When a flashback comes on it can feel like yo... - Heal My PTSD
When a flashback comes on it can feel like you have zero control. But we can interrupt it. What helps you stop a flashback?
Nothing does. I get a flashback and then I'm stuck in that time warp, the whole scenes are again played out, the screams, the love I had for my granddaughter. My daughter telling me to take my hands off the baby and leave. Going home in the pouring rain. Nothing felt real then. Nothing feels real now. Everyday it's replayed over and over and over. I'm stuck
Hi Sarah...I am wondering if you have ever taken that memory and scenes and rewritten an ending you want? I do a lot of journaling. Also, are you at the point when you can have compassion for yourself. I know that 19 months ago I triggered at a holiday dinner at my daughter's. I did so much damage. It was so hard, but I kept working and working on what happened. It has been the hardest lesson of all. I hope that I have learned that I must place me first. That no matter who it is, that to come back inside of me and hear me. That if I need to go home, that its ok. Not to try to be super mom and grandma. I place my hand on my heart, there is compassion. I did the best I could, and will no longer beat myself up, and go forward doing the best I can do. Namaste~ (P.S. I had to wait for my daughter to speak to me again...19 months. I am grateful to have had such an opportunity to learn so much!!)
Last night we did a free webinar about flashbacks and why they happen, plus some treatments and tools to help stop them. You can listen to the replay here in the The Science Behind Your Symptoms, Part 2: Changeyouchoose.com/webinar...
It's been a while now since I've had a full on flash back, but they do come still, though they are weaker and don't cause me so much panic or pain. I think that I've had to get used to their presence and the techniques that you talk about are similar to what I did for my self but I use language thats less professional and more personal to my own childhood and the methods that my mum used to teach me to deal with emotions such as anger as I was growing up.
So she taught me that when I was angry and wanted to shout or kick out about something, that I should pause within myself and count slowly up to ten or down from ten to zero and take some deep breaths... this enabled me to calm myself down a bit and manage my anger better.
I can see that this is very like the effects of the breathing exercises and mindfulness techniques that scientists have developed but it is more culturally relevant to my family of origin, if a bit home spun.
I guess now that I can see that my mum was onto a good thing when she taught me that. I wish I could have used her resources more, because I think that had our relationship not become so brutalised by my responses to my traumas, mum would have been an awesome support for me and had the potential to do so much good.
Unfortunately I struggled for twenty years on my own until I hit a full on mental health problem that landed me in hospital for two months and then on medication. I think I survived so long using many of the thing mum taught me in childhood, she also taught me to revel in the beauty of the natural world and to use it as a source of positivity and wonder which I can see now as a form of meditation... a bit like focusing on a candle flame for a while... but this time it's something that catches your eye in nature.
Also mum has always taught me to eat in a nutritionally balanced way and when I realised that I needed help, but finding nothing much seemed to fit what I was experiencing, I did what I could to prevent my life spiralling out of control. So I did focus on eating well and healthily, deliberately choosing not to turn to drugs or alcohol, being very careful with my money, although these were very positive protective strategies they were also an expression of my hyper vigilance. And because my reaction wasn't the stereotypical going on a drunken/drug ridden cruise into oblivion, because I seemed to be managing my symptoms so that they didn't cause anyone to notice how bad things really were... nobody did notice. I managed to get married to a lovely gentle man and get a degree and hold down a job before finally loosing it and everything I'd achieved with it including the marriage. So that was like a second trauma almost twenty years after the first.
Another of the things I did was to go to counselling but unfortunately I didn't recognise that it was causing me more pain and persisted with it, even when my husband could see that it was making things worse. I did learn a lot about myself and my responses in counselling, but the thing was that I was partially in denial about what had happened to me and until I was faced with physical evidence of what happened I couldn't believe the truth of what had happened because it seemed so far fetched to me... but in reality when the surgeon told me that he'd removed the physical evidence from my body twenty years after the event, I slowly went into a profound shock and within fifteen months had been diagnosed with PTSD, left my husband and was suddenly in hospital mentally ill.
Since then many professionals have suggested I try mindfulness and meditation and the breathing exercises, but I found them really un-natural for me and I found they were an artificial interpretation of resources I already had within my grasp and could and would utilise daily. For me the most significant thing about why I tipped over into a full blown mental health crisis was very obvious and entirely practical... whilst all this psychological shock was happening, my husband and I moved house to a city where the rent prices were the highest in the UK, we couldn't afford to live there but as we were working for a church members of the congregation volunteered to put us up in an unplanned way... in real terms this meant we moved house and knew we could stay there for four months before needing to find something else and this pattern kept repeating it's self. In that period we moved house four times in fifteen months, had serious money problems, Pete was starting a new job, I was in need of support but totally removed from my natural community of support, miles away from family and actually had not been able to relate to any of my family members properly since the time of the initial trauma twenty years before.
It has always been obvious to me that this was too much stress for a person but it went on: Then suffering mentally and not able to put words to what was going on, and feeling that I was actually very near to actually committing suicide... I took action in order to preserve my life... I broke up the marriage... so that tipped me right over the edge, I became psychotic.
