How do people deal with flashbacks? It's like they come out of nowhere, and suddenly I'm in a very bad place. I could be having a great day, then all of a sudden, I'm reminded of a past trauma, and I'm back to rock bottom.
I want so badly for it all to stop, but I know it may never stop. I can't control when they come up. I think maybe it's time for me to see a therapist who specializes in trauma. I've only just come to the realization with my current therapist that I have PTSD, so this is all quite new to me. I just want to get over it, but I know it's not that easy.
How do you all deal with past traumas?
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puppypancakes3
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Hi there, i can hear your struggle and hope you have family and friends around to help support you. Remember PTSD takes time to recover from and cannot be rushed, i know because i tried repeatedly. Are you getting professional support i.e. talking about what happened and how it affects (you)! Try and find something you enjoy that can be a distraction that makes your body and mind stronger (i ramble - walk) getting out in countryside where it quiet and peaceful, can go to pub afterwards sometimes or not, there is no pressure to attend. Please be kind to yourself because the ptsd is due to a trauma, the symptoms may play out time and time again and leave you exhausted etc. Read the Headway information, i found it spot on and stopped blaming my difficulties on myself. You will walk your own pathway, some will be bumpy and you may fall down, get up come on here and get support as well as from family and friends. Remember some things take time but you will get to a better place. I live with PTSD but it does NOT define me.
When Dr. Dan Siegel talks about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and integration in trauma recovery, he explains PTSD symptoms as pulling survivors between the two extremes of a riverbank: On one side is rigidity and on the other side, chaos.
I know from my own PTSD struggle (which went on for over 25 years before I finally healed), with PTSD you feel out of control so often, so many times and in so many ways that eventually – or even right away – it’s easy to slip into a mode of just giving in to the chaos. (If you’ve felt this way, too, leave me a simple "yes" in the comments so I know I’m not alone!)
The problem with giving into the chaos is that when you do that--when you allow yourself to swirl along without any attempt at finding a way to steer--recovery becomes more and more out of reach.
Reclaiming your ability to make choices and take actions is critical. How do you do that? One way is to look at how being intentional works in mindfulness. I sat down to chat with my colleague, Megan Ross, the Trauma Therapy Coordinator at Timberline Knolls to chat about these two ideas.
Putting Mindfulness and Intention into Action
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the intended awareness that one develops of the present moment. It’s not just becoming aware, but it’s having clarity around your awareness so that your awareness can develop into regulation and organization. Awareness itself can be a stepping stone and it’s incredibly useful, however it’s not necessarily action oriented so to have intention around awareness, around the present moment ends up providing you with the next layer of mindfulness being able to work for you.
We have a tendency during, and even after, trauma to get stuck in the freeze response and paralysis. We stop acting and live in default mode. You are activating the recovery experience when you see the difference between awareness--which is not action-oriented--and intention, which is.
Historically, mindfulness comes from an Asian perspective. The root of mindfulness is how to have ‘right being’ or clarity of being, or purity in being. So, there is an added element of being aware and one of our translations for that is intention. To have intention around your awareness so there is reason with it and purpose, and to develop purpose through the trauma recovery process is, in fact, what many of us struggle with.
How do we redefine our own purpose through recovery? Mindfulness, as a practice as well as an orientation to the way you are in the world. If you have intention with it, and you have clarity and purity with it, then you are turning over that leaf toward a new purpose. That new purpose lives inside of the present moment through mindfulness.
Let’s get a working definition for term intention. I love that word. I use it a lot in the work I do with PTSD survivors because it can be so useful in terms of helping them shift out of feeling powerless and into feeling powerful because being intentional is all about reclaiming your ability to choose which, when followed by an action, shifts you out of a mentality focused on victimhood or submissiveness. What do you mean when you use the word, "intention?"
