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Had A Bad Emotional Flashback?

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Kintsugi

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So, last night I got extremely, extremely trashed at my friends' house with a few other people (two of whom I'd just met and didn't know at all).

Please refrain from telling me to stop drinking. I know I've been drinking too much. I know it's a response to being under a lot of stress. I know it's not helpful. And these sorts of situations wouldn't happen if I wasn't getting hammered 1-3 times a week.

Everything was fine for awhile. It's like it hit me all at once. I also had eaten very little yesterday, which didn't help. Anyway, I went to the bathroom, where I puked several times and also peed I guess, and I suppose I was really truly gone, because when I went to dry my hands after washing them, I still hadn't pulled up my pants. My friends' door doesn't close all the way due to a bathmat on the floor and the way their towel rack hangs on the top of the door, so I go to dry my hands, trip on my pants, attempt to catch myself by grabbing the towels, and the whole towel rack comes flying off, flinging the door wide open, at which point I apparently stumbled backwards about 10 feet, falling into the wall and breaking the toilet roll holder clear off the wall in the process.

I'm taking this all in in a matter of seconds when this dude I don't know appears in the doorway, stares at me, wide-eyed, disappears, and I hear him say something like, "She's naked" (not accurate, but okay).

I get up, close the door, secure my pants. My female friend knocks on the door, I open it, and I don't know what the f*ck happened. The next thing I remember, she's taken me to her bedroom, and I am sobbing. I say over and over things like, "I didn't mean to. I just tripped." Just on a loop. She told me today that this went on for about 15 minutes, and then she took me home, because I was flipping out about getting back to my house.

I don't remember all of the details of last night, but I do remember how I felt when I was sobbing. I just had this intense, completely disproportionate emotion flooding through me. Normally, I would have just laughed it off, but I was a disaster. I felt panicked, intense fear, and I just couldn't pull myself together.

I'm assuming I experienced an emotional flashback. It was f*cking terrible and embarrassing and I felt like so much shit when I woke up. I was mortified.

Was this an emotional flashback? I definitely felt powerfully regressed. It was horrible. :sorry:
 
I don't know, but minus the drinking, it sounds like something that could have happened to me. But it's not something I'd have previously thought could be called a flashback. I'll often have the same emotions flood through me, intensely, as when I was on the ship and going through what I went through. Is that a flashback?
 
I believe it is.

I have come to call these reactions, typical of David and of many other clients over the years, emotional flashbacks—sudden and often prolonged regressions ("amygdala hijackings") to the frightening and abandoned feeling-states of childhood. They 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. When fear is the dominant emotion in an emotional flashback, the individual feels overwhelmed, panicky or even suicidal. When despair predominates, it creates a sense of profound numbness, paralysis, and an urgent need to hide. Feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also common in emotional flashbacks. Such experiences are typically overlaid with toxic shame, which, as described in John Bradshaw's Healing The Shame That Binds, obliterates an individual's self-esteem with an overpowering sense that she is as worthless, stupid, contemptible or fatally flawed, as she was viewed by her original caregivers. Toxic shame inhibits the individual from seeking comfort and support, and in a reenactment of the childhood abandonment she is flashing back to, isolates her in an overwhelming and humiliating sense of defectiveness.
Pete Walker

ETA: Walker is writing in the context of complex/developmental trauma. I don't know if emotional flashbacks are unique to that group.
 
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That sounds a lot like what happens to me, though in my case it was in adulthood, with my time in the Navy. Not sure that counts for Complex, though.
 
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There are certain things, that if I do them in the "right" order, or they simply happen to exist all at once, I am <whistle> gone. Hardcore gone.

I was trying to think of an example in my own life, but instead, just pulling from the points you listed:

- Drinking / Diminished Capacity (one of mine, btw, if I can't think clearly because I'm drunk, starving, sleep dep, sick, drugged, concussion, etc. it sort of primes the board for all the times during my trauma years that was also the case... But also because I'm drinking things tend to blur more, including timelines / then&now ).
- Sick
- In pain
- Guilty (I've done something, doesn't matter if it was an accident of minor proportions or intentional of epic, the feeling of guilt-regret being there)
- Embarrassed
- Things around you are broken
- Startled / Surprised
- Half naked (or very specifically pants at ankles)
- Male voice saying you're naked, or calling out to others
- Apologizing

^^^
Any of this sound like any of your traumas? Or any specific combo? (Including things I didn't list).
 
