Quotes About Flashback

I sometimes feel the most for my clients who were "only" neglected, because it is so difficult to see neglect as hard core evidence. Most people remember little before they were four years old. And by that time, much of this kind of damage is done. It typically takes some very deep introspective work, to realize that current time flashback pain is a re-creation of how bad it felt to be emotionally abandoned.

Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them.

Advanced flashback management, then, involves learning how to manage the disconcerting experience of falling asleep feeling reasonably put together and waking up in a flashback. Typically this occurs because a dream has triggered you into a flashback. If you remember the dream, you can sometimes figure out why it triggered you. With growing mindfulness you may even understand which events from the previous day triggered your dream.

Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback. Giving up the salvation fantasy is another one of those two steps forward, one step backward processes. We typically have to wrestle with denial a great deal to increasingly accept the unfair reality that we will never be totally flashback-free.

This is how that reactivity takes place in a flashback. A survivor wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she feels anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her inner critic to scare her with perfectionistic rants: "No wonder no one likes me. I've got to get my lazy, worthless ass out of bed or I'll end up like that homeless, bag lady in the park!

The critic's black-and-white assessment is: "Either I'm cured or I'm still hopelessly defective." And once you identify with your critic's pronouncement of defectiveness, you are off and spiraling downward into a full-fledged flashback - captured once again in the ice veneer of toxic shame that freezes one in the Cptsd stranglehold of helplessness and hopelessness

When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal.