Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A GUIDE AND MAP FOR RECOVERING FROM CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy.

Figure out what you are flashing back to

Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks

Cultivate safe relationships and seek support.

Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment. Validate and soothe your child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn your tears into self-compassion and your anger into self-protection.

Use thought-stopping to halt the critic’s endless exaggerations of danger, and its constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself.

Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body. It cannot hurt you if you do not run from it.

Remember this flashback will pass as it always has before.

Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child.

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.