and this destabilizes your own sense of what's real (to the point where you're not sure anymore whether this imagined perception or your own is real)

Racing thoughts

Slowed down - thoughts slow down to molasses, slower reaction times, feeling sluggish, feeling drugged

Staring off into space - thousand yard stare while the mind goes blank

A sensation that the world is moving faster than you, like you can't keep up or track things

Feeling sucked back into the past, losing track of where you are and what you're doing

Possibly faster reaction times (?) - time seems to slow down and your reactions speed up (for example, thinking you gave someone ample time to respond or react to something you said, then later finding out that you waited for a bare two seconds)

Depersonalization - watching yourself act while having little or no control over the situation; everything seems unreal or hazy; feeling unreal, feeling cut off from your own personal physicality, from your own sense of self

Derealization - the world around you seems unreal, and/or seems vague, dreamlike, lacking in vividness, emotional colouring and depth; feeling separated from the outside world by a fog, a pane of glass, or a veil; familiar places suddenly look alien and bizarre

Freeze response: feeling less able or unable to concentrate; foggy-minded; feeling numb, sleepy, maybe even bored; feeling physically tired; wanting to crawl into your bed (or into a computer game, a TV show, a book, the internet...) and never come out; feeling like you're disappearing, like you're not fully real anymore; feeling like you're a powerless spectator; feeling wiped out and hopeless

Fawn response: seeking to conciliate others by doing them favours, anticipating their wishes, being "good" (=helpful, cheerful, competent, a good listener,...); being beyond reproach; keeping your 'difficult' feelings and opinions entirely out of a social interaction; "eliciting" (=encouraging the other person to talk about themselves at length so the conversation turns into a monologue that doesn't require you to participate or be open)

Fight response: seeing red, feeling overwhelmed by anger, feeling a strong urge to do something, to "fight back", to destroy everything fragile you can lay your hands on

Flight response: a need to "do, do, do", a need to achieve something: jobs, errands, speed-cleaning, hyper-organizing one's house or project, increased need to exercize,...

[Convalescent]

I recognize so many of these symptoms. Some of them are signs of flashbacks, some are effect anxiety and some of long-term stress.

[schrödinger's cat]

Yes, it's very widespread, this list. I think one might print it out and use it as wallpaper by now, it would cover quite a bit of ground. It was fascinating to hear how each of us experiences their flashbacks, and very comforting, in a weird way. I'd always thought I was the only one having that kind of experience. So this list is proof that all of us on OOTS have this one thing in common, each one in their own way. So this list is probably useless as a diagnostic tool, but useful if one wants to look at something and know that one isn't alone.

[Convalescent]

Yes, it's very widespread, this list. I think one might print it out and use it as wallpaper by now, it would cover quite a bit of ground. It was fascinating to hear how each of us experiences their flashbacks, and very comforting, in a weird way. I'd always thought I was the only one having that kind of experience. So this list is proof that all of us on OOTS have this one thing in common, each one in their own way. So this list is probably useless as a diagnostic tool, but useful if one wants to look at something and know that one isn't alone.

I think it's also useful as identifying what you feel. I'm having quite a lot of trouble with that, and it's a common thing with C-PTSD, so information like this is gold

I've yet to fully understand an EF (well, I understand it, just needs more meat), and I don't know if it fits with the therapy in the clinic I'm going to in three weeks (they don't use the term EF or visual, just flashback), so I'm a little confused. But I think I'll figure it out in time. For me, some of these signs (when it's not something else) is a trigger of some sort. I guess you can call it an EF... it kinda makes sense. I was at a friend of mine a couple of months ago, and I got triggered real bad. To the point where I was too scared to walk in the living room where she sat. I talked about my psychiatrist some time afterwards about it, and she helped me connect the dots. So... a lot of miserable feelings from earlier where there, but no visuals.

[schrödinger's cat]

I added something about social anxiety, because that's one point we hadn't got to so far. So thanks.

About EFs: did someone recommend Pete Walker's book to you yet? In case they didn't: he's a therapist who has CPTSD and who's also specialized in CPTSD. Plenty of useful information presented in a very compassionate and respectful way. Here's his website: http://www.pete-walker.com. He has several free articles, and some of them explain how EFs "work" and how to manage them. So maybe that could be of interest to you.

[Dutch Uncle]

***Warning: very old thread.***

Thoughts on the nature of Emotional Flashbacks.

The following is perhaps a bit 'linguistically', but I'd like to share it anyway.
***possible triggers on physical abuse*** (I think they are pretty mild though. But still.)



In Dutch there is the phrase that something can "make itself Master over you". "Overwhelming", is perhaps a good English word for it. Or "overpowering".
I think that when I have an EF, it makes itself Master over me. I feel powerless, 'learned helplessness' takes hold, can't act anymore, the whole lot.
And I think that therein lies the connection with (childhood) abuse, where I have been completely powerless. My brother for example would literally hold me on the floor, his four year older body has always been so much heavier then mine that I could never free myself of his stranglehold, and he would pummel me when down.
Parents do the same: dragging along their reluctant toddlers or small children by the arm when mom has to go shopping (that is a relatively benign example. Perhaps it's the only way to get diner on the table that night.) or in other situations. Spanking, preferably when hold down on the lap of dad (the very same lap one wants to sit in so fondly!). Then of course there are the verbal threats, manipulation etc.
These are all situations where I have been utterly "overMastered", in a very real sense.

When in an EF, it literally does "make itself Master over me." It literally does overPower me. As I have grown to be used to in childhood: "Stuff it, Dutch Boy. You're powerless no matter what."

[Bimsy]

Usually I slow down and I feel so cold that the warmest thing I can find is too cold for me.
You might as well put me in the oven, I'll still freeze.
But when some time has passed I can feel very warm instead, probably after I have started to relax.

A colleague was passive- aggressive towards me yesterday, It set me off really bad because she was slamming doors and acting mad without saying a word to me.

There is nothing more exhausting than feeling like this.