Emotional Flashbacks, how do you cope?

Hi everyone! I keep popping back on and off with this forum. So hello once again! I was wondering what you guys might do to cope with emotional flashbacks, to be clear about what I’m asking here is the definition and what I'm referring to. Emotional flashback: flashing back to an emotional state without a clear memory of the event that caused the state. Experiencing the emotions tied to the traumatic event without remembering the event itself.

I had no idea I had been dealing with emotional flashbacks until I read the description and realized it had been something i was constantly dealing with. If anyone has any personal input its much appreciated. I have been trying to get myself out of those states just by recognizing what is happening which has been helping a lot and then doing self soothing and treating it like a flashback. Though sometimes looking back i can tell sometimes i just don't have the disdain sometimes to calm down enough and look at the situation from a third person perspective.

Whats your experiences with emotional flashbacks?
I find mine mostly revolve around anger which feels very weird i think because that emotion is very taboo for the system.

Thanks everyone!
-Scar

hi Scar this is little fairy
when bad person say bad things and I cry I will call a friend.
- Little Fairy

Hi Scar,

I used to get a lot of emotional flashbacks. Like yours, I never knew why I got them. I think the brain is trying to remember something that a part of you doesn't want to remember. I talked about those with my therapist after they had passed. But when a flashback hits you, that's the tricky part. I almost always have someone with me to remind me to try grounding. My emotional flashbacks almost always come with fragments of bad memories though.

You might've heard of this exercise. It has helped me sometimes with flashbacks when they're not at their worst. But when the flashback hits:

Find 5 things you can see,
4 things you can feel,
3 things you can hear,
2 things you can smell, and
1 thing you can taste.

I hope this helps even a little bit.

WindRiderFairy

Hey Scar,

We just figured out about emotional flashbacks last year, after like a lifetime of having them and being clueless what the ###$ was going on.

We got a webpage bookmarked that has dozens of different grounding techniques. We found a few on here that work for us, maybe you can find some that work for you.
http://did-research.org/treatment/grounding.html

Viola

I go for mindfulness, that is observation instead of diving right into the feeling.
then a reality check.
that is usually the key. then self-soothing.

Asti "forgot" to mention that she has an amazing website with all kinds of resources about things like this, and many others: dis-sos.com

We used to think writing was a waste of time. That is until emotional flashbacks took predominance. Then we realized we didn't have the vocabulary. We'd say we were upset. That's it. T gave us a starter list of emotions. We started by just going thru T's list and writing down what seemed to fit. Learned EFs really have a lot to reveal.

WindRiderFairy wrote:
You might've heard of this exercise. It has helped me sometimes with flashbacks when they're not at their worst. But when the flashback hits:

Find 5 things you can see,
4 things you can feel,
3 things you can hear,
2 things you can smell, and
1 thing you can taste.

and the mindfulness birdsong87 mentioned help us...

Thank you everyone this was very helpful it has helped a lot actually trying out some of the resources. I appreciate all the help.