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Panic attack caused by association

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osiris

MyPTSD Pro
I’m thinking this is a stressor rather than a trigger, but it hit like a wave today.

I spent a good part of the day watching old films, no problem, and then I put one on without thinking about the year it was made. Then as it started suddenly panic hit me, full body sensations, a need to be physically sick and I was thrown back twenty odd years.

What I’m struggling with is that it’s not connected to the time when the actual CA events happened, but when as a teenager I was made to go back to the place where it happened. So I was thrown back to reliving the anxiety and freaked out experience of reliving the original trauma.

Does that even make sense?

I don’t even know how to begin to work through this one. Is freaking at an event that was freaking at an event even a thing? I know it’s probably bound up in how my parents totally failed me at that point (as well as as a kid) - but I’m floored that it came out of nowhere.
 
It does make sense. It sounds like you were retraumatized, and were remembering that event.

I feel this way about a research trip to Iceland. My peers there treated me in a way that was so stressful that I failed to function properly for a good portion of the trip. It was stressor after stressor after stressor. Though nothing traumatic happened to me while I was in Iceland (at least nothing that I didn't cope just fine with after witnessing), thinking of Iceland still makes me so uncomfortable that I have very strong reactions to remembering it. I usually end up pushing the thoughts away. I found my journal where I collected my data and saw I had written what Iceland smelled like in different areas, and just having that reminder really messed up my day.

I don't yet know how to work through it, either, except to begin by figuring out what's behind the feelings. A previous therapist helped me with this by doing EMDR, where I focused on a memory from Iceland instead of whatever I felt was causing it. My brain naturally took me to several places that, to my brain, were related to the way my peers were treating me.

:hug:
 
I don’t even know how to begin to work through this one. Is freaking at an event that was freaking at an event even a thing?
For sure.

So, a couple years ago? I was visiting my parents and I poured a drink in one of their cut crystal glasses that they inherited from my grandparents. And as I raised the glass to my mouth, was SUDDENLY in a major flashback of being on a quay in mumble-mumble, fully armed, orange sodium lights bleeding across 80s soviet era architecture. I could feel every grain of sand, smell every everything, feel the hot thickness of the air, the salt sticking my eyelashes and dripping down my suit, the bleeding cracks in my fingers, hear the voices above, the breathing behind me, the shishing shishing of salt water absorbing into the concrete jacks...

Why? Because I was scared out of my goddamned mind, and had been calming myself down as we took the beach, by bringing to mind summers at my grandparents. The hot sun, cold swimming pool, the scent of the crystal cut glasses as we drank grapefruit soda :facepalm: I’d forgotten all about it. If I’d been asked? At any time prior to that moment in my parents kitchen? I probably would have denied it. But right there, in that moment, I remembered everything. Because I relived it. Including the memory I was wrapping around myself like a talisman. The scent of cut crystal glasses.

A good memory, totally unrelated to anything in my trauma history... except that I’d been thinking about it at the time. Drop kicked me from the present right into the past.

***
There are countless other examples, in my own life. Some more on point with what you’re describing. But as that one leapt to mind? It felt right to share it. Our minds make connections, our brains make connections, and sometimes those connects get tangled... or are separated by degrees or gulfs. But those connections? Are still very real.
 
Does that even make sense?
I remember just being lost as to what types of things were throwing me into full on panic or freeze attacks. I learned along the way to trust the process. There was always some sort of tie in when I reacted that way although sometimes it took years to figure it out.

All of this stuff that happens while we are sorting it all out is 100 percent logical - it just isn't always obvious as to why it is logical.

It's true though, it did throw me for a loop until I figured out not to worry about how it tied in.
 
Ahh, 2nd degree triggered...

I love these ones. ( :wtf: Kind of love.)

I found helpful, if I can't sever the link between the 2nd thing to trauma in indirect ways, to work with it as a new cluster of things setting me off, on its own.

Dump all those associations into one trash pile, sort them by themes / details / patterns.

Work out which clutter leads to which reaction. A-ha, this color is panic attacks. Its different shade spaces me out. Its darker cousin leads to rage fits, not identified why. But talk about it, it's just art and woonders. And change the lighting and I'm out, just not there mentally. :facepalm:

THEN work out if & how that relates to trauma.

Because all around I'm more triggered by normal life... than hardcore trauma. It takes me a while that reverse in how things react & feel is not one, but still trauma thing... and being well versed in trauma but totally flop & fail in normal, no big deal, and happy.

So doing the same exposure on it...
But from another end.
The normal bits.
 
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