In time and working with a psychologist I was able to do some family work with my parents and I had some EMDR which I found very gentle and oddly helpful. Three years after that psychotic episode, now in recovery and having had to move house again to live with my parents, I began to be able to write about and discuss with my psychologist the reality of the event I'd been denying and I recalled the memories and pieced together the facts in some tangible order. Unfortunately this was around the time of negotiating the finical agreement of our divorce which, for us, came a year after we were actually divorced. The court hearing was a major stressor for me and with recalling the memories at the same time too and choosing to do something about the memories, which scared my parents rather a lot... their fears about what I might do, raised my fear about them trying to stop me choosing how to approach this. This racketed up the tension in the house so much that I found myself having a relapse, again I was in hospital, but this time my parents said that they'd no longer have me living with them under their roof. So I was technically homeless.
Two months later, having organised from hospital, the final sale of my half of the property we'd jointly owned (something I had to convince the psychiatrist I had the capacity to decide and get his signature to the lawyers before the moneys could be exchanged) I had found a flat and was able to tentatively approach my parents to see if they'd help me transport my half of our joint possessions out of storage into my newly rented flat. This went ahead and I've now been living alone for just about a year.
Oddly I have a strong memory of realising I wanted to live alone when I was nineteen but someone persuaded me not to... it's taken me so long to understand what I was repeatedly told in hospital by the doctors and nurses, that nobody can tell me how to recover, that its something only I know what it looks like, what it means and how to get there they even said to me, "you are your own expert. nobody else can tell you how to do this, you need to follow your instincts, be gentle with yourself, care for yourself and discover the path that's right for you." these words have been absolutely essential to me even beginning to have the notion that I should trust my instincts, but with these things in my heart and mind I began to decide to do the things I wished other people would do for me, so I wished that I had friends around to take me out for coffee... So I took myself out for coffee. I was going mad in the hospital without exercise so once they'd let me out for an hour on my own would walk for an hour each day. I treated myself to some new clothes. As they started to trust me to stay out for longer I'd take my computer with me and connect to free wifi in a coffee shop and email my friends, see what was happening to them using social media, and generally reach out to others.
It's been really slow coming back to some semblance of confidence again... but recovering my mental health second time round has been less hard than the first time and having the space to chill out in my own flat and live how I need to, even if it's not what my parents would find acceptable, has been so empowering in its own right... its evidence to me that my choices count, that I don't have to pretend to anyone at all... I'm happy with my emotions just as they are and the choices I make to meet my needs, even if they are a bit unconventional. I'm no longer distressed by my emotions or by the responses they provoke in others... because mainly other people don't know about them now unless I want to tell them and I don't have to tell them if I don't want to. The people who support me know how I am and it's been really important to understand that as an adult my parents don't have the right to know all about my mental health and my medication, its ok to be private about that if I want to be, I don't have to bare all. I have a social worker who sees me for about an hour and a half once every two weeks and I've recently finished seeing a specialised counsellor who was really wonderful at keeping in touch with me whilst I was in hospital... doing telephone counselling and providing me with an opportunity to request the hospital let me out to go and see her for appointments which they agreed to.
So in a way although all these techniques that you spoke about in your webinar are things I've considered... they came really late on in the day for me, I'd already managed myself for twenty years, and by that time I'd developed my own strategies for getting through life.
Some of the key things I did early on was within a few months of the traumas happening I chose to forgive the perpetrators for what I'd understood they'd done and the second choice I made was to choose to feel the emotions that came my way because of the experience. I realised that to deny myself that liberty was to cut off part of my heart and isolate it from the rest of my being... I didn't want to do this violence to my self, I was already in pain because I was wounded but to sever my connection with the part of me that was hurting, meant in my mind that I was choosing to cut it out of circulation and on its own it might shrivel up and die, so if I wasn't able to recover it in time to come, I would be less than a whole person in the future. That was my sixteen year old logic. So thinking that I opted to stay in touch with the pain, to allow the emotional blood to flow and to believe that the pain was evidence that the neurones were still alive and active, so my body would eventually repair itself. (I came from a medical family so I had absorbed by osmosis and curiosity quite a lot of knowledge about the biology of healing wounds and my response to my psychological wounds was to transfer this hotchpotch of knowledge to the psychological problem I was experiencing.)
I also developed a serious interest and a bit of a critical view of the bible, following what was right for me spiritually and having arguments with God about what the preachers were teaching. I was studying the bible for myself and developing a belief system that worked for me right up until the first mental health crisis. My church communities (there were several over the years) were very well meaning and a positive communities that were as helpful as they could be in supporting and encouraging me, but often they were projecting the solutions of their own troubles into my life and sometimes when I tried these solutions out in my own bid to end my pain, they caused more pain.
In the end what brought me peace was knowing what had happened to me and being able to organise the story for my psychologist and myself via email... once I had done that, it was literally about fulfilling my basic needs, a place of my own, food, warmth, some employment, building enough confidence in my mental good health to begin to try to make new friends, whilst slowly that peace was sinking deeper into my being and my understanding of my right to choose for myself was slowly getting stronger. I also had to rebuild my confidence that my own skills and abilities were still valid despite the stigma around mental ill heath that seemed to subtly say that now I'd had a mental heath crisis I couldn't be trusted with any position of responsibility any longer.
