Have you ever been doing really well in life, feeling in a really good place, emotionally, mentally and with your business? Then, there's this one little event. Someone makes a comment, you get in an argument. Maybe you go back to a certain environment, perhaps to visit your family and boom! Everything changes. You may feel like an adolescent again, there's so much rage and frustration, or like a
kid full of despair and hopelessness. Maybe, you're confused and overwhelmed then,suddenly, the whole world looks different. The thoughts about your body, your relationships, the plans you have for the future all seem far away and pointless. It may seem everyone's being really hard on you, they don't understand you and you just want to run away from all of it. You feel as though you're collapsing in on yourself, ready for a fight. You may wonder, "How did I get here? What happened"? This
is an emotional flashback experience. Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christof, founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology, somatics and trauma informed body based meditations to fully resolve old trauma patterns, create resilience, and rehabilitate the nervous system
for coaching. I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace and on the Education Team for the, Neurosematic Intelligence Coaching Certification. I'm also an NSI practitioner whom bridges the world of your nervous systems into sacred plant healing spaces. Today, we are diving into first of our five components of this CPTSD series - emotional flashbacks. What does it look like to manage this trauma response with the framework of neurosomatic intelligence and how do we
define a 'flashback" ? Well, we're going to get to that. But, before we dive into what is an emotional flashback from a neurosematic intelligence perspective, we need to ask the question, "How would we deal with this, manage this trauma response from an NSI perspective"? I'm going to share with you a couple of previous definitions that we had worked with in our own experiences of healing. Gabor Mate refers to emotional flashbacks as physio-emotional time warps. I love that!
Pete Walker defines emotional flashbacks as a sudden and often prolonged regression into overwhelming feeling states, when a survivor experienced early childhood abuse. But through the lens of neurosomatic intelligence, we've taken it just a little bit further. I'm going to let Elizabeth lead us into what is an emotional flashback from the perspective of NSI. When we look at this through the lens of the nervous system, we're holding it as a present
moment experience, not just a regression. So, an emotional flashback is a real time response to a trigger. That could be an acute trigger, something that comes from one of your senses, like you smell something, a sound, or you touch something. It could be a sensory trigger, but it could also be a pattern that your brain recognizes, the way someone is speaking to you, their facial expression, any kind of pattern that resonates for your nervous system. This creates a real time response to the
trigge -, a reaction inside of your body. That reaction is usually something that occurred frequently during your development in childhood or maybe just during a prolonged period of stress. This internal state in your body, the actual physiological change that occurs inside of your body and occurs with your brain function, creates a new reality that you are then living in. It actually changes the external world
to match what's going on inside of your body. So it can be that those big emotions start to move through your body. Guilt, shame, despair, distrust. The way you see the world around you and other people actually starts to match. The information that your brain is perceiving begins to match that feeling. Therefore, it's actually changing the way our brain filters information and your reality is changing. We're going to get into the neuroscience of all of that.
In the big picture, it changes the way our brain filters information coming through, then our perception of the world really changes. So, the subtle difference between Pete Walker's definition and our NSI definition is that it's not just that we're going back to that old state, but we're creating a new reality, and we are actually living in that reality, and it's carrying into our future as well. These emotions are big. Emotions related to an emotional
flashback, are typically,overwhelming. Fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief, and oppression are not the emotions people want to feel in their lives. They are often suppressed intentionally, in real time, although sometimes unconsciously. The thing about these emotions is - although they feel like ordinary emotions, that humans share, the emotional intention gets re-triggered. For someone who has Complex Trauma, it's as if the original event is happening again,
inside their body. These emotions are quantitatively different from the ordinary experience of fear, of grief, of shame. We will dive into exploring this experience in a further conversation. They are outside of the range of an ordinary emotional experience and for the person having this experience, it's completely overwhelming. It completely burdens them as they don't have the capacity to manage this overwhelming amount of,
"negative emotions". So, someone with CPTS has a really difficult time with emotional processing. That's part of someone's experience with CPTS. It always comes with something emotional because maybe it wasn't modeled in childhood. Maybe it was unsafe to feel or express any emotion with your primary caregiver or with anyone in the relationship in your
environment during development. Those repressive mechanisms can be maladaptive behaviors, for example, disordered eating, substance use, or abuse, overworking, or over training. You could get physical outputs like migraines or any kind of pain. Chronic Fatigue is an expression of a maladaptive response, as an output from repressed emotions. I think it's so important, we address that an emotional flashback isn't only an emotional experience. There's a physiological experience in the body,
too. It's going to come with those behaviors and those outputs. You're going to experience these with emotional flashbacks, as well. I want to go a little deeper into that. Why do we go into repression? When we experienced that original event, that's creating the emotional flashback. It was, again, probably during our development in which we did not have the capacity to process those
big emotions. We weren't in an environment where that was safe and we didn't have caregivers that could co-regulate with us and help us relieve some of that emotional stress. With time, our system learns to adapt by repressing or suppressing the emotions going into those repressive mechanisms.
