Emotional Flashbacks from Complex-PTSD

I'm an introvert and a bit of a homebody.  So during the early months of the pandemic, why did I frequently find myself pacing the perimeter of my home like an agitated and caged wild animal, feeling trapped and intensely desperate... as if I had suddenly been transported back into the severe social isolation of my teenaged years as a fundamentalist homeschooler?

As a mom of two high-maintenance kids with dramatically different needs from each other, I provide emotional support on a daily basis, for problems of all sizes... so why did my nervous system frequently react to their big emotions as if there were a true crisis, leaving me continuously drained with nothing left for myself?

It turns out that these types of experiences are called emotional flashbacks, and they are a common symptom of Complex-PTSD.  Through some recent therapy, I found my way to a book that has been incredibly important to my childhood trauma healing process.  In fact, from my reading, I ended up with over 20 pages of highlighted quotes that made me feel seen and understood in a beautifully bittersweet way, putting things into words that I had felt but never seen expressed so clearly.  

The following information is an overview that I built using excerpts from that book, "Complex-PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving" by Pete Walker.  If any of these quotes really resonate with you, I'd strongly recommend reading the book too, especially with the support of a therapist if that is an option for you.

What is Complex-PTSD?

First, the good news about C-PTSD. It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. This means that it is environmentally, not genetically, caused. 

 

C-PTSD is a more severe form of PTSD. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic, and social anxiety.

What causes C-PTSD?

When abuse or neglect is severe enough, any one category of it can cause a child to develop C-PTSD. That is true even in the case of emotional neglect if both parents collude in it. When abuse and neglect is multidimensional, the severity of the C-PTSD worsens accordingly.

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C-PTSD almost always has emotional neglect at its core. A key outcome of this is that the child has no one in his formative years who models the relational skills that are necessary to create intimacy.... A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support, and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease....This is despite the fact that many high functioning survivors learn to socially function quite adequately.

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Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger. C-PTSD then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult (relative, older sibling, neighbor, or teacher) to turn to for comfort and protection.... Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent's warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable, and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort.

What are the characteristics of C-PTSD?


1. EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS: Emotions That Are Out Of Sync With The Present

Emotional flashbacks...unlike PTSD, do not typically have a visual component. Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief, and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts. ...Flashbacks can range in intensity from subtle to horrific. They can also vary in duration ranging from moments to weeks.

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These are some common experiences of being in an emotional flashback. You feel little, fragile, and helpless. Everything feels too hard. Life is too scary. Being seen feels excruciatingly vulnerable. Your battery seems to be dead....When you are trapped in a flashback, you are reliving the worst emotional times of your childhood. Everything feels overwhelming and confusing, especially because there are rarely any visual components to a C-PTSD flashback.

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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. When despair predominates, a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur. A sense of feeling small, young, fragile, powerless, and helpless is also commonly experienced in an emotional flashback, and all symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing toxic shame.

2. HYPER-AROUSAL OF THE SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM: Stuck in Fight, Flight, Freeze, and/or Fawn (the 4 Fs)

The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people's feelings.

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A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening. A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity. A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing that resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt. A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker.... Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive.

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Amygdala hijackings are intense reactions of the emotional memory part of the brain that override the rational brain. These reactions occur in the brains of people who have been triggered into a 4F reaction so often, that minor events can now trigger them into a panicky state.

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As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict, and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self expression. Like the soldier overlong in combat, PTSD sets in because you feel as if you are constantly under attack. Unfortunately, internal attack is now added to external attack, and you become locked into hypervigilance and sympathetic nervous system arousal.

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I have noticed that extreme emotional abandonment...also creates this kind of codependency. The severely neglected child experiences extreme lack of connection as traumatic, and sometimes responds to this fearful condition by overdeveloping the fawn response. Once a child realizes that being useful and not requiring anything for herself gets her some positive attention from her parents, codependency begins to grow. It becomes an increasingly automatic habit over the years.