Knowing why it is you engage in the behaviors and the experiences that you do then it is very easy to ‘float’ and the float can be experienced as dissociation, a disconnection between yourself and the relationships or the place that you’re in. So, to place intention in there, you are effectively aligning the purpose of yourself in the moment.
I’ve written previously about PTSD symptoms and how mindfulness can help. It’s a powerful, and yet very simple, process that can yield incredible results in a survivor trying to reclaim a sense of calm, control and connection. Most especially in how it allows you to build a practice of exactly what Megan identified: giving you a purpose in the moment. With purpose comes focus, and with focus comes control.
All of this goes a long way in laying the groundwork for what to do in those critical moments when you want to interrupt or prevent PTSD flashbacks. How to do that will be the subject of my next post. (Cliffhangers are the worst, I know, but bear with me as this post is already getting too long!)
Recently I wrote about how to stop PTSD anxiety, flashbacks and panic from the perspective of putting mindfulness and intention into action. My colleague, Megan Ross (Trauma Therapy Coordinator at Timberline Knolls) and I had a whole conversation about this and I wanted to share her insights with you.
But there was a cliffhanger: Once you understand PTSD symptoms and how mindfulness can help change your physiological experience, the question arises, "What do I do now?" Specifically, what can you do to interrupt or stop flashbacks?
Megan Ross and I talked about this too. See what you think about the tips that we covered.
Putting the Theory Into Action
Once you understand PTSD symptoms and how mindfulness can help change your experience, the question arises, "How do I stop PTSD anxiety, flashbacks and panic?" To continue our conversation, I told Megan what I was thinking about the effects of trauma. Namely, everything feels like so much chaos and we feel so powerless. Building on our previous discussion of intention and purpose, I agreed that we can start shifting into feeling powerful (vs. powerless) through making choices and taking actions. Then, taking the idea of being intentional with awareness, I asked her perspective on these questions I hear so often,
“How do I stop a flashback? How do I manage a moment where I feel everything’s out of control? What do I do when I feel like I’m floating?”
I asked Megan how someone applies mindfulness in answer to those questions. And, how we can use mindfulness to interrupt, prevent or stop a flashback. This is what she said:
A couple of points. One reason why a definition of mindfulness is somewhat amorphous or challenging is because mindfulness itself is an experience, or an “experiential knowing.” You have to put action into mindfulness. It’s not just a theory we can hope we’re doing. You have to actually become aware of yourself through sensory awareness and becoming aware of the world around you through orientation.
There are a couple ways that assists in the anxiety, panic and flooding experience, which can lead to flashbacks. Another point of mindfulness is that it’s a muscle you have to develop. So, interrupting panic, anxiety or a flood is providing a worked muscle to end up orienting back to the environment around you; being able to become aware of sensory information that is coming into you and beginning to slow and pause.
A really effective way that this ends up working is through the idea of a panic or anxiety attack: Mindfulness is being able to interrupt that process by pressing a pause button inside of that process to end up developing space. That space then has the ability to either shift the thought or relieve the adrenalin dump, which shifts the emotional response.
One of the ways you can develop that yourself is by noticing something that really feeds you. That is, creating pause and space in the cycle of a panic attack by imagining something that makes you feel good.
So that is one way of approaching interrupting a flooding situation. You can use any focus favoring any of your senses: sight, smell, sound, touch, or taste. The point is to reorient yourself to the present moment that you are experiencing rather than the thought, the adrenalin and the emotion tied to the panic.
So, what do you think? When you put the theory of mindfulness into continual practice you can imagine how the thought/adrenalin/emotion process gets hijacked (in a good way), which allows you to reclaim control in the moment. Successfully building the muscle means practicing mindfulness in low stress moments, which will make it easier to access and utilize in more challenging circumstances.
Let me know what you think of this, how it works for you and other ideas of how to stop PTSD anxiety, flashbacks and panic by leaving a comment. We're all in this together; share your voice with me.
