Does Anyone Else Have Immersive Flashbacks?

[joeylittle]

...I'm not sure what else to call them.

I only started having PTSD symptoms 6 months ago, when I began addressing a violent part of my past. About a month into that, the intrusive memories suddenly went from intangible dread-feelings and hazy memories with a bit of lost time to what I have now.

What I have now is primarily physical. I can't see where I'm at, only where I was; I feel what I felt then, physically, and I'm responding to all of that verbally the way I did at the time. Now that I'm more used to it, I'm not so completely afraid that I'm just psychotic...and I can ground myself eventually, but I have to really fight for it.

I'm aware of when I'm most vulnerable, and am in therapy (and have had it happen in front of my therapist, so he's had a chance to see it); he referred to my intrusive memories once as being "extremely physical" and ever since then I can't help feeling like there's something extra-wrong. The way he said it felt like it was something he'd never seen before, and he does trauma work almost exclusively.

Basically, I will end up screaming and crying, physically almost frozen, and I have so much trouble breathing I occasionally pass out. That's what my flashbacks look like. They last 2-5 minutes. Re-grounding takes 10-20 minutes. And then I generally just need to cry for awhile.

Anyone else have this, or know someone who does?

 

[Seasounds]

What you describe speaks to me, as I use to (since I thought it was therapeutic to always follow my cry as thoroughly as I could allow) let go into a memory so deeply that I 'let go of my present time ego structure' and would be exhausted, followed by shaking and hours/days of frozenness.

From working with trauma specialists, I found that regressing that deeply is not necessarily therapeutic. Also, I learned to feel deeply without tightening my muscles, which helped me experience sadness about the past without losing my ego structure, which decreased my frozenness and increased my ability to move out of emotional expressions and be grounded, more quickly.

 

[joeylittle]

Thank you for writing, change.

I definitely don't think these are therapeutic - neither do my doctors. I think they don't quite know what to do with me/them except keep teaching me to ground faster, recognize and avoid triggers, and take a sedative before it hits, if possible.

Is there a way to practice not tightening up, muscularly? Or did you just set about to stop doing so?