CHAPTER 8 - MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS

Emotional flashbacks are intensely disturbing regressions [ "amygdala hijackings" ] to the overwhelming feeling-states of your childhood abandonment. When you are stuck in a flashback, fear, shame and/or depression can dominate your experience.

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. In the worst flashbacks an apocalypse feels like it will imminently be upon you.

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 Cptsd flashback. This is because, as Goleman's work shows, amygdala hijackings are intense reactions in 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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This is a list of 13 practical steps for helping yourself to manage an emotional flashback:

13 Steps for Managing Emotional Flashbacks

[Focus on Bold Print when flashback is active]

1. Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback" . Flashbacks take you into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as you were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.

2. Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present." Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.

3. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.

4. Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her/him unconditionally– that s/he can come to you for comfort and protection when s/he feels lost and scared.

5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless – a safer future was unimaginable. Remember this flashback will pass as it always has before.

6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. [Feeling small and fragile is a sign of a flashback.]

7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches you into "heady" worrying, or numbing and spacing out.

[a]Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. [Tightened muscles send false danger signals to your brain.]

[b]Breathe deeply and slowly. [Holding your breath also signals danger.]

[c]Slow down: rushing presses your brain's flight response button.

[d]Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a pillow or a stuffed animal, lie down on your bed or in a closet or in a bath; take a nap.

[e]Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body. It cannot hurt you if you do not run from it.

8. Resist the Inner Critic's Drasticizing and Catastrophizing.

[a]Use Thought-stopping to halt the critic's endless exaggerations of danger, and its constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self- attack into saying "NO" to your critic's unfair self-criticism.

[b]Use Thought-substitution & Thought-correction to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.

9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment. Validate and soothe your child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn your tears into self-compassion and your anger into self-protection.

10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.

11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.

12. Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal your wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to your still unmet developmental needs and can provide you with motivation to get them met.

13. Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become de-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.

My clients, who post this somewhere conspicuous until they memorize the gist of it, typically progress more rapidly in their recovery. You can easily print out a copy from the "13 Steps" page of my website: www.pete-walker.com.

Triggers And Emotional Flashbacks

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. Nonetheless, becoming increasingly mindful of our triggers is crucial because it sometimes allows us to avoid flashback-inducing people, situations and behaviors.

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 all unknown adults can trigger us into fear even when there is no resemblance to our original abuser[s]. I still occasionally feel triggered when I come across a group of teenagers, because I grew up in a neighborhood where there were many violent ones. For this reason, my son who is quite empathic joked that he will not become a teenager when he grows up.

Sometimes someone looking at us, or even noticing us, can trigger us into fear and toxic shame. One of my clients once came in intensely triggered because a cat was staring at him. 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. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.

It took me decades to overcome my intense performance anxiety about teaching. Nothing could trigger me more than an upcoming teaching engagement. Fortunately I was unwilling to give up this activity, because I enjoyed it most of the time once I got going. I did not make any real progress, beyond learning to "white-knuckle it," until I recognized my performance anxiety as a flashback to the danger of talking at family dinner time. This recognition allowed me to see that I was unconsciously terrified that my parents were going to show up and scoff at me in public.

At first, I [my critic] labeled this a preposterous idea, but when I started to imagine and practice aggressively defending myself against them on the drive to my teaching engagement, I soon experienced an enormous reduction in my anxiety. This experience lead to me formulating Step 6 in the flashback management steps above, as well as my ideas about angering against the critic, which will be explored in the next chapter.

The Look: A Common Trigger Of Emotional Flashbacks

Early on in working with this model, I was surprised that certain clients with relatively moderate childhood abuse were plagued by emotional flashbacks. Most of them in fact were quite sure that they had never even been hit. Many of them however would talk about how they hated it when their parents gave them the look.

The look, in most cases, is the facial expression that typically accompanies contempt. Contempt is a powerful punishing visage backed up by an emotional force-field of intimidation and disgust. A raised voice can be added intermittently to the look to amp up its power.

When a parent gives the look to a child, she is "telling" him that he is not only in serious jeopardy, but that he is also "a sorry excuse for a human being" . Over time, the look can make the recipient feel terrified and repugnant, as it drives him into an emotional flashback of fear and shame.