I have PTSD, been though many therapies, and nothing has worked. May I ask you a question. Have you had on traumatic event, or many? If you have had one event then easier to get thought it. If you have many it’s harder. I have many triggers, looking at a picture, smelling something, someone treating me badly. What my PTSD therapist has me do is have me sit in a chair, look across to the chair in front of me empty, say what I want to my abusers, scream , yell, even act you you slapping hm, what ever you want, it’s does give you a sense of relief at the time, and saying what you wanted to say at that time. But It doesn’t last, here are some of therapies you might want to try. Of coarse there is talk therapy, then there’s sound therapy, light therapy,, meditation, TMS, A Phycatrics can only send you someplace for the TMS therapy . The best thing for me is to surround myself with people that really love me, and have a lot of laughs, and fun. ❤️
Thank you for your reply. I've had many traumatic events from living with someone with addiction and witnessing several traumatic incidents, so I have what they call complex PTSD. I understand it can be more difficult to treat, but I have faith that things will get better.
I'd highly recommend looking at somatic trauma therapy. Somatic means having to do with your body. Research is revealing how important it is to work with the body in healing trauma. The sensations you feel (whether you are aware of them or not) are telling you something and are in your _body_, not your mind or thoughts (though we often start having thoughts because of what our body is feeling). Talking only can help so much. Sensations can get stuck in your body, keeping you in that traumatized state. Some different somatic trauma therapies are Somatic Experiencing, Neurofeedback, and many others. Google search "somatic trauma therapy." Some people to look into are Peter Levine, Bessel van Der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Dan Siegel, and Diane Poole-Heller. Peter Levine is fantastic for understanding trauma and memory and for shock trauma. Gabor Maté is fantastic about ongoing traumatic stress and what it does to our bodies and about addiction. Bessel van Der Kolk is amazing on childhood trauma (CPTSD) and psychiatry. Dan Siegel is really interesting about trauma with relationships. Diane Poole-Heller worked with Peter Levine for many years and so she is great with shock trauma and has specialized in developmental and attachment trauma. If you don't know what kind of PTSD you have, I'd start with Peter Levine. You can listen to any of these people on YouTube and they have also written books. I saw a talk therapist for years, and yes, it did help in many ways. But real healing has not come until I started looking into work that involved my body. Hang in there.
This may interest you. There is something called fascia. This is the body tissue that joins everything together. In the fascia are thousands of nerve endings which feed its state into the brain. The brain acts on the state of the fascia.
The international conference on fascia was at Harvard medical School in 2007. Fascia is the bit that medical students throw away when they do their dissections. We feel in the body we do not feel in the head. We can change our feelings by moving.
I have to the conclusion that certain therapists re-enforce trauma by causes us to stop moving when we are sitting in front of them. We talk to a friend and we move freely and the problem we have becomes less.
Thanks, John. Yes, I am very aware of fascia. Thank you for what you shared. Very relevant. A woman named Kathy Kain (who doesn't have a huge web presence but who is VERY skilled in working with the body) is someone I forgot to mention. (She does training under "Somatic Practice." There are quite a few folks who specialize in doing this kind of therapy. I think they are getting a kind of practitioner list.)
Anyway, she talks a lot about that. Basically, she teaches people how to use touch to help heal trauma. Fascia is one of the areas she focuses on. Yes, our fascia also contains and reflects our trauma. And, as you said, it runs throughout our bodies.
And yes, stopping moving, becoming more rigid, tensing our muscles (which attach to our fascia, right? so that pulls on the fascia), constricting our bodies are all things that happened to a traumatized person and a traumatized nervous system.
It is possible that sitting and just talking about things could reinforce that "holding" pattern, particularly if it is not seen by the practitioner so it can be interrupted.
Movement is another current discovery in working with trauma. There are trauma-informed (those are the key words if you or someone you know is looking for someone) yoga teachers, dance teachers, etc. I've gotten interested in noting that some talk therapists are beginning to do therapy while walking or hiking. This is a great way to do talk therapy. Moving.