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Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others. They act as if they believe that the price of admission to any relationship is forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries. The disenfranchisement of the fawn type begins in childhood. She learns early that a modicum of safety and attachment can be gained by becoming the helpful and compliant servant of her exploitive parents. A fawn type/codependent is usually the child of at least one narcissistic parent.

3. TOXIC SHAME: The Ingrained Belief That Imperfections Make Us Unworthy of Love

Toxic shame inhibits us from seeking comfort and support. In a reenactment of the childhood abandonment we are flashing back to, we often isolate ourselves and helplessly surrender to an overwhelming feeling of humiliation. If you are stuck viewing yourself as worthless, defective, or despicable, you are probably in an emotional flashback.

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Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail or verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage, and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child's bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment.

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John Bradshaw describes the devastation of the child's emotional nature as 'soul murder.' He explains this as involving a process where the child's emotional expression (his first language of self-expression) is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame.

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I finally realized that for me and many of my clients, verbal and emotional abuse damage us much more than our physical abuse. Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all. Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child's brain.

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Good enough parents provide generous amounts of support, protection and comforting. They also guide their children to deal constructively with recurring existential difficulties such as loss, real villains, painful world events, and normal disappointments with friends and family. Most importantly, they model how disappointments with intimates can be repaired. A key way they do this is to easily forgive their children for normal mistakes and shortcomings.... In the traumatizing family, however, there is little or nothing that is good enough, and hence little for which to be grateful. The child instead is forced to over-develop a critic that hyper focuses on what is dangerously imperfect in her as well as others. This sometimes helps her to hide aspects of herself that might be punished.

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The superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance. The inner critic is the superego gone bad. The inner critic is the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents' approval. When perfectionist striving fails to win welcoming from your parents, the inner critic becomes increasingly hostile and caustic. It festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self hate, self disgust and self abandonment. The inner critic blames you incessantly for shortcomings that it imagines to be the cause of your parents' rejection. It is incapable of understanding that the real cause lies in your parents' shortcomings.

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I subscribe to authenticity as one of my highest values, but it does not include sharing my outer critic's view of you or exposing my inner critic's unfair judgments of me. As stated earlier, the toxic critic is not an authentic part of us. We were not born with it. We were indoctrinated with it by parents who viewed us in an extremely negative and jaundiced way. Because of this, we need to protect our intimates from its distorted and destructive judgments.

Many C-PTSD survivors flounder in caustic judgmentalness, shuffling back and forth between pathologizing others and themselves. They get stuck in endless loops of detailing the relational inadequacies of others and then of themselves....Karen Horney described this trauma two-step as all-or-nothing lurching between the polarities of the grandiose self and the despised self. When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikable to be included.

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Sometimes, when I am experiencing an extended flashback, I start over-noticing imperfections in the general household order. Where the critic first points the finger varies. If I am triggered into tired survival mode, the inner critic can launch into berating me for my sub-standard contribution. If on the other hand I am triggered into flight mode and have been speed cleaning, my outer critic can start keeping score. In this latter mode, my outer critic can perseverate about how little my wife is doing compared to me. The comparisons are typically in the areas where I have recently been over-contributing. But my fawn side is pretty strong and before too long, I can start noticing all the venues where I do not contribute as much as she. And suddenly I am the selfish slacker of the family. As the flashback continues, I may then flip into berating myself for being picky and ungenerous.

4. SELF-ABANDONMENT: The Lack of a Developed Identity

The abandonment depression is the deadened feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that afflicts traumatized children.

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A key aspect of the abandonment depression in C-PTSD is the lack of a sense of belonging to humanity, life, anyone, or anything.

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Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child's brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the C-PTSD-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible.

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A traumatized child becomes desperate to relieve the anxiety and depression of abandonment. The critic-driven child can only think about the ways she is too much or not enough. The child's unfolding sense of self (the healthy ego) finds no room to develop. Her identify virtually becomes the critic.

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Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon themselves and give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection. This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.

