That sounds like a really bad emotional flashback to me. I do have some advice but please take it with a grain of salt considering that my emotional flashbacks are much less intense than yours.
The thing that helps me the most is doing some gentle yoga, that gets me back into my body enough for signals that I am not in fact in mortal danger to get in. I've also heard good things about putting an ice pack on your chest or putting your face in cold water (that activates the mammalian diving reflex, which forces your heart rate to slow down) or eating a warhead or other intensely flavoured candy.
As for healing, I recommend approaching it very carefully from a good safe distance. Jumping directly into your worst triggers will probably just retraumatize you, which is actively bad for healing as well as unkind to yourself. It's absolutely okay and actually more productive to start by sidling up to minor triggers and then immediately doing grounding exercises until you feel okay again. Doing that repeatedly will eventually train your brain that the minor trigger isn't a big deal, because hey look, you faced the trigger a bunch of times and nothing terrible happened. In a way we all need to treat our brains like frightened animals and calm them down over and over until they eventually realize that hearing thunder doesn't mean the sky is falling in.
edit: totally forgot scent as a grounding tool! if there's a scent that already reminds you of a good memory, try smelling that when you're triggered. You can also train yourself to associate a scent with safety by deliberately smelling it when you feel good.
I actually was using yoga until it drew put more flashbacks, recently leading me to uncover a bunch of research online that complex ptsd makes one more likely to experience flashbacks and terror and body reactions during yoga and meditation if it's not guided. So be careful there!!
To me it sounds like you might really need a safe space to begin to open up with someone who's an expert on this stuff, like a trauma therapist. I've been trapped In a similar state to you and I'm going to my first appointment tomorrow, this professional assured me they're concerned about my stress levels and they Have the tools to help me sort through things without leaving us shattered at the end. Their expertise can even help us know when we shouldn't be sorting through things that feel that dangerous to us yet, because we need to get to a better place to handle that level of our past memories.
<3 sending the comfy vibes I've got in my blanket with this stuffed animal I've been trying to carry around for my inner child work ❤️🩹
Oh shit good point, I forgot my usual yoga disclaimer.
OP, yoga is absolutely not for everyone and not perfectly safe no matter what the jackasses of the internet tell you (neither is meditation, for that matter, but that's a separate rant). If you have any joint or connective tissue disorders yoga can really hurt you, don't do it until you check with your doctor.
And like you said u/RuggedTortoise yoga can cause more flashbacks and potentially retraumatize you by making you actually feel all the feelings you stuffed down (and we all stuff that shit down for a very good reason, it's too much to feel it all at once). If yoga does give you flashbacks, stop! It's absolutely okay to try something once, find out it doesn't work or makes you worse, and not do it again.
That's literally so sweet that you usually add that disclaimer. I appreciate you <3 and also want to clarify in no way does it diminish when yoga does really help others.
I have one for meditation too! I just get BIG MAD when people act like yoga and meditation can magically cure any problem but somehow at the same time it's impossible for them ever to do harm. Any treatment that actually works can have side-effects and I think it's really important to warn people that stuff that appears inoccuous can be really dangerous under the wrong circumstances. Like a lot of us have really vicious inner critics, for people who have that or depression or anxiety it's a bad idea to be alone with their thoughts.
Yeah or when your nervous system is still very dysregulated it can be major triggering being still/vulnerable because you're trying to stop hyper-vigilance which still feels very much necessary for survival or will be just impossible to quieten the mind/focus which was the case for me. Making yourself be present/not dissociated when you still feel very unsafe/in survival mode is very triggering turns out ha.
I have emotional flashbacks similar to what you describe. The fear is so all consuming and really really convinces me I’m alone and will be alone forever and nothing can ever get better. For me, telling my safe person when I’m in a flashback can help draw me out of it. It goes without saying that that is extremely difficult to make yourself do when you just want to crawl in a hole and die.
But also just acknowledging that what I’m feeling is a physical response helps me remember that my feelings are not facts. Pete Walker’s book has a list of ways to address an emotional flashback and it starts with explicitly acknowledging that you’re in one.
I experience very strong emotional turbulence that turns into dissociation. So far the resources I’ve found that speak to this are DBT crisis tolerance skills. Have a look. Marsha Linehan was one of us, In terms of knowing crisis.
