A.R. Mitchell's Blog, page 3

What Causes a Flashback: The Fear Response

Flashbacks are caused by things that we’ve experienced but haven’t had the opportunity to heal from, so the fear responses that we had in the original moment, come back to warn us that the original moment might happen again.

But what is the Fear Response?

Fear is something we all deal with and have unique responses to, but the fear response is something that is universal.

Fear is a biological reaction that lives in your body and is a life saving response. It warns you that something is dangerous - and while that warning may not always be real, it is still an important warning.

Fear is a recipe of body made survival chemicals which give you body the instructions on how to react. The reactions or responses to fear fall into five categories.

Fight - you fight the scary thingFlight - you leave the scary situationFreeze - you stand in the scary situation unable to move or reactFlood - you get all the emotions at once (this is similar to a small child who needs to sleep and starts wailing with overwhelm, but can’t figure out how to sleep)Faint - in order to avoid the scary situation you pass out and ‘play dead’

None of these responses are wrong or bad - they just may or may not be beneficial depending on the situation. For instance, if you need to survive a storm, fainting won’t help you. But if you need to survive a bear, fainting will help you because you will appear uninteresting to the bear and it will leave you alone.

The problem with fear is that it can take over your life, and this is called hypervigilence. More on that next week.

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Flashback: Aftermath

The most important thing to know after a flashback is that you are safe. If you’re not safe, take steps to be safe, whatever that looks like.

The flashback was real. The incident that caused the flashback was also real. It is important to note that these incidents - both past and present are ok to have. Flashbacks are not moral failures: They are a reminder that you survived.

That doesn’t mean you get to hurt others while you are in the flashback. What it does mean is that you are in progress of healing.

Once you are out of the flashback - attempt to ground yourself. Grounding means that you bring yourself back to the present, safe, reality, away from the survival mechanism which allowed you to survive the original traumatic event.

Grounding looks different for each person. Grounding techniques are individually tailored to each person. Some people drink very cold water, some people doing breathing exercises or meditation. Others have a certain scent that they enjoy or soothes them.

The most important thing is that you find the techniques that work for you. These techniques are best practiced when you’re not in a panic - so try them when you’re calm and find the ones which work best for you.

Grounding Techniques Include:

Breathing Techniques

Meditation

Cold or Hot Items (ice packs, cold water, hot tea)

Items that feel Good or Unique to You (Stress Balls or items with a unique texture)

Scents

Items You can Focus on that will Calm (Candles or dim lights)

Use technology to your favor and look up what free apps are available and can be used on your phone or other ever present technology.

Oftentimes our triggers sneak up on us and we can’t always reach for the things we have physically present at home, so having something on your smartphone or tablet is a calming must for the moments we need grounding and can’t get out of a public situation.

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Flashbacks: For Those Living with Them

For those living with flashbacks - your body is trying to heal.

Living with flashbacks is difficult. They’re not predictable and even though they’re ‘memories’ - they’re a type of memory that takes you directly back to the event and that is not only terrifying, but it is physically exhausting.

Any time your body has to revert to a survival technique is an exhausting experience. But the thing about about flashbacks is that they are signals that your body wants to heal. And flashbacks are a clue on where to start that healing process.

A memory that isn’t ready to heal will potentially stay hidden or inaccessible. You might have physical pain and tension from that injury, but not know how to move forward. All these things are ok. The important piece is that you find a reliable understanding other person who can help you through this healing process. Even if they’re not a qualified mental health person or medical professional, if they can take the time to listen and support you through the process that counts. A listening friend counts for a lot. Just make sure they are able to listen and not reflect back the toxic things that you’re trying to heal from.

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Flashback: For Loved Ones

This is a post for the loved ones of those who experience flashbacks. I hopefully didn’t get too salty on this, but a lot of people don’t get it, or think that flashbacks aren’t real, or that their loved one is blaming them.

It’s not about you. Their flashbacks are things that happened to them. Every flashback is different. Every moment in the flashback is them refacing what hurt them.

They are vulnerable afterwards. Don’t yell at them. Don’t hurt them. Don’t touch them. You may not even be able to talk to them because trauma steals words.

They did not ‘create it’ - trauma doesn’t get created willfully. No one wants to live with trauma.

They didn’t think about something scary and ‘give themselves a panic attack.’

If they share something with you - they’re not blaming you. They are looking for support in a frightening situation. If they ask you to change something so that you can have a better relationship, follow through with that request as best you can.

They aren’t weak, pathetic, too empathetic - or showing you a ‘victim card.’ To speak of trauma is not victimology, to be able to speak of trauma is to start the healing process.

You can either be part of that - or you can walk away.

Traumatized people attract people like them - which often means insecure individuals who have their own things to deal with. Some traumatized people are incredibly empathic and attract childish little narcissistic buttheads despite their best efforts.

If you think you’re being blamed for the flashbacks that someone close to you has when they try to explain what happened to them - you probably need some listening skills or empathy, along with some understanding of what trauma is and how it affects the body and the survivor’s relationships. If that doesn’t work you might be a narcissist… which a is fancy word for, “self centered childish little butthead.”

