Emotional Flashbacks

[schrödinger's cat]

I don't like to be under the control of someone else and "obey". That is exactly it, but it feels humiliating and dangerous to me. People I have talked to don't have this at all! They trust and just hand themselves over, which is pretty foreign to me!

It's like they think they're surrounded by an invisible force field that willl keep things at bay. "Oh, such things only ever happen to other people, I'm quite safe."

.....except my inner critic says "That's because you have to be treated like a baby!" Because to tell the truth, the technician doing the mammogram DID talk to me in a gentle voice like I was 5 yrs old! And that's what I need, so I feel guilty and like a fool because the inner critic is calling me a baby. Can't win.

I once knew a huge, strong guy, a trained policeman who now worked as a truck driver, who fainted at the dentist's.

But if you do have to leave a situation, doesn't your inner critic punish you for it? Or don't you then feel like a failure for having to leave?

I feel like a failure anyway. But let me think about this. The thing is, about twelve years ago, two separate doctors on two separate occasions triggered my PTSD. (No assault happened, they were just insensitive jerks and triggered me.) Those weren't CPTSD flashbacks, they were PTSD ones - hypervigilance and tunnel vision and the feeling that I was physically, actually under threat. That feeling lasted for three days each time. After that, it grew into a numb sense of heightened (but not actual) danger. It took me a LONG time to feel safe and at ease again. So that's probably why the sheer thought of making a run for it comforts me. I know, it's not practicable in most cases. But the thought that I could theoretically do it helped. I'm at the doctor's volitionally. No one can force me to stay there. I can leave. If someone made me stay, I could call the police. PTSD makes me feel actually, physically threatened, to the point where I enter a room and instantly choose a seat where I can get up and leave, I scan the room for exit routes, I jump out of my skin if someone sneaks up on me, all that kind of thing. And in that particular context, it made sense to remind myself that I have always the option to flee.

So far, I've only ever exposed myself to low-risk and low-fear situations. I've been to the hairdresser's, but not yet to a GP. I dodged out of routine appointments for the past... how many years? But I went to a GP a few weeks ago, for something that was low-risk and didn't feel threatening. (A toe that wasn't as bendy as it should've been, and I wanted to make sure nothing was broken.) And the GP I went to was nice! Wow. So maybe that'll help ease me back into things.

But back to the point I was trying to make - I think I prepared for those situations ahead of time and tried to find out at what point I might leave, and how I might go about it. If a GP is about to do something that might trigger me, I might tell him that I'm prone to anxiety attacks and I'll have to do this some other time when I've had time to prepare? I never had to put this to the test, so I've no idea if this is doable. Or, I might say: "I'd like to think about this for a few days first"?

[pam]

Thanks Kizzie  I honestly think if Big me was better at knowing what to say to a Little me (like a good parent?) then I could then comfort myself when I have anticipatory anxiety. But I suck at that stuff/haven't had any experience not having a mother or kids. I was crying to my boyfriend the night before the test saying that this is why I didn't deserve to have kids--because I couldn't make them go to the doctor either! (ie. "put them through pain") I don't know how to be "soothing" to someone else, or my inner child, without lying (so I can't do it). But now that I had a good experience, I hope I can draw on that. But I doubt it because my personal statistics are still on the side of not trusting drs.

SK, Thanks for reading and responding.
So you differentiate between CPTSD and PTSD symptoms or flashbacks? I have to think about that more. I know I qualify for both. But i just never separated the 2 from each other--just lumped them in together. Some of my symptoms are very physical, like if someone comes to close to me while I'm sitting down and their hand comes anywhere near my face, I will flinch (from being hit in the face) in exactly the same way as the startle response (which I annoyingly have all the time). I also noticed when about to go to a wedding reception this summer, that my anxiety caused me to literally freeze up as if I am scared to death to even breathe. As if I'm at home alone and an intruder broke into the house and I'm hiding in a closet trying not to breathe, to save my life. But in reality, I'm sitting on my own couch, safe in my apartment with my bf, dressed up and ready to go to a fun social event.....yeah, right! My body thinks it's in mortal danger--I could barely talk or breath and was tensed up like crazy, gripping myself tight with my fingers etc.. So this would be a PTSD FB (flashback)? But if I had emotions that went along with it, such as "everyone's gonna laugh and point (just like they did when i was 12) so I can't go" -- that would be more of a CPTSD EF? If so, I have both combine a lot. But this is a very interesting difference I should pay more attention to it, lol.

"It's like they think they're surrounded by an invisible force field that willl keep things at bay. "Oh, such things only ever happen to other people, I'm quite safe."

Yeah, that's because that is actually true for them.

