Flashbacks have gotten bad

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I feel like I'm chained to a table and forced to watch every stupid thing I've said and done on multiple TV screens. I'm 42 and stuff from childhood still haunts.

Bullied in School, worried about doing the wrong thing and my father shouting at me, having to really watch myself around my one Grandma. Realizing everyone was laughing at me, not with me, making such a fool of myself, and it goes on.

I had a really bad one about Gym class the other day and an incident at work that got me nearly fired some years ago.

Need someway to deal with this better.

We all have regrets and things we are ashamed of in the past. When they surface, we can apply a counter thought such as;

1. At least it keeps me from boastful pride.
2. It was something that while painful, I learned from.
3. If I knew then what I know now, it wouldn't have gone so poorly.
4. Perhaps I am the only one who remembers this.
5. How can this memory be of use to me today.

Writing about your experiences, even if only for your own eyes, can be therapeutic.

I was only diagnosed in early middle age, and knowledge gave me the power to understand all the whats, whys and hows of childhood and youth. We all have our regrets. You're by no means alone on here!

However it's important to move on and not let your past determine how your future will be. The past can hold us back if we let it. But once we gain knowledge, that gives us the ability to change those things which we have control over.

I always found mindfulness to be helpful for when I'd get 'pulled backwards in time'. Personally, I'm a big fan of citrus fruit for that sort of thing. I'd take an orange and hold it in my hand, roll it around, feel it, see it, smell it...I could toss it from hand to hand and hear it. It was basically a way to get myself anchored back in reality and out of my own head. Once that stuff started to get less intense, I would get up and walk around, paying mind to the feel of the ground under my feet, the sounds of my footsteps...I'd touch things around me, and maybe go wash some dishes by hand to again, engage the world outside of my head.

I'm not saying only do that. But things like that worked to help snap me out of it, you know? From there I could do other things like exercise, write, draw, whatever was working for me at the time regarding dealing with past events that kept trying to live on and replay in my head.

Sorry you have this stuff going on for you right now. I hope you can find some things that work because reliving unpleasant things from the past is no fun. I wish you well in this.

Maybe if you want you could set goals and work toward them

You can't change the past

Yeah

Bullying (a bother to me as you realize most humans hate you for no reason other than being Autistic)
Eggshell walking
Other stuff

I distract myself and daydream to help escape it all.

E: don't like mentioning some stuff (makes memories come back harder), so it can go under "other stuff"

Last edited by Dillogic on 11 Mar 2022, 7:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have the same issue. I found this interesting article: https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to-st ... -obsession

I know how you feel. I am traumatized by how I used to be in my teens. I could still kick myself for some of the embarrassing things I did. And I still have dreams where I'm forced to go back to high school forever and that I'm surrounded by all the kids that had picked on me, being judged, left out, etc.

I have an autobiographical memory, which is a blessing in some ways but a curse in other ways. Remembering my past can bring me comfort, but it can also bring me fear. The horrible social isolation I suffered was enough to haunt me the rest of my life. Well, my social life at high school was spiky; one day I was liked and accepted in the group, the next day I was ignored and ostracized.

I hate my 14-year-old self, I was such a stupid little wimpy dork and so immature for my age. I lacked self-awareness so often acted inappropriately and unintentionally embarrassed my peers, which ended up with me being lectured.

Yes, I done a lot of things I am not proud of. And I was treated poorly by my peers. I was worryingly unpopular and didn't really help myself, even though I wanted friends. I was scared of the school bells which made me look ridiculous. If it wasn't for bells I might have been much cooler at school.

School bells never sound very pleasant - they are not dissimilar to fire alarms with their insistent shrilling!

Definitely not my favourite aspect of school life either.

Sounds can be a bother on their own (hypersensitivity), and they can also bring back memories of these things.

The latter bothers me the most when I'm having an exacerbation of these things, albeit it doesn't last and I get through it (some noises will always make me feel on edge though).

I am doing EMDR and my mom did hypnotherapy. We found these methods very useful. In my 20s I learned lucid dreaming in order to manage my nightmares.