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Most trauma survivors were blank slates who were brainwashed into accepting the critic as their primary identity. To the degree that a family is C-PTSD-engendering, to that degree is it like a mini-cult. Cults demand absolute loyalty to the leader's authority and belief system. In early thought-stopping work, most survivors need to empower their efforts with a healthy rage against their parents for destroying their self loyalty and their self individuation.

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An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child's budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life.... Even when he manages to identify a goal of his own choosing, he may struggle to follow through with extended and concentrated effort....I have worked with many survivors stranded in this form of adult helplessness.

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The narcissist reverses the parent-child relationship. The child is parentified and takes care of the needs of the parent, who acts like a needy and sometimes tantruming child. When this occurs, the child may be turned into the parent's confidant, substitute spouse, coach, or housekeeper. Or she may be pressed into service to mother the younger siblings.... Pressing a child into codependent service usually involves scaring and shaming him out of developing a sense of self.

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Of all the 4F types, fawn types are the most developmentally arrested in their healthy sense of self.... Fawn types typically respond to psycho-education about the 4Fs with great relief. This eventually helps them to recognize the repetition compulsion that draws them to narcissistic types who exploit them. The codependent needs to understand how she gives herself away by over-listening to others. Recovering involves shrinking her characteristic listening defense, as well as practicing and broadening her verbal and emotional self-expression.

What Triggers Can Activate C-PTSD?

A trigger is an external or internal stimulus that activates us into an emotional flashback. This often occurs on a subliminal level outside the boundaries of normal consciousness. Recognizing what triggers us can therefore be difficult.

External triggers are people, places, things, events, facial expressions, styles of communication, etc., that remind us of our original trauma in a way that flashes us back into the painful feelings of those times. Here are some examples of powerful and common triggers: revisiting your parents; seeing someone who resembles a childhood abuser; experiencing the anniversary of an especially traumatic event; hearing someone use a parent's shaming tone of voice or turn of phrase. Many triggers, however, are not so explicit.... 

Sometimes someone looking at us, or even noticing us, can trigger us into fear and toxic shame....Other common triggers include making a mistake, asking for help, or having to speak in front of a group of people. Moreover, simply feeling tired, sick, lonely, or hungry can sometimes trigger a flashback. Any type of physical pain can also be a trigger. For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers.

What are the Physical Effects of C-PTSD?

Trauma takes its toll on the body in many ways....Most of the physiological damage of extended trauma occurs because we are forced to spend so much time in hyper-arousal—stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. When we are chronically stressed out (stuck in sympathetic nervous system activation), detrimental somatic changes become ingrained in our bodies.

Here are some of the most common examples of body-harming reactions to C-PTSD stress: Hypervigilance, Shallow and Incomplete Breathing, Constant Adrenalization, Armoring (Chronic muscle tightness), Wear and tear from rushing and armoring, Inability to be fully present/relaxed/grounded in our bodies, Sleep problems from being overactivated, Digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract, Physiological damage from excessive self-medication with alcohol/food/drugs.... In cases or verbal and emotional abuse, our capacities to be comforted by eye and voice contact are undeveloped or seriously diminished.

How Can We Heal from C-PTSD?

Journeys of recovering may begin when a death or great loss brings up an emotional storm that opens up a hidden reservoir of childhood pain; or when a friend shares something about his or her recovery process that strikes a chord; or when a book or TV show triggers a more serious consideration of what really happened in childhood; or when something gets 'opened up' in couple's therapy; or when a healing crisis in the form of panic attacks or a nervous breakdown requires some outside help; or when the self-medicating strategies developed to sooth depression and anxiety get out of control and also require outside help.

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Before we enter into recovery, it may feel like life is nothing but a struggle to survive. However, when recovery progresses enough, we begin to have some experiences of feeling like we are thriving. These may start out as feelings of optimism, hopefulness, and certainty that we are indeed recovering. And then, the bottom inevitably drops out because recovery is never all forward progress. Oh so unfairly, we are back to feeling that we can barely survive. To make matters worse, we are amnesiac that we even had a respite from surviving. Another flashback has hit and we polarize back onto the surviving end of the continuum. We are stuck in the anxious and deadened feelings of the abandonment mélange. In survival mode, even the most trivial and normally easy task can feel excruciatingly difficult.

