Self-doubt - Can You Get Flashbacks Without Ptsd?

[Hashi]

@macca, I understand your focus on wanting to know the truth, and wondering whether this would tell you that. I think you also need to consider whether you're ready to know. I posted something about this yesterday, in a different thread.
https://www.myptsd.com/threads/passing-a-lie-detector-test.39529/
It's the last 2 paragraphs of post #17.

Of course, it's up to you. I would just suggest that you consider this aspect while thinking about it.

 

[macca]

Thanks @Hashi . I don't know if my subconscious will be able to tell me, as I suspect I was only 3. It's very tempting to try, even though it scares me deeply. I tried to force it too, by making myself think about things as I was going to sleep one day soon after EMDR when things were ticking around. I had an horrendous nightmare, which led on from dreaming about the trauma re-enactment play - it became "the real thing" and messed me up for a bit. Yet it still doesn't feel like it's enough, as I don't know if I made that up either.

I think it's because of my problems with invalidation, perhaps. It's amazing how deep the invalidation wounds can go, the depths they drive me to consider going to, even though I feel like terror lurks there. Yet, when it comes down to it, I don't know if I'll be able to get past the wall my brain has built. I hate feeling stuck in limbo like this, not being able to say - such and such happened, and that's why I have PTSD - even to myself. It makes me doubt, and then I end up being harsh with myself for being so stupid. I don't know. It's very confusing. I wish I could just easily accept that I may never know. I can for short periods, then it creeps up on me again. I will definitely think about it, and talk it over with my T. I can't see her for a few weeks, as she is on holidays, so I hope I don't drive myself crazy by then!

 

[scout86]

First, absolutely there are other things that can cause flashbacks. My first real experience with flashbacks was with a friend who had used LSD. All a flashback is is something that's happening in your brain. The way I picture it, something slips off track and a "memory" gets replayed in a way that makes it seem like you're living it now, not seeing it as something that happened in the past. In the case of my friend, it was actually a memory of a hallucination, and it happened because LSD does weird things to your brain chemistry.

Here's the thing, you DO have symptoms, right? There is something that complicates your everyday life, right? You are not choosing to create all that, are you? (And, if you are, for some reason, you still have some kind of problem, right? Because who would do this to themselves just for the "fun" of it?!)

The way I see it, there is no such things as "over reacting". You may react more than someone else would. You may react more than someone else wants you to. You may react more than is your own best interest. You may react in a way that seems, to others, to be out of proportion to the apparent situation. But you're NOT "over reacting". You are reacting exactly the way it seems appropriate to you, at the time, with the information and understanding you have at the time, to react. It's YOUR reaction, so it's "right", under the circumstances. That doesn't mean you would react the same way if you had different information and understanding. It is what it is at the moment. It's true FOR YOU and that's all that matters.

At the risk of annoying everyone with another horse analogy.... I run into horses all the time that people tell me have been "abused". Most of the time, there's no real history to support that, there's just a horse with a particular issue or set of issues. Sometimes I'm sure the "abuse" has been deliberate, planned, cruel, and evil. Sometimes, actually more often, it's been kind of accidental and has happened because of human stupidity and ignorance. It DOESN'T MATTER where the "problems" came from. A horse who is afraid because someone deliberately and maliciously beat him is no more afraid than one who is afraid because someone was confusing and ignorant and out of line. And, you deal with the results exactly the same way. It's interesting to know how things got started and sometimes I guess it's helpful. But it's not necessary. I have never said to a horse, "Hey, you have no right to be afraid of me! You didn't have a truly cruel handler, you only had a stupid and unpredictable one. Snap out it it!" Would that make any sense at all? Of course not!

I don't know what you went through. I know that you want to know, and I understand that. The point I'm trying to make is the specific details don't matter as much as the result. And, there IS a result, right? You may not have clear, literal, accurate memories of specific things. Maybe you never will, who knows? The thing is, you can't, in truth, make up feelings and reactions and a world view, without being aware that you're doing it. (And, if someone does that, they need some help too!) It sounds like what you're experiencing now is kind of vague and hard to be sure of as far as what it means or what it "was". Go with that. Accept that as where things are now. Give yourself how ever much time you need to sort it out. Consider how these things (flashbacks, or what ever they are) relate to how you experience things now. What if they do turn out to be symbolic somehow, instead of literal? The message they bring will be just as true. The big thing I want to suggest, I guess, is to remember that there is no such thing as over reacting. It doesn't hurt to step back and look at your reaction and the situation and see if it still seems appropriate, based on the best information you have, but it you're having a strong reaction to something, it's significant and there's a reason for it. At least, there was a reason for it at the time and place it started.

macca, I've got to tell you, I'm really impressed at the courage you have to work so hard on this and be willing to discuss it with others!