Cognitive behavioral therapy

Dialectical behavior therapy

Psychotherapy

Diversion

Hobbies

Friends

Journal

Meditation

Psychotropics

Diet

Acting lessons

Self help books

I have had a bit of success in working through intrusive thoughts and memories by using a mental metaphorical file called "finished business" I wrote this on another page a while ago, explaining my method. Things are getting better over time.
Autism Intrusive thoughts
Re-living trauma, replays of old experiences

All my life I have had a “running dialogue” in my head. I hear every thought, and I am always thinking. Since I function best using words, this is understandable to me.

I have also had continual “loops” of old bad experiences shove themselves into my conscious thoughts regularly. I “replay” the upset, the angst, the pain, the fear over and over.
I came to the conclusion after my diagnosis, that this is my brain looking for answers about what happened, and seeking answers about how to avoid repeating what happened.

It is my understanding through discussion with others on the online forum groups that I attend, that this is a common experience.
Re-living trauma, pain, angst, anger, and upset is evidently a side effect of poor processing and misunderstanding. It is as if our minds still try to sort the event out and to come up with a “better ending” or new understanding.
This might be a sort of perpetual attempt to process something that is not comprehensible.
I have ( and had ) a lot of “loops” replaying old pains and fears.

These things happened before I knew about my autism and before I understood my very slow to non-existing processing of “real life” interactions.

There were perpetual misunderstandings, I was forever reacting in ways that angered others due to my own misunderstandings (and eventually to my angry frustration and almost instant defensiveness whenever anyone approached me).

I was ready to be attacked, assumed that I would be attacked and constantly vigilant to escape through the mal-adapted means I had developed as I grew up.

In interacting with other autistic people in forums, asking questions, etc, I have learned that this is a common and distressing side effect of our autism. All those replays pushing for attention, replaying the hurts and the angers and fears over and over. It became a sort of habit to re-live those experiences and to repeatedly come to the conclusion that others were hostile and out to get me.
Traumatic confirmation bias, and a self fulfilling cycle, however unsatisfactory. I was stuck on “hold” continually re-living old pains and traumas.

That was before I knew about being autistic.

Knowing my autism diagnosis gave me new perspective on these old hurts, and these constant reminders of my inability to defend myself, my complete incompetence to deal with people in almost any upset situation, my lack of ability to understand what had happened, and why.

I was not able then to see how my autism (and theirs, too) sometimes got in the way of communication, resulting in misunderstandings, angry flare ups and worse.

After learning of my autism, I began to allow those memories “head space” instead of trying to avoid them. ( something I was never really able to do).

As I faced the memories one by one, I was able to take each apart in little bits and to see how autism had added confusion, anger, misunderstanding, mis-comunication, hurt feelings and so much more to the original “triggering incident”.

Once I was able to figure out “what happened” I have been able to set that particular memory aside.

If I am sure I can not fix it, can not change the outcome, can not do a thing about it all these years later, then I deliberately file that memory into a metaphoric file
(remember I think in words, not pictures) that I created in my mind.

You may find it helpful to actually picture a file with a label on it and the memory as a paper, or other item and actually visualize this part, if that is the way your mind works.

I take my painful memory, which I now have new understanding of, and I file it in that metaphoric file, which I call “finished business”.

If that particular memory presents itself in my mind again, I remind myself that it is “finished business” and immediately send it back to that file.

Over the course of about three years since I have been practicing this method, I am finding more peace and having far fewer intrusive bad memories. I allow the memory “head space” until I have examined it with my new understanding, if I can not change anything now, but I know and understand more about “how or why it happened”, I can safely ask it to go to the “finished business” file and to stay there.

In many online conversations with others on these self help, self support ” by autistics and for autistics” forums, I have explained how I do this, and I have got good feedback from others about its usefulness as a tool to help find peace and self understanding.

Diagnosis is the key to self understanding.

I realized recently that I might not have mentioned this method for dealing with old pains on this blog in the past and thought it might be something useful for others with painful and distressing memories to try.

Hoping you too will find this helpful.