relearning how to live

When people think of PTSD and “flashbacks”, they often think of someone re-experiencing a traumatic experience like combat: seeing and hearing the traumatic experience almost like a hallucination. But Complex PTSD often involves a kind of flashback known as an “emotional flashback”. These flashbacks do not have a visual or memory component to them: they are simply a sudden flood of negative emotions like shame, fear, anger, sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness. People with C-PTSD therefore often don’t realize that they’re having a flashback, or even that they have PTSD. One of the key parts of C-PTSD recovery is learning to recognize and manage these flashbacks to traumatic childhood experiences.

The best source I’ve found so far on emotional flashbacks is Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. In this book and on his website, Walker suggests the following steps for emotional flashback management:

MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS 

1. Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback.” Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now. 

2. Remind yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present.” Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past. 

3. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior. 

4. Speak reassuringly to your Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally– that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared. 

5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless—a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before. 

6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback.) 

7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out. 

Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain.) 

Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger.) 

Slow down. Rushing presses the psyche’s panic button. 

Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap. 

Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it. 

8. Resist the Inner Critic’s catastrophizing. (a) Use thought-stopping to halt its exaggeration of danger and need to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying no to unfair self-criticism. (b) Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments. 

9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate—and then soothe—the child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection. 

 10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don’t let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn’t mean you are shameful. Educate those close to you about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them. 

11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable. 

12. Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still-unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met. 

here's some decent sources where you can get some actually helpful and accurate info:

dissociation faqs from the international society for the study of trauma and dissociation

did-research - basic, but it's there.

traumadissociation - detailed explanation of diagnostic criteria and symptom presentation.

this-is-not-dissociative and also their resource list - one of the mods, katherine, is the creator of did-research.

did-sos - mainly resources for those who have did/osdd-1 (or "just" cptsd), but others may find it informative or even helpful nonetheless.

bear in mind all of this stuff should be looked at with a critical eye, as with everything online pertaining to highly stigmatized psychiatric diagnoses. don't just take things at face value, think about them.

did/osdd-1 is not like sybil. did/osdd-1 is not like split or glass. did/osdd-1 is not like the united states of tara. did/osdd-1 is not "multiple people in one body" or obvious blackout switches and dissociative fugue between every single alter or something purely iatrogenic/sociocognitive in nature. it is a post-traumatic condition as a result of long-term traumatic experiences in early childhood where a reliance on dissociation as a coping mechanism prevents integration of the parts of the self into a cohesive whole. i'm making this post because twitter is a shitshow of both teenagers and grown adults that should know better spreading easily disproven and sometimes dangerous bullshit like insisting child alters should be treated like actual children and doing otherwise is problematic when actual predators have used that same logic to groom actual children. what people with did/osdd-1 need is less myths and misinformation, not more. the pervasive misunderstanding of and stigma against osddid is part of why we face disturbingly high rates of suicide and psychiatric abuse that exacerbates the trauma we've already faced. it's a serious issue that extends beyond internet arguments and while people without did/osdd-1 need to be more vigilant about participating in the spread, the enormous chunk of people who have it and are happily being wrong aren't exempt from this either.

you and I will always be back then…

I’m no better or worse than anyone else.

I deserve the same things in life as anyone else.

I’m a human being.

Right now, I am feeling ________(fill in the blank).

I don’t know how I’ll feel in 5 minutes, or tomorrow.

I can’t predict the future.

Life is full of painful, pleasurable, and boring moments.

So now try to remember when it first happened, it could be that you were still really small, or you were directly faced with the abuser/danger, or you were in unsafe environment where you couldn’t freely express, but the thing is, it didn’t hurt so bad the first time because you were unable to both survive and feel that amount of pain. Children’s bodies are not capable of withstanding traumatic amount of pain and survive, that pain is repressed and dissociated for later when bodies are big and strong and able to survive it. You cannot allow yourself to experience pain and fear that would make you extremely vulnerable and thus less likely to survive in traumatic situation so in that case too, your body represses the emotions and settles on dissociation until you’re safe enough and strong enough for these to be properly processed.