When we're a child, that is the most adaptive thing for our system to do, because it really is unsafe for a young, developing nervous system to be overwhelmed with these things when we don't have the environment, caregivers, or the skills to process. Tthen that becomes the well worn pathway, so that survival response is triggered again and again when we experience the emotional flashback. When you're feeling internally, that emotional flashback, you're really moving into
a survival state. Even though you're an adult now and you're capable of surviving this experience, it does not feel like that inside. The survival mind is triggered, then you're moving into a threat response. Your brain and your body respond as if it's life and death. In the, Limbic System, which is the emotional center of our minds, where we process our memories, our emotions and our stress responses, that system regulates and appraises the events that are happening in our life, deciding if
we're safe or not. When we've been patterned and conditioned to have that threat response to these experiences, that system can become very hyperactive - in particular, our amygdala. So, all the time, your, "threat detector" is being activated, the alarm bells are going off, and then you're moving into that survival of CPTS. Emotional flashbacks, demonstrates a level of cognitive impairment, because often our cognitive brain,
our memory, it gets shut down in those traumatic events. But, what gets encoded into us is the emotional response, the emotional trigger, the trauma of the event gets stored, then our brains might not cognitively even let us remember that event because we were dissociated. You can't be in two places at one time. You can't be dissociated and in your body laying down memory because you are not there. These emotional flashbacks range from being subtle to completely horrific feelings in the body.
They can also be moments which lasts for a few weeks or maybe decades. The manner in which we encode memories, doesn't get integrated. Remember our conversation with, Matt Bush about how, Complex Trauma impacts brain development? He used a metaphor about a filing cabinet. Our brain, in particular, our hippocampus - instead of encoding these memories into our long term memory center as it should, it just leaves
them out on the desktop. We have all these feelings that are scattered and sitting around, and then when we're in that moment and we want to find that verbalization file so that we can actually speak about what is happening for ourselves, or we want to find the emotional regulation center so that we can have a little bit more control of these emotions then of the
emotional flashback. Or maybe we want to reach for the calm, the somatic experiencing folder that's sitting on the top of our desk, and we're like, you can't find anything because it's just all a mess. It's scattered all around and it's just so very disorganized. Having CPTS is fragmentation. Speaking of the hippocampus, this plays a really important role in an emotional flashback. There are two big things I
want to talk about. First of all, our hippocampus is where we store information about memories. One of the ways this impacts us, is when we get sensory inputs coming in. All that information about the world around us and about what's going on inside of us, goes into our brain, moving into the limbic system, where we can either have an experience of reward, "Oh, this feels good. I'm going to move toward this". Or, we can have our amygdala detect threat and we
move into a threat response. The amygdala works with our hippocampus, with our past experiences and our memories, to decide what is threatening and what's not. So, when we have these past experiences, that's where those patterns are recognized. That's where those triggers come from, and then more of the sensory information coming in as perceived as threatening, and then it
moves us into those f responses. Or, if the events happened in very early development, which we'll talk a lot more about in our next season, when we talk about memory, we might not even have the proteins in our brain to lay down long term memory. There's certain proteins that have to be there for the cells to
be able to create the neural pathways of long term memory. Then, we don't have a cognitive memory of the event, but we do have the memory in our autonomic nervous system and in our body because it's still being patterned by those events, even in early development. So, it lives in our nervous system and in our body, BUT we have no cognitive memory of what occurred. The flashbacks are somatic, and this creates a very emotional, somatic experience of what we've no cognitive reference. I'm just
gonna leave it at that. It can be very overwhelming to know what to do with that when you don't have a memory of it. That's why it's so important we share our examples and our life stories of our lived experiences on this podcast. Many people experience things they don't have a cognitive memory of then find ourselves in
repetitive downspiraling experiences and behaviors. This is another reason why community is so important when we're engaged in healing - when we're on an intentional healing journey. As Elizabeth mentioned, we',re going to dive much deeper into memory. But I just want to reiterate that, living with CPTS can be isolating. The dissociation can be so traumatizing because you're not there and you don't have the memory for it.
