Y’all ever get fatigue so bad that you’re laying down and it feels like you need to lay down MORE? Advanced laying. Somehow.

Emotional Flashback Management

When people think of PTSD and “flashbacks”, they often think of someone re-experiencing a traumatic experience like combat: seeing and hearing the traumatic experience almost like a hallucination. But Complex PTSD often involves a kind of flashback known as an “emotional flashback”. These flashbacks do not have a visual or memory component to them: they are simply a sudden flood of negative emotions like shame, fear, anger, sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness. People with C-PTSD therefore often don’t realize that they’re having a flashback, or even that they have PTSD. One of the key parts of C-PTSD recovery is learning to recognize and manage these flashbacks to traumatic childhood experiences.

The best source I’ve found so far on emotional flashbacks is Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. In this book and on his website, Walker suggests the following steps for emotional flashback management:

MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS 

1. Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback.” Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we 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 your Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally– that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared. 

5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless—a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times 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 little is a sure sign of a flashback.) 

7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out. 

8. Resist the Inner Critic’s catastrophizing. (a) Use thought-stopping to halt its exaggeration of danger and need to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying no to unfair self-criticism. (b) Use thought-substitution 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, and to validate—and then soothe—the child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our 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 those close to you 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 our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still-unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met. 

13. Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradual process—often two steps forward, one step back. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback. 

[Image Description: The image is of a short comic. Panel 1: A multicolored circle is talking to a squiggly gray blob labeled ‘Random Singlet.’ The multicolored circle says “Hey! It’s Blue!” Panel 2: Random Singlet responds: “Hey Blue!” Panel 3: Multicolored circle thinks to themselves “It’s not Blue.” Panel 4: Multicolored circle continues thinking, looking a bit awkward “We’re just too tired to explain right now.” End ID]

Oh look, it’s time for this again!

Another firm reminder that “inclusive” plural spaces can be dangerous and harmful to people with DID and OSDD, especially if they are newly diagnosed or still exploring the possibility that they have DID/OSDD.

It’s not “gatekeeping” to recognize that there’s a difference between having a mental disorder like DID/OSDD and experiencing non-disordered or non-dissociative plurality.

People with DID/OSDD need their own spaces.

[ Yes, I am going to keep posting things like this every time I see advertisements for “inclusive” discord servers being cross-posted to both DID and other plural tags. ]

Unfriendly reminder that if you’re warning people away from “medical journals / resources” about DID/OSDD you’re not being woke or “inclusive,” you’re being anti-recovery and anti-DID/OSDD. It’s common fucking sense that if someone has a disorder, they should seek resources based in research and science that can help them.

The amount of people I get hate from because I’ve used the ISSTD as a resource because “it’s ran by professionals, not peoeple who have the condition”... I mean c’mon...

How emotionally immature parents impair their children’s opportunities to learn emotional regulation naturally: 

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

so heres the thing

i think that endogenic “systems” are valid, as in they really could be experiencing multiplicity. theres a lot we dont know about the human mind/brain and how it works. nobody has the right to tell someone how they are feeling or what they are experiencing. HOWEVER, they shouldnt be using did/osdd specific terminology. “systems” formed without trauma are not did/osdd, and therefor shouldnt use terms specific to the disorders. they should have their own separate community and words to describe and talk about their experiences. i dont have any suggestions for alternative terminology, but im sure if people come together they can come up with some.

basically endogenics arent systems and shouldnt use system terminology, however they are valid and deserve their own terminology and communities

Just for some background here, I have DID and my position is that DID and OSDD are caused by trauma, and that people experiencing other types of plurality are experiencing something very different from what we are experiencing. 

I respectfully disagree with the idea that the word “systems” belongs to us, the DID community. We are DID systems, or systems of dissociated parts, but the word systems exists in many other contexts and is useful in many other ways. 

Before I understood myself as a part of a DID system, I studied Family Systems Therapy. In Family Systems Therapy, we talked about systems of individual people and how their connections with each other impacted one another therapeutically and psychologically. In college, I was contemplating becoming a therapist specializing in Family Systems Therapy. That had nothing to do with DID or even parts of self. I was studying whole, separate people who were a part of a system. 

When I started therapy and I wasn’t ready to accept that I had DID, I was introduced to Internal Family Systems Therapy. It was so much like the Family Systems Therapy I’d studied in college, but the idea was that I had a whole system of parts inside me, like an internal family. My therapist explained that everyone has an internal family of parts inside them. Internal Family Systems Therapy (or IFS) is an entire model of therapy built on the idea that all people are made up of a system of internal parts of self that function like a family. Therapists use this therapy technique to help people without DID/OSDD, people who are not even plural at all, make sense of their internal chaos. 

The concept of having a “system” is a useful concept even for people who don’t have DID, who aren’t plural in any way. These people don’t have alters or parts of self the way that we do, but recognizing that they have “parts” like an inner child, an inner critic, an inner warrior, etc, and that these parts make up a “inner family system”, that is valuable to them. 

So when I see folks on tumblr trying to argue that “system” belongs to the DID/OSDD community, I just can’t agree. It also belongs to singlets who are in IFS therapy who are working on getting to know their internal family system, and those folks aren’t even plural. 

I need everyone to go and subscribe to @multiplicityandme on YouTube and all other platforms bc they are a educational, charming, wonderful and entertaining system and theyve taught me so much and I love all of them a lot!

This is @multiplicityandme 's most recent video- and I mean what I said in the og post: GO SUBSCRIBE AND LIKE AND COMMENT beacuse they are wonderful people are raising so much awareness and creating such a comfortable space for people with or without DID to come and watch and learn to understand what they are going through. I have been watching for about two years now and I've never made a better subscription choice honestly. This most recent video struck a lot of chords in me- having been through panic attacks and similar situations, and they are all so brave for doing this and everything else 💜

I need everyone to go and subscribe to @multiplicityandme on YouTube and all other platforms bc they are a educational, charming, wonderful and entertaining system and theyve taught me so much and I love all of them a lot!

We second this. I have never been prouder to back a youtuber more. Want someone that isn't problematic and just gives you their experience with their disorder as they experience it? @multiplicityandme. Do you wanna watch some cool dudes chill sometimes? @multiplicityandme.

Seriously, I'd die for them and their content.

Oh my goodness what a compliment! 😭💖🌸 thank you so so much

Carolyn Spring, Recovery is my best revenge

I need everyone to go and subscribe to @multiplicityandme on YouTube and all other platforms bc they are a educational, charming, wonderful and entertaining system and theyve taught me so much and I love all of them a lot!

This is so nice 😁 thank you