Flashbacks--Decades Later

Today, January 30th, 2013, when I checked my stats, I discovered that somebody had found my site by typing "Complex PTSD flashbacks decades later . . . "  I would like to address this search term because I can imagine that the person who typed it must have been in some distress.   Unfortunately, I am not educated in the technical or scientific aspects of neurology related to flashbacks or trauma energy.  I can, however, share my own experience related to the search term in hopes of alleviating some of the anxiety that the searcher may have been experiencing when he or she did the Internet search.

Flashbacks related to old trauma experiences can wreak internal havoc and cause a person who may be living a fairly ordinary life to question her sanity.  That's what happened to me one day late in 2009.  That flashback, in fact, motivated me to find my present therapist and do some healing.  No way did I want to risk continuing to have flashbacks like that one!  So I was desperate.

The day began as an ordinary autumn day in Portland, Oregon.  I had taken public transportation, including the local above-ground light rail system, to my appointment at The Grotto, a Roman Catholic facility that provides spiritual support for people who need or want it.  I had met with a spiritual director who also had credentials as a social worker.  Although I had been a lifelong Episcopalian, I had recently converted to Catholicism and had a lot of questions regarding the Church. 

During my session with the spiritual director this time, for some reason she pounded me with questions, and by the time I walked out the door, I felt spacy.  However, I managed to find my way back to the light rail station and caught my train heading for downtown Portland where I would catch my bus.  I didn't understand the reason for the spacy feeling, but I wrote the feeling off as low blood sugar, since I had not eaten for six hours.

As I sat on the train, however, the spacy feeling intensified, and suddenly I was nine years old and back in the kitchen of my childhood.  I must have done something I should not have done because my father, in a rage, was roaring at me.  I was on the floor, and he was towering over me, roaring.  And then he did the unspeakable: In order to drive home his rage at me, he picked my favorite cat up by the tail and flung her against the kitchen wall. 

As I sat on the train hurtling into town, I tried to claw my way from the past into the present, but I couldn't.  I remained age nine, lying on the kitchen floor, shutting my eyes and trying to cover my ears so as to block out the cries of my cat and the thud of her body on the kitchen wall as my father flung her.  Gradually, the flashback faded, and I looked around me to see if anyone near me had noticed what had happened.  Nobody had. 

When I got home, I lay down and reviewed the experience.  I was about 70 years old.  Why had my mind locked itself into an experience I'd had at age nine?  I was able to understand that I'd had a flashback.  I'd read about flashbacks and had even experienced flashbacks at times when I was under extreme stress during my twenty-year abusive marriage.  But why today?  And why that particular flashback? 

To this day, I cannot explain to myself why, exactly, I had that particular flashback.  However, my guess is that my flashback was triggered by the manner in which the spiritual director had questioned me.  She pounded her questions at me, unrelentingly, so it seemed to me.  I had felt frightened and powerless under her questioning, yet I continued to reply, which caused her to continue her questioning.  If I had asked her to stop, she would have stopped, but I was too terrified to ask--just as at age nine I had been too terrified to ask my father to stop his raging and stop abusing my cat. 

I did not return to The Grotto for spiritual direction.  Instead, I found a therapist and began unraveling the tightly-woven tapestry of C-PTSD.  I've come a long way in my journey of healing, a journey inspired by that flashback I had at age 70 that was based upon a traumatic event that occurred in the 1940s. 

Thus, if you are experiencing flashbacks arising from traumatic events of your distant past, your mind may be telling you that it's time to begin to heal.  Listen to your mind, and heed its message.  Find a qualified trauma therapist that you are comfortable with and begin to heal.  Based upon my own healing experience, I can assure you that the journey is worth the effort. 

Jean, Age 9