That can already just be so overwhelming for people to understand. So, I just want to just take a moment to really honor the magnitude of what you just said. Yes, I think it's really important. I want to give an example, because it can be hard to wrap your mind around this. Sometimes the triggers are very small, we don't have any cognitive reference and suddenly we find ourselves in the behavior. It's confusing. Here's an example. I went to my OB-GYN to for my annual exam. It was, a very normal
thing. Cognitively, I'm very prepared for it. I understand I'm safe in the environment. There's some, body boundary violations that happen in that experience. There's someone going into my body - it's, "safe" cognitively, because I've consented, but, I get home feeling very dissociated, and I don't understand why. We were recording a podcast episode that day, and I just couldn't think. I couldn't
articulate my thoughts very well. Afterwards, I went immediately to the pantry and began snacking on a bunch of stuff, which is a way that I regulate my nervous system and get interoceptive stimulus. It wasn't until that moment of being in the pantry where I was like, what is happening? What's going on here? It was my body and my nervous system having a reaction to the experience that triggered me from way early body boundary violations that I didn't
have any awareness of. I could only realize that fact, by finding myself in the behavior. It takes working with and through your body to process - because we have experiences with no memory. That is wild. No cognitive memory, because if we don't have cognitive memories, we still have physical and emotional memories. A cognitive part of an emotional flashback, does alter our cognitive thoughts about ourselves and about our world. The emotional flashbacks are really a neurotag, they are a schema
that gets. That creates change in many areas of the brain all at one time. And we know from pain neuroscience that a neurotag is essentially a group of neurons that frequently fire together. So they wire together, right? Neurons that fire together wire together. When enough sensory stimulus is present to activate a neurotag, the whole memory is pulled to the surface. Imagine that you're a young child in the park, and was stung by a
bee. Maybe, each time, you return to the park, eat the same food, you hear the sound of the bee. That whole neurotag is drawn up - you feel panic, perhaps pain and the the tears start to come. You begin to have an emotional reality of this fear of something happening again because it really hurt the first time. The really important thing to remember, is that when we have neurotags, we have a threshold for how much stimulus we
need to activate that whole neurotag. How threatening the situation was, will determine if a neurotag is more likely to come to the surface -because our brain thinks of it as it's very important. There was a time when my life was threatened on a physical level. But, it could also be at a social level, or an emotional level. Those survival neurotags are timeless. They don't know past, present, future. Our survival mind only lives in the present moment.
