Tell me about emotional flashbacks...

[HeadAboveWater]

Why do they happen? What purpose do they serve? Where could I read or learn more about them? Thanks in advance for your time and patience in pointing me toward resources. I don't have conscious memory of having had them as an adult, but I had two this past week after a little over a year Out of the FOG.

In the first incident I had misplaced some jewelry. The logical thing to do would be to retrace my steps and think of where I left it. Instead I flashed back to a ring I had misplaced about 20 years ago when I was living in my mother's home. It was a gift from a boyfriend, and I hadn't seen the ring for months. My heart sunk knowing that I had lost something valuable. Entirely unrelated to having lost the ring, I was digging through a disorganized cabinet in search of something. It was a deep, dark cabinet stuffed with broken electronics, crumpled papers, board games that had missing pieces, and other detritus. I happened upon an old bag that belonged to my sibling and pulled it out thinking it might be useful to me. The bag was itself full of trash, so I set about emptying the compartments. In it I found the missing ring. At the time I was practically weak from the relief I felt. I popped the ring back on and never thought of it again. Looking back, it doesn't make sense. My sister never would have put my ring in her bag. I also know my sister would never store her bag in this odd cabinet. Within a second of remembering this lost ring, I knew my mother had tucked it into the bag and pitched it into the cabinet. (It was only the three of us who lived in the house.) At best, she was careless. At worst, she was cruel.

A couple of days later, I had my father to my house. He noticed that an art project we had made together needed repair. I mentioned that I intended to work on a similar project in the coming year and that might give me the opportunity to repair what we had made together. My mind then went to something I had made with my father. One of them was a jewelry box for my mother. I designed it myself and built most of it. We probably spent 20 hours or more crafting it to professional standards. I then remembered how she quickly broken the chain support on the box. I also haven't seen that box since she moved houses over a decade ago. It's likely gone for good, much like the pricey pendant I saved up for as a teen, gifted to her, and last saw lying in pieces in a junk drawer.

Most of my mother's behavior was neglectful. In a few cases she had angry outbursts, one of which turned physical. I think I had been working hard on giving her the benefit of the doubt and being empathetic toward her for a variety of reasons. There's something about the way she treated objects connected to me, though. It's like I can excuse the way she treated me as a person, but the way she treated objects is harder to explain away. It seems like more of a deliberate pattern and a sign of her feelings toward me. It's not the stuff I care about, though it would be nice to have the things she damaged and discarded; it's that it feels like me she discarded by proxy. For some reason I was really feeling that in my gut this week.       

[RavenLady]

I'm still learning too but Pete Walker is excellent on this. If you haven't already done a deep dive into his book "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving", I can highly recommend it. Here's an article he wrote too. http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

My understanding is that in the case of PD parents and child abuse & neglect, emotional flashbacks reflect our unprocessed feelings when we were kids stuck in the abusive environment and unable to get free. We had to stuff everything awful because it wasn't safe to work through it then and we probably didn't have the tools anyway. Being trapped in the abusive & emotionally abandoning environment basically shaped our brains and arousal systems in unhelpful ways so we get mega-doses of fear and other negative emotions that can be disproportionate to our current situation. When a trigger reminds us unconsciously of what it was like for us back then, we sort of time-travel to that scary, lonely, damaging space, it freaks us out and we develop unproductive coping strategies. Until we heal we will keep going back. They can last for minutes, hours, or days. I think I've had them last weeks. Weeks of dissociation and really awful feelings and pain. They are a sign that somebody hurt us in a really significant way, whether emotionally, physically or both. The good news is our brains are plastic and we can heal.

Makes sense to me that your PDm's mistreatment of items that were precious to you would be connected to her mistreatment of you, and this would be very disturbing to young HeadAboveWater. Sounds like you have good insight and it's worth listening closely to yourself on this.

[1footouttadefog]

The destruction, mistreatment and neglect of items related to you, as you have described, are in my estimation loaded.

These actions reflect more than a momentary interaction you may have had at any given time with your motjer.

For example as you said you gave the benefit of the doubt out of empathy.  Perhaps An argument could have reflected her having other issues at the moment.  An overreaction could have indicated being overwhelmed with anxiety etc etc.

But to harm am inanimate object in a symbolic way as a pattern, indicates a lot of underlying emotions, and is heard to explain away. 

[HeadAboveWater]

Thank you, Raven Lady for the Pete Walker resource. I've been checking it out.