 

[macca]

I like your horse analogy @scout86 !

I do have other symptoms, and have done on and off in patches as long as I can remember. Intrusive memories, mainly of the emotional abuse stuff, but also of sexualized play from about 4, flashbacks, hyperarousal, triggered behaviours, easily startled, nightmares, chronic depression and low self esteem, etc. Yet I still doubt myself so easily. My T has said the emotional abuse alone would be enough to have caused PTSD. I don't get why I doubt myself so much still. I go around and around with accepting it's there no matter the cause, and feeling I'm a drama queen and a fraud.

However, I will try to think of the horses next time it happens! A very useful analogy.

 

[Abstract]

macca, I have come to the conclusion that self protection is definitely not the only thing at play for me with my extreme stuff around what is true or not or how I play that out. My invalidation injuries are severe and some of this is definitely introjected invalidation. I struggle to believe there is a self protective element to it all a lot of the time as it feels so awful that I can't imagine anything worse. I guess that is the point if it is happening though as I am being protected! :confused: I don't feel protected. The amount of self abuse is extreme and relentless and takes on a will of its own.

I guess I wouldn't feel it is self protective though as most of the time I don't think I have a right to be needing to be protected.

Please don't underestimate the effect of the abuse at home and your fathers terrorising and unpredictable behaviour as well as the deficits that you obviously experienced at home. Our family environment is key in how we manage in life and deal with the world and ourselves.

I have thought that one of the worst things about invalidation injuries is that they severely injure our relationship with our selves. There is a rift after that seems hard to get past. Everything turns into fodder for self abuse and self doubt as well as sensitivity.

 

[Echo]

@macca, I am struggling in the same way as you. Several months into the onset of PTSD, I started getting tiny images flashing in my mind. Just an image of a finger at first, which I realised I had seen for many years on and off. Suddenly I realised whose finger it was, and as soon as I did that, bang, my body started convulsing and I felt acute pain in specific areas of my body. I also, I thought unconnectedly, started thinking about why there were large parts of my childhood I couldn't remember, despite having a brilliant visual memory and the ability to remember conversations in detail from years ago. I guess the lid was coming off. Again, as I thought about why I couldn't remember, strange things started happening to my body.

I wasn't working with a therapist at this point. Like you, I was really hesitant about what to make of all of this. I kept saying to myself that I didn't know what status to accord these bodily sensations and 'memories', and to be honest I am still unsure several months later.

Two things have tended to make me think there must be something to it all, that my body must be telling me something genuine. I had struggled with this for a few weeks and then had to visit one of my sisters. She is very perceptive and I was really trying hard to hide anything and everything from her. She was really rattled to see me and suddenly said to me, after a conversation in which I had said nothing of this, "I do know what is going on. I have guessed, you know." She persisted for a week without me saying anything. I realised very strongly that, as the oldest sister of four, I had sought to protect my sisters and that I was terrified that something might have happened to them, too. That in itself told me something about myself. I really didn't now want to suggest anything to them about what was happening to me, in case it had happened to them, too. I felt, and still feel in respect of the other two sisters, that I must let them remember anything of theirs in their own time. I ended up in tears but still didn't say anything.

After this week of persisting, I asked my sister what she thought she knew about me, what she had guessed. She then splurged out a mixture of accusations about what she claimed I had recently said that gave her cause to 'guess'. We soon realised that I had said nothing of the sort, but the mere fact she had ascribed those things to me (that our father had abused me; that something had happened in a particular house), must in itself be her mind suddenly remembering. It was a massive shock to us both, when we did compare notes, that our 'memories' completely confirmed each other's. Neither of us wanted at all to believe that this all could be true. She wanted facts from me, and I had none to give, since I was still struggling hugely with emerging scraps of things. I still am.

The second thing that made me think there must be something in all of this, though what I still don't know, was a terrifying session with my therapist a month or so later. She works with sensorimotor therapy. I had been explaining to her over several weeks about the bodily sensations I was experiencing. They were driving me mad, stopping me from sleeping and causing a great deal of physical pain, because of the scoliosis in my back. That week I told her about the sensations in my legs. They felt like they were constantly in a drawn-up position, drawn right up into my hip sockets, with tremors up and down them like electricity the whole time. I had muscle spasms radiating out from my sacrum as a result and frequently felt and was unable to walk. All my body wanted to do was turn over on its side in a foetal position.