When the look is used to control an older child, it commonly flashes her back to an earlier, pre-memory time when the look was empowered by traumatizing punishment. The look rarely terrifies a child into obedience unless it has previously been paired with hitting or other dire consequences. Years of working at Parental Stress Services convinced me that most young children ignore the look unless it was previously accompanied by traumatizing punishment.

Typically, the look is empowered via a psychological process called conditioning. Here is a classic example of aversive conditioning. Technicians deliver an electric shock to an animal in a cage at the same time that they ring a bell. The animal of course has a fearful and distressed response to the shock. It does not, however, take many repetitions of pairing the sound with the shock before the sound alone elicits the same upset response in the animal.

This is analogous, I believe, to how a child learns to be terrified of the look. With enough pairings of the look with physical punishment or extreme abandonment, the parent can eventually delete the smack and get the same results with just the look. With enough repetitions in early childhood, this pairing can last a lifetime, so that the parent can control the child forever with the look. In my hospice work, I have seen several dying, ninety-pound mothers still able to put the fear of god into their huge sons with the look.

The look then is a powerful trigger for making adult survivors flashback to the fear and humiliation of their childhoods. Once again, many of my clients do not remember this because the punishment only had to accompany the look for a few months while they were toddlers before it became permanently wired as a trigger. Moreover, it is the rare person who has any memory before he is three or four years old.

Unfortunately the look can continue to work even after the parent dies. There are at least two reasons for this.

First, we internalize our parents in a way that they can subliminally appear in our imaginations and give us the look whenever we are less than perfect. This includes "imperfections" in thought, feeling or action.

Sadly, I often see this subliminal look mimicked on the faces of my flashbacked clients as they scowl contemptuously at themselves.

And second, when anyone else looks at us disapprovingly, we can generalize that they are as dangerous as our parents. This is what happened to me in the emotional flashback that I described in chapter 1.

The worst thing about having been traumatized with the look in childhood is that we can erroneously transfer and project our memory of it onto other people when we are triggered. We are especially prone to doing this with authority figures or people that resemble our parents, even when they are not sporting the look.

Internal vs. External Triggers

As we move out of early recovery, we begin to observe that internal triggers are even more common than external ones. Such triggers are commonly the nasty spawn of the inner critic. Typically they are thoughts and visualizations about endangerment or the need for perfection. The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive. Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking. He can also frighten himself by enumerating the many ways that he might mess up any upcoming task.

When internal triggering is at its worst, small potato miscues and peccadilloes trigger us into a full blown emotional flashback. We then devolve into a polarized process of negative-noticing – an incessant preoccupation with defects and hazards. We perseverate about everything that has gone or could go wrong.

As recovery progresses, many survivors are shocked to discover that the majority of their flashbacks are triggered internally by these types of inner critic programs. We will explore below and in the next two chapters the ways we can rescue ourselves from the critic's internal triggering processes.

Progressive Trigger-Recognition

With ongoing recovery, we become more knowledgeable about our triggers, and avoid them when practical. Identifying our triggers also helps us to get into flashback management mode more quickly.

Recognition further aids us to handle unavoidable triggering situations. Forethought allows us to prophylactically practice flashback management before we get activated, as I did in the performance anxiety situation mentioned earlier.

Recognizing the moment of triggering is even more important than recognizing the trigger itself. This is because flashbacks sometimes start out subtly and then progressively become more intense. Early recognition therefore helps us to invoke the steps earlier, and decrease the intensity and duration of the flashback.

Finally, resolving a flashback requires rebalancing significant biochemical changes in the brain and body that take time to subside. For example, over-adrenalization sometimes dramatically morphs into the hangover of adrenalin exhaustion, before the adrenal function can be rebalanced. Decreasing the intensity of a flashback with quick remedial action decreases the time it takes for our physiology to recover.

Signs Of Being In A Flashback

We can often find ourselves in a flashback without ever having seen the "flash." There are a variety of clues that we can learn to identify as signs that we are caught in a flashback. This is essential to recovery, as naming our experience "flashback" [step#1 in flashback management] often immediately brings some relief. Even more importantly, it points us in the direction of working the other 12 steps of flashback management.