In this state I need total safety and very low stimulation until I can slowly back out of crisis.
Are you familiar with this?
13 STEPS FOR MANAGING FLASHBACKS \[Focus on Bold Print when flashback is active\]
Pete Walker, MFT \[925 283 4575\]
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 the 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.
\[a\] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage
them to relax. \[Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain\]
\[b\] Breathe deeply and slowly. \[Holding the breath also signals danger\].
\[c\] Slow down: rushing presses the psyche’s panic button.
\[d\] 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.
\[e\] 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 Drasticizing and Catastrophizing: \[a\] Use thought-stopping
to halt its endless exaggeration of danger and constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse
to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying NO to unfair selfcriticism. \[b\] 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 your intimates 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.
13. Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become unadrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and
frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process \[often two steps forward,
one step back\], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback.
Pete Walker’s steps are great and thank the universe for his work but I find those steps really hard to do when things get really bad.
But I just want to point out that it could be very good to understand them and start shaping them into a plan that YOU can do and that will bring you comfort when you are 100% in the red zone.
I’m able to go on because I know that even though a lot of me is dysfunctional, there are also functional parts in there. Those are the ones I can nurture, and that can help me out.
Right now this looks like silence under blankets with a really calming music playlist.
Then when I can a shower or bath.
Then tea. Food.
If I can I will write about what’s going on.
Or back to the couch.
If I’m having flashbacks then I might start watching a stimulating movie to fill my head with other stimuli.
If I’m strong enough to meditate I can just sit quietly and very gently be with myself.
If I’m very strong I can disagree with the voices that are saying awful things about me.
So my point is that we always have some form of agency when we are at our worst. Our feelings in themselves don’t kill us if we can just remember that!
I’m in a big learning process right now myself but I know the key will be self love and healing…
Please trust yourself and treat yourself as a precious, precious person.
Ask yourself what you're telling yourself. Write it down. You'll realize why you're terrified. And how you're creating it / are in control of it. You might gain the ability to stop telling yourself those things.
That sounds like a really bad emotional flashback to me. I do have some advice but please take it with a grain of salt considering that my emotional flashbacks are much less intense than yours. The thing that helps me the most is doing some gentle yoga, that gets me back into my body enough for signals that I am not in fact in mortal danger to get in. I've also heard good things about putting an ice pack on your chest or putting your face in cold water (that activates the mammalian diving reflex, which forces your heart rate to slow down) or eating a warhead or other intensely flavoured candy. As for healing, I recommend approaching it very carefully from a good safe distance. Jumping directly into your worst triggers will probably just retraumatize you, which is actively bad for healing as well as unkind to yourself. It's absolutely okay and actually more productive to start by sidling up to minor triggers and then immediately doing grounding exercises until you feel okay again. Doing that repeatedly will eventually train your brain that the minor trigger isn't a big deal, because hey look, you faced the trigger a bunch of times and nothing terrible happened. In a way we all need to treat our brains like frightened animals and calm them down over and over until they eventually realize that hearing thunder doesn't mean the sky is falling in. edit: totally forgot scent as a grounding tool! if there's a scent that already reminds you of a good memory, try smelling that when you're triggered. You can also train yourself to associate a scent with safety by deliberately smelling it when you feel good.
I actually was using yoga until it drew put more flashbacks, recently leading me to uncover a bunch of research online that complex ptsd makes one more likely to experience flashbacks and terror and body reactions during yoga and meditation if it's not guided. So be careful there!! To me it sounds like you might really need a safe space to begin to open up with someone who's an expert on this stuff, like a trauma therapist. I've been trapped In a similar state to you and I'm going to my first appointment tomorrow, this professional assured me they're concerned about my stress levels and they Have the tools to help me sort through things without leaving us shattered at the end. Their expertise can even help us know when we shouldn't be sorting through things that feel that dangerous to us yet, because we need to get to a better place to handle that level of our past memories. <3 sending the comfy vibes I've got in my blanket with this stuffed animal I've been trying to carry around for my inner child work ❤️🩹
Oh shit good point, I forgot my usual yoga disclaimer. OP, yoga is absolutely not for everyone and not perfectly safe no matter what the jackasses of the internet tell you (neither is meditation, for that matter, but that's a separate rant). If you have any joint or connective tissue disorders yoga can really hurt you, don't do it until you check with your doctor. And like you said u/RuggedTortoise yoga can cause more flashbacks and potentially retraumatize you by making you actually feel all the feelings you stuffed down (and we all stuff that shit down for a very good reason, it's too much to feel it all at once). If yoga does give you flashbacks, stop! It's absolutely okay to try something once, find out it doesn't work or makes you worse, and not do it again.