So, your body and your autonomic nervous system do not know that this occurred in the past, because of the way our brain filters information and we're living in the present reality of the threat response. This shifts the external world to our internal state, so our reality changes to actually be life threatening in a normal, regulated nervous
system state. What I'm perceiving, is still objective, based on the filters of my brain, because we pull in so much information from all of our sensory input systems. Our brain has to filter that information, based on what it thinks is important. So there's 4 billion bits of input coming in every single second and we have all this stimulus coming in, that would completely overwhelm our system. Only about 2000 of those little bits even make it to our unconscious parts of our mind and they are
subconsciously processed. Then very few of those data points, maybe 40, actually make it to our conscious awareness. What I'm perceiving is my reality and then only approximately seven of those ,actually make it to our conscious thought. So much of what I'm experiencing in my body and my nervous system is not experienced by my cognitive mind. When I'm in a flashback and those filters change and everything becomes survival driven, I'm starting to become aware of everything that's
threatening. Everything that matches the feelings of despair, everything that's pointing me towards abandonment or high alert states. My filters are really changing, to ONLY let through the information that confirms that danger. It reminds me of a line in a, Tony Jones song where she says, "Rreality is only sort of real". It's all based on your perception, on where your brain is filtering. 7 out of 44,000! Wow, think about what your brain is filtering through. All of this is for your
survival. When our brains detect threat, we want those extra threat sensors working. We want those threat triggers to be more apparent. We want to be able to pick up on them easier. But, when the threat is only perceived and not real and you're still going to go into those altered perceptions of reality, you are moving into hyper vigilance. This can happen not only around physical threats, but because CPTS is relational, and this doesn't happen only around
physical threats, because CPTS is relational. You're also hyper vigilant around social threat, creating a lot of social anxiety, maybe codependent behaviors and self abandonment, which we're definitely going to be getting into later. A fawn response, correct? Fawn is such a social response. In general, you could have a general mistrust of others.
Maybe that mistrust is going to come from people that you already know and love but now, you suddenly have a hard time trusting them on many levels, even though they could be being present with you and they're not actually going to leave you beacuse they love and respect you. But, in those moments, your whole lens has shifted to the way that you're perceiving this particular relationship. You are leaning into constant states of hyper vigilance and chronic stress in
relationship, too. As we discussed in the stress response and relationship episode, you can start to see the link between that stress and chronic inflammation, immune dysregulation and generally poor health outcomes. I experienced this and see it with other people. It's the way you interpret people's facial expressions, their vocal tone, what their intentions are behind what they're saying and it starts
to shift. Someone can say something to me and if I'm in an emotional flashback, I normally would give them the benefit of the doubt and trust them. But, if I'm in an altered state, it feels they're coming at me or getting ready to be angry or leave me. It changes the way we interpret everything - what everyone is saying and how they say it - their entire being. As you mentioned, the internal state is really ramping up our stress response inside.
Theer's a link between ACE scores and health outcomes, whether because of our maladaptive behaviors, that we use in those moments to help us regulate and come down out of that state, or the actual changes that are occurring inside of our body, the immune response. We spoke with, Matt about how the immune response
is part of our stress response. If you're continually being triggered into a stress response, you're either; really taxing your immune system so it becomes fatigued over time and can't protect you against disease, or it's going to just stay really ramped up. Then, you start to experience issues - like
autoimmune conditions. If emotional flashback is making the entire world more threatening and creating that survival pattern in your brain and your nervous system, you're chronically moving into those responses having repercussions for your health. People with high ACE scores are going to have more emotional flashbacks and be moving into a dysregulated state. We talked about CPTS being redefined as, chronic outputs, the five distinguishing characteristics
and chronically reappearing symptoms. They're the outputs of chronic dysregulation. I have an ACE score of 4. I'm a Stage 3 breast cancer survivor. I completely relate my Complex Trauma and ACE score to the cancer. The stress over time, many other things happened throughout my life beginning with, early developmental stress. Stress is compounded and eventually something is going to happen like my cancer diagnosis. The body just can't maintain that level of stress. So what do we do about
this? How do we manage emotional flashbacks? It begins with awareness. It begins with listening to this conversation. Here you are learning about yourself, about your brain and your nervous system. It begins to shift the understanding of these characteristics. We see them in the beginning, as similar to identifying with personality traits. This is who I am. But what starts happening with time, you begin shifting yourunderstanding. These characteristics