One common sign of being flashed-back is that we feel small, helpless, and hopeless. In intense flashbacks this magnifies into feeling so ashamed that we are loath to go out or show our face anywhere. Feeling fragile, on edge, delicate and easily crushable is another aspect of this. The survivor may also notice an evaporation of whatever self-esteem he has earned since he left home. This is a flashback to the childhood years where implicit family rules forbade any self-esteem at all.

Another common clue that we are flashing back is an increase in the virulence of the inner or outer critic. This typically looks like increased drasticizing and catastrophizing, as well as intensified self-criticism or judgmentalness of others. A very common example of this is lapsing into extremely polarized, all-or-none thinking such as only being able to see what is wrong with yourself and/or others.

In my own mid-level recovery, I learned that when I was feeling especially judgmental of others, it usually meant that I had flashed back to being around my critical parents. The trigger was usually that some vulnerability of mine was in ascendancy. In response, I then over-noticed others' faults so that I could justify avoiding them and the embarrassment of being seen in a state of not being shiny enough.

Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them. Here are two common instances of this: [1] a minor upset feels like an emergency; [2] a minor unfairness feels like a travesty of justice.

In the first instance, you drop a book that you are carrying and launch into an angry, self-berating tirade that lingers for hours. In the second instance, another driver's relatively harmless, un-signaled lane change triggers you into rageful indignation that reverberates in your psyche for hours.

When we are not mindful at such times, we can erupt against ourselves in self-disgust and self-hatred, or we can unfairly explode out against the relatively innocent other.

On the other hand, we can choose healthy flashback management once we recognize these examples as flashbacks to the real emergencies and injustices of our childhood. Furthermore, we can harvest recovery out of these unpleasant flashbacks by seeing them as proof that we were traumatized. When we do the latter, we can morph our anger into healthy indignation about the outrageously unfair conditions of our upbringing.

More On Self-Medication

Another clue about being in a flashback is an increased use of primitive self-soothing techniques. Many survivors learn early in life to manage their painful feelings with food, distracting activities or mood-altering substances. Over time self-medication can become habitual and devolve into substance or process addictions.

With self-medication, I believe there is a continuum of severity that stretches from occasional use on one end to true addiction on the other. For many survivors, self-medication is a matter of degree. An especially strong urge to use more substance or process than normal is a powerful clue that you are in a flashback. With practice, mindfully noticing a sudden upsurge in craving can be interpreted as the need to invoke the flashback management steps. Moreover, I see many survivors gradually decrease their self-medicating habits by effectively using these steps.

Flashbacks In Therapy Sessions

This section is for survivors who are in therapy or contemplating starting it. Over the years, I have noticed that as survivors feel safe enough with me, opportunities arise more frequently for working with flashbacks during sessions. Sometimes it even seems that some part of them "schedules" their flashbacks to occur just prior to or during our session. It is as if they are looking for "on the job training" in flashback management. Some therapists describe this as regression in the service of building the healthy ego.

I recently experienced this with a client who rushed into my office five minutes late, visibly flushed and anxious. She opened the session by exclaiming: "I'm such a loser. I can't do anything right. You must be sick of working with me." This was someone who had, on previous occasions, been moved by my validation of her ongoing accomplishments in our work.

Based on what she had uncovered about her mother's punitive perfectionism in previous sessions, I was certain that being late had triggered her into an emotional flashback. In this moment, she was experiencing right-brain emotional dominance and a decrease in left-brain rational thinking. As so often happens in a flashback, she temporarily lost access to her post-childhood knowledge and understanding. This appears to be a mechanism of dissociation, and in this instance, it rendered my client amnesiac of my high regard for our work together.

I believe this type of dissociation also accounts for the recurring disappearance of previously established trust that commonly occurs with emotional flashbacks. As we progress in our recovery, we learn that flashbacks can cause us to forget that our proven allies are in fact still reliable. With enough practice, however, we can learn to interpret feelings of distrust with proven friends as evidence that we are in a flashback. We are flashing back to our childhoods when no one was trustworthy.

Grieving Resolves Flashback [Step # 9]

Returning to the above vignette, I wondered out loud to my client, "Do you think you might be in a flashback?" Because of the numerous times we had previously identified her emotional upsets as flashbacks, she immediately recognized this and let go into deep sobbing. She dropped into profound grieving.