My therapist said that she had felt for some weeks that there were several physical movements that my body was longing to complete from the time of various traumas. She suggested I lay down on the floor with my feet against the door and gently start to push against the door. The minute I did so, I went into full-blown terror and started screaming, "Stop it, Daddy!" and I could see my childhood bedroom with my mother standing there. I was horribly shocked by the force of this and what I had seen and experienced. As I stood up, shaking violently, the whole of my upper body twisted - it felt as if I shrank to the size of my 8-year old self. Since then I have been unable to get rid of that twist, so I now have several ribs and a shoulder dislocating by the force of the muscle spasm. It felt as if I had been forced to reach out and touch something as a child at that moment, and my current self just does not want to know. I don't want to re-remember that memory and I am massively stuck because of it.

My therapist feels this incident at age 8 is very likely to be the moment when I got my scoliosis. The only thing I could do was to twist away from whatever was happening to me.

My other sisters know I was raped when I was 20. They think the PTSD is as a result of that alone. Both of them have tried to tell me it wasn't rape and that I should just move on and stop 'wallowing' in it. One of my sisters is married to a forces man and she can't accept PTSD in anyone except war vets. I could go on and on about the culture of minimization and invalidation in our family. I realise now it was constant from my mother particularly. I was deemed by her to be oversensitive. She constantly told me I was making things up, that I lived in a fairy-tale world. Even last Christmas (a year ago), just weeks prior to the onset of my PTSD, she brought photographs along to our Christmas do and set about invalidating my memories all day long - she seemed obsessed. Shortly afterwards, when I was already ill (she knows nothing about the CPTSD diagnosis and I have never talked to her about anything to do with the rape at 20), she and my father rang to ask me what my earliest memories were, just out of the blue. And then set about telling me, I couldn't possibly remember those things (just walks on the beach with our cat, etc.).

To get unstuck, I know I am going to have to tell my parents about my diagnosis - to get the truth out there - and to say that I need to have a break from family life whilst I get well. I don't plan to accuse anyone of anything at this stage, though I am quite sure that if they did anything in truth they will read any letter I send as accusatory. I know I need that space, to get away from my family's insistence on reinterpreting everything and need to deny my experiences. I don't want to be asked about it. My family - all of them - always feel they have the right to know about everything, in order to set about dismissing it. More than anything, I feel I need to push them all away for the time being, in order to give myself space to explore just what did happen to me. I need to find out for myself, in my own time, what my body wants to tell me, and only after all that will I be able to tell myself what status it all has. I may discover it is not what it appears, and that is fine. I certainly still don't want to believe it of my parents, despite all of the signs telling me it must be so. It is a massive struggle, and I expect many of us go through the same process. What I hope we arrive at is a knowing one way or another. Each of us has to have our own proof, we have to find our own gut feeling without all the family's moves to interfere.

No wonder we lack self-confidence and self-esteem if we have always been told we are wrong. It is so insidious. I hope we can rescue ourselves from the morass of a family in denial.

 

[Seasounds]

Yes, I agree, there are many ways to get unstuck. I have spoken to family members, also, to no avail-disastrous really.

Back to sensory information-to elaborate a bit, the images, sounds, thoughts. and feelings, that my body gives me, represents my subjective experience. This information is the key to undoing of my the trauma. That is why it is important for me to trust it as my truth and work in therapy, with this information as my truth, no one else's. (With this perspective, moving forward does not lead to blaming others, where they can disregard my truth.)

I find that some therapists discourage clients from trusting these keys, because there is no concrete evidence for them. And I know that I did not trust them at first, due to not wanting to believe what the keys implied.

These keys are liken unto following the first strand of thread that unravels the ball of yarn...a vehicle to associate to thoughts, feelings, images, sounds, which serve me, to express and feel and heal, myself.

 

[Leanne1]

@Echo
Oh man! I'm really impacted about what you wrote about the conversation you had with your sister!

I have a memory of a man from our apartment block coming into my bedroom, while i was changing my cloths, while our parents were not home. I was badly injured, so the police were called. (I had been experiencing sexual abuse from a family member already, so if i could have, i would have hidden what happened) But i have no memory of what happened. My sister had told me years ago, that she came to the bedroom door, and saw him there.

I finally got the courage to ask her recently what she saw, as I have no memory. She said she can't remember either. She said she just remembers being scared, and hiding in the closet in the hallway.

I haven't asked her if our Uncle hurt her as well. Part of his threats were that he would hurt my little sister if I don't do what he says. I like to believe that she was left alone. I don't know if I will ever be able to ask her, as I don't know if I could handle it if she was hurt by him as well.

 

[Echo]

@Leanne1 - I'm so sorry you had to you through this. It seems the patterns are the same for so many of us.

I think the shattering thing about the conversation with my sister was that she was 5 when this particular episode happened and I was 8. Of course, we both remembered what we remembered through the eyes of small children. When we had our conversation we suddenly realised and understood from the perspective of our adults selves, though the fear remains for both of us - still unprocessed - and any move I make or plan to make terrifies my sister even now (we are in our 50s), as well as me. We are trying to keep our adult perspectives in place but it is so difficult, particularly when we have 'no proof' (or do we? We don't really know).

