So. There was an episode at work and I don’t want to go back and look at how much I’ve written about it on here. Suffice it to say, I’m trying to define “flashback.” So I found this video:
This was my reply:
Thank you for this! I have a diagnosis of PTSD (technically severe I guess), but I’d never had a “flashback.” Then just recently there was an episode at work where I was having an intense intrusive memory (normal for me) accompanied by imagery (slightly less normal but probably not technically a flashback) and I was behaving in ways that would have made complete sense if the situation I was remembering had been actually happening again, but which made NO sense in the actual situation. Is this a flashback? If not, is there another word for it? I’m trying to describe the situation to my treaters but I don’t remember this happening before. I’m getting a lot of, “Okay, it sounds like you were reacting to emotion” or “so your emotions didn’t fit the facts” and I’m like, no, I was responding to facts in a way that would have been completely appropriate if the facts my brain had been providing me with had been accurate.” But I TRIED to check the facts and my brain insisted that it had given me correct facts (which it turns out that it had not). So I’m being encouraged to just emotion regulation skills and it feels unhelpful because to me, I wasn’t acting on emotion; I was acting on bad information. I think the breakdown in communication is because after the episode was over, I did spend an hour sobbing behind the Xerox machine, at which point I was indeed emotional. But I was emotional because I was embarrassed because I had acted inappropriately because my brain gave me bad information. When my brain was wrong about the situation I was in, I don’t remember a ton of emotion. So it seems like emotion regulation skills wouldn’t have solved the original problem.
Sorry that’s really long!
My YouTube comment on the video above
Now, it’s slightly more complicated than that because, in fact, I was projecting onto a co-worker. So it was like I was intensely remembering this sad event, and genuinely believed that the bad event truly was happening to my co-worker.
Anyway, I’m back in the hospital. I’m looking at my notes on the app and the intake doctor described the episode above as me “realizing that she [meaning me] was not regulating her emotions appropriately.” And I don’t know how to get across what actually happened.
In other news, the same note said that in my previous living situation “She [meaning me] will call 911 all the time for the cops to come in.” When what I actually said was that I couldn’t call 911 and had never once called 911 for that reason.
I also said that I did in fact live in a chronically life-threatening environment, which is leading to an increase in PTSD symptoms after having gotten out of that environment. The increase in PTSD symptoms is making it hard for me to tell if other people are in trouble, because I’m having all these symptoms and project onto others and then think other people are in crisis. (For some reason that I will probably need to explore in therapy down the road, I really have never inaccurately thought that I was in trouble when I wasn’t. Honestly I look back and usually things were a lot worse for me even than I realized at the time. However, I constantly think that other people are experiencing an emergency and I need to intervene.) So the intake doctor wrote that I had inaccurately thought that my living situation was dangerous due to PTSD symptoms.
I don’t know, am I really that inarticulate?
So, maybe my first commenter ever would like to appear just now and give me words to describe what happened. Was it a flashback? Is there any language at all that could explain this succinctly?