Her crying combined tears of relief with tears of grief. Her tears of relief came from being able to take in my empathy. Her tears of grief were the feelings of her abject childhood pain being released. Her tears of relief also came from once again remembering the source of this previously confusing and overwhelming pain.

My client continued to cry and released more of the pain of her original trauma. Further tears were about being stuck so often in flashbacks. As her tears subsided, she recalled a time as a small child when she literally received a single lump of coal in her Christmas stocking. Mean mom had "scrooged" her as punishment for being ten minutes late to dinner. Her tears then morphed into healthy anger about this abuse, and she felt herself returning to an empowered sense of self. Grieving brought her back into the present and broke the amnesia of the flashback.

She then remembered to invoke her instinct of self-protection. We had gradually been rebuilding it with role-plays and assertiveness training. She angrily vented about her parents' destruction of her right to defend herself against abuse and unfairness. She started cheekily chanting "That's not fair!" as if to show her parents they could no longer attack her for saying it.

She then moved further into reiterating her right to have boundaries. She mocked mom and dad as poor excuses for parents. And then she turned her anger onto the critic with a resounding refrain of saying "no" . "No, you cannot judge me. No, you cannot pick me apart anymore. No you cannot waste my time with all your stupid worries!"

Finally, I reminded her to reinvoke her sense of safety by recognizing that she now inhabited an adult body. She was now free of parental control. She had many resources to draw on: intelligence, strength, resilience, and a growing sense of community. She lived in a safe home. She had the support of her therapist and two friends who were her allies and who readily saw her essential worth.

I also observed that she was making ongoing progress in managing her flashbacks which were occurring less often and less intensely.

After about forty minutes, she was released from the flashback. I have witnessed this restorative power of grieving on innumerable occasions. The intricacies of therapeutic grieving will be explored in chapter 11.

Managing The Inner Critic [Step # 8]

When Cptsd survivors come of age and launch from the traumatizing family, they are often unaware that their minds are dominated by an inner critic. In assisting others to manage flashbacks, the most common help I offer is to encourage them to challenge the alarmist and perfectionistic programming of the inner critic.

This type of scenario arises frequently in my practice. A client, in the midst of reporting an inconsequential mistake, suddenly launches into a catastrophizing tale. He reports from his critic's nightmarish fantasy that his life is deteriorating into a cascading series of disasters. He is flashing back to the way he was continuously over-punished in childhood.

One of my client's drasticizing sounded like this: "My boss looked at me funny when I came back from my bathroom break this morning and I know he thinks I'm stupid and lazy and is going to fire me. I just know I won't be able to get another job. My girlfriend will think I'm a loser and leave me. I'll get sick from the stress, and with no money to pay my medical insurance and rent, I'll soon be living out of a shopping cart." It's disturbing how many drasticizing inner critic rants end with up with an image of homelessness. What a symbol of abandonment!

Recovering requires being able to recognize inner-critic catastrophizing so that we can resist it with thought-stopping and thought-correction. In this case, I reminded my client of the many times we had caught his critic "freaking out" about every conceivable way his life could go down the tubes. I then encouraged him to refuse to indulge this process, and to angrily say "no" to the critic every time it tried to scare or demean him.

Finally, I reminded him of all the positive experiences he actually had with his boss [thought-correction]. I also helped him enumerate his many successes at work, at school and at life in general.

The inner critic not only exacerbates flashbacks, but eventually grows into a psychic agency that triggers them. Reversing the damaging effects of the critic is the subject of the next two chapters

ADVANCED FLASHBACK MANAGEMENT

Waking Up In The Abandonment Depression

As recovery progresses, you notice more subtlety in the triggering process. As you do, you become more mindful of your inner critic's hard-to-detect triggers. You also discover that some triggers are indiscernible. This is especially true of triggering that occurs during sleep.

Advanced flashback management, then, involves learning how to manage the disconcerting experience of falling asleep feeling reasonably put together and waking up in a flashback. Typically this occurs because a dream has triggered you into a flashback. If you remember the dream, you can sometimes figure out why it triggered you. With growing mindfulness you may even understand which events from the previous day triggered your dream.

The most difficult situation to manage is when you cannot remember the dream. This type of flashback can feel particularly unfair and discouraging. It is rich fodder for the critic, which can declare that you are not only getting nowhere in his recovery, you are getting worse.

