Dealing with body flashbacks

This article is triggering. I didn’t see a way to openly talk about this subject otherwise. I am limiting the most triggering information to a paragraph that I will mark with **** at the beginning and end and that can easily be skipped without effecting the comprehension of the rest of the text. Because we are generally speaking about the body, pain and traumatic memories it might still trigger memory and possibly body flashbacks. Always take full responsibility for your own well-being and stop reading if you get disoriented.

 

 

It is not rare for trauma survivors to feel sensations in our bodies that match our experience back in TraumaTime. Often that is pain in private regions, but it can include other forms of pain or pressure or other sensations and be located everywhere in the body. This is often called somatic flashback or body flashback. Trauma specialists consider it positive somatoform dissociation, indicating that it is a special kind of structural dissociation. It is not a hallucination or psychotic in nature. Psychiatrists still diagnose it as conversion disorder, which is hopelessly out-dated AND stigmatizing.

 

 

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One of the most common sensations is that of penetration, vaginal or anal or both, combined with sharp pain in the lower belly or a feeling of ripping or being cut open. This can be accompanied by the sensation of blood or other substances flowing down the legs or pressure inside the body. It is also very common to feel something in the mouth or throat, to gag or struggle to breathe, cough or feel like the throat is sore. It is possible to feel like someone is beating or cutting or burning or choking us. Sometimes marks of that spontaneously show on the skin. It is common to feel pressure where either hands or ropes or a body or other means held us down, often on the torso, wrists and ankles, but it could be anywhere and include the phantom pressure of a collar. It is possible to feel the sensation of surfaces on the skin or the temperature during a traumatic event or even like body parts are submerged in water or other substances.

There can be body flashbacks that are difficult to identify because the sensations accompany abuse, like extreme hunger, thirst, exhaustion from an adrenaline crash, muscles weakness, very shallow breathing or stillness, a hoarse voice like we have been screaming for a long time or the bodily feeling that we are dying that we might have felt after severe and long periods of abuse and near-death experiences. This is just a rough overview. Any sensation from TraumaTime might haunt us in the form of somatic flashbacks. If you experience any of that or something similar, I want you to know that it is normal. It is horrifying, but it is normal. Let’s move on to things that might help.

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I cannot explain how body flashbacks work. But I can give you some exercises you could try to reduce them.

 

First steps

Every successful intervention to stop body flashbacks starts with orientation and grounding.

Our body is telling us that we are back in TraumaTime in a pretty convincing way and we can easily lose touch with Today and slip into a dissociative state where we get caught in the flashback experience.

It is essential to look around, see what is really happening and realize that this is an old sensation. There are no abusers around. Nothing bad is happening to the body.

Sometimes it might help to look at certain body parts to see that nothing is there or touch them with our hands to sense what is actually there.

 

It usually helps to get more grounded when we do some short discrimination and tell ourselves all the differences we can detect between this situation and TraumaTime.

 

With DID, we need to make sure that the parts who experience any form of flashback at that moment get oriented and grounded, too. It might be difficult to get their attention, that is when I usually use The two Hands or unusual sounds like this.

 

Sometimes this is all that it needs. Smaller body flashbacks stop when we focus on what the body is really feeling today. The more present we are, the less our sensations will be influenced by TraumaTime. One more reason to make it a goal to get out of chronic dissociation of the body. It leaves us vulnerable in this area.

 

 

Basic tools

 

Mindfulness

The first thing we need to do when we are oriented and grounded but still feeling the intrusive sensation is disidentification. It means not being immersed in the experience; that only causes panic and extreme emotions like helplessness or despair that make us unable to act. We can achieve disidentification by mentally taking a step back to observe and describe things from the position of the distant observer. It pays off to practice this mindfulness exercise regularly, it is not taught to upset us. Only when we are oriented and our head is clear we can systematically approach the problem.