are here for me to learn and know them. Personality traits are outputs of a nervous system that's been trying to keep me safe. This is huge. Back to the stress response relationship - Matt said, we're in a training ground. We're in a training ground when we're in those developmental stages of how our nervous system is going to adapt for survival. This is really important because it gives us the ability to think about our own thoughts. You talked about how, there's a physical, an
emotional and a cognitive component of a flashback. Our thoughts will also begin to change. In an emotional flashback, you'll have loops of being really hard on your body. You'll get the loops of threat about other people. When we have that awareness that you're speaking of, we can begin to think about our own thoughts with altitude. This is a concept called, metacognition - an awareness and understanding of our own thought process. We know from research on bias, that metacognition can alter our
brain function. When we are able to have awareness and understanding of our own thought processes, we get more fuel and activation to our frontal lobe, and pre-frontal cortex allowing us to take a different route of information processing. I talked about how the information coming in, will get interpreted by the amygdala and the hippocampus's
impact. Then, the information could return into our brainstem and kick off a survival responses But, when we're able to have awareness, it actually changes the route of that information so more of that can make it up to our frontal lobe and we can have what's called a, high road response instead of a reflexive survival response. If we can do that over and over again- because we're neuroplastic and our system is always adapting to the experience it's having,
we can really begin to re-shape. We can re-shape our amygdala and how it responds to that stimulus. We can re-shape the pathways, getting information fuel and activation to our frontal lobe. Awareness is about our thinking and exposing ourselves to new experiences and new ways of interpreting the stimulus coming in which decreases the inherent cognitive biases in our brain and starts to lessen that distortion.
Yeah. And we do also have to work with the nervous system in the language it understands, which is sensory inputs. If we can create direct sensory stimulus that creates different physiological response, when we are moving into a flashback, we can interrupt the pattern and start to create a new one, right back to that pattern recognition. That's why these tools are so important. We stress the daily, intentional
training of the nervous system. So by joining us at, rewiretrial.com you're going to have access to the tools we use to re-pattern our CPTs, to re-pattern these emotional flashbacks and really get to a place where we don't even recognize ourselves. Yeah. In our recent recording with, Toni Jones, she said something that really stuck with me. She talked about knowing yourself -that when you look back at old philosophers and theologians,
the message of," Know Thyself" came through so clearly.Bu, tshe wasn't just talking about knowing your purpose, what you like and don't like, but really understanding how you are made. How your operating system functions, not just knowing ourselves at a surface level about strengths and passions, but understanding our
brain, our body, and our nervous system. And that when you know how you're designed, because you have that information, you can see how the world affects you, how you're being influenced, what activates you, what shuts you down, what creates safety and how you can cultivate resilience. That's really what we mean by becoming the expert of your own nervous system.
It's a very empowering process to have the tools, the understanding of your nervous system and methods, to recognize what's going on, to recognize flashbacks. When you're deep in a flashback, it's hard to know because your filters have changed. So, you want to begin identifying those little signs you might be in an emotional flashback - the telltales you can rely on. Remember, I spoke about being in the pantry and thinking, okay, something's happening here. Oh, I need to
process some anger. Oh, I need to move my body. Oh, I need to use some tools to re-regulate. You can begin to identify when you're in a flashback, then you can do something because you have the tools and the processes available to you to. Absolutely. Repeating the tools will decrease the amount of flashbacks you experience. There's a neurological principle we talk about often. It's the SAID Principle; Specific Adaptation to Impose Demand. It means that what we do, we get better at.
Those reactions are becoming more myelinated, more well worn, efficient pathways to the brain. If you think of a speaker wire, the wire is the pathway, and the myelination is the plastic that goes over the speaker wire to protect it. So, that efficient path is getting wired and so is that myelinated path, it gets thicker. It becomes like a thick cable. If we re-pattern over time, with new tools, with new reactions and maintaining altitude, we're still feeling safe and being able to
regulate around the trigger. It becomes a well worn pathway that the brain can choose to take a higher road response more frequently and start chipping away at that well myelinated path. Remember, that neurons whch fire together, wire together. Now, we're going to begin breaking up this path. We've got to lay downa new path and we've got to get that path myelinated. Yeah, it's really powerful to think that we can do that. We can start to intentionally create these new pathways.
