I am sometimes struck with a sense of vertigo, of time shifting beneath me, becoming slippery. Other times, it feels as though a past year that has has been laid over the current one. The sense of this is, at times, strong enough that it becomes necessary to prod myself. I walk around my house, finding objects that belong to the current year. Stop what I am doing and practice my saxophone or go through a dance routine, activities I have only learned in 2020. It’s been happening often, lately.
A year ago I was in crisis. I knew, at the time, the things I felt were too much for me to manage. Exceeded my capabilities. I knew then, already, that when I got to a better place I would need to deal with the excess. Trauma. It doesn’t have to be extraordinary, the reason that brings us to this place. In the eyes of others, your reaction may look completely unreasonable and out of place. To those not in your position, what you are facing may seem easy to understand or solve. Or turn off. It’s in the past, let it go. Forget about it. It’s not possible to do these things. The body remembers. You can split this into 6 easy payments but the bill is still your responsibility. In full. Traumas not fully dealt with send tendrils to reach you where you are, entangle you and hold you back. We all have things we push down and distract ourselves from thinking about. One random event can tip the scale and you find yourself in a crisis that demands your full attention.
I have felt this feeling before in my life. I have sensed the slipperiness of time, one year laying itself on another. I did not have the correct terms for it, then. In an attempt to accurately explain it I simply described it as seeing a ghost of myself.
I have mixed feelings when returning to the places I have lived. It, by and large, ends up being a positive experience. The scale is so weighted with the positive, how many trips will it take to convince me that I do not need to approach it with a sense of dread?
My trips to Utah are the worst for this. I have been traveling there my whole life. I was born there. Utah is full of my pioneer heritage and family. There is not another place I travel that is so familiar and yet so foreign as well. There are ghosts of me all over Utah.
It starts as soon as we start to fly over the Rocky Mountains. There is a subtle change in the mountains as Colorado becomes Utah. As we clear the mountains I see one of two things, depending on the flight pattern. We either cross on the south side, passing over my college, or we fly straight in, revealing Salt Lake City itself. My thoughts first turn to my grandmother. The memories still so vivid I can smell the melted plastic of the animal figurines I loved to collect. (You put a quarter in a touristy vending machine and an animal would be made in front of you.) I can taste the bread and butter sandwiches she would pack in a shoebox for us to eat on the way home. I can feel the cool night breeze off the mountain I believed was hers, as she lived at the foot of it. My grandmother and I were very close. Our spirits were the same. I see myself sitting on the top of a ladder in her cherry tree. I see the three of us visiting the pioneer history sites that filled me with a sense of pride. I see her sitting on the edge of my bed as I cried because I missed her and our visit was over. I feel a sharp pang of longing for her. The ghosts of a much younger me, so trusting of the world. My innocence hurts me. When she died, suddenly, my grief was deep. So deep, that it created another ghost, crying in the bedroom of my first house. My grief causing a permanent shadow there.
My thoughts then turn to a more difficult time in my life. I see a college-aged me. Life interrupted. This period of time, lasting only a few months, had the power to change the course of my life. The crisis in which I found myself then had grown to impossible proportions. I did the best I could, but could neither manage nor control it. My heartbreak and despair grew with such vibrancy that images of me were burned onto everything. These images, visible only to me, are the shadows of my former life. They are the apparitions that cause the dread I feel returning to Utah.
I can see myself, there, gazing out my bedroom window. There is another me softly crying alone in the living room. There I am, walking Temple Square, smiling and looking at the lights. I see myself, walking home from the movie theater, the snow so fluffy it stacks on top of our heads. There is me, a dark figure crossing a field in the night.
I have a fear of crossing my own path, that a wrinkle in time will transport me back and I may not being able to return.
I now have the correct term for what I have experienced in these times. The years stacking on on top of the other. Time shifting beneath me. The fear of there being a wrinkle in time I might not return from. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Flashbacks.
My way of describing it is much more romantic.
If you are like me, upon hearing the correct terms, you think of Vietnam Veterans. You think of the Elizabeth Smarts of the world. You think of Sybil and horrendous child abuse. They are those things. PTSD became a term following the Vietnam War. The therapy model I have been involved with for the past 18 months, EMDR (Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing) was developed in response to PTSD in war veterans. These things also affect the everyday people of the world. I have an interesting story, to be sure, but nothing extraordinary. Trauma is the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one’s ability to cope or integrate the emotions involved with that experience. These things can happen, to all of us. Trauma significant enough to us will leave a mark. A ghost visible, only to us.
Click here to learn more about trauma (previous blog post).
Although I’ve had this feeling of time shifting before in my life, I didn’t have a “by the book” flashback until this past year. I was in the mall when it happened, finishing up the Christmas shopping. It was the Sbarro’s that did it. Passing by it, not even paying attention that feeling of vertigo occurred. I knew where I was at the time, but there was the additional reality of being in the mall near my college in Utah. I was transported back there, in a way. I felt my 22-year-old self, sitting at Sbarro’s. Immediately I felt the terrible anxiety and pain of that time. Having not felt the full brunt of this for decades, it took only a few seconds before panic set in. I fled the mall, through the first doors I saw. As I reached the doors I completely expected to run into a slushy Utah parking lot on the other side. I realized later I had even braced myself for the coldness I anticipated. I expected to be greeted with the familiar mountains of the Wasatch Front, the peaks covered with snow. Instead, I found myself in the bright sun of southwest Florida. Reaching the safety of my car helped but it was not until I reached home and started doing the things I had learned in therapy that I started feeling like myself again. My current self.