 

Self-care

Some suggest taking care of body regions like they are actually sick or wounded today and I never found any relief in that. It seems to me that this is working against my orientation and grounding that tells me that it is not real today. I cannot promise that it won’t help you though, so you might just as well try. If the source of the problem is a young side of our being who needs to feel the care, this would be the way to go.

 

Imagery

Imagery is commonly used to create relief. That might be a light exercise or a water exercise for a sense of cleansing from the sensation or to replace it with a different experience, like that of light or healing. You could also make up imagery that seems fitting for you. I sometimes imagine the intrusive sensation like knit-wear. I then start pulling a thread to unravel it, roll up the thread and contain it.

 

Breathing

Our body will automatically hold the breath when we are in pain, increasing the trauma experience of the moment, so breathing on purpose is important. You could combine a breathing exercise with imagery, too. Imagine the intrusive sensation as having a color or geometrical shape and break it down to little pieces. Then you can imagine breathing those out and breathing in something you would prefer, like peace or calm. It seems to work best when we inhale into the pain.

 

Medicine

For some people taking pain medication works. Make sure to keep track of what you have taken to avoid overdosing, especially when different parts are fronting. You could also imagine that a harmless substance, like vitamin C or candy or a spoon full of syrup, is really special medicine and that might work just as well. It is not really about the substance and more about the belief that it should work.

 

Counter-Sensations

It might help to create a tangible body sensation today to counter the intrusive sensation. This could be done by applying ice or warmth or brushing the skin. For me it works best to simply tense muscles in that area and release them. Humming can create a different sensation in the throat.

 

Time

When nothing seems to work you need to at least stay oriented and grounded and breathe to avoid getting lost in the memory. It will pass. It rarely lasts for very long unless it is part of an anniversary reaction or keeps getting triggered. Even anniversaries will pass, it just takes a bit longer. This is especially important to remember when our body tells us that we are dying. We just have to get through a couple of days, it will pass. If we don’t actively do anything to prevent it, we will survive.

 

Other approach

With DID it is worth checking if someone inside is responsible for the experience, either by being caught in it or as a means of punishment or because they believe that this is their job. The tools needed might not be those for body flashbacks but work with abuser-oriented or programmed parts and you need your T to help you with that.

 

 

Advanced

Don’t try any of the advanced tools without a T to support you. They need to be learned properly before you can use them for yourself. You cannot use advanced tools if you are still chronically dissociating your body awareness.

To try tools that are effective against more severe somatic flashbacks we need advanced skills in self-regulation, disidentification and especially guiding our thoughts like we practice it in mindfulness meditation.

You cannot take any of that lightly because we need to focus on the intrusive sensation. Don’t attempt this if you are not sure that you can stay grounded. We want to avoid an abreaction.

 

 

Pendulation

For pendulation we need to identify the area of the traumatic sensation, that is usually easy, and a resource. The resource should be a place in the body that feels good or at least neutral. That is why we need to be grounded in the body, it is important to have an area that we can sense well, so the body awareness must not be dissociated.

With chronic pain issues it can be difficult to find a neutral place, but it really doesn’t have to be big. I usually go for the earlobe.

We can then start by moving our attention and awareness to the resource area to mindfully experience it and make sure we are grounded. Then we start the pendulation movement with our attention and awareness and move it to the traumatic sensation. Don’t dive into the pool, just put your toe in. There is no need to go deep into that experience. Then we continue the pendulation by returning our attention and awareness to the resource area and make sure to feel that properly and get grounded there before swinging back to the trauma sensation. Repeat as often as needed.

You should not try this alone because you can easily get caught in the trauma experience and get stuck there. It can be an extreme effort to find back to the neutral area, the awareness is easily trapped in the pain. I would very much recommend to practice moving awareness on purpose like we do it in mindfulness meditation. It is a key competence for pendulation to work.