Thank you also, 1footouttadefog. Your perspective helped me to better understand my feelings about these objects.

[treesgrowslowly]

I agree with Ravenlady s post.

I'll share what I've been experiencing with emotional flashbacks.

My big point though is that my flashbacks have gotten 'easier' to experience since doing EMDR with a T who understands childhood neglect.

The therapists I met before the EMDR T did not understand neglect. Overall they assumed that I could enjoy my life without grieving my childhood. Nothing they did with me actually helped in the long run and they saw flashbacks as cognitive events not somatic and emotional ones. They wanted to talk about my past not help me process it physically.

Nowadays, when my body knows its safe to feel an emotion, it does. The emotions I felt after years of abuse were anger and frustration which are very hard to express because of confusion and projection. Most people will run for the hills if you show them how angry you are. With EMDR treatments my body started to feel safer to express grief and sadness.

Throughout my life, all emotions had anxiety sticky-ed to them because of the emotional abuse and neglect metted out my by parents.

I could not grieve or express myself as someone who had lost something, which is what is emotionally honest. I lost something dear and grief is about processing ones loss.

As my body has felt safer more often, after EMDR , and a tonne of work to stay with my self instead of focus on others, I have had the emotional flashbacks that bring up tears easily, and sometimes daily. I finally feel like I am grieving, which is not the same as dissociation, or anger, the two states my body went into to protect me. Our bodies are very very wise.

I'm currently processing a flashback to a pretty significant experience of neglect I endured in my teens. Before EMDR and feeling safer than I had been feeling, this event didn't reigster as neglect the way it is now today. Now that I feel safer, in a way that a child of two PD parents never does, the flashbacks come so that I can experience emotional honesty with myself.

One thing an abuser does is deny their abusive behaviours and the effect of their abusive behaviours on the target. As their child I internalized their denial, to survive. And now in feeling safe from their abuse my body can process things with honesty. I find that my emotional flashbacks contain truths about who I am and what I've survived and it has gotten easier and easier to accept them as part of my grieving process.  I no longer need to deny myself.

The denial was to protect me from their abuse, it serves no purpose and loving parents don't require their children to deny their emotions.

More and more, the things I say to myself about myself are loving. I take good care of my self when a flashback happens. One of my abusers used to like to tell me that I dont have emotions. As a child I had no idea what to do when she said that. As an adult I know what I lost, and I grieve this and give myself as much love as I can. The other day I had a flashback about how much I love/d her. I cried.

And the emotion moved through me within a few minutes as I lay there, weeping as I thought about her and crying. All by itself my body eventually said, "ok self... let's go to the present and be in the day again".

[RavenLady]

treesgrowslowly, your post is poignant and illuminating to me. Thank you for describing your journey into the somatic aspects of your healing. I'm going to need to chew over your insight about anxiety being stuck to all the other feelings. I relate.

Also, that most people run for the hills when they glimpse anger. Most, but, pivotally, not all. It's understandable. Anger's not the prettiest of emotions and obviously can make creatures violent. It's meant to drive threats away. DH and T have been present for my (nonviolent) anger and some girlfriends have glimpsed it without running away too. Being seen as a momentarily angry, but still somehow lovable, woman, is its own kind of healing. But anger freaks out people who haven't gone through something like this and don't understand that anger is for escape. 

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Ravenlady,

Thank you for your sharing. I almost didn't post my post because it's a lot of new honest insights for me to know about myself. But then sites like this are where I've found the most understanding in society about my experiences.

I in turn will sit with how you wrote about anger because the way you phrased it immeditate resonated. I agree with what you said about anger and I am also processing the hurt and anger towards someone who really let me down early in my recovery process. Taking this back to the original post topic, I keep having flashbacks of times I spent with her, where I didn't feel safe telling her how I felt. I really resent that now. I dont see her anymore but as she was a family member she is still around. I crave emotional flashforwards with her where I am honest with her and she is mature and responsive and supportive towards me.

I keep telling muself that she cannot "handle the truth" (remember that famous movie line) and she comes to mind when I think about people who needed me to hide my anger because they couldn't support me at all in any way.

I am also at the end of a long time with a T I liked but who is no longer making me feel safe. My last session with her she really resisted letting me emote around her, and she actually broke the moments of vulnerability with jokes she made to break my focus. I'm kinda mad at her too a bit! But life goes on and there are other Ts and it is normal to move to a new T as we change and grow.