Sometimes its hard to know if we suffer from Complex PTSD when we are having an emotional flashback.. For so many of us left alone or neglected or traumatised in childhood we were not ALLOWED to know about it.. Now I realise that those early experiences stay lodged inside I am more respectful to my body (containing the trauma memory of my earlier life) that hurts sometimes. Therapist Pete Walker’s 13 points for managing emotional flashbacks is so useful and at the end of this post I will link to an earlier post in which I shared this information taken from his book Complex PTSD : From Surviving To Thriving.
In this post I just wanted to share how reminding ourselves and our inner child that we are now safe takes in points 2 and 6 of his list. In point 2 we remind ourselves when fear or anxiety is triggered for some reason that even though we ‘feel like’ we are in danger, we actually are not.. Its just in childhood it was often not safe to have our feelings or be upset by hurtful things done.. Point 6 means we remind ourselves we are in an adult body while remembering to speak lovingly and reassuringly to our inner child instead of turning the judgmental punishing parent onto ourselves (which encompasses point 4 of his list.)
I began to notice recently that when feeling stressed or anxious it helped me to ‘stop running or reacting’ and tune into my child in my body to ask how she was, what she was experiencing and then attempt to offer soothing and reassurance.. This may sound strange but it does work and when my inner child feels heard then things in my body and over ridden mind tend to start to calm down..
So many of us had no alternative but to dissociate in childhood and as teenagers. For me this involved turning away from the painful reality into a world of books and magic (and this was not dysfunctional as it helped me in some way to survive and feel seen on some level.) For example, I remember Mary Poppins books as being several of my particular favorites when Mum and Dad and I had to live in that miserably cold house under construction in the dead of winter with no flooring.. To me I alwways prayed for a loving figure to come and take me away on a world of adventures, far from the coldness and emptiness of that experience.
Talking about that time with Mum in later years she said how stressed she was and my older sister got sent to Nanas so she was protected.. In fact I just wrote a post I have not yet posted about light and dark and warmth that speaks of how, these days, soothing of my body goes along with actively seeking light and warmth. Often I was so paralysed in my early trauma I could not even take these steps of initiative and I shared in a V log yesterday how I was punished and screamed at for taking initiative in class at age 6. Just taking action to get myself in a warming space or covering my body or seeking comfort from a teddy bear may help us when we are triggered and feeling small and fragile and when we do this it is important that our inner critic does not shame the impulse. And that we are not shamed by someone else’s outer critic.
It is clear to me now that the overwhelming feelings I had as a child were of stress and fear.. I used to wet the bed and I used to hide things like underpants and things I broke due to ‘clumsiness’ i.e. being left alone and having to do things that were beyond my range of ability at that age, like baby sitting younger relatives.
It occurred to me earlier that often mornings, waking to a house empty but for Jasper are a trigger for me too. I am in flashback for most of the morning or was until relatively recently. Now I get my body moving.. but even earlier the tears I had and longing for my parents and god parents was a sign of feeling so sad for my sister that her inner child is not being addressed in her hospitalisation. Managing age regression and emotional flashbacks is necessary for us.. I notice certain poets writing entire poems about being in a flashback almost a frozen inner child state of longing, ravenous need and helplessness. I notice too when those older primal feelings emerge and are not only about my life but about the life of my ancestors too which somehow seem to live on so powerfully in the present. The archetypal yearning for loving available inner parents are ones that may make us summon up such transpersonal sources for comfort too, as and in an effort to be seen, acknowledged in our soul and ‘held.’
Anyway being able to speak lovingly to our fragile self is so important to our emotional recovery work that I wanted to post this today and link to Pete Walker’s list of 13 things to do to help with flashbacks….there is always something we can do to help ourselves and there is always a way to find to be kinder in us to the inner child who struggles and so often may feel overwhelmed by an split off ‘adult’ world.
https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/understanding-and-dealing-with-flashbacks/
Emerging From The Dark Night 