Flashbacks and Anxiety

Question asked.

I have been struggling for 5 months with flashbacks and anxiety attacks. How long will this last?

This was a question I found myself asking often.

When will it go away?

How do I live comfortably with these memories and emotions?

How do I not allow my PTSD or anxiety to control me?

PTSD was a steady constant, and I still suffer just not in the same way as the first year.

The trauma that we endure doesn't just disappear but it transforms in shapes.

In the beginning I lived inside those memories of hospitals, seeing his face, hearing his last breaths. I could be working and all of a sudden I was literally back in the room of a hospital, hearing the footsteps of doctors outside the door, smelling what the room of that hospital smelt like, hearing my husband breathing or the monitors beeping.

I very much was not mentally present but living inside the echos of those hospitals.

I tried dissecting each memory, tried to understand its importance. Thought maybe I missed something and that's why they were so prevalent in my mind.

One of the first flashbacks that was a daily occurrence after my husband had passed was the first night we were sent to Columbia Presbyterian hospital. I remember they told me I couldn't sleep in the room next to him that I needed to make a bed in the waiting room of the floor. I put the couches together and I stared off into the lights of the city streets. I was scared, I didn't want to leave my husband alone and I was scared for him, I was alone, I was terrified that there was no coming back from what my husband was about to go through.

Flashbacks are our bodies response to not being able to process what we were intended to process at the time of the experience.

The experience that we went through overwhelms our natural ability to cope so the event keeps intruding into our present thought's emotions and physical reactions until we can understand them and process the narrative.

For many of us that suffer with PTSD I have learned that the longer we run away from the memories, the longer we try to avoid the flashbacks, the longer we suffer with them. For me personally I have discovered that my feelings are a direct link to the memory.

If I am feeling overwhelmed, I get a flashback of a day that my husband was being discharged from the hospital and they took out his IV and there was blood everywhere. I vividly can hear him say "baby there is blood on my sneakers can you get it off" I can see his face and the look of defeat in his eyes, I can feel his hand on my shoulder trying to brace his steps as we walked.

The current feeling has nothing to do with the experience I had 2 years ago however my nervous system linked the feeling to that.

So how do you delink those feelings from past to present?

With an immense amount of work, and focus that this step requires.

There came a point after the year mark that I said I can't do this anymore. I needed control back because those flashbacks were devouring my existence. So when those moments came where I was back inside that hospital I did the work.

If I was inside my shop working on a car and I had a flashback I forced myself to get up and go outside.

Focus on my 5 senses to ground me again

I was consciously paying attention to what the weather felt like

listening to the sounds that were happening around me

touching anything that was physically around me

focusing on an object that was currently there.

Forcing myself to regain control in the present. Once I was able to regain control I would reflect on the feeling I was having before I was sucked back into my trauma.

What was the current feeling, and how did that feeling relate to the feeling I had while in the hospital?

Just recently I hadn't had a flashback in almost two months, and then someone really close to me was leaving for a few days and instantly I had a flashback.

What was the correlation?

Being alone, being scared something would happen and not being able to cope with it by myself. Being scared that something would happen to the person that was leaving me.

Dissect your flashbacks because there is so much more there than the memory.

I have always been very self aware and I am a firm believer that you only know what you know.

So research, learn, define, and make the decision to heal yourself at your own pace.

Understand that what you went through is traumatic, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions are all valid.

Our nervous system is trying to fill in the blanks in order for us to survive except life keeps spinning and we don't even have the time to understand what is happening to us.

There are four very distinct symptoms of PTSD. I have faced every single one of them.

Intrusion- This is defined as the flashbacks, nightmares, memories, and the emotional and physical distress when these things intrude on our lives.

Avoidance- This is what happens when we physically cannot walk into a space that holds such a deep memory. For me I can no longer go to mine and my husband's favorite place to eat, no longer drive even remotely close the hospital that he died in let alone the building that he had chemo at for an entire year. Suppressing the thoughts or emotions that were related to certain events because I didn't want to face the pain that they caused.

Hyperarousal/reactivity- Being angry at the world and nothing no one could say would help. Not being able to sleep or simply not being able to get up. Constantly scanning the rooms for danger or being so over stimulated by absolutely anything and everything. Its like we have a heightened sense or awareness for everything around us and we fear it all.

Negative changes in thinking and mood- We are constantly feeling guilty or detached from the rest of the world. Feelings of helplessness and vulnerability. Difficulty experiencing positive emotions and an insane negative belief of yourself and the world around you.

Please understand that PTSD is not weakness. It's maladaptive survival response. The brain literally trying to protect itself from the danger that is no longer present.

I want to talk about something briefly which is pretty wild from a psychology standpoint and maybe it will help someone going through grief and trauma simultaneously.

What is grief?

Grief is an emotional response to losing someone you love.

Waves of sadness or longing and missing the person

The brain slowly learns the person is gone while maintaining emotional connection.

What is trauma?

Trauma is a survival response to the threatening and overwhelming event. It constantly keeps you stuck in fear, shock, intrusive memories and hypervigilance. The brain is literally struggling to register the events that occurred so it replays them for you over and over and over again.

When both of these things occur at the same time your body is actually creating a psychological tug of war. As grief is trying to accept the loss trauma is trying to stay on guard for danger.

People sometimes ask "What is wrong with me that my grief doesn't look like what they expected?"

There is nothing wrong with any of us.

Psychologically its because the brain is still trying to solve the trauma and the grief is trying to mourn the loss and that creates a nervous system that is literally going haywire.

Does PTSD ever go away? For me it has softened over time, yet still is very much there. My awareness to it though allows me to have more control of it than before.

I believe that once you can balance out your grief and trauma.

Once your grief allows you to accept what has happened

you can focus on understanding the trauma and rebuild the story in a way y

our brain can understand. Reconnecting to the person in your memory with the trauma dominating the narrative.

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