Jump to: Emotional Flashbacks A Brief Overview · The Challenging Nature of Emotional Flashbacks · Clues For Spotting Hidden Emotional Flashbacks · It’s Not You, It’s an Emotional Flashback · The Isolating Nature of Hidden Emotional Flashbacks · What Awareness Can Offer

If you’re here, you may be familiar with CPTSD. One key differentiator with PTSD is emotional flashbacks, which you may or may not have heard about. I know it took me a while to realize they even existed. Knowing this can help to make you feel a little more understood.

After a brief overview, I’ll focus on how emotional flashbacks can be hidden and offer clues to help you notice them. This article is not about what to do during a flashback or how to regulate once you’re already inside one.

This piece is about finding relief from awareness. It’s about recognizing when something you’re experiencing may not actually belong to the present moment, even if it feels convincing. While they’re hard to face, just knowing that “it’s not you” but a nervous system response, can offer some relief.

You may have experienced the following: you know that your reactions are coming from trauma and that you’re experiencing PTSD, but something still feels off or like it’s missing when you read about it.

In addition to the commonly listed PTSD symptoms, you may also experience sudden and intense emotional pain, that doesn’t always apply to what’s happening around you. If this is the case, you may be experiencing emotional flashbacks.

I didn’t personally come across this term until reading an article by Pete Walker that described them. Knowing you’re not alone and that there was language for this experience can offer some reassurance.

Emotional flashbacks are particular to CPTSD. Because they don’t always look like traditional flashbacks, and since there’s still limited lived-experience information available, they can be harder to recognize and respond to.

Emotional flashbacks are intense and sudden painful experiences that a person may feel as:

• Dread
• Hopelessness 
• Feeling trapped
• Panic
• Intense emotional pain
• Abandonment
• Rage 
• Helplessness
• Shame

Pete Walker refers to them as “amygdala hijackings” in response to events that occurred earlier in life. Your body is re-experiencing something from when you were younger.

They can take over quickly and feel frightening or destabilizing, sometimes creating the sense that you’re going crazy.

In addition, emotional flashbacks are often layered with shame. This shame usually comes from long-held negative beliefs about yourself that developed in unsafe environments, even though those beliefs are not the truth. Shame can intensify the flashback and make it harder to step back and see what’s happening.

The Inner Critic can get extremely loud during Flashbacks. Get some immediate CPTSD-specific grounding scripts to turn down the volume.

If you’d like suggestions on how to shift your focus during a flashback go to A Small Shift for Support in Emotional Flashbacks. I’ve also included a link to Pete Walker’s work at the bottom of this post.

Dealing with emotional flashbacks is difficult enough on its own. They’re one of the most challenging aspects of CPTSD. They can feel devastating, disorienting, and all-consuming.

There’s this deep, gut-level fear, despair, shame, or self-loathing feeling rooted far beneath the surface. They may make you feel like the problem is you when it isn’t. These experiences can be excruciating and nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through them.

Sometimes emotional flashbacks are obvious. You’re triggered by something and suddenly feel flooded with intense sensations.

But other times, they are far more subtle and this is where an extra layer of complicatedness comes in.

When emotional flashbacks are more nuanced or hidden, it can make dealing with them, and CPTSD accordingly, more difficult.

Not all emotional flashbacks arrive with a clear signal. You may not feel a sharp emotional spike or a sudden wave of panic. 

Instead, you might experience a sudden, but more subtle, shift in your mood or body without a clear cause. You may feel unsettled, irritated, withdrawn, or uneasy, even though nothing specific seems to have happened. The uncomfortable emotion is still there but a little more discreet in feeling than a full-blown episode.

Because there isn’t always an obvious trigger, it can be easy to assume that the feeling belongs to the present moment. This is one reason hidden emotional flashbacks are so hard to recognize.

Hidden emotional flashbacks are not always intense or dramatic. Sometimes they feel more like a fog or a lingering unease beneath the surface that mirror the symptoms above.

You may experience a lower-level sense of dread, anxiety, or heaviness that follows you through the day. You may feel emotionally flat, anxious, tense, or preoccupied without knowing why.

Because these experiences are quieter, they are often mistaken for mood issues, personality flaws, or general stress.

You might not realize you were in a flashback until it begins to lift, or until you notice that your thinking and body feel a little more stable.

When emotional flashbacks are hidden, they often reveal themselves indirectly. 

Intense or Deep Feelings

• One of the biggest clues. Whenever you’re experiencing intense, in the sense of deep feelings, especially if you don’t know why, this is a clue that you’re in an emotional flashback. 
• The reaction may be stronger than the situation in front of you.
• Even if they’re not as intense as a quick and sudden emotional flashback. Pay attention to intensity and depth.

Lingering Duration
While they can last for a few minutes to hours or more, sometimes the effects linger so you forget that the way you continue to think, feel or relate to others are actually lingering effects.  

Hidden emotional flashbacks may come in the guise of more subtle reactions like these:

• A subtle background of anxiety even though things around you haven’t changed
• Lingering dread
• Feeling trapped externally by your environment even though you’re safe
• Feeling trapped internally for example in decision making
• feeling like you’re about to get caught for something even though you did nothing wrong
• Something bad will happen for no reason when you’re in a safe environment
• Wanting to pull away from a trusted loved one, even when you know they’re safe
• You may also feel an urgent need to fix something, explain yourself, withdraw, or defend yourself

These clues don’t always point clearly to trauma, especially if you’ve spent a long time being told that your reactions are overreactions.

One of the most confusing aspects of hidden emotional flashbacks is how convincingly they can disguise themselves.

They may show up as resentment or irritation. You might feel angry toward someone you are speaking to, even though their words don’t objectively warrant that level of response.

You may become reactive, cold, or defensive without understanding why. You might feel the urge to shut down or pull away, believing that you are simply being distant or guarded. You may want connection and fear it at the same time.

In these