The question that was very hard to live with at first was who am I now all this has happened? What does recovery look like for me? And in all honesty I don't know yet. I'm kind of, letting it emerge of it's own accord, mainly because it was the pressure to pretend that drove me into rushed decisions driven by my need for everything to be normal. If I'm to listen to the real voice of my instincts, the quiet timid voice that barely speaks her name, I need to give it time for it to speak, for me to recognise the sound of that voice within me and how to choose to honour that voice in the decisions I make. So for now, even though I'm a graduate, I'm working as a self employed domestic cleaner for twenty hours per week and using some savings to subsidise the rest. It's given me some thinking time and the chance to be gentle about my pace of life for a while. It hasn't all been plain sailing though. I still have good days and bad days days when the memories for an aspect of the whole saga return. Only a few days ago I was planing to spend a large part of a day filling out an application form for a job I wanted to apply for, but I found myself grieving all day about my ex husband not being with me to witness the progress I've made. Unfortunately this meant that I missed the deadline for the job application. I'm used to these kind of things happening, it means I've got more processing to do and probably that I need more time before I'm ready to apply for that job anyway, so It's all good. I've learnt that pain and grief actually signal progress, so now when I've gone through a day like that I think, 'ok that's another bit of work done, good, I'm moving on.' and slowly little by little things are getting better and my health is returning.
Along the way I've found that many of my prejudices have been stripped away or uncovered for what they are... that in it's self is a challenging process but one that means you are learning something new... which can only be good news.
I've been writing now for over an hour! I need to stop. But it's been interesting writing a little of my experience. I hope it wasn't boring to read. 
K
"Since then many professionals have suggested I try mindfulness and meditation and the breathing exercises, but I found them really un-natural for me." You are right to suspicious of them because they are often very different from the Mindfulness taught by the Buddhist monks.
Mindfulness and meditation takes some time to learn and you need the help of other practitioners who have been doing it for some time. The professionals tend to strip out that "Mindfulness and meditation" is a spiritual discipline.
If the body has gone out of kilter a too long session of Mindfulness and meditation is not to be recommended. You need a very short session of now more than five minutes. More than this will do damage until you learn how to sit in ways that work with the body's way of doing things instead of against it.
Hope this helps
Touching my bracelet or ponytail holder on my wrist; it helps me to remember where I am. I practice and practice doing that same thing every time I have a flashback. It is getting closer to automatic now. It almost always helps to interrupt them.
I try to think of other things but I can't it doesn't go away its always gonna be there in my mind.
Nothing can stop a flashback. It just applies out of nowhere. There are plenty of things you can do to stop a flashback spiralling out of control.
In the language of Buddhist monks as it comes it will go. Just don't feed it.
I have been doing meditation and mindfulness as a Buddhist for a long time. What is second nature to me has been acquired over many years of practice.
Can I suggest you contact your local Buddhist group and see if the meditation practise works for you. There have been many many research papers written on the good effects of meditation and mindfulness. My experience of both meditation and mindfulness is that they cannot be learnt from books.
Hope this helps
The only thing i have found can help me is a breathing control system i learned ten years ago for addiction. Or apart from that getting back to where i feel most safe and at ease if i am outside when it happens to me. But that is just me and may be different for other people. Poohbear'
Sometimes if I am not too far into a flashback, I can bring myself out of one by changing my position. If I am sitting I will try to get up and stretch.
It's somewhat difficult to stop a flashback if I am in a dissociaitive state.
I just read to hold an ice cube
My therapists recommends tactile touch....getting back into my body....rubbing my hands together....walking around trying to get back in my body. Using my favorite fragrance to comfort me.......When I get triggered it comes on so fast and is so powerful it is an out of body experience and very dangerous. Makes me do crazy impulsive things.
Incredible anger......little impulse control. Very scary. I usually need to go find a dog or hug my dogs...that brings me back to center. I hate being triggered. Got me in big trouble at work....I usually cuss like a sailor.... Almost lost my job of 17 years because of my outburst.....it's like pouring kerosene on a simmering fire.....happens so fast. My counsellors keeps assuring me we can make these less and less...but sometimes I don't know. If I don't keep in tune with my stress level...I'm more vulnerable. Trying to learn what triggers me.....and become more aware when I am more vulnerable because of stress or feeling bad physically.
Had a major meltdown today.....good thing not at work. My dog is diabetic and won't eat. I'm afraid she is going to die soon and I can't seem to do anything to keep her alive. I've spent thousands of dollars and she will probably die sooner than later because I can not get her to eat. I've lost everyone in my life I love to death...including my fiancé two months before our wedding. I hate death. I hate that I can't stop it. I've been close to death four times...attacked beaten left for dead....at the OKC bombing...trapped under my truck as it ran over me...I've escaped death so far but I am terrified of death....and angry at it as well. Sometimes I just try to lie very very still and pray and pray for an angel to come and do a soul surgery on me.....