That happens to me quite often - an extreme emotional reaction to something to where I know somewhere in me it's disproportionate to the situation is how I identify I'm having a flashback, most of my flashbacks are emotional. It's horrible because I can feel myself overreacting - like I'm standing outside myself watching it - but have no way of stopping quickly. And I feel very very young, powerless and frightened.

Then I'm left with a "hangover" for a few days while my body recovers from feeing so upset (I literally hurt in my chest) and while I try to repair the relationships, my credibility etc. It most happened in my uni group where I was triggered by something and lost my temper with my course director and another student... I'm still trying to fix that one out.

Simply put, I feel your pain cos I've been there far too many times.
 
Thank you for writing about the term "emotional flashback." I'm sure this is included in part of my shutdown symptoms. Also, it sounds like that is what happened to you. I hope you feel better soon.
 
@Friday Several of those things were at play. I was drunk, yes, although like I said, everything went to shit seemingly all at once. I was definitely experiencing feelings of guilt/shame right before this happened. I became really nauseous really quickly (I rarely throw up when drinking unless I'm mixing beer and liquor), so I intentionally induced vomiting in an attempt to feel better. I remember washing my hands and face, maybe more concerned about why I was vomiting than dealing with my pants, because that was a strange order of operations.

When I tripped, I was in this state of utter "WTF just happened?"--just really bewildered the moment I lost my footing and began falling--and the next thing I'm taking in (I didn't even process the pain from falling, that came the next day when I realized how f*cked up my arm was for knocking into the metal toilet paper holder) is this guy's face staring at me, and it might be worth mentioning that he's crazy tall compared to me (everyone there was 5-14" taller than I), but he has a baby face like a gaunt teen (like my abusers--not necessarily my brother, but my brother used to involve kids/young teens who I didn't know or marginally knew), and I'm slumped against the wall in this little ball, with my pants around my ankles, just dazed as f*ck, and when he disappeared and said I was naked, that's when my ass kicked into high gear.

Supposedly (I don't remember this at all), my male friend had come to the door to ask if I was okay, and I slammed it in his face without saying anything. When my female friend knocked and asked what happened, was I okay, that's when I fell apart, and then we were in her room, and I was just shaking and in pieces over it. I also remember repeating that I wasn't naked, but mostly I kept saying that it wasn't my fault and I didn't mean to.

Another bizarre thing about my behavior was that my friend told me she was going to take me home, and I, like, had this intense feeling that I had to escape, so I beelined to the door, gave some obligatory half-hugs as I was still walking, and I was thinking that if I hurried, I could get to my car in time to escape. Which is really strange. I'm not any kind of advocate for drunk driving. My friend was clearly okay to drive (also weird, because we drank the same amount, and usually we're on the same level, but I was so out of it), and normally I'd just be happy she offered me a ride, but my head was, like, "Must. Escape!" Like I was trying to get out of an imagined hostage situation.

I'm really grateful for all of the responses saying it might not have been 100% the alcohol at play, because it's really strange to me that everything went to shit within a few minutes, and when I woke up, I couldn't make any sense of my behavior and thoughts. Like my ridiculous plotting of an escape? Wtf was I thinking? Why did I feel so strongly that I needed to run away? And what really sticks out from the whole thing is
A) pants being around my ankles and feeling really small and bewildered
B) Hearing some dude I don't know say I was naked
C) Feeling this overwhelming sense that I had to exonerate myself when my friend asked what happened, like I was being accused of something, even though I most certainly wasn't. Rationally, I know all of my friends would think the whole thing was hilarious (they do)

ETA: it may be worth mentioning that my friends' bathroom is set up almost exactly like my parents' old bathroom, where my brother used to bathe me (don't even get me started) and also where I first (attempted) to disclose my abuse (which my mother insists never happened, but it totally did), at which point I told my mother I didn't want my brother bathing me anymore, and that was a whole terrible thing. I don't remember anything about my brother bathing me except how it felt when he toweled me off, which is not a good feeling at all--layers and layers of feeling shame. But maybe this is relevant.
 
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