Example of an Emotional Flashback

     My ex and I were driving home from an amazing trip up north where we'd go off grid for a couple days. 

The day we were to head home, I wanted to leave early in the morning. My ADHD meds, Adderall had been filled at the pharmacy. I had been off it for 3 weeks because the last script, he flushed down the toilet. He said he would not have emphetamines in his house. (Never felt like MY home). 

    Side note - last time i saw him, he had snorted adderall and offered me some. Hypocrite?

   Anyway, he was mad i wanted to elave camp early. He was purposely stalling to punish me because he didn't want me on this medication due to an addictive past. But this was to help me, I was finally diagnosed after years and years of struggling. 

    He was so mean to me on the ride home. "You happy now, you got your fix you fucking fene. You stupid bitch, it's all you care about!" He was screaming at me so hard I watched his face turn red. His eyes were so dark. He really meant these things he said. He had no remorse or compassion for my tears and i began to have a panic attack. I was shaking, crying, my focus and reality went to a dark place. I begged him to stop. To pull the truck over. I was in such a panic, i attempted to jump out of the moving vehicle. This moment gave me an emotional flashback. I thought back to my previous relationship in which I was screamed at when he was drunk. He suffered from depression and anxiety. He was a pathological "skate around the truther." He was not consistent with his meds and when he drank, he flipped a switch. It wasn't until he beat the shit out of me that I left. I also flashed back to when my kids father would scream at me. This man, told me he hopes I end up with someone who beat the shit out of me. Well....I did. 

    The most unmemorable part of this emotional flashback was the yelling. It felt like a fierce hot wind. I felt like I was being blown away - like my insides were being blown out, as a flame on a candle is being blown out. 

    Months later, I learned about auras. I flashed back to this and felt like my aura had been completely stripped from me. 

    At the time itself, I felt completely disoriented, unable to speak, respond or even think. I felt terrified, shakey and very small. Somehow, I finally managed to make my way out the door and get out of the house where I eventually slowly pulled myself together. I had to leave a man I was in love with. Or so I thought that was love. I focused on the good and ignored the bad. 

    It has taken me months,  to figure out that this confusing and disturbing phenomenon was an intense emotional flashback. I have come to understand the nature of this type of regression. I realized it was a flashback to the hundreds of times me mother, in full homicidal visage, blasted me with her drug using, alchoholic in full homicidal visage, blasted me with her rage into terror, shame, dissociation and helplessness. 

    Emotional flashbacks are also accompanied by intense arousals of the fight/flight instinct, along with hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system; the half of the nervous system that controls arousal and activation. When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal. Luckily I have never had suicidal ideations. But it's common in people with cptsd. When despair predominates, a sense of profoud numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur. I'll discuss my trip to Michigan later. TERRIBLE. Running doesn't make kthe pain go away. It will follow you, until you deal with it. 

    A sense of feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also comonly experienced in an emotional flashback, and all symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing TOXIC SHAME.