And actually, one of the signs for me that I'm in an emotional flashback is when I have that feeling or the thoughts even. It's always been like this. It's always going to be like this. Because the truth is that I know that we are neuroplastic beings. We're changing all the time and we're capable of change. So when I find myself in that place where I'm thinking, like, always has been, always will be, oh, I'm in a flashback, and that's one of my telltale signs,
and it's true for me. I've seen it with you, with our clients, with NSI practitioners we work with - it's really possible to re-pattern. It has been years since I've had an emotional flashback that I wasn't able to move through that same day. I'm not saying it never happens, because these things happen - they
happened a lot in development. Just like with the doctor's appointment, other times I'm having a conversation with my partner, you know, even you and I could have something that'll come up that'll trigger that flashback experience. But in real time, I'm able to recognize it, do the stuff somatically, to be with the emotions that come with it, to actually have the new experience of releasing those emotions and creating emotional regulation and then coming back to safety. And I am
re patterning. Those are skills I'm developing that now. I don't get stuck. It's incredible. It's a very new lived experience for both of us. I'm so thankful for it. To have these tools, because, as you're saying, like dysregulation, is going to happen. It's always going to happen. Those trauma responses, are going to happen and some triggers will impact us, but it is really about modulation and emotional processing.
Can we move those emotions through the body? Can we regulate and move between the states of activation to rest in recovery? To be able to adapt a healthy nervous system is not a flat line. We are not doing this to be calm all the time. That's not realistic and not desirable. We want to feel joy. We want to have excitement in our lives and sometimes things aren't going to go our way. So nervous system regulation is about fluidity. Nervous system regulation is dynamic, and it's always
unfolding in the present moment. It is about navigating what arises within you, allowing your set point to adapt and re-regulating to establish a new baseline or a level of homeostasis I recently read a quote by, Basil Van Der Kolk," When the alarm bells of the emotional brain keep signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it". So, it's about working with the emotional body to also be a regulator for your nervous system.
The emotional processing component is huge and a skill that we have to develop because of the repression that is there for so many of us with CPTS. If it's not subconscious repression, it might be conscious suppression. I don't want to show these emotions. It's going to be too much for people. I don't want to be angry. I don't want this. I don't want to that. I don't want to put that on other people. We're either reflexively repressing the emotions or we're choosing to suppress them.
That has real consequences for our health. it expends a lot of energy in the body. We're made to move emotions through our body. It's part of the way we're designed. When we're going against that, all of the time, we're holding that energy and our muscles are bracing, our body is contracting, and that is stressful. Then we never get the stress relief that comes from the emotional processing.
It's about doing and learning that in a minimum effective dose that's right for your nervous system, because it's also really important to remember, especially when we're working with people with complex trauma, that everyone is different. Navigating the nuances of a regulated nervous system is a very personal journey. This is all about understanding your own unique nervous system and learning to speak the language of your nervous system.
This is what we do at Brain Based Wellness - to empower you to become the expert of your own nervous system, to read the signals that it's sending you to learn the tools that are right for you and affect positive change. The best place to start with that is on the site@rewiretrial.com so that you can start to develop that unique and personal relationship. It's important to remember,
that these components interplay with one another. When experiencing an emotional flashback, the toxic shame could be bubbling under the surface super hard. Then, this voice rises loudly saying you're terrible - how terrible your life is and how bad everything. feels All of these thoughts furthers self abandonment and furthers the self abandonment. How are you supposed to engage with or a social life/social situation, without having a level of social anxiety that you have to numb yourself
in some way to get through? Maybe on the back end, you're engaging protective behaviors. So, it's really important to understand the nuances of the way you experience your nervous system. Wha your emotional flashbacks feel like and what is happening in and around you. In your body and brain, knowing you have agency of this experience You have. That's what we offer you. To gift your power back utilizing the tools on
our site at, Brain Based Wellness. Yes. The daily practice is about you regaining trust and power within yourself. Yes and we're going to be diving into all those topics you mentioned, in upcoming episodes. The inner critic, self abandonment, social anxiety and toxic shame. We'll be unpacking those more at the level of the nervous system and also offering ways to work with each of these chronically occurring outputs of the nervous system.
Thank you so much for joining us today, y'all,! We'll see you next week. Thank you. Bye.