I was browsing through the forums for a while tonight and I thought I'd finally say hi. This is my first post here.
Since last December, I've been going through a massive, wild uproar of trauma-related flashbacks. I've been calling them emotional flashbacks a la Pete Walker and his books about CPTSD, but I see that others here have called them affective flashbacks. It's been brutal, but it also seems to be necessary. I'm facing things about myself and my life that I had been too scared to explore before.
They revolve around a feeling of survival terror from very early in my life— often during these flashbacks, I cry and feel like a pre-verbal child. A mass of feelings of needing help and not having anyone, of being afraid of my angry, suicidally depressed mother and bullying older brother, of being terrified and endangered without even an expectation of being soothed or protected, feeling viscerally hopeless, giving up and going dead, and sometimes of dreadful grief and loneliness—I could go on and on and be more explicit, but I'm trying to describe powerful emotions without concrete events or much cognition going on. My adult self is observing and taking note of these upsurges of feeling as they occur, just so I can write about them in my journal and describe them to other people, e.g. therapists, trusted friends, people in support groups, etc. I must have cried hundreds of times over the last year, including at least a couple of times today.
Another way of describing all of this is getting powerfully triggered all the time, by nearly everything, or so it seems. My best understanding of this is that I am dealing with developmental trauma mixed up with a degree of attachment disorder and CPTSD, depending on what lens I look at all of this through. When I started working with a new therapist last December, I opened up a bulging Pandora's box of pain, and it's been pouring out of me since then. I think I'm doing some important healing—I'm very overt about what I'm going through with friends and on social media, and have been creatively prolific (I'm a visual artist, and to a much lesser extent a writer and storyteller), but the experience truly sucks. It's far from over, and am nearly burned out by it.
I was upset this evening by current real-world problems I'm struggling with, and thought I'd finally post here. I want to see if this community/forum is one I want to be a part of.
There are many more complexities in the mix with what I've just described, but I'll save them for other posts.
Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this.
Since last December, I've been going through a massive, wild uproar of trauma-related flashbacks. I've been calling them emotional flashbacks a la Pete Walker and his books about CPTSD, but I see that others here have called them affective flashbacks. It's been brutal, but it also seems to be necessary. I'm facing things about myself and my life that I had been too scared to explore before.
They revolve around a feeling of survival terror from very early in my life— often during these flashbacks, I cry and feel like a pre-verbal child. A mass of feelings of needing help and not having anyone, of being afraid of my angry, suicidally depressed mother and bullying older brother, of being terrified and endangered without even an expectation of being soothed or protected, feeling viscerally hopeless, giving up and going dead, and sometimes of dreadful grief and loneliness—I could go on and on and be more explicit, but I'm trying to describe powerful emotions without concrete events or much cognition going on. My adult self is observing and taking note of these upsurges of feeling as they occur, just so I can write about them in my journal and describe them to other people, e.g. therapists, trusted friends, people in support groups, etc. I must have cried hundreds of times over the last year, including at least a couple of times today.
Another way of describing all of this is getting powerfully triggered all the time, by nearly everything, or so it seems. My best understanding of this is that I am dealing with developmental trauma mixed up with a degree of attachment disorder and CPTSD, depending on what lens I look at all of this through. When I started working with a new therapist last December, I opened up a bulging Pandora's box of pain, and it's been pouring out of me since then. I think I'm doing some important healing—I'm very overt about what I'm going through with friends and on social media, and have been creatively prolific (I'm a visual artist, and to a much lesser extent a writer and storyteller), but the experience truly sucks. It's far from over, and am nearly burned out by it.
I was upset this evening by current real-world problems I'm struggling with, and thought I'd finally post here. I want to see if this community/forum is one I want to be a part of.
There are many more complexities in the mix with what I've just described, but I'll save them for other posts.
Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this.