[Badmemories]

I think emotional flashbacks for me are like if I was an animal. I feel the anger(sometimes), stress, panic disorder,but it comes out of no where for NO reason and I can not really identify what is causing it. So for me it is just a reaction. Not different than an animal, a reaction coming from no where for no reason. I am trying to identify the WHY's but not much luck yet.

[schrödinger's cat]

I only found out about EFs a few days ago. So I never thought about my various flashbacks and how to classify them until I wrote that post. It's one reason I'm so glad to be here. Talking to others is a lot more thought-provoking than simply just thinking about things, and it makes one think clearly and combat woolly-mindedness.

So... hm. Let me think about this. Perhaps those flashbacks might be mainly caused by CPTSD, but I seem to get two basic kinds.

Variation one triggers my freeze response. It numbs me and makes me tired and less able to concentrate. I drift into doing all kinds of numbing, escapist things, while also feeling terrible and having toxic thoughts run amok in my head. Up until a few days ago, I didn't even know those were flashbacks. They're hard to spot. It's really like drifting into a fog. It's a slow poison, not a quick shock.

Variation two gets me a feeling that I'm threatened, that I'm under threat of... I don't even know what. No, now I get a clearer idea. A threat of being actively rejected and abused, not just passively ignored and overlooked. I think that's it. That too makes me want to do some of the escapist things I mentioned. But I don't gently drift into doing them: I frantically dive for cover. I feel that I'm acutely in danger of being scapegoated, singled out, othered, and made to feel shameful, the way I felt as a kid when my mother was close to exploding (she had a LOT on her plate and was sometimes very short-tempered from all that).

That kind of flashback is the one I called PTSD flashback in my previous post. I realize though that I'm not a hundred percent sure it is one. It fits the PTSD model well, and I think it's the reason I was (mis?)diagnosed with PTSD by two different therapists.

However, there's never any tangible memory that gets evoked. There isn't anything visual, or anything I re-hear or re-feel. It's all just in the way my body reacts, it's that sense of danger, and it's the moods and thoughts.

There are two possibilities.
1) I have both CPTSD and PTSD flashbacks, like I thought at first.
2) I have two kinds of CPTSD flashbacks (possibly more? - must look into this). What kind I get depends on what kind of past experience gets evoked:
--- a) memories of being neglected and/or memories of "passive" / "gentle" emotional abuse (like withholding, minimizing, trivializing) -----> freeze response, numbing, dissociation, depersonalisation; flashback feels like a fog thickens around me; I avoid people and "risky" situations mostly because I feel too shameful/inept/unacceptable (=inner critic)
--- b) memories of being emotionally abused in an "active", i.e. recognizably aggressive or hostile way, or memories of physical abuse -----> feeling shocked, endangered, like I'm under threat now; feeling like I must dive for cover; highly elevated startle response, I can't stand being crowded and very easily feel claustrophobic, I feel like I need to hide, I avoid people because everyone seems like a potential threat for more abuse (=outer critic), I'm panicky and hypervigilant,...

I'll have to think about this again a few times to see if it holds water, but right now, it seems likely that this is what's happening. After all, each flashback mirrors the way I felt about the specific trauma back then when it happened. (And all these years I thought I didn't remember what my life was like when I was a child. A part of me remembered all along, and tried to tell me about it, but I wouldn't listen.)

Thank you for talking to me about this. I hope I wasn't misleading you.

[Badmemories]

Thank You for posting this. I am thinking/trying to work through My abusive childhood. My Mother also raged. A LOT. Her encouragement was criticizing... I don't remember getting any positive responses like "You did a god job!"  I toke care of My siblings at such an early age that I did not have a childhood...I don't think I was even allowed to have any thoughts of MY OWN. I think I probably was the Golden Child most of the time... but sometimes the scapegoat...Thank You again! 

[pam]

BadMemories, I have always been aware of why i was reacting or having the feelings I was having. I always could see where in my past it related to. Maybe this is because my abuse was more overt? Or "active" like SK describes. I knew my emotions were too intense for the present situation, so I always knew I'm really upset or angry or whatever about other things. I could feel myself being triggered. But I could never (still can't really) "control" my feelings, especially in EFs. 

IDK, maybe that's the one "good" thing about overt bullying type of abuse, compared to covert manipulation and betrayal, is that it's pretty obvious and therefore easier to see, admit, share, get empathy for, and harder to deny within yourself.

Maybe you could ask yourself, when feeling like you're in an EF, "What does this feel like? What does this remind me of? When I was younger I felt like this when ______." or say to yourself "This is just like _______." Maybe that could help you pinpoint the origin?

