The Downward Spiral of Flashbacks & Dissociative Episodes

The Friday Edition | No. 8

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The Downward Spiral of Flashbacks & Dissociative Episodes

Recently, a very painful and triggering event dropped me into a deep hole of flashbacks and dissociation. Over the next few months, a series of other events threw me into more flashbacks, deep dissociative states, and depression. Like being tossed and rolled endlessly in the raging waves and surf of a stormy, violent sea you can never find a quick escape because you are never sure which way is up or down. And, even in the moments when you think you have found the way up and out, you are slammed again by another ferocious breaker that leaves you stunned and pushes you back down into the deep, dark abyss.

Having gone through this many times it feels like it would be an easy thing to know the landscape and the road back out of a flashback. But like being born anew – the understanding of reality, knowledge, reason, and essential functioning are wiped clean in these states. Amnesia-like experiences are common here so believing that you can recreate an old route back to safety and the land of the living is a pipe dream. Coming back to what you knew previously as “your life” is a hellscape of roiling, crashing waves – taking you under – spinning you around over and over again. It is a waiting game while being tossed around like a rag doll.

The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop.

_Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma”

When I finally found an opening to come back I found myself numb, my eyes unable to focus, having trouble thinking and breathing; almost feeling like I was being suffocated. I was deep in a dissociative state. But even there while my worldview seemed familiar, my mindset was of an alien looking out through my own eyes. There was some knowledge that I was myself but everything was skewed in some way that made the world seem surreal, darkened, unsafe, and unnavigable. I felt like a zombie – a dead woman walking; functioning as best as I could to the outside world but completely shattered and confused within – held together in a deep freeze of numb detachment.

There are so many who know this feeling, and I am sorry for it. When complex trauma takes hold life becomes a downward spiral to other worlds, other times and spaces, the inability to discern up from down, other dissociative and emotionally adverse conditions take hold, and reaching for harmful remedies and actions to try to find wholeness overtake all else. Additionally, during these times we often try to employ superhuman efforts and abilities created to continue normal functioning, at a job or in a relationship, for example, and to just simply survive another day. But as we are not superhuman these over-achieving actions and efforts, while in a state of being mentally and physically depleted and compromised takes a toll, and comes at a high price to mind, body, and soul. Sometimes the only reason to keep trying for the surface is simply the habituated and mere fact that the body is still breathing, and the strained hope that the storm clouds will part and bring light back into our world again, and refocus our eyes and senses – so we keep trying.

Every day takes figuring out all over again how to f***ing live.

_Calamity Jane, the HBO series “Deadwood”