It takes a while before the traumatic sensation will be reduced or dissolved. If nothing happens after 5 minutes of pendulation it might not be the right tool for the moment. I usually experience some differences but it can take up to 20 minutes until a severe body flashback is dissolved during an anniversary reaction. It takes patience and the ability to stay focused.

 

This is the best tool I know to stop even severe somatic flashbacks because it supports integration. It is of limited use for whole-body experiences of unspecific body flashbacks like extreme exhaustion though.

 

If the source of the pain is a part who is causing it, pendulation might not make a difference. They might have reasons that seem vital to them and it might take some time to help them to shift their perspective.

In that case we would try the following exercise.

 

 

Pain focusing

For this exercise with work with the pain by focusing on it. It is not the most comfortable thing to do. That is why we need advanced skills in disidentification and the distant observer. We would get overwhelmed by emotions and memories otherwise. If you cannot focus on the pain without losing it, it would be better to simply return to Orientation & Grounding.

 

At first we can take a moment to relax as much as possible, breathe and check our grounding.

Then we could imagine that we are a scientist whose job it is to examine the pain and report on it.

To do that we can explore all the characteristics of the pain.

Pay attention to where exactly the pain is located, where the area begins and where it stops, where exactly the edge of the pain is located. Imagine it like a 3-dimentional area that you can report on.

A fair warning, the pain might increase a bit at first. That is when we need to breathe and stay in our position of the curious observer who wants to find out more about this.

When we have explored where exactly the pain is we can imagine a boundary around it. Maybe we can imagine building a wall around the edges or a fence, maybe we dig a trench around it, wrap it in plastic or find another way to surround it completely. Then we could be aware that there is an inside where there is pain and an outside where there is none. We have contained the pain in this place. We can make our boundaries as big, strong or deep as we need to, so that none of the pain can escape.

 

When we are sure of our boundary and our grounding we can start to explore the inside of the area by describing the characteristics of the pain. Does a color or shape come into mind? Would you describe it as warm or cold, as flat or uneven, is it static or does it move? Is it rhythmically pulsing or constant or random? What is the quality of the pain? Is it like a burning or stabbing or pins and needles or pressure or dull or sharp or tight or piercing or something else?

Don’t describe what happened that caused this pain in the past. Don’t imagine the reason for the pain, just stick to the quality of the pain you are feeling right now. We can easily be drawn into pictures and memories, but that is not what we are trying to do at this moment, we are just a scientist who tries to describe the experience for a medical report.

Now we can start to shrink the area by tightening the borders we have created. Very slowly the area can get smaller and smaller while we push the borders towards the inside. We can shrink it as much as possible. Sometimes that means that there is only a small spot of pain left that is a lot easier to handle than the big pain. Sometimes the pain might shrink and vanish altogether.

We can then return to orientation and grounding and either hold the little pain where we can handle it or thank our inner scientist for finding a way to remove it.

 

When reading this exercise tells you that it will be too difficult to handle, don’t try it. We only use this if nothing else works. It is not the most comfortable thing to do. When this was first suggested to us we thought the person had lost their mind. I wouldn’t bother to write it down for you if it didn’t work though. It can make bearing the pain a lot easier if it cannot be removed completely.

 

 

Negotiation

Pain focusing might offer the compromise you need to negotiate a truce with parts who believe that it is their job to hurt you. They can, but only in this shrunk little area. That way they won’t get in trouble for not doing their job and you have limited the trouble it is causing you.

Sometimes the detailed report of how the pain felt can convince parts that they have done their job well and it is finished now, the message came across, so they can stop now.

When I couldn’t identify a part to negotiate with I have totally called inside, telling them that thank you, I felt it, they can stop now.

Negotiations might help for the moment the pain occurs, but to solve the main problem behind it you need to work with your T.

 

 

I hope that this will give you ideas how to approach body flashbacks that match your current skills. Always remember that the experience will pass. When in doubt, always go for orientation and grounding.

 

 

 

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