Member-only story
Understanding the Trauma Response of Flashbacks
An involuntary recall of vivid, disturbing memories
Jade grew up in a household where emotional abuse was constant. Being yelled at, blamed, and made to feel invisible were daily occurrences. As an adult, these early assaults are viscerally re-experienced whenever Jade’s partner raises his voice during an argument. Suddenly, she isn’t just hearing him. She’s feeling like a scared child again, frozen and small. Her body goes numb. She can’t speak.
It’s not just that Jade remembers being yelled at as a kid. She feels like she’s become that child again, like she’s back in her childhood home, even though she knows she’s in the present.
At first, Jade struggled to explain what happened. She’d say, “I just shut down” or “I don’t know what came over me.” Fortunately, Jade has been my client in trauma-informed psychodynamic therapy for a substantial enough period of time to know that she was having a dissociative flashback.
As a seasoned complex trauma clinician and survivor of complex PTSD I am well accustomed to recognizing flashbacks as a core symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), complex PTSD and dissociative disorders. They are sudden, vivid experiences in which a survivor feels as though they are reliving a past event, often one that was…
