Is It Possible To Dissociate During A Flashback?

[Bedbug]

I keep feeling like I am about to have another flashback (I am starting to recognise the feeling I get before one starts). But it doesn't happen. Or I don't know if it happens? Or I have dissociated during the flashback?

Does that make sense? I just lie on my bed, waiting for it to hit, then it's all over. Just like that. (I say "Just like that," but I don't really know how long the feeling lasted.

I have spent the past couple of weeks in a bit of a daze, hardly getting out of bed.) But I am left with this really nagging feeling that something has happened. Maybe I am just hovering on the verge of a flashback, enough to get the vaguest sense of what it is, without going through it. Maybe a memory is coming back that I will soon recollect "normally" without having to go through the violence of a flashback. But I am also wondering if it is possible that I am having the flashback but I am completely dissociating during it. Just switching off, while it happens to some other part of me like I have when I've carried on with all sorts of other normal activities in a complete blackout, leaving me with no memory of them afterwards.

Does anyone else get this feeling?

 

[WillowMarie]

I get feelings like this. I have very few visual flashbacks, but can relate with remembering memories. Sometimes I feel like something is trying to come up. This is usually when I am thinking of things and starting to feel emotional because of it. I start to dissociate (I feel floaty) and try grounding techniques, but that feels like it sucks me out of whatever was happening and back into reality.

There was a time even after I did the grounding techniques, I know my brain still took me somewhere, showed me something, but I was unaware. I knew this because all of sudden I was seeing what was in front of me, but I wasn't before, it that makes sense. And my eyes were open the whole time.

Other times, I feel like I can almost see something playing out in front of my eyes, or a picture that is there, I just can't see it. It is a weird feeling because it is almost like something is there, but I can't know what it is.

 

[Abstract]

Hi. Please ignore if I have got the wrong end of the stick. This is what occurred to me. There are flashbacks where one is one hundred percent back in the past. A dissociated flashback like this would mean that you may not remember anything after at all. I have never had one and there is always at least a small part of my mind in the present so I do have a vague sense it has happened and what it was about at least.

The big thing with flashabcks for me is that I am devastated after. It can take me weeks to settle down again.

The other possibility is that your anxiety is being raised because you feel you may flashback. That anxiety may be pushing you over into a deep dissociated space where you loose all awareness and sense of time and it would be a means of you attempting to avoid the intrusion or flashback. When I loose a period of time like this there isn't the intense fallout that happens after a flashback.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

To answer the title question, I don't think it's possible to have a flashback where you DON'T dissociate. Flashbacks are reliving the past in one shape or form. Dissociation at the very basics is not being fully connected to the present. So at the very least, when you're reliving the past in a flashback, you're not fully connected to the present, hence the dissociation.

As for the rest of your post, I don't have experience with what you describe so I'm no help!

 

[Bedbug]

I'm new to trying to figure out what is happening to me and I think I've got myself a bit muddled. I didn't think I could get much more muddled right now!

Solara, guess you're right when you say that a flashback is dissociation by definition. I think what I was trying to understand is the feeling that I am right of the verge of a flashback and then it's gone. As I've been losing chunks of time while also carrying on apparently normally lately, I was wondering whether I could be having the flashback and blacking out from it at the same time. My mind just feels so fractured right now. To begin with I was afraid that I had Dissociative Identity Disorder and that one personality was having flashbacks while the other wasn't, but I'm pretty sure I don't have this because when I am in a blackout I still carry on as I normally would (sometimes people have seen me, sometimes I've later found evidence of what I was up to). It is still "me", my normal personality, it's just that I don't remember what I've done when I snap out of it.

I think what's happening to me is that I am shutting down right at the tipping point of the flashback. I'm not letting it happen. And I'm struggling to understand this "teetering on the edge of remembering" feeling. It's more intense than the familiar feeling of not quite remembering dreams when I wake up. But I guess it would be, since the memory is more real than a dream. Abstract, I think you're right when you say that this "almost remembering" feeling is raising my anxiety so much that I am then zoning out and losing a chunk of time, rather than going through a flashback and not remembering it again afterwards. The flashbacks I have experienced so far have left me feeling awful afterwards. Physiologically awful - covered in sweat, tears and vomit - not pretty. But pretty obvious.

WillowMarie, I totally understand that sense of "almost seeing" that you described. I feel that too.

Do you know about that famous psychology experiment on selective attention known as The Invisible Gorilla"? The participants are asked to watch a video where a group of people are passing basketballs to each other? The test participants have to count how many passes are made by the people wearing white T-shirts. Right in the middle of this a guy wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the group, stares at the camera, beats his chest and walks out of shot again. Most people are so busy counting the basketball passes that they don't see the gorilla. They are shocked when they are told about it and watch the video again. I often feel like that. It's like my brain keeps inserting the gorilla (the repressed memory) into whatever I'm looking at and then asks me if I saw it. I didn't see it, but part of me knew about it enough to ask myself if I saw it. Like I said, it's different to trying to recall dreams. It's more insistent. But just as elusive.

I want to see my gorilla.

 

[Abstract]

"almost remembering" feeling is raising my anxiety so much that I am then zoning out and losing a chunk of time, rather than going through a flashback and not remembering it again afterwards.

This sounds very likely to me from what you say. Leaving flashbacks aside, dissociation absolutely can mean a loss of awareness of what is happening around us and time.

With DID a different part is fully aware and present while another one is blanked. With other dissociation it is that a level of consciousness is changed. Closer to part of our mind being unconscious and therefore having no awareness. A trance state. Not unusual with PTSD.

left me feeling awful afterwards. Physiologically awful

Exactly.

. I didn't see it, but part of me knew about it enough to ask myself if I saw it. Like I said, it's different to trying to recall dreams. It's more insistent. But just as elusive.

I think re living comes in many forms and many degrees. From the faintest whiff of it to a full-blown flashback. It sounds like you are being followed around by the phantom of your trauma.

 

[Bedbug]

It sounds like you are being followed around by the phantom of your trauma.

I think I'm chasing it now, but it's still in control.

 

[Bluerose]

Flashbacks few and far between now but did involve dissociation to varying degrees. Gradually came to recognise the signs and was able for the most part to take control by using grounding techniques. Sometimes even a simple but firm No! not going there! Thank you! Helped. But it took some work and time to get there.

 

[Powder]

I don't know but I have read about and experienced the flashback of the recuperative state that followed an attack. This involves lying in bed and recuperating from an attack. I want so say more but my 4 year old is laughing like a mad woman and I may go crazy. ;)