If you’re blaming the person experiencing the flashbacks and thinking that they’re a victim… yeah. They are a victim - but it’s real. Victimology is not a choice made. Victimology is what happens when a choice cannot be made.

If you are purposefully and knowingly, triggering the person to have flashbacks, then you are disgusting. You may consider it a power trip, but exploitation is inhumane. Repeated traumatizing of a severe situation breaks the individual person into pieces and is the subject of war crimes.

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Flashback: Grounding

To recover from a flashback you have to bring yourself back - this is called ‘grounding’. A flashback feels like you, and all the pieces of personality that make you yourself - get yanked away. This is also combined at least for me with a physical feeling of dizziness and being pulled or jerked in a direction that I never decided to go.

When the body has a flashback it loses the ability to tell ‘the right now’ from ‘the back then.’

Physical sensations are key to getting the part of your mind that can separate that difference and getting you back into you, so that you can function.

What you want to start with isn’t force or logic - it’s something that you can feel and is ideally solid. Coolness works well too because the calming part of your nervous system, called the vagus nerve, responds to coolness by realizing that it needs to regulate itself and tries to get back to normal functioning.

The vagus nerve connects with the heart and lungs which during a flashback start racing and you may or may not be able to breathe. Some people start gasping for air - some people can’t breathe at all until they calm down.

Both these have to do with a survival reaction - and that’s ok. Your body is doing what it’s supposed to do in order to survive.

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Flashbacks as Survival

This is for the writers in the room and people who have never experienced a flashback. I wanted to make a post about the process from a sensory standpoint. For those who have flashbacks, this may help you identify what’s going on and help you regulate your emotions and physical body better when you do have flashbacks.

As little kids we were taught about the five senses. Hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch. This five senses are processed through the nervous system.

Trauma also lives in the nervous system.

Trauma freaking wrecks the nervous system.

So after any trauma your five senses are going to be heightened. Your hearing will be sharper, your vision might make you extra sensitive to lights, smells get stronger and touch can be extremely overwhelming, especially if it was part of the trauma.

Sometimes the opposite can happen where the nervous system gets overwhelmed and shuts off one of the five senses. This is an extreme case, but it’s something that happens.

So for your characters: Something occurs that reminds them of a trauma.

The five senses get heightened.

Since trauma lives in the nervous system, the body will respond with danger signals because the nervous system is giving them all the warning signals of another trauma about to happen.

And your character is going to react in that trauma. They are going to react in the trauma of the situation that occurred before. This is the trauma that wrecked their nervous system.

It’s not about their current day moment - it’s the reaction to a long ago moment that got trapped in the nervous system and the nervous system wants to put the body back into a safe place.

The body is put into this safe place through dissociation. Dissociation is a separation from the body, because the nervous system wants to protect the person and when we’re physically stuck and emotionally stuck in trauma - the only way of escape is to have what’s commonly called an out of body experience.

Dissociation occurs during a flashback - but unfortunately - the character experiencing the trauma will have to go back to the traumatic moment. They don’t get a choice.

And it’s during this dissociation part that the trauma gets replayed. When I say replayed - it’s not always like you’re watching a movie. The person experiencing the trauma thinks it’s real life in the current moment. And it was real life to them before when the original trauma occurred. In dissociation there is no time. There is no now vs back then. Everything is present.

And it is terrifying.

There are ways to get out of the flashback, but they take time and practice. You can’t expect the techniques to work immediately because again - this is not something the individual person can think their way through logically. It’s also a matter of calming down the nervous system and that takes physical time. People don’t just, “snap out of it.”

We’ll talk about this process next week.

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Flashbacks as Survival

Last week I said that, “a flashback is the body’s survival mechanism in response to an incident that reminds you of a trauma.”

And I narrowed it to three responses:

This week I’m showing you those responses with a character I know and love. Her name is Emily Jones. She’s a fantastically sweet, tough and brave young woman. Her dad happens to be Indiana Jones, because I love the original series and thought Indy and Marion needed daughters. (I’m also terribly bored with heroes having sons.)

Emily survived a tomb cave in when she was four. She’s got facial scars and is blind in one eye. Emily is an archaeologist like her dad - which means she’s crawling through dangerous tight spaces, facing traps and lethal villains. And she also occasionally in the midst of all these standard action adventure treasure hunt pieces - gets a flashback to her time in the tomb.

When Em has a flashback, here’s what happens….

1. Something in her present…

(As she’s crawling through a tight situation)

…Reminds her body of something in the past.

Em loves her job. She’s choosing to put herself in these thrillingly dangerous situations. She wants to crawl through ancient ruins and find amazing things.

2. The body’s nervous system will decide that this incident in the present has similarities to the thing in the past and it is a threat.

But Em isn’t in charge of her entire nervous system. The nervous system just takes in information and gives it to us. We don’t always get to decide what to do with one hundred percent of that information.

And sometimes our nervous system gives us faulty information that puts us into an overwhelm. This overwhelm trips the survival systems in our brain - and flashbacks happen.

