Jump to: What Emotional Flashbacks Can Feel Like ⋅ The Instinct to Push Back and Fix ⋅ What Doesn’t Work During an Emotional Flashback: An Example ⋅ The Core Shift ⋅ The Nuance: Discreet or Masked Flashbacks ⋅ Why Emotional Flashbacks Are So Confusing and Feel Like Identity ⋅ Emotional Flashbacks Can Feel Like Losing Progress: The “Failure Loop” ⋅ You Are Building Safety, Layer by Layer

If you’ve landed on this page, chances are you are familiar with emotional flashbacks. Here, I tackle an additional support option you can use, in addition to grounding, but which can be used to help regulate on its own.

This article isn’t about stopping emotional flashbacks or fixing what comes up in them. It’s about shifting where your attention goes while you’re inside one and how it helps. This approach is one option for emotional flashback management to support your grounding work.

Emotional flashbacks are absolutely one of the most difficult things in CPTSD. They can feel devastating, disorienting, and consuming. 

If you learned about PTSD first and were confused about the missing piece, you’re not alone. I know it came as a relief, although not comfort, knowing I was not alone and that a concept existed for this.

There’s this deep, gut-level fear, despair, shame, or self-loathing that feels rooted far beneath the surface. They are excruciating and feel impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Emotional flashbacks are particular to CPTSD. Because they can show up in different ways and there is not a lot of information about them, they can be harder to recognize and respond to.

If you are reading this, you probably already know this. You have likely lived it and my heart goes out to you. Remember, you’re not alone in this. 

When an emotional flashback hits, the natural tendency is to push back against it. This makes complete sense. The pain can feel unbearable, and of course you want it to stop.

The brain immediately tries to solve the flashback using logic. It starts analyzing, questioning, replaying, and searching for answers: 

• Why did this happen?
• What did I do wrong?
• Why was I treated like this?
• How could this have gone differently?
• I could have done something differently…

As we all know, this doesn’t quite work.

The urge to solve the flashback is a survival response but it makes you feel like a failure, because you can’t “solve it”. The thinking brain is trying to regain control and reduce threat. But during an emotional flashback, logic alone cannot restore safety.

This is why emotional flashback management often also needs to focus on grounding and support rather than insight or problem-solving.

For the purpose of this article, I’ll keep this mild.

Let’s say you are having an emotional flashback that you can attribute to a specific memory or image, such as being scolded as a child. What the brain tries to do is to somehow fix the past inside your head.

It asks questions like: What did I do to deserve this as a kid? This is so unfair, why didn’t others go through this, why me? What were my parents thinking?

This doesn’t work.

You can’t always figure out what other people were thinking. You can’t change the past. Yet part of you still wants to. This builds from an ingrained lack of self-trust and resilience, which are both deeply impacted by complex trauma. It’s possible that our primitive brains have not evolutionarily caught up to the more complex thinking brain as well. 

As you progress in healing and retrain the brain, you may notice that it automatically tries to undo the past less and less. This happens gradually. It is learned or forced. 

Insight has its place, but during an emotional flashback, insight alone does not bring safety.

This shift is about moving away from fixing the content of the flashback and toward holding the part of you that is hurting. We are moving away from fixing (the story) and toward tending to (the feeling). This is one way to put emotional flashback management in practice.

If you need to, use your grounding tools (e.g.: 5-4-3-2-1 method, ice, EMDR music.) as part of your emotional flashback management.

When you have a little more capacity, you can also return to tools like the Compassionate Reframe. You might try finding that compassionate response to help steady you and remind you that you are not your trauma.

As a personal note, I’ve found that accepting I’m having a flashback, and that I won’t always feel better, right away helpful as well.

Shift the focus: You switch your focus from trying to fix the actual content of the emotional flashback to tending to the part of you that is actually hurting.

Instead of engaging with the story, the memory, or the mental replay, you turn your attention toward healing what’s inside.

You can use Visualization:

• Imagine a healed version of you holding you now.
• Bring light, warmth, love to the part of you that feels activated. 
• Picture you holding yourself tightly or a younger self
• → Find a compassionate response for you in the now 

You can utilize somatic tools as well:

• Try to locate the sensation in your body:  Is it in your gut? Your chest? Your throat? 
• Does it have a shape, a color, a texture? Picture those parts breathing, change the shape, color. 
• You can also use weight, touch, temperature.
• Personally, slower exhales help. It engages the calming response

You are here for yourself now.

Acceptance helps in those moments too. Acceptance here does not mean approval of a past event. It means acknowledgment that you’re experiencing a flashback. You name what is happening without trying to immediately change it.

Then you bring care to yourself in the present moment. You offer yourself love now, not just retroactively. If you can, you sit with the pain, even just a little bit with compassion, so it can begin to process and move through you. Of course, this is assuming you have the capacity. Please don’t push if you can’t. Remember, this is just what’s helped me personally.

This is the part you switch to.