Flashbacks As The Inner Child's Plea For Help

With undetectable triggers, I find that it is most helpful to see a flashback as a communication from the child that you were. The child is reminding you that he woke up feeling desolate innumerable times in that house that was not a home. He woke up daunted by the prospect of once again having to reenter the poisonous milieu of your family. The child is now asking you to meet his unmet need of having someone to go to for comfort when he wakes up feeling wretched. It is as if he is saying: "See! This is how bad it was – this is how overwhelmed, ashamed and miserable I felt so much of the time."

Managing the pain of waking up in the abandonment depression is one of the most difficult, long term challenges in recovery. Sleep seems to be a regressive, right-brain dominant experience. It is not uncommon to wake up with a temporary loss of access to the left-brain cognitive functions that control our more sophisticated understandings of our present-day reality. Without the latter, flashback management often reverts to the critic and our early childhood attempts to cope. This creates a fruitful ground for the critic to explode its arsenal of self-pathologizing programs [enumerated in the next chapter].

Years ago, I customarily responded to awakening in flashback with hypochondriasizing ruminations about my health: "What's happening to my energy? Something must be seriously wrong with me. I feel like death warmed over. That ache in my back is probably a tumor. I lost two pounds this month. I just know its cancer! I wish I could just die and get it over with."

This kind of drasticizing could and did sometimes go on for hours – even days. Moreover, it typically pulled me out of the abandonment depression by creating so much anxiety, that I was forced out of bed into busyholic rushing. I would then hurry through the day unconsciously rushing to outdistance myself from this awful thinking process, as well as the abandonment pain underlying it.

Because of a great deal of practice, I now quickly realize that hypochondriasizing means that I am in a flashback. Accordingly, I work to shift the focus of my thought processes to the theme of generating love and kindness to the child within me. I dedicate this work to my historical child who woke up countless times feeling horribly abandoned in my love-impoverished family of origin. For me, this is now my most practiced flashback management process: breaking my merge with the critic to concentrate on caring for myself.

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There is another type of flashback message that seems to come from my inner child. It is that I have slipped back into my old habit of neglecting him. Often it occurs when I ignore him by regressing into overusing my flight response. My flashback then seems to be his clamoring for some proof that my compassion for him is not merely empty rhetoric. And typically when I slow down and go inside, I find that old pain of self-abandonment - that old pain that I now think of as "being lonely for myself." Often this brings up some tears. Almost as often, crying initiates a release from my flashback.

Flexible Use Of The Flashback Management Steps

Helen started her session in a deep state of self-alienation: "I am just such a hopeless case! For no reason at all, I got myself stuck in a terrible flashback yesterday. And it wasn't one of those impossible-to-figure-out, waking up-flashbacks you keep telling me about. I was fine all morning, and then Bam! I was in it up to here, and there wasn't any stupid trigger. Nothing caused it. It's just me. Hopelessly screwed up! Mentally defective!"

Discerning the trigger of a flashback is a slippery slope. Seeing the trigger can often rescue us from blaming and hating ourselves for the flashback, but there is not always an identifiable trigger. In such situations, looking for the trigger can quickly deteriorate into self-pathologizing vivisection. This slippery slope can quickly become a cliff as we plummet deeper into the abyss of the flashback.

It is almost always a matter of perspective. Am I trigger-searching from a place of being on my side or a place of fault-finding? When it is the latter, it is best to abandon the search and move toward invoking self-acceptance, as there will always be triggerings that are unfathomable. The process of self-support needs to trump the healthy urge to "figure it ALL out" at such times.

The process of self-acceptance also needs to trump any of your efforts to fix the flashback when this striving becomes tainted with self-irritation and self-disappointment. Sometimes, as described above, the best understanding you can achieve is an overarching one that your inner child is feeling profoundly abandoned. She is cowering from a humiliating attack from your critic and needs for you to switch gears and demonstrate that you will care for her no matter what.

Existential Triggers

Many psychologists use the term existential to describe the fact that all human beings are subject to painful events. These are normal recurring afflictions that everyone suffers from time to time. Horrible world events, difficult choices, illnesses and periodic feelings of abject loneliness are common examples of existential pain. Existential calamities can be especially triggering for survivors, because we typically have so much family-of-origin calamity for them to trigger us into reliving.

