Flashbacks to traumatic memories

Post Reply New Topic

Recently I've been experiencing 'flashbacks' to random memorires of tramatic events that have occurred, months, years even decades before in the past.

I was at work on Friday and I had a flashback to being in the playground on a wet April day and I was upset that it was too wet play ourside and there were too many mosquitoes. This had no bearing on the work I do as a 41 year old truck dispatcher. My mind jumps around to things that happened , 10, 15, 25 years ago with no apparent pattern or meaning; I can't see to escape from this.

Does anyone elso, in particular older aspies, have problems with this? What have you done to cope?

Yes, I've had (still have) flashbacks to past traumatic experiences. It's horrible. I'm speaking to my psychiatrist about the experiences and flashbacks.

Happens to me too. Less and less since I've been in my current town, but for a full year after I first moved it was happening all the time, and it was awful. It almost felt like my previous life (where I used to live) was trying to pull me back somehow.

PTSD- never heard of it. Before I heard about Asperger's I was in and out of inpatient and out -patient medial care for a variety of diagnoses; 'panic disorder', 'social phobia', 'depression' 'social avoidance' 'stress', nothing really took until I learned about Asperger's when I was 35.

I'm 100% sure I'm an Aspie now. I don't want to go looking for other labels; this one suits me fine!

I had a flashback to walking all night to my girlfriend's on the other side of the city when I was 17 today at work. (I'm 41 now and married to someone else currently going on 15 years), the flashback had no relevance to anything in the here and now. Just typing this now, I'm having a memory flashback to when I was renovating my aunt's house in 1991; this has no bearing whatsoever on me here and now.

Why does this happen??

I had therapy for PTSD when I was 19, and a few years after that I "overcame" the issues I was dealing with, which I've never really seen good documentation on people doing so, so I'll do my best to describe what I at least think happened.

PTSD is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It applies to people in shell-shock from war or people who have gone through some other mental trauma (which shell-shock is just one particular example of mental trauma). The way my therapist described it, it's like that traumatic moment is defined as traumatic because the mind can't understand it. Think of it as a major cognitive dissonance overload. So the mind puts everything related to the trauma into a mental box to be studied and figured out at a later date, and every so often the mind opens the box again to try and see if it can understand it any better. If it's something really difficult, the person may relive it over and over again, to the point that the person may not recognize reality from the memory.

Sometime it's something specific, as it was in my case, and at the time I thought about it incessantly, pretty much every day at least, and sometimes many times per day. I just could not mentally get away from thinking about it. It's as though my brain was addicted to thinking about it and no matter what I did I just couldn't get away from it. There came a point a few years after therapy when I could finally understand everything that had happened, and seriously, just like that, *poof*, I stopped thinking about it. Now the only time I think about it is when I'm talking about it or consciously choosing to think about it. It isn't pervasive and hounding me at every turn anymore.

It's also quite possible that the trauma is more nebulous, especially if you have dealt with years of being bullied or abused. There may not be a specific incident that you can point to, but instead a lifetime of incidents. Depending on you own mind's ability to handle those issues, you may still be suffering from PTSD.

So here's my best guess, assuming that it might be PTSD (as it might not be related to PTSD at all, nor am I a psychologist, so take it with a grain of salt) . You might be in the same state I was in when I kept reliving my own thoughts over and over again, although mine were specific around one particular thing. It's part of the mind trying to work things out. The older you get and more knowledge you gain, that adds info and tools to the mind that it can use to gain understanding of things that happened in your past. If you've settled on Asperger's as an answer to your life, that sort of helps clear out a lot of the conflicting info that you may have been given from all of those other diagnoses you said you've received. Also, after I came to terms with my own PTSD, I also started reliving pretty much a lot of my past. It's as though a lot of memories were being created in the moment and then put on the back burner until I got the PTSD dealt with, as though I was there but not really feeling anything, but reliving the memories added more meaning and feeling to them the second time around.

Yes, but my flashbacks always involve other people.

Objectively, the events seem so trivial that probably none of the other people involved remember them. But I'll be trying to go to sleep at night and a conversation from thirty years ago will pop into my mind and I'll wish that I had said "..." Why didn't I realize that at the time?

It just feels like every social connection comes at the cost of the these future regrets. So over time I've become more and more reluctant to make social connections.

Yeah, it really does sound like you mind is unraveling past issues. For me, it was like all the memories were stored in black-and-white, and the reliving stage was bringing them forward in new, full Technicolor!

Being able to accept who you are means taking all those past memories and getting them re-sorted in your mind to fall in place with your knew knowledge as the guide.

Is that not normal?
Seriously?
That happens to me all the time. It has done all my life.

Is it really not normal?

I assumed everyone had it.

I would love to not have that problem. It makes me feel such rage.

I have flashes all the time of past horrible experieces. I have PTSD from childhood abuse....still at 40. I used to have nightmares when I was younger. Not many of my flashbacks invovle the abuse though as I was very young and it would take quite lengthy therapy to recover those memories anyway. A lot of stuff from junior and senior high school.
What I do to that seems to help is that I write it out. Write out everything you can remember about the experience. It's not easy, but it helps to release some of the emotional charge. The more you do it, the weaker it'll become.
Mindfulness meditation may help too.

I also have the flashbacks to old traumatic events. Most can't be worked out with the perpetrator as they are dead, I am in my mid 50's. I thought it was just a weird thing I alone experienced. Glad to see, at least, that there are others with similar experiences.

Starting to see a psychiatrist in 2 weeks, maybe she can help me work thru the junk. Love the new insurance on this job. Even pays for a shrink.

Yes, and no.

I've recovered buried memories of abuse. I've always been fascinated by those so it was pretty ironic when mine showed up.

I've since studied and become a reasonably talented hypnotist and NLP practitioner so I run into a lot of dissociative issues including DID, PTSD, and various forms of buried memories.

My advice is to seek professional help. What you're going through is common for people with trauma in their past and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. Do yourself a favor and start developing your support resources now.