You do not need to do this perfectly. There are no “shoulds” here. Even a few seconds of presence counts. Sitting with the pain just enough for your system to register that you are not alone with it anymore is often enough to begin shifting the experience.

These are not cure-alls or quick fixes. It’s about all the little things you do together and over time to bring your nervous system back into safety. We’re not trying to force anything or do something perfectly. It’s about taking steps when you can and opening up to curiosity, the present, and finding a small exit route.

A gentle anchor can help you stay in the present. I created a free Phrase Bank with scripts for safety, neutrality, and compassion that you can keep close.

We talked about variety earlier, but there are some flashbacks that are specifically more discreet or masked. This makes it harder to respond. These types of flashbacks can still show up as intense anxiety, dread, or agitation, but may not be as flooding. This can make emotional flashback management challenging, because you may not realize what is happening at first.

You may think you are responding adequately to something that’s happening in the moment. At face value, your reaction seems to make sense.

For example, instead, they show up as:

• Sudden resentment or irritation
• Anger toward the person you are speaking to
• Feeling reactive, cold, or defensive without understanding why

You might not realize that this anger itself is an emotional flashback.

You may not even realize that you are in an emotional flashback at all. You just may think all that resentment or fear is caused by the thing in front of you right now. That’s what can make it so hard. But usually, if you take a step back, these reactions are not proportionate to the external environment you are experiencing.

You can remember that sometimes emotional flashbacks are more obvious while others are discreet. Intense feelings usually serve as a clue. Try to observe yourself when you’re having intense feelings. Should these feelings be so intense given what’s happening right now?

You’re probably responding to something old, rather than what’s in front of you right now. When you acknowledge those moments as emotional flashbacks, it can relieve the pressure of feeling like you’re the problem, which makes you feel incapable of handling your feelings and questioning them.

It can really help just to know that sometimes you’re experiencing a masked flashback: it’s not you.

Emotional flashbacks are confusing partly because they don’t always announce themselves clearly. You may not see images or remember specific events. You may just feel overwhelmed, unsafe, ashamed, or deeply unsettled without a clear reason.

They may feel disproportionate to what is happening in the present. The reaction feels too big, too intense, and too consuming for the situation at hand. This often leads to self-blame or the belief that something is wrong with you fundamentally. But there isn’t.

You may also not always know you’re in one; they are insidious, hijacking, and can pull you under before you realize it.

It can feel like your pain is incomprehensible to others’ even those you know have CPTSD. This is the trauma lens talking to keep you isolated. It is in full fight-or-flight and has decided that this was safer. Part of it is also the lack of comparison points with others. Until there’s more awareness in CPTSD, please know that there is a way out and that yes others go through this too.

These experiences feel rare or unusual, because often there is so little lived-experience information available. Many people don’t have the language to describe what’s happening when they’re dysregulated, and large clinical sites tend to dominate search results for complex trauma while missing these internal realities.

Emotional flashbacks can come back. When they do, they can make you feel like you are constantly losing progress or starting over. I call this the failure loop. It’s a painful pattern where each flashback feels like evidence that nothing has changed and that healing isn’t working. This is not the case.

Healing is not linear. Healing isn’t even good or bad, it’s just different phases. Learning safety happens in layers. Recovery is not always a big moment or quick. It’s not an immediate absence of flashbacks, for me at least. It means your nervous system is gradually learning something new, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

As time passes in your healing journey, you may notice that you recover from emotional flashbacks faster than you used to. Your body and mind begin to learn, slowly and unevenly, that they are safer now.

I plan to address the failure loop in a separate post because it’s so important and deserves its own post. For now, it’s enough to know that having emotional flashbacks does not erase your progress.

There are no “shoulds” in recovery.

Emotional flashback management is not about doing things perfectly, but about staying connected to yourself when you can.

When you are in the thick of it, simply noticing that you are in a flashback, even if you can’t shift out of it right away, is a win. The small wins need attention too and reinforce your healing journey. They are easy to let slip by.

It means a part of you is remaining present, watching over the part of you that is hurting. You are breaking a cycle that likely started long before you had the words to describe it.

It’s not about eliminating all flashbacks all at once. It is about slowly teaching your nervous system that you’re okay now. You are building that safety, one small moment of awareness at a time. Be gentle with yourself today.

You are doing the hard work, and you deserve to rest in the moments between.

Warmly,
Allie C. | CalmFire™

When you’re triggered, finding the right words can be hard.
I created a free Phrase Bank with specific phrases for safety, neutrality, compassion, belonging, and personal power. Use it as a gentle anchor back to the present.

If you’d like to read more about CPTSD and symptoms that are missed but commone check out: What is CPTSD: Overview & Common Missed Symptoms

To learn more about Emotional Flashbacks, check out Pete Walker who has done work on the subject matter.

Note: I’m not a licensed professional. I’m sharing from my own healing journey and these are tools that have helped me personally. Please give yourself and others space and patience along the way. This blog is for support, not a substitute for professional care. If you are in crisis, call 911 or your local emergency number.

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