One time a female counselor I was seeing told me she was getting married. My heart sank and I got quite depressed. I felt very sad and alone. My "rational" mind was like "what's the problem? It's none of my business. That's her personal life! What do I care?" But my FEELINGS were that she "was about to abandon me, I won't be that important to her anymore. I won't be a priority. She will forget all about me." Things like that. But I wasn't even that close to her for any of that to make sense either! So, after a few days ZI figured out that her getting married was a trigger for me--It brought up how when I was 8 and my father married my stepmother, they both started neglecting and abusing me, yet before the wedding, they both treated me quite well. So I felt that my counselor was going to "leave me/hate me too." Once I figured out why I wa having these crazy feelings, it went away. It also helped that she said her patients were her No. 1 priority and no man was going to stand in the way, lol. So, basically someone getting married triggered my childhood feelings of abandonment and I "over-reacted."     

[pam]

SK, You only found out about EFs a few days ago? Well you sure sound like you know what your're talking about!

I like the way you analyze this stuff.

I read somewhere here that EFs are not visual, but FBs from PTSD are. But if a person has both CPTSD and PTSD, oh who cares what type we have. It doesn't matter as long as we pay attention to it and try to let it lead to some kind of healing, etc. I actually started using the term "EF" on my own yearsa go to describe what was happening to me to my therapists. They first think I am literally reliving the same EVENT as before, and I was like "Noooo, I am in the present situation, but there are emotions from my past coming up and mixing in. And I know they don't belong there, but i can't help it. So I am having an emotional flashback, not a completely delusional state where I actually think my father or stepmother is here right now. Nothing like that. It's just the EMOTIONS."

An example of that is whenever a boyfriend would break up with me in my late teens and early 20s, I would cry, then the next thing I knew I was thinking of my mother andcrying because she died (when i was 5). So again with the theme of abandonment--the breakup would trigger my unfinished grieving for the loss of my mother. Part of me was literally stuck at 5 and I would go back to that any time someone would leave me in a permanent way.

A few weeks ago I had, for the first time, a weird flashback that was UNTRIGGERED! I was lying in bed thinking about how I love DJ and so glad we are together (not something I've felt a lot in life). I was about to fall asleep and all of a sudden i heard this sound in my head--the wood creaking from my father stomping up the stairs when he was mad and was about to storm in my room and hit me for some unknown reason my stepmother made up. That sound scared me wide awake, and I was like *? I was happy and just about to fall asleep! So......IDK, that was a first.   

[Kizzie]

A few weeks ago I had, for the first time, a weird flashback that was UNTRIGGERED! I was lying in bed thinking about how I love DJ and so glad we are together (not something I've felt a lot in life). I was about to fall asleep and all of a sudden i heard this sound in my head--the wood creaking from my father stomping up the stairs when he was mad and was about to storm in my room and hit me for some unknown reason my stepmother made up. That sound scared me wide awake, and I was like *? I was happy and just about to fall asleep! So......IDK, that was a first.

Maybe your good feeling about loving DJ and being glad you're together was a trigger - you warning you not to feel too good because it might be taken away from you?  And maybe some soothing here would help - telling your younger you it was bad then but things are good now and it's OK, the rug won't get yanked out from under you this time. 

[Butterfly]

Ok so I only thought of EF as the times when I was in extreme high anxiety and panic. It didn't occur to me the flinching and startle response, the times when for no apparent reason my energy is utterly drained and fall asleep in the middle of the day. So are these EF too?

[Butterfly]

From http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions ('amygdala hijackings') to the frightening circumstances of childhood. They are typically experienced as intense and confusing episodes of fear and/or despair - or as sorrowful and/or enraged reactions to this fear and despair.
Flashbacks strand clients in the feelings of danger, helplessness and hopelessness of their original abandonment, when there was no safe parental figure to go to for comfort and support.
Without help in the moment, the client typically remains lost in the flashback and has no recourse but to once again fruitlessly reenact his own particular array of primitive, self-injuring defenses to what feel like unmanageable feelings. I find that most clients can be guided to see the harmfulness of these previously necessary, but now outmoded, defenses as misfirings of their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. These misfirings then, cause dysfunctional warding off of feelings in four different ways:

• fighting or over-asserting one's self with others in narcissistic and entitled ways such as misusing power or promoting excessive self-interest;
• fleeing obsessive-compulsively into activities such as workaholism, sex and love addiction, or substance abuse (uppers');
• freezing in numbing, dissociative ways such as sleeping excessively, over-fantasizing, or tuning out with TV or medications ('downers');
• fawning in self-abandoning and obsequious codependent relating. (The fawn response to trauma is delineated in my earlier article on "Codependency and Trauma" in The East Bay Therapist, Jan/Feb 03).