3. The body will react in a way that you couldn’t react in the past to whatever is happening in the present. And the nervous system will not be able to tell the difference between your past incident and the current situation.

This means that a flashback happens and Em is back at four years old and needing rescue, even though in the present she’s a highly capable woman.

One last thing:

A flashback isn’t a phobia. Indy famously mutters, “I hate snakes.” That’s a phobia. It’s one thing that he hates. He isn’t minding his own business eating noodles and suddenly having flashbacks to the snake pit that held the Ark of the Covenant. He just hates snakes.

Em doesn’t hate small spaces. She willingly crawls into them on most occasions. She’s not afraid of small spaces. She knows she’s not in danger she can’t handle. But her nervous system gets overwhelmed at times and decides things for her.

This happens to us all. We get overwhelmed by a nervous system that sending us “Danger!” notifications and flashbacks happen.

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What is a Flashback?

A flashback is the body’s survival mechanism in response to an incident that reminds you of a trauma.

What will happen?

Something in the present will remind your nervous system of something in the past.

This is very important because it’s your nervous system - not you. This is not a case where you get worried about something and trigger yourself, or worry yourself into a panic because you were “thinking” about something, although that can happen.

The body’s nervous system will decide that this incident in the present has similarities to the thing in the past and it is a threat.

The body will react in a way that you couldn’t react in the past to whatever is happening in the present. And the nervous system will not be able to tell the difference between your past incident and the current situation.

This may sound really complicated but I’ll work through it with a common example: Combat veterans and fireworks.

There’s a veteran. They’ve seen combat. They’ve survived a few explosions while they were at war. They lost friends during the war. But they know that they’re safe at home.

Then: Fireworks.

The body registers the noise of a large boom. The nervous system goes, “I know that sound. It’s a threat.”

The veteran’s body reacts like it’s been trained to do. That means they take action to survive.

The body doesn’t know that it’s hearing fireworks and that the veteran is in a reasonably safe area. It just knows: Large Boom = Danger = Must React if I Want to Survive

It doesn’t matter that the current reality is a safe area. The survival system of the body doesn’t tell time. Telling time as in “That was then, this is now,” is a logic part of the body. The logic part of your body leaves the room when there’s a threat.

And this is why you may find a grown veteran who hasn’t seen combat in a couple of decades, hidden behind a couch in their living room. They’re not cowards. They’re not crazy. They have an overworked hyperactive survival system which reacted in an effort to save the veteran’s life, based on what worked in a prior situation.

Next week I’ll talk more about this and give an everyday life example.

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Symptoms

I’ve mentioned secrets and we’ve gone through some examples of secrets and how they work to keep us in places that aren’t good for us. But here’s the truth - when symptoms show up, it’s an indication of something being wrong. Or at least - not okay.

We need to pay attention to the symptoms and our feelings even if we don’t like them.

Symptoms are what helps us know something is wrong, and unwrapping the secrets and dealing with the emotions we don’t want to experience are keys to healing. Unlocking forbidden areas and revealing secrets are not fun experiences - unless they’re in a treasure hunt adventure movie.

I want to take some time and talk about flashbacks in the coming weeks, because flashbacks are one of the most famous symptoms of trauma. Everyone has at least seen them in movies or memes and it is an unfortunate joke about an extremely disruptive experience.

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Secrets Part 4

We’ve been talking about secrets… and I mentioned that our brains can hide things from us.

This is dark and complicated, but extremely important. (That was your trigger warning.)

Your survival brain has one job: to keep you safe.

And your survival brain is excellent at its one job.

It wants you to live.

No matter what horror you have been through - your survival brain wants you to live.

And the survival brain is incredibly creative in this process.

Sometimes, especially at very young ages, people do horrible things to us. This is extreme abuse… human trafficking is one example. And it’s probably the most well known.

Survival brain for these kids has to defend them from horrific abuse.

And survival brain wants to survive.

Survival brain looks at a child in a dangerous and very abusive situation and says, “I will protect you. I am going to send the you that makes ‘you’ away, because you can’t handle what is happening.”

This is survival brain being a bodyguard to logic brain. Logic brain holds us, our personality and makes us who we are. Survival brain wants to protect that.

And desperate measures are employed.

When a child cannot escape a situation like human trafficking or abuse on that level - survival brain sends logic brain away.

Survival brain may also create a ‘character’ or ‘personality’ that can handle what the child cannot, in order to survive the abuse. Some people who have been through this call this process splitting, or describe the character as an ‘alter.’

It’s still them. It’s just a different them that helped the child survive.

The professional psychologists characterize this as Dissociative Identity Disorder.

And here’s a video of a person with a system of ‘alter’s who helped them survive through trauma.

As a writer… I have characters, but I know they’re fictional. I love them dearly and I recognize that my characters have elements of me - but they aren’t me.

When a person has dissociative identity disorder they don’t separate the “characters.” They also aren’t “characters” they are actual persons. To make it clearer, they are actual persons in one body and when the overwhelm appears, they will dissociate and switch into another person who can handle whatever caused the overwhelm.

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