Possible emotional flashbacks? (TW)

Hello again. First of all, this post might be triggering for some because I'll talk about flashbacks and what I think triggers them, so for those who are not comfortable with topics related to family please stay safe.

I begin saying that I do not remember my trauma; or at least, I just remember one of them, but not The Trauma that caused me to feel and experience thoughts and sort of breakdowns that I cannot explain. There are some sort of "proofs" that something happened when I was little (4 or 5 yo or so), because I remember that the insomnia and the nightmares began then. But I honestly never knew where a specific feeling comes from, and I've had it since I can remember. Before I began describing it (briefly I hope), I want to say that I still have little or no idea of what a flashback feels like. I think I've had minor visual and emotional ones of the medical trauma that I sort of remember, but they were never strong or pervasive as the other ones are. So because of this, if someone has had the experience of flashbacks with repressed memories or things like that, please let me know.

So, I noticed that there are periods in which this feeling is more present. These periods often coincide with summer, and I (almost always I think) experience it when I'm at home. It doesn't matter who I'm with, every member of my family can sort of "trigger" it. It often happens in the morning, and this I cannot explain why. It's like, I wake up, I see them and/or am with them, and if I have some sort of contact with them (even not physical) there's a risk that I'll experience it. The feeling is a sort of "freezing" one, meaning it sort of paralyzes me, and my stomach twists. I say it's pervasive because from my stomach it takes why whole body, and suddently I feel the need to lock myself away and to cover my ears. If somebody touches me, it often gets way worse. The weird thing is, I don't have images or words in my mind whatsoever, so it's only an emotional and impulsive thing. The thing that I consider weird is that even my little brother can trigger them, and I always thought that since he was born when I was 5, the feeling should have nothing to do with him.

I tried to explain this and my nightmares to my therapists, but none of them seemed to know where those came from and never dig into them (which it's sort of a good thing for me).
I don't know what to think, because it's a thing that upsets me most of the time, since this feeling never went away and keeps ruining the time I spend with my family every time.
This is why I wanted to name it with what it could actually be, but as I said, I almost never experienced something like this, so I never really knew.
Is there someone with thoughts about this? Do you think it sounds similar to something someone else experienced?

Hi Exul,

Emotional flashbacks are tricky I think, but they're actually more common than the kind of 'flashback' portrayed in media (where you get the audiovisual replaying of memory/events.)

For the longest time we didn't think we experienced any flashbacks because we never got that a/v memory replay thing you see on tv. We thought that's what a flashback was and since that never happened, we didn't think we had them. It took us a long time to realize that flashbacks can be purely emotional, or somatic, and then realized we've been having them for years!

I started a thread a few months ago about our experiences figuring this out:
dissociative-identity/topic204497.html

As for how it feels for you and what triggers it, that's going to be unique to your own experiences.

For us, we get different kinds of emotional/somatic flashback depending on who's triggered. Eg. Arin, Janet, Melissa, are the source of our fear flashbacks. Arin sometimes also brings physical pain with really bad ones. Claire and Ewan are sources of depression / despair / loneliness / abandonment flashbacks.

You mention that you don't know why the feeling could come from your little brother, but to me it seems like there's an obvious connection - you mentioned something must have happened when you were 4 or 5, and your little brother was born when you were 5. He may have had nothing to do with the original event, but he likely represents that time of your life. Someone inside is connecting him to the time when he was born, which was around the time something happened. Does that make sense?

As to what you can do about it, we found two techniques worked for us.

The first was 'grounding' excercises. Ground yourself in the present. You can focus on the time & date, to remind yourself that you are here in the present and not in the past, that you are safe, nothing bad is happening or is about to happen, etc.

We did this for a while and it worked pretty well most of the time.

The second thing was, when I realized the flashbacks were coming from insiders, I saw 'grounding' as treating the symptoms but ignoring the problem, i.e. a suffering part. So I started approaching it in terms of seeing the flashback as someone crying for help, and trying to give them the help they needed.

In the thread I liked, I explain in detail the what and how. What we do may not work for you, but it may give you ideas on how to address your own flashbacks.

We still get them and still do this by the way. A week or two ago we were in the grocery store when a strong fear-flashback came on, like a panic attack. Wound up curled up in a ball in our car in the parking lot, talking it through with the little inside who was upset. We got it sorted out, but it was 10 or 15 minutes of unpleasantness till it was resolved.

Edited to add:
Oops my mistake, the flashback thread was the start of figuring this out, but the actual longer resolution was in the second post of our journey thread:
dissociative-identity/topic205203.html#p2133847

Good luck!

Violet 1

I agree with Violet 1's advice on how to manage emotional flashbacks.

A flashback is a re-experiencing. That can mean re-experiencing sensory information of one or more sense so that could be like TV and film like to show a complete sensory emersion in the past or it can be smelling a scent that isn't there. It can also be re-experiencing past emotions or thoughts.

Often flashbacks are triggered by an association. The thing associated doesn't have to be bad and could even be positive in and of itself. For example in our system we have Nixie who is triggered by most things if I'm honest one of those things is if someone says they love us. If Ozalces says he loves us its a good thing he is telling us he cared for us but because our abuser told us that he loves us she associates the words with him and begins to panic.

VioletFlux wrote:You mention that you don't know why the feeling could come from your little brother, but to me it seems like there's an obvious connection - you mentioned something must have happened when you were 4 or 5, and your little brother was born when you were 5. He may have had nothing to do with the original event, but he likely represents that time of your life. Someone inside is connecting him to the time when he was born, which was around the time something happened. Does that make sense?

Actually yes, it does make a lot of sense! It's weird I didn't think about it like this before. I thought that all the people that may "trigger" that feeling had necessarily to do with the event, so I didn't consider him a possible source for that feeling. It's always been weird, connecting him to that period of time, because I don't remember a single thing about him being a baby. He, like my parents, are (almost) totally outside the memories from that period, but I think this may make sense too, since maybe I've tried to forget something in particular about that time?
I don't really know. All I have are theories and this is frustrating.
Do you think I could (or should) try to ask someone inside about this? If maybe someone considers my parents and my brother like a trigger for that period? Just to know who exactly is that remembers something, or that struggles the most with those memories (hope I explained myself).


As for the grounding techinques, I tried using them instantly when yesterday evening I (we?) was still feeling bad, and I kept repeating in my head reassuring stuff like (as you suggested) date and time, kept telling myself that we were safe and nothing bad happened that morning/day (yesterday), it was just a bad thought, etc etc.
Apparently it worked! I didn't expect it to at all and I don't even know why, but I'm grateful I tried. Hope this will help in the future too.
Thank you so much, I will keep searching for grounding techniques when things like this happen again. (and thanks for the thread!! I'm sure it'll help a lot)[/quote]

NyxX: thank you too. I hope I'll be able to figure out who exactly feels this emotions and how can I try and make things easier for us. From what I've seen, both bad and good things seem to trigger something for us too.

Good luck and I hope things won't get too hard for both of you, too