Are You An Unintentional Time Traveller? How Emotional Flashbacks Disrupt Our Space-Time Continuum.
In this blog I explore the nature of emotional flashbacks, what they are, and how to reduce the way they can impact on your life.
Emotional flashbacks occur when someone with a history of complex trauma finds themselves emotionally reliving something that happened to them in the past in the present day. Susan Raffo, craniosacral, somatic bodyworker and author of “Liberated to the Bone: Histories, Bodies, Futures” refers to flashbacks as a form of time travelling. This chimes with trauma-therapist Judith Herman’s view that trauma is experienced as a collapsing of past, present and future and that unprocessed trauma exists timelessly in the nervous system and body.
Emotional flashbacks are feeling based as opposed to the more well-known specific event PTSD-related visual flashbacks (which may also involve images, sounds, tastes or smells).
Emotional flashbacks can be confusing and overwhelming and can look similar to a panic attack: checking out, going blank, losing verbal capacities, staring into the distance, struggling to breath, tearfulness along with physical reactions such as intense, fast heart beats, tightness in the chest and throat or spacing out completely and losing the edges of the body itself.
The difference is that a panic attack is usually a reaction to extreme anxiety and has its own set of cognitions, whereas an emotional flashback is triggered by a past event and the reactions can then lead onto a panic attack.
Pete Walker, a therapist who lives with and also helps people with complex trauma, refers to emotional flashbacks as “amygdala hijacks” in his classic book “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving”.
The amygdala is the easily triggered, easily overwhelmed car-alarm system of the brain. When it gets activated our nervous system, biochemistry and brain goes into survival mode.
The brain isn’t designed to make us happy, it’s designed to make sure we survive, and as compassion-focused psychologist Paul Gilbert has said, it operates on a “better safe than sorry” principle.
This means that many of us who have survived repeated, difficult situations can be randomly thrown into high arousal, high emotion states without knowing exactly what triggered it.
Those high arousal , high emotion states aren’t just about fight mode (kicking off in some way) or flight mode (running off in some way). They can also involve freeze, friend and flop modes or a combination of all of these.
Here are some ways these modes might show up in therapy (please note these are made up composites and do not come from actual clients):
Freeze - “why didn’t I fight back/defend myself?....I found myself rooted to the spot...I couldn’t move...I felt like a zombie....”
Fawn - “why did I keep smiling at them even when bad things were happening...they made my life so difficult with their bullying, but I went out of my way to be the best friend they’d ever had....”
Fight - “I just lost my shit and ended up being thrown out of the club...they even called the police, it was so embarrassing looking back, but at the time I didn’t care, I was like The Incredible Hulk; I just wanted to keep protecting myself...”
Flight - “I don’t know what happened but I found myself in my car driving to Brighton from Barnstaple....I didn’t know where I was going or why, just that I needed to get away....I locked myself in the bathroom to try and get a grip...just like I used to do at home when I was a kid, I’m 58 but felt like a 7 year old again!”
Flop - “I felt so small, like I’d shrunk back to being a child again...I just wanted to make myself as unobtrusive as possible...I just needed to find somewhere to lie down, it was like I’d lost all the strength in my muscles....”
Emotional flashbacks are very common experiences for people who are living with Complex PTSD or C-PTSD. PTSD is generally associated with a particular memory of an event or similar events. C-PTSD is associated with the experience of many traumatic events over a longer period, usually from childhood.
Survivors of physical, sexual, emotional, abuse or neglect often feel unsafe in their bodies and unsafe in the world, we learn to dissociate from our emotions because they feel so overwhelming, literally like they might destroy us.
It’s also important to note here that trauma as an experience of overwhelm affects different people in different ways, it’s a very individual thing. For example, opening the front door and expecting it to be a friend, only to discover it’s a stranger who reminds you of someone who hurt you, might spin me out completely, but not trigger you at all.
We can then beat ourselves up about it, telling ourselves there’s something wrong with us , and we can’t cope with normal life like everyone else. However, we’re experiencing an emotional flashback not a personal failing, and we have to learn to be compassionate with ourselves when it happens if we notice it at the time (or afterwards when we’re calmer).
We Can Learn to Manage Emotional Flashbacks.
Pete Walker has a great set of strategies for managing emotional flashbacks which I, and many of the people I work with have found super-helpful. You can find the detailed list here, but some of the headlines on how to deal with flashbacks are:
Label it: “I’m having a flashback”;
Emphasise safety: “remind yourself you’re here now and you’re safe”;
Remember boundaries: no-one has the right to hurt you”;
Soothe your inner child: let your adult part tell that child part you can protect it;
Resist Time Travelling: remember the flashback will pass, it’s not forever;
Come back to the body, the ADULT body – you're not the helpless child, but an adult with skills, strengths and resources. Invite the body to relax if you can or if that doesn’t work for you, gently tense the surface of the body to remind you where its edges are;
Slow down and soothe, notice and name the fear, slow down the breathing and see if you can observe what’s happening without getting hooked further into it;
Notice the inner critic trying to get in on the action and see if you can ask it to sit this one out or come back later (this one takes a bit of practice!);
Give space for grief and loss; it’s part of the releasing and healing process;
Notice any trigger patterns and what you’re flashing back to;
Be kind to yourself afterwards because this stuff takes time to process, and recover from - therapy can help us to learn the skills to do this.
Juliette Verzi has written a wonderful article about coping with their emotional flashbacks. (Trigger warning: contains descriptions of their childhood physical and emotional abuse). The article has a lovely graphic guide to the stages of managing an emotional flashback and offers suggestions for mapping out your own. Juliette lists their stages as:
Trigger – The moment the flashback begins, the moment of danger connecting with previous moments.
Flood – The moment the nervous system reacts and the strong emotions and thoughts emerge
Freeze – The moment of going into auto-protection mode
Defrost – The moments after the flashback has passed
Self-Soothe – The moments taken to recover by deliberately and repeatedly engaging the senses and the body.
You can download a template to help map out your own “stages” too.
In a future blog I will also discuss how to manage PTSD flashbacks using Babette Rothschild’s brilliant flashback protocol.
In the meantime, if this information is chiming with you, we can probably help here at Rhizome Practice. We offer EMDR, Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for trauma, PTSD and C-PTSD. We also draw upon Dr. Arielle Schwartz’s framework for working with C-PTSD too.
Therapy for C-PTSD is often long, slow work which you might want to undertake in phases – stabilisation, processing and integration – and the work can involve other modalities too, which we would be happy to advise you on as the work proceeds. It is possible to reclaim life and your nervous system back from (C)-PTSD; it’s an arduous journey that’s definitely worth taking.
