Emotional Flashbacks

Click here for guided practice

Click here for inquiry from class

You wake up feeling anxious and mentally review your day. There is nothing in particular to be anxious about.

You hear a loud voice a few aisles over at the store and you flinch then hold your breath. You look over and it’s clear there is no danger to you, yet your heart is beating faster than usual and it takes several minutes to calm yourself.

You see a look of disgust on someone’s face and you immediately flush with shame.

Pete Walker calls these emotional flashbacks. They often don’t have an explicit memory component and we don’t realize what is happening. The amygdala (primitive brain) hijacks us back to the frightening and abandoned feeling-states of childhood. Emotional flashbacks are accompanied by inappropriate and intense arousal of the fight/flight instinct and the sympathetic nervous system. Typically, they manifest as intense and confusing episodes of fear, toxic shame, and/or despair, which often beget angry reactions against the self or others.

Read the complete article by Pete Walker here.

When we experience threat, we are activated into fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn. Our higher level brain goes offline. Pete identifies 13 steps to bring it back online. The tricky part is that we don’t recognize we are having an emotional flashback and we forget we are not helpless now. There are specific things we can do to come back into the safety in the present moment. Print out the list ahead of time and have it somewhere handy.

Cultivate somatic mindfulness, awareness of your body and thoughts. Monitor your internal environment for inner critic attacks, holding your breath, tightening your neck and shoulders, and other signs of distress. Do box breathing to break the trance. Use your eyes — look around the room for cues of safety and to bring yourself back into this moment where you are not in danger.

Become familiar with these Emergency Practices and use the guided practices when you recognize you’ve been hijacked.

Now, work through the 13 steps by reading them and/or listen to the 6 minute guided practice below.

13 Strategies for Flashback Management List

MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS (read full list with description on above link)

1. Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback.”
2. Remind yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present.”
3. Own your right/need to have boundaries.
4. Speak reassuringly to your Inner Child.
5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless — a safer future was unimaginable.
6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child.
7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out.
8. Resist the Inner Critic’s catastrophizing.
   (a) Use thought-stopping to halt its exaggeration of danger and need to control the uncontrollable.
   (b) Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.
9. Allow yourself to grieve.
10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support.
11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks.
12. Figure out what you are flashing back to.
13. Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized.

Participate in our community class Sundays 10AM Eastern for inquiry and sharing. Click here for link.
Join me Sunday at 1PM Eastern for a guided reflection on Insight Timer Live.