I become hypervigilant beyond my normal and want to isolate away from family and friends. It just feels like something horrible is about to happen. In my experience, an emotional flashback causes me to feel nuclear war is about to begin, or I am in extreme danger. It is like living a nightmare while you are awake, with overwhelming sorrow, toxic shame, and a sense of inadequacy.įilled with confusing and distressing emotions from the past, an emotional flashback is extremely painful. Emotional FlashbacksĪccording to Pete Walker, emotional flashbacks are a complex mixture of intense and confusing reliving of past trauma from childhood. There is no information stored by the hippocampus to tell our amygdala that the danger has passed. Thus, our brain sends us into a flashback, where we re-experience the traumatic event as though it were happening in the here and now. When encountering a sensory stimulus (trigger) that reminds us of the original trauma we experienced, our amygdala over-reacts and sets up a cascade of chemical events in our bodies to get us ready to fight, flee, or freeze. Later, when encountering similar sensory input from our environment (triggers), we transport back to the original event and do not remember what caused the flashback to occur. Instead, these memories become jumbled and force our amygdala to always be on the alert to any clues that we might be in danger.Īfter the threat has passed, strong, negative emotions leave our brains with a hodgepodge of images, sounds, smells, and senses of what just happened. When the amygdala is over-stimulated by trauma, the hippocampus becomes suppressed, and the memory of that particular event can no longer become a cohesive memory. What Goes Wrong?Īnother vital role of the amygdala is the recognition of danger, as well as sending out signals to our bodies to prepare for the flight/fight/freeze response. However, traumatic events change this cooperative system into something quite different. Normally, the hippocampus and amygdala work together to form new memories that become encoded in the brain for quick access later. The hippocampus is vital for the formation of long-term memory and catalogs the details of our experiences, so that recall of those events is possible. This reaction prepares us for future encounters with the same or similar dangers. The fear-response created by the amygdala evolved to ensure the survival of mankind by encoding the information of the threats we encounter as memories. The amygdala is responsible for processing emotional information, especially fear-related memories. The key players during flashbacks are the amygdala and the hippocampus. To understand how flashbacks are such all-consuming and heart-wrenching experiences, we need to look at what is happening in the brain. The Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Flashbacks Surviving a Concentration or Internment CampĬlearly, complex traumatic-stress disorder results from a different kind of traumatization than PTSD, and healing may take decades or even an entire lifetime.However, CPTSD usually involves traumatic and long-term abuse: physical, emotional, or sexual in scope. These events, while highly traumatizing, are quickly resolved with emotional support from either friends/family, short-term psychotherapy, or both. Normally, PTSD involves experiencing traumatic events such as the following: One of the primary differences between PTSD and CPTSD is that post-traumatic stress disorder results from a single event, where complex post-traumatic stress disorder forms in relation to a series of traumatic events. The Differences Between Flashbacks from PTSD and CPTSDĬomplex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is a complicated and new diagnosis that has yet to appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). People experiencing flashbacks become transported back to the traumatic event, reliving it with all its sights, sounds, and fears as if it were happening in the present. Yet, flashbacks are not like a nightmare, where the person wakes to realize it was only a dream. You cannot choose when or where it will happen. Flashbacks are devastating to those who experience them, as they are suddenly and uncontrollably reliving something that happened in their past.įlashbacks are akin to vomiting when having a stomach virus. What Are Flashbacks?įlashbacks, in PTSD, are where one relives a traumatic event while awake. This piece will concentrate on flashbacks that are part of the lives of those who live in the shadow of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. However, flashbacks are a nightmare for those who have experienced extreme trauma in childhood or as an adult. Most of the time flashbacks are benign when they experience a trigger, such as the smell of fresh-baked bread, and it reminds them of their grandmother.
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