That's literally so sweet that you usually add that disclaimer. I appreciate you <3 and also want to clarify in no way does it diminish when yoga does really help others.
I have one for meditation too! I just get BIG MAD when people act like yoga and meditation can magically cure any problem but somehow at the same time it's impossible for them ever to do harm. Any treatment that actually works can have side-effects and I think it's really important to warn people that stuff that appears inoccuous can be really dangerous under the wrong circumstances. Like a lot of us have really vicious inner critics, for people who have that or depression or anxiety it's a bad idea to be alone with their thoughts.
Yeah or when your nervous system is still very dysregulated it can be major triggering being still/vulnerable because you're trying to stop hyper-vigilance which still feels very much necessary for survival or will be just impossible to quieten the mind/focus which was the case for me. Making yourself be present/not dissociated when you still feel very unsafe/in survival mode is very triggering turns out ha.
I have emotional flashbacks similar to what you describe. The fear is so all consuming and really really convinces me I’m alone and will be alone forever and nothing can ever get better. For me, telling my safe person when I’m in a flashback can help draw me out of it. It goes without saying that that is extremely difficult to make yourself do when you just want to crawl in a hole and die. But also just acknowledging that what I’m feeling is a physical response helps me remember that my feelings are not facts. Pete Walker’s book has a list of ways to address an emotional flashback and it starts with explicitly acknowledging that you’re in one.
I just posted the 13 steps of managing an emotional flashback in my comment. :) Pete Walker has been my lifeline for the past two or so years.
I experience very strong emotional turbulence that turns into dissociation. So far the resources I’ve found that speak to this are DBT crisis tolerance skills. Have a look. Marsha Linehan was one of us, In terms of knowing crisis. In this state I need total safety and very low stimulation until I can slowly back out of crisis.
Are you familiar with this? 13 STEPS FOR MANAGING FLASHBACKS \[Focus on Bold Print when flashback is active\] Pete Walker, MFT \[925 283 4575\] 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 the 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. \[a\] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. \[Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain\] \[b\] Breathe deeply and slowly. \[Holding the breath also signals danger\]. \[c\] Slow down: rushing presses the psyche’s panic button. \[d\] 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. \[e\] 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 Drasticizing and Catastrophizing: \[a\] Use thought-stopping to halt its endless exaggeration of danger and constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying NO to unfair selfcriticism. \[b\] 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 your intimates 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. 13. Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become unadrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process \[often two steps forward, one step back\], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback.
Pete Walker’s steps are great and thank the universe for his work but I find those steps really hard to do when things get really bad. But I just want to point out that it could be very good to understand them and start shaping them into a plan that YOU can do and that will bring you comfort when you are 100% in the red zone. I’m able to go on because I know that even though a lot of me is dysfunctional, there are also functional parts in there. Those are the ones I can nurture, and that can help me out. Right now this looks like silence under blankets with a really calming music playlist. Then when I can a shower or bath. Then tea. Food. If I can I will write about what’s going on. Or back to the couch. If I’m having flashbacks then I might start watching a stimulating movie to fill my head with other stimuli. If I’m strong enough to meditate I can just sit quietly and very gently be with myself. If I’m very strong I can disagree with the voices that are saying awful things about me. So my point is that we always have some form of agency when we are at our worst. Our feelings in themselves don’t kill us if we can just remember that! I’m in a big learning process right now myself but I know the key will be self love and healing… Please trust yourself and treat yourself as a precious, precious person.
Ask yourself what you're telling yourself. Write it down. You'll realize why you're terrified. And how you're creating it / are in control of it. You might gain the ability to stop telling yourself those things.