My sister remembers being terrified of the passageway between my bedroom and that of my parents (it was a tiny space) and she remembers horrible, scary voices, as well as other things that I won't detail about that day.

Part of the problem is the splintered version of what emerges. It makes it all so difficult to make sense of and to believe. Maybe one gets more understanding as more emerges, although my therapist says it is not necessary to remember. She says all that is necessary is to acknowledge that something put me in this state of terror and that my body is not lying. She also says I have to stop trying to protect my sisters even now. She says they are grown women and that I cannot carry all this silently for the whole of my life. That it is not my fault or responsibility to do so. But it is so hard and I wouldn't really know what to say to them if they called me out on it. I feel sure my little sister was hurt, too. Her adult behaviour is so erratic, so I would be terrified of causing her to spin off into PTSD, too.

Meanwhile my parents live a charmed life....

I do hope you and your sister can approach this together as adults, too. It is so much to carry on your own.

 

[Leanne1]

@Echo I

I do hope you and your sister can approach this together as adults, too. It is so much to carry on your own.[/quote]

me too.
thanks,

 

[Deleted member 1860]

I'm confused why you think that emotional abuse and being terrorized by a parent isn't trauma?

I was sexually/physically/emotionally abused, all by different people. It was the emotional abuse that caused the most damage BY FAR.

I think you may be looking for a smoking gun when in fact it may be the buildup of smaller traumas over time that could be causing your symptoms.

 

[macca]

@Solara perhaps you are right. You are also right about how damaging the emotional stuff can be. The other things that I listed earlier (like the asthma attack, hiding from the rapist) were scary, but much more damaging in my family's non-response or even acknowledgement of my experience. I think what seems to happen to me is I go through cycles of being logical and knowing I have indeed got PTSD, no matter the cause, and then cycles of invalidating myself. I think the invalidation part had been growing because I had a little lull in my symptoms the past few days, and that combined with contact with my family, who then invalidated me. I then had a full-blown invalidation attack. Nothing logical was left.

Now this morning I feel the logical part is in control again. Partly because of all of you good people here. And unfortunately partly because of the endless stream of nightmares last night. I had tried to tell my mind to let it out, like @Hashi discussed she had tried to do, but it backfired a bit, just as she had warned. I cannot remember what the nightmares were, just that I was terrified of someone coming into the room. Almost like a flashback but asleep. Whenever I woke, which was too many times to count, I was terrified of the dark and of being alone, though I wasn't alone, my husband was there.

I think that I would just let the whole thing go, but the flashbacks bother me. They are of a dark figure entering my room, and are terrifying. Then there's all the stuff that seems associated with that specific thing, like the body memories, the trauma re-enactment play (with disturbing knowledge no 4 year old could have), the panic attacks where I have talked and acted like a small child thinking someone's going to "hurt" me. The flashbacks and body memories - that's the stuff I cannot confirm, but that drives me crazy. I was recently able to look at a photo of the relevant (highset) house, and confirmed that my bedroom did indeed have a window over the verandah (like a deck). And my mother behaved with avoidance when I noticed to her how she didn't need to lock her doors (in the very tiny town they live in), and asked if she'd ever needed to and she mentioned only the city where I live, where they lived too for a time. When I asked her about the town I wanted to know about, quite innocent in the conversation, she startled, gave me an odd look and pretended the question didn't happen. Then there's something she's always said about me, but that she would also ignore and clam up tight if I asked about now - she always said when I was 3 I was a happy child with a healthy appetite, but that I "changed literally overnight" into a child who wouldn't eat or sleep, was inconsolable and cranky (she didn't say it, but she implied that I stayed "difficult"). The last time she said it, I had said "don't you mean over time, not overnight", and she said "no" it was "quite literally overnight" (and she doesn't exaggerate, she minimises), and that it was due to my starting to develop asthma. Well - no. Children don't exhibit that kind of change when they first start getting asthma. Plus, I remember having several panic attacks relating to men in my early childhood, eg where I screamed and screamed when a man seemed to look at me and walk towards me when I was sitting in the car waiting for my mother at 4 years. I had a similar incident now, nearly 40 years later, when my husband stood over me and grabbed my wrist when I was on the bed - I was "gone" and screamed and screamed. I wish I knew what the hell this was all about. I'm obsessing over it I know. I really need to let it go. Arrghh. I try to concentrate on the things that have happened that I can remember, like the emotional abuse stuff, but it keeps going back to the other stuff I cannot verify. I'm getting very sick of my own head. I want to switch it off. I want to know, yet I also know it would come at a high cost.