Although I certainly wish I had not been as affected by the events in my life as I have, I do not feel like it reflects on me poorly. As a person. I have always been one who feels things deeply. There is an obvious downside to this, I am currently writing about it. There is an upside to it, though, and these things I would never wish out of my being. The incredible depth of my love, the feeling that my heart could burst at the beauty of something, my compassion and empathy, the way I can feel music in my soul. My ability to turn feelings into writing and dance. The ease at which I make friends. My ability to connect with others, especially as I get older. I am able to feel the grief, joy, disappointment., brokenness, and triumph of others because of who I am and what I have lived.
Wouldn’t we all love the ability to go back in time with the knowledge we have now? We could undo every bad thing that ever happened to us. We could make different choices, drive home a different way. We could convince loved ones to please stay home with us today or urge them to go to the doctor when their cancer was treatable. We could avoid relationships that didn’t end well by avoiding meeting that person in the first place. We would already know those who were not worthy of our trust. It is impossible, of course, to do this. (Not to mention all the technical details of avoiding one person only to meet another with the same ending, etc. This is just a hypothetical question anyway.) We are unable to go back and re-do anything. The best we can do is hope that we learned enough from the experience to avoid it in the future. In a primal way, this is what flashbacks are all about.
How Memories are Stored in the Brain
Memory is a complex process that involves many parts of your brain, but to keep it simple, we’ll focus on two of the key players: the amygdala (emotional memory – especially fear-based memories) and the hippocampus (the brains historian, collects details such as who was there and what time of day it was).
During a traumatic event, this system works a bit differently. Since you are in danger, your body’s built-in fight-or-flight mechanism takes over. The amygdala is overactivated while the hippocampus is suppressed. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: the processes involved in building a cohesive memory are de-prioritized in favor of paying attention to the immediate danger. As a result, your memory becomes jumbled.
After the Trauma has Passed
If you encounter things that remind you of the traumatic event, like a smell that was present when it happened, your amygdala will retrieve that memory and respond strongly — signaling that you are in danger and automatically activating your fight-or-flight system.
Normally when your amygdala senses a possible threat, your hippocampus will then kick in to bring in context from past memories to determine whether or not you are really in danger. But because the hippocampus wasn’t functioning properly during the traumatic experience, the context of the memory wasn’t stored, and there’s no feedback system to tell your amygdala this situation is different and you’re not in danger.
Flashbacks, instead of being about the past, are about the future. Avoiding something we already know is a danger. Many years ago I was driving with a friend in the passenger seat. We’d just been to dinner and were busy talking and laughing. She suddenly yelled for me to slow down, then slid down, bracing for impact. I came to an abrupt stop, not knowing what she’d seen but knowing it was imminent danger. After a few seconds, she righted herself and looked around. She then explained that we were in the middle of the intersection where she’d had a serious traffic accident. She’d been pinned in her car with airbags deployed for 90 minutes. We had been talking and laughing up to that point. She hadn’t been paying close attention to where we were going. Had we crossed the intersection from another direction she probably would not have noticed it. As it was, though, we took the same route she had that night. Her peripheral vision had been collecting information as usual when her brain recognized she was seeing the same things she did the last few seconds before impact. It sent an alarm out, to abruptly stop it from happening again.
Over time, these trauma responses can limit us socially and prevent us from enjoying our lives. For this reason, it is important for us to threat and heal from them. We are the only ones who can do this for ourselves. Seeking the help of a therapist to help us understand and work through these sometimes random interruptions in our lives is the most direct way to deal with them. Having a better understanding of context does help as it adds further information to the event for the brain to consider. Talking about the incident and discovering the often irrational beliefs that formed with it can help to undo them. (For instance, I let myself be happy for once and look what happened. I won’t make that mistake again.)
Therapy and having a greater understanding of the circumstances are the long-term way to free ourselves from being affected by the past. I have done a great deal of this myself in the past 18 months. Slowly unwinding the traumas from my life and being. Facing the grief that has waited till I was stronger. As always on this subject, I say it is not easy but it is most definitely worth it.
Here’s what you need to know about coping with a flashback while it is happening:
- Tell yourself you are having a flashback. Talk to yourself (literally) and note where you are now and that you are safe.
- Remind yourself that the traumatic event is over. It happened in the past and you are in the present.
- Help yourself stay present by using your five senses. Look around you. Walk into another room and drink a glass of water. Speak with a loved one you trust.
- Know what makes you feel secure. For example, wrapping a warm blanket around yourself, practicing breathing or relaxation exercises, or calling a friend.
- Learn the triggers that lead to your flashback. After a flashback, use a notebook to write down what happened right before, what you heard, and how you felt. (Source and full text)
