Emotional Flashback happening

I had planned to make my next post on the topic of understanding the evolutionary concept of stress and what it does to people who were scared of their surroundings at an early age. Maybe include how stress and anger are related, and how both of them have been hijacked and normalized in our modern world.

...but...I didn't pay enough attention to my limitations today. I jumped from one household task to another family task, then met up with friends, and now my nervous system has hijacked my whole existence.

How do I currently feel? My body and my thoughts are totally disconnected from one another. My heart is pounding, and I feel my pulse everywhere in my body. I'm tired... or maybe tired is the wrong word, I'm mentally not quite in the room, somehow stuck between dissociation and the actual world around me. My brain is blank, yet hypervigilant to everything happening in my house. I can tune out my family's voices, but only until one voice shows the slightest indication that they are not 100% happy with something or someone, then I hear every word like it's magnified, pounding on my eardrums. I feel like I have to do something, intervene, shut down any dissatisfaction, or flee, hide... or maybe attack. My whole person is running purely on self-protective instinct: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze (4Fs [Pete Walker, CPTSD]) seem to all be trying to act at the same time.

At the same time, I am grateful to have obtained a certain level of control in these situations... at least mostly. Years of hard work to gain an understanding of my inner workings, and the reasons behind them, have done much to help me get through these phases. At least mostly, as I still sometimes only notice days into a massive flashback that I've been living and acting through the 4Fs.

So while my body is somehow in fight, flight, and freeze simultaneously, I have spent the last hour in bed, sometimes hooked into the surrounding conversations, but mostly just noticing the many symptoms of the emotional flashback and accepting them. I know they will pass. It feels horrible, but considering what I have in my life's backpack, it's not surprising.

While I experienced many professionals who tried to help me reduce my symptoms, which really all failed, it has been the understanding of CPTSD and diligent research into my own past that helped me reduce the feeling of shame in these phases to zero. Even after first realizing I had CPTSD, it still took quite some time, more than a year for sure, before I stopped trying to hide my inner discomfort from my family. Bringing my family on board and having them understand my trauma and what it sometimes does to me, that has been the biggest change in my life. Not long ago it would have been unimaginable for me to be vulnerable enough to actually say: "Oh, I think I just overdid it. My body is going haywire, I'll go lie down and take a rest," and then actually go lie down, listen to an audiobook I know by heart, and listen to my body and mind. IFS-style, I try to find the part that actually knows nothing dangerous is happening around me and nobody is about to attack me, and then from the point of view of that part, accept the body experience currently in motion and comfort the terrified parts cowering in a dark corner, afraid of all interpersonal interaction.

And as this post shows, with some time and acceptance, and thanks to the understanding I have managed to obtain about my inner workings and their origins, I'm okay. I'll need to tread carefully for a while and nightmares are probably a certainty tonight, but I'm okay, and being able to write that actually makes me smile.

#EmotionalFlashback #CPTSD #KPTBS