I feel like i'm out of my body during flashbacks

[katgil33]

So, i've noticed at work, home, or whenever I'm having particularly intense flashbacks, bad memories, I "leave my body". For example, I've blanked out at work to the point that my boss can't get my attention, and she's told me that it's like there's no one there. It's just, they feel so real and I get like "lost" and can't grasp any surroundings and it's scary and a total nuisance. I just go numb, basically. Does anyone get this?? If so how do you ground yourself before you're "lost"?

 

[ShodokanJenn]

For me, my flashbacks immediately overwhelm reality. All my senses relay information from the flashback, and my surroundings are completely gone. I lose the ability to think or reason, trapped in the past and reliving it. I don't have any warnings, so there is no grounding for me. I am hoping you get some helpful answers from others here.

 

[Gamereign555]

Yes this makes sense to me. The flashbacks are not pleasant and stressful to say the least and I believe depersonalization,derealization and spacing out is occurring because of that. Part of us does not want to be there and so the dissociations exist.

I was never that great at grounding and fortunately my flashbacks and dissociations are not that bad in awhile.

I need to look up grounding techniques, they are on this site I’ve seen but never read. When I was in therapy I think we were just starting to tackle this. She wanted me to do mindfulness exercises.

Mindfulness has to do with taking us out of our heads by examining our actual surroundings in a systematic way. We are literally observing the textures of things, the smells of things, the shape of things, the color, etc. the exercises are done in specific ways though and they help ground us.