Dealing with Flashbacks

What are Flashbacks?

Flashbacks are raw, unaltered memories that suddenly enter your conscious mind. A flashback can strike at any moment out of the blue, or it can be triggered by a smell, taste, feeling, word, situation, or almost anything that is personal to your unique situation of where and how the abuse happened. Only you have these specific triggers. Flashbacks strike without notice and they are painful. It’s like being all snuggled up in bed asleep and then getting thrown into a sea of ice water. The pain is very real and it is all-enveloping. You freeze at that moment. You can’t think or breathe. You are back in the throes of being catastrophically hurt. At that moment you are that abused 5-year-old. You see, feel, hear and experience that trauma as if it was happening right then at that moment. It is harrowing!

Recognition

It took me a few years to get settled into my new life. I had to move around quite a few times in those early years and I discovered what I wanted and where I wanted to be as I made my own way through my life. Once I was settled and felt safe with friends all around me, I started feeling odd. My brain kept tuning out from the present to crazy flashing, terrifying feelings and I had nightmares. A lot of them! They kept on coming when I least expected them. After a few weeks of trying to make sense of what I was feeling, I started writing down what I saw and felt. I discovered that journaling helped little by little. The more I wrote in those early weeks and months, the more I “felt” as the memories started flashing back clearer. The flashes started to become longer and more terrifying. I started looking back at my writing and I managed to piece together some of it. I resisted for a long time to comprehend that these were flashbacks from my own life. I was not mentally ill like I had been told so many times by my abusers. These were real memories.

Realization

Once I recognised that the flashbacks were from my own life, the floodgates opened. I started flashing back to some really heavy traumatic memories. Memories that my brain had forgotten until then. I had no defence against these. The flashes came when I was shopping in the mall when I was playing sports with my friends, and even when I was in class at college. I had started dating and I was even flashing during sex. The flashbacks were agonizingly painful and I needed confirmation about whether these flashes were actually real. How could I do that? How could I go up to my abusers and say: Hey, I remember you used to rape me when I was 5, do you remember it too? Did it actually happen? I started to doubt myself because of course, I had no desire to travel back to my home city and start tracking down and asking questions to dirty old men. No, I needed concrete evidence like the written kind. There was one way I could find out the truth about my abusive childhood. I witnessed two murders when I was 8 years old. I knew the victim’s names and I knew where they took place. I needed to read those old newspapers from the 80s.

Libraries have old archives and these proved to be a gold mine for me who was seeking the truth. I found exactly what I was looking for and I remember feeling angry that the papers had not written all of the details. It was these “details” that I knew which made me realise that these murders did in fact take place and I had been there. How else could I know all those details that were not in the paper? I had seen them so clearly in my flashbacks. It was not easy for me to see those articles in print. They hit me hard and I was journaling more than ever. My feelings were pouring out into my journal. All of it, the way I felt, the pain, the shame, the hurt, and the survivor’s guilt. I was all alone and I had no therapist or friend who knew the truth that could help me. It was just too painful to come to terms with for me. I needed time to digest the truth. I got angry and I went to the police about everything. That was something I had to do to get justice for the two families who had lost their loved ones in the worst possible way. I considered traveling to the families and telling them how the murders happened but I worried about my own safety and decided against it. I decided to let the cops deal with it all and leave it firmly in my past. I needed to move on.

Dealing with Flashbacks

Once realization had hit me, the flashbacks continued constantly. I also had nightmares most nights. Until one day, they stopped and I was thinking “whoah” is that it, now? Can I finally leave all of this behind me? Have I remembered everything?” Of course not! They carried on after being triggered. It was a bit like a flood had hit me and now I was dealing with the rest of the water. My brain was releasing the memories one at a time.

Reading about abuse and trauma

I realised that I needed help to deal with the flashbacks and I went to my trusted friend, the library. I have always liked to read and find out information and so I tackled my flashbacks the same way. I decided that by reading up on abuse and trauma, my own experiences would simply “go away”. How wrong could I have been! Reading about trauma only magnified my own memories and I remembered a lot more about the abuse itself. Little things were deeply embedded in my brain. I started by reading a book called: “The Courage to Heal” By Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. I then worked through Laura Davis’ follow-up workbook with the same title. Working through my trauma was difficult and it took me a few years but it helped me.

There was one good thing that I took comfort in knowing and that was that I was not alone. I had never thought that other children had suffered like me. It was a revelation. I started reading a lot of survival stories and just knowing that I was not alone helped me. I also started to understand why I was acting the way I was because I was not ill. That was another huge step forward in my healing.

The Scuba diving Method

I discovered this method when I was at a Lamaze class whilst pregnant with my first child. It is a method to cope with pain during childbirth but I found it to be really helpful when dealing with a particularly traumatic flashback. I have used it many times since.

Imagine you are a scuba diver, and you need to dive deep into the ocean into a cave to get a pearl. You really want the pearl because it is beautiful. As you dive deeper into the water, the pain of the depth hits you and it gets worse but you ignore it because you need that pearl. The pain gets worse and worse and then you see the pearl, grab it and swim back up to the surface. I use this method but instead of being a diver, I imagine something happy to reach for or something that I have achieved. It is a little bit like in the Harry Potter books/movies when Harry is attacked by the dementors, and he has to perform a Patronus charm in the form of a stag. His stag is so happy it scares away the dementors. If this is something that you think might help you when you flash back to something really painful then go ahead and try this.

Grounding

I finally took the leap and went to a trained psychiatrist for counselling. I asked for specific help on how to deal with my memories as they kept triggering in all sorts of places. I wanted some magic cure on how to stop them but unfortunately, repressed memories don’t work like that. They have to come out one way or another and ignoring them only make them come more forcefully.  I learned about a strategy called grounding. Grounding is a method that anchors you to the present moment and it can stop the flashback from lasting long. In effect, you take back that control again. I learned that when a flashback hit me, I should try to anchor myself to the present moment by reciting to myself all that I could sense. I used my 5 senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. This took me a lot of practice! Once I got the hang of it, I found that I could manage my flashbacks better just by trying to remind myself where I was, and what I could see, hear feel, and smell. I also sometimes used to recite my age and the year to distance myself from the abuse. It happened but it was a long time ago. Give it a shot and see if this will work for you too!

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