[Kizzie]

This thread is amazing but it makes my head hurt lol  - ack, I need to figure out how to add more smileys, love the one with the stars going round and round the smiley's head, it would work here so well. 

Flashbacks - I have both Katz.  I have the PTSD kind where I can see and feel a traumatic memory (like being spanked really hard and screamed at by my M for embarrassing her when company was over and then put in a hot bath), and others that are just feelings based with no visual component, a stream of consciousness kind of flashback which do range as you suggest Katz from a milder sort that make me foggy to really extreme where I have a huge panic attack.  So it's natural to notice the BIG ones like Butterfly captures in her post, and miss the smaller ones.   Walker does suggest that "Flashbacks can range in intensity from subtle to horrific"  (p. 3) so it does sound like there's a continuum of sorts with CPTSD EF's and most likely the same holds true for PTSD visual flashbacks (VFs). 

[schrödinger's cat]

Kizzie - "range from subtle to horrific"? Oh thank goodness, that explains a lot.

Do you tackle your different flashbacks in different ways? That's on my to-do list - to explore what precisely I'd need during panicky vs foggy flashbacks. With the panicky ones, I need safety, reassurance, maybe the chance to anger or grieve my way through the bad memories. With the foggy flashbacks, I need... what? Hm. Must think about this. Hah, maybe I need a Richter scale for EFs. An early warning system.

Butterfly, I've asked myself that same thing for years. Those things always happened around EFs though. During bad times, even my food intolerance* gets worse, which is just weird.

(*If I eat foods that contain histamine liberators, it's like something's hitting my off switch. Histamine is a stress hormone. Maybe EFs produce so many stress hormones that the little extra contained in food tips me over the edge, I don't know.)

[Kizzie]

Wow Katz, I have the same thing with certain meds and foods when I am in an EF (which I did not realize before).  Things that my system usually handles seem to have an extra punch - caffeine, chocolate (wah), and cold meds especially.  Makes perfect sense now - we already have a lot of adrenalin and cortisol and heaven knows what else pouring into our systems (or trickling depending on the intensity) so add anything on top of that and blammo. Hunh.

Hmmmm, do I handle my flashbacks differently ? Good question.  I know with the PTSD type ones it's almost easier to get through because its visual and tangible.  My H is a great at helping me through those - so talk therapy of a sort, validation and comfort for those. 

The CPTSD EFs  - like everyone here I guess I'm just starting down that path.  Differentiating between them by level or degree and then our response is a great start though.  Butterfly - I startle really easily sometimes and hadn't considered it as part of a milder EF perhaps.  But I think we're onto something here.  So what to do for the different degrees of an EF? E.g., "Hmmmm, I feel like numbing out - what's going on here and what can I do to stay in the moment?"  So I guess some grounding strategies for staying in the moment. For the more severe ones - I haven't had one in a while but now that my H knows what they are now so I guess talk to him about what's going ion, use Walker's 13 Steps and some of the other soothing strategies, and when I'm able post here to see if that helps to bring it down too. And stay away from food and meds that add to making my system go haywire, rest and not joking here, drink lots of fluids to wash all the toxins out. 

Love the Richtor Scale for EFs  Katz 

[Kizzie]

I split this topic and moved three posts to "Our Relationships with Others" under "Relationships with SOs" http://outofthefog.net/C-PTSD/forum/index.php?topic=122.msg735#msg735

[Annegirl]

Just had an ef for a few hours, but I'm still struggling with it, I'm trying to settle my breathing and my chest and stomach and thoughts. I so want to ring my therapist but haven't the money and the children are around. I know it's nothing but I was writing on here when my husband and son started saying, pushing me verbally to get off this forum, my husband started manipulating me and making me feel guilty. I knew that if I were vacuuming or doing dishes he wouldn't have said anything. I always meet my children's needs before I write anything. Anyway all I gave my son the iPad and went to start the dishes, but I nearly started screaming and pulling my hair out and almost cried ( which i was kind of happy about as apparently I need to learn to cry and my facial tic will go away) I kept thinking "it's all I'm good for". Working, it was the only time my mother kind of left me alone, even though if I hadn't done it properly ( like spend 2 hrs on something meticulously cleaning it) she would yell, hit scream until I worked all day long, she even made me late for school most days because I had to do so many things around the house constantly.
So I feel like this is all I'm good for, I went for a walk so I wouldnt shout in front of the kids which I ended up doing to my husband when I came back anyway, he said it wasn't true, but actions speak louder than words. He never tells me to stop what I'm doing if I'm cooking or cleaning. He is nice to me most of the time though even when I am doing something I enjoy.