Flashbacks: emotionally not as bad, as bad, or worse than the first time around?

[gorgonzola]

I am seeking to establish how much my emotional memories have been edited, so if the answer to the title question is anything but "worse" then the answer to my underlying question is "a great deal".

 

[Sideways]

Are you wanting feedback from other folks on how much their flashbacks have changed? Or are you more wanting to explore how much your personal experience has changed? Can you say a bit more…?

 

[gorgonzola]

Other people's experiences of flashbacks vs the original event being flashed back to.

 

[Ecdysis]

We had a discussion about this recently somewhere on the forum, but I can't remember where.
Basically there were two camps:

1) The initial trauma was experienced as utterly horrifying and the flashbacks are "fainter" echoes of that initial experience.

2) The person was so dissociated/ numbed out *during* the trauma that they "felt" only a limited amount of the horror in the moment, and now that they're in safety ALL the feelings are coming back full-force in the form of the flashbacks, so these actually "feel" far worse than the numbed traumatic event did at the time.

I don't think either of these is better/worse or right/wrong. They simply show the complexity of trauma and how two people will react differntly to the same trauma, or even how one person wil react differently to different trauma over time.

 

[gorgonzola]

My flashbacks can last just a few seconds and put me out for a week or more.

I'm really fuzzy on the emotional memory of the original trauma, but going by how far I know I went to escape the inescapable it must have been pretty bad.

Main problem is that I know the original lasted continuously without breaks for months up to a year or so and I can't conceive it being as bad as the intensity of two seconds of flashback can be but drawn out for that long. That doesn't seem to jive with being somehow somewhat functional at the time of the original.

From what you point to, @Ecdysis, that suggests I was leaning heavily on dissociation at the time, but I only think I was doing that to try to resolve things at the end as it were, rather than during.

I am a confused person.

 

[Movingforward10]

That doesn't seem to jive with being somehow somewhat functional at the time of the original.

It makes total sense that you would have been dissaosicated throughout that entire time to survive it. Which enabled you to be somewhat functional at the time. Given the traumatic feelings that are surfacing during the flashbacks. How could you have survived it for that length of time otherwise? It would have been impossible?

That is the level of dissaosication we do. It's instant that dissaosication during trauma, not in any awareness. And it can stay like that for a long long time.

 

[gorgonzola]

How could you have survived it for that length of time otherwise? It would have been impossible?

I didn't survive it though. I am not the original gorgonzola.

 

[Movingforward10]

I didn't survive it though. I am not the original gorgonzola.

Yeah, I'm sorry. The word 'survive' is so loaded, I used it without thought really. I usually use the word 'endured' rather than survive. I don't know if that word reasonates more but it works better when I think about my experiences as I don't use the word 'survive' anymore for mine.

 

[gorgonzola]

Nothing to apologise for, @Movingforward10. I prefer "having a discontinuity", maybe. I was a bit of a shutterbug at the time and almost all of my memory from around the time has been edited out according to my photographic record, I think by accident though I'm not sure.

Now go enjoy your holiday! Shoo!

 

[cherub]

Personally for me I think that they're usually much less bad than the actual event, but there's been a couple times when it felt a lot worse.