Many thanks for the reply. I have also looked up "Nervous system regulation."
You say: "Some talk therapists are beginning to do therapy while walking or hiking." This sounds like a great idea.
You say: "Movement is another current discovery in working with trauma." Movement therapy is actually hundreds of years old. Many men engaged in it. Although they did not call it movement therapy.
Got lost when Freud and others discovered ways of making lots of money by putting people on a couch.
Haha. I didn't say movement therapy is new, though it sounded like that. Just that we are "discovering" it recently--from a research standpoint. _Re-discovering" would have been more accurate. Embodiment is very, very ancient. Yep. It got lost.
Oh, and I forgot! An important phrase. "Nervous system regulation." Try looking that up. When you go through trauma(s), your nervous system will learn responses that are there to keep you safe, but that can really get in the way later. Triggers are an example of this. Smelling a smell. Seeing something. Your body is literally responding to the things that are "attached" to your trauma. Nervous system regulation can help you clear those attachments. Good luck. Small steps. Lots of compassion for yourself in this process.
You have asked the question: "How do you all deal with past traumas?". My answer is to leave them alone.
The trauma has happened. There are multiple reasons why the trauma has happened. The more you probe the more different reasons can be uncovered. Often it is not possible to determine what reason is the right one and what reason is the wrong one.
The thing of concern is what is happening now. You remember something and you have a flashback. The flashback is not very comfortable and you want to get rid of it. So you get tense and the tenser you get the more uncomfortable you become. You are caught in a positive feedback loop which re-enforces the trauma you are experiencing in the present.
What can you do? Ground yourself in what your body is experiencing and enjoy the ride. Examine the territory of the way the body is reacting. Observe it. As it comes it will go.
What I am saying is not possible to think of in the middle of an attack without some sort of training. What is training? Have a look at moving meditation.
There is something called fascia. This is the body tissue that joins everything together. In the fascia are thousands of nerve endings which feed its state into the brain. The brain acts on the state of the fascia. The fascia can enter into a particular state and the brain responds by having a flashback. So instead of concentrating on trying to stop the flashback change the state of the fascia by moving gently in particular ways. You have to experiment to discover what these ways are. It takes time to investigate.
Here is a YouTube video on moving meditation given by a Buddhist monk. I like moving meditation because it can change the fascial state though movement.
Hey puppypancakes3, I hope the download dump of information there from me didn't overwhelm you. When you are first learning about trauma and discover that you were/are traumatized, it can be overwhelming. Though I gave a list of people to check out, and other people had good info too, please take care of yourself around checking the info out. Maybe start with one person. Or one topic. Let yourself process it a bit. I found that educating myself about trauma was really helpful. It made me feel much more normal and not like a person with some terrible "disorder." Do go slowly and honor any feelings of overwhelm that you get by backing off, going slowly, and stopping any time you feel that. Little bits.
John's right, meditation is great; I'd highly recommend the moving kind too. It can be really difficult to go into our thoughts and body with our attention. If you find yourself having a tough time with it, for _any_ reason, please find yourself a trauma-informed meditation teacher.
Take care.
I try to ground myself by naming objects or colours in my view. I say things out loud if I'm alone, such as "I am safe" and I also hold on to something, whatever solid object is near, or a piece of my own clothing, which helps to bring me back into this reality.
I hear you and I honestly wish I could say how I coped, I never really did or have. It’s been 8 years and I still get them. Nowhere near as often and they don’t affect me half as much, but I didn’t get any help or support after so that’s probably why. I only recently had the useless 8 sessions that the GP refers you to but she was awful. Planning to go private now. CBT is meant to help with coping strategies but the list for that is endless too. Plus I’m disabled so has to be over the phone. I hope you get some help with it soon x
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Just that we are "discovering" it recently--from a research standpoint. _Re-discovering" would have been more accurate. Embodiment is very, very ancient. Yep. It got lost. 
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