Another particularly triggering existential phenomenon is the fact that we all suffer invisible, unpredictable mood shifts. Good moods sometimes inexplicably deteriorate into bad ones. As novelist, David Mitchell wrote "Good moods are as fragile as eggs… and bad moods as fragile as bricks" .

Unpredictable shifts in your emotional weather are typically problematic in Cptsd. These shifts can quickly trigger you into a full-fledged flashback. This is usually because you were punished or abandoned in the past for showing your full complement of feelings. So now, out of old habit, you automatically dissociate when your emotional weather is inclement.

The inner child often experiences this as you reverting to the pre-recovery adult who had no time for feelings. The child then feels that he is once again trapped in the past where he was so devastatingly abandoned. Perhaps, the resultant flashback is his only way to really get your attention. This is, again, why I try to make my default position turning to myself and my inner child with unconditional positive regard as much as possible.

Later Stage Recovery

When your recovery matures sufficiently, you realize that much of the emotional pain of your flashbacks is appropriate but delayed reactions to your childhood abuse and neglect. You process your feelings in a way that resolves flashbacks, and also builds an increasingly healthy, sense of self.

This, in turn, leads to an ongoing reduction of the unresolved childhood pain that fuels your emotional flashbacks. Flashbacks then become less frequent, intense and enduring. Eventually, you learn to invoke your self-protective instinct as soon as you realize that you are triggered. As flashbacks decrease and become more manageable, the defensive structures built around them (narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, dissociative and/or codependent) are more readily deconstructed.

At this stage of your recovery, you may now experience an ironically satisfying experience when you come out of a flashback. You may sense on many levels of your awareness that life as a child in your parents' house was even worse than you realized. Simultaneously, you may feel a corresponding sense of relief that you are now freer from your parents' life-spoiling influence than ever before.

HELPING KIDS MANAGE EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS

This list is for social workers, teachers, relatives, neighbors and friends to help children from traumatizing families. It is adapted from the steps at the beginning of this chapter. Depending on the age of the child, some steps will be more appropriate than others. Even if you are not in a position to help other kids, please read this list at least once for the benefit of your own inner child.

1. Help the child develop an awareness of flashbacks [inside "owies" ]: "When have you felt like this before? Is this how it feels when someone is being mean to you?"

2. Demonstrate that "Feeling in danger does not always mean you are in danger." Teach that some places are safer than others. Use a soft, easy tone of voice: "Maybe you can relax a little with me." "You're safe here with me." "No one can hurt you here."

3. Model that there are adults interested in his care and protection. Aim to become the child's first safe relationship. Connect the child with other safe nurturing adults, groups, or clubs.

4. Speak soothingly and reassuringly to the child. Balance "Love & Limits:" 5 positives for each negative. Set limits kindly.

5. Guide the child's mind back into her body to reduce hyper-vigilance and hyperarousal.

a.Teach systemic relaxation of all major muscle groups

b.Teach deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing

c.Encourage slowing down to reduce fear-increasing rushing

d.Teach calming centering practices like drawing, Aikido, Tai Chi, yoga, stretching

e.Identify and encourage retreat to safe places

6. Teach "use-your-words." In some families it's dangerous to talk. Verbal ventilation releases pain and fear, and restores coping skills.

7. Facilitate grieving the death of feeling safe. Abuse and neglect beget sadness and anger. Crying releases fear. Venting anger in a way that doesn't hurt the person or others creates a sense of safety.

8. Shrink the Inner Critic. Make the brain more user-friendly. Heighten awareness of negative self-talk and fear-based fantasizing. Teach thought-stopping and thought substitution: Help the child build a memorized list of his qualities, assets, successes, resources.

9. Help the child identify her 4F type & its positive side. Use metaphors, songs, cartoons or movie characters. Fight: Power Rangers; Flight: Roadrunner, Bob the Builder; Freeze: Avatar; Fawn: Grover.

10. Educate about the right/need to have boundaries, to say no, to protest unfairness, to seek the protection of responsible adults.

11. Identify and avoid dangerous people, places and activities. [Superman avoids Kryptonite. Shaq and Derek Jeter don't do drugs.]

12. Deconstruct eternity thinking. Create vivid pictures of attainable futures that are safer, friendlier, and more prosperous. Cite examples of comparable success stories.