The tricky thing about flashbacks that are purely emotional is recognizing them for what they are. We are stuck in an emotional experience from the past. Yet the nature of the trigger would often justify that kind of emotion, just not the level of intensity and the duration. Over time we can learn to recognize the very specific quality of feelings that accompany an emotional flashback.
Characteristics:
- unusually strong emotion, doesn’t match the situation
- underlying sense of despair
- sense of overwhelm and victimization
- hopelessness, thinking there is no solution
- intensity is relatively stable, not coming and going in waves like normal emotions
- accompanied by an underlying stress response
- duration is longer than usual emotions, without intervention it can last hours and days
- sometimes accompanied by feeling small/young
To be able to identify emotional flashbacks quickly, we need to be familiar with stress responses and how normal emotions change and develop over time. When we examine our experience from the position of the observer, we can notice the differences and signs that something is off.
Attempting Orientation and Grounding or Emotion Surfing will not be very effective. It is possible to have a clear head and name 100 things we can see in the room, that doesn’t change the state that we slipped into. In my experience this is best resolved by treating it like a form of structural dissociation. We assume that at least a fragment of past memory got activated. Sometimes it is more than that and there is a full dissociative part inside who is stuck in re-experiencing and we get flooded with their emotion. It makes sense to approach this with parts work, no matter if the diagnosis is cPTSD or DID. Janina Fisher offer instructions on this in her book on fragmented selves that we need to adapt for DID. Then an intervention could look like this:
1 It is only a flashback!
Realize that you are having an emotional flashback. That means it isn’t about today, it is about the past. Describe the emotions you are experiencing and how they feel. How do you feel when you think of it as something belonging to the past? Maybe you can look inside and try to find the part who isn’t doing well right now. That could be an actual child part. In cases when things aren’t split off that much we can imagine that the old experience takes the shape of our past self so that we can talk to it and interact.
2 What does it remind you of?
Check in and ask yourself or the part/past self, if you can remember the situation from the past that fits the emotion. That could include situations that lasted for a very long time or were repeated in similar ways over time. Sometimes the appearance of the part can already give us a hint. Maybe their clothes tell us what is going on, they carry an item or they say something. Maybe the environment says it all. Try to get a clearer picture of what happened there without going deeper into the feeling.
3 What did you learn there? What does it need now?
Ask yourself or the part/past self, what lesson you learned in that situation, maybe about yourself or about other people. What thought stuck with you? What is the belief you picked up there? Maybe you can discuss that in therapy. And what are the needs that were neglected? Are those needs present right now? Try to find a gentle and understanding perspective for the despair that came up so painfully.
4 What can we do differently today?
Challenge the old belief. What difference does it make to think of it as an old belief? What has changed in the meantime? Are there different and new experiences with people, maybe even the person who triggered us today? Why is the old conviction not fitting into the scene from today? You can help inner parts to get more oriented or you could act in a way that could disarm and replace old lessons.Take care of the need, try to comfort, offer reparations (that could happen using imagery), ask what you can do to make the situation better, think about interventions to protect them, check what they need so they don’t have to be afraid. Make sure that the solution is noticed inside and ask it is enough or if anything else is needed. In most cases we can dissolve the flashback why reality-checking the belief that comes up or meeting the need.
Then we could move on to a discrimination exercise, more parts work or an exercise to release the tension from our body to manage the stress response. It usually needs a couple of different skills and exercises to resolve a triggered reaction completely.
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