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Here are some common areas where I see that recovering survivors fail to notice and self-validate their progressive degrees of improvement. 1. Less intense launching into a 4F response. 2. Increasing resistance to the critic. 3. Increased mindfulness about flashbacks or inner critic attacks. 4. Increased time feeling good enough about yourself. 5. Progress in meeting arrested developments listed in chapter two. 6. Decreased overeating or use of self-medicating substances. 7. Increased experiences of good enough relating with others. 8. Decrease in the painfulness and intensity of flashback feelings.

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Particularly potent help also comes from the grieving work of reclaiming the ability to cry self-compassionately and to express anger self-protectively...Another especially helpful somatic practice is stretching. Regular systemic stretching of the body's major muscle groups can help you to reduce the armoring that occurs when your 4F response is chronically triggered. This results from the fact that 4F activation tightens and contracts your body in anticipation of the need to fight back, flee, get small to escape notice, or rev up to launch into people pleasing activity.

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Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of ourselves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth. Grieving restores our crucial, developmentally-arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress.

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Verbal Ventilation Heals Abandonment. When we share what is emotionally important to us, we learn to connect with others in a meaningful and healing way. This applies to sharing concerns that excite and please us, as well as those that frighten and depress us. Perhaps there was no more detrimental consequence of our childhood abandonment than being forced to habitually hide our authentic selves. Many of us come out of childhood believing that what we have to say is as uninteresting to others as it was to our parents....When we practice the emotionally-based communication of verbal ventilation in a safe environment, we repair the damage of not having this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings.

Verbal Ventilation and Intimacy. Reciprocal verbal ventilation is the highway to intimacy in adult relationships. Sufficient practice with a safe enough other brings genuine experiences of comforting and restorative connection. For me and many of my clients, such experiences are more alleviating of the loneliness than we had ever thought possible. Nowhere is this truer than with mutual commiseration. Mutual commiseration is the process in which two intimates are reciprocally sympathetic to each other's troubles and difficulties. It is the deepest most intimate channel to intimacy—profounder than sex. Mutual commiseration also typically promotes spontaneously opening into many levels of light-hearted and spontaneous connecting.

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As a psychotherapist...I have frequently noticed that survivors who need pharmaceutical help seem to benefit most from SSRI anti-depressants. Taken at the right dosage, SSRI's do not usually blunt your affect in a way that makes grieving impossible. Moreover, if your critic does not budge with extended critic-shrinking work, SSRI's can usually reduce its volume and vitriol enough so that you can effectively shrink it.

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Making a written record of your positive attributes is especially helpful as flashbacks often create a temporary amnesia about your essential worthiness and goodness. Flashbacks seem to involve a temporary loss of access to more current left-brain learning. MRIs show greatly reduced left brain activity in hyper-aroused C-PTSD survivors. In my experience, memorizing your list enhances your capacity to dissolve that amnesia... Additionally please let me remind you that qualities do not have to be perfect or ever-present to qualify as qualities. If it is true of you most of the time, then it is a quality.

~and let's end with this beautifully hopeful quote~

We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process are often rewarded with emotional intelligence far beyond the norm. This is somewhat paradoxical, as survivors of childhood trauma are initially injured more grievously in their emotional natures than those in the general population.... Perhaps the greatest reward of improved emotional intelligence is seen in a greater capacity for deeper intimacy. Emotional intelligence is a foundational ingredient of relational intelligence – a type of intelligence that is also frequently diminished in the general populace....Many of the most intimate relationships I have seen are between people who have done a great deal of freeing themselves from the negative legacies of their upbringings.

A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life. The introspective process, so fundamental to effective recovery work, eventually deepens and enriches survivors' psyches... The survivor who follows the introspective 'road less traveled' becomes increasingly free of compulsive and unconscious allegiance to unhelpful familial, religious and societal values that were instilled at an impressionable age. The recoveree now gets to choose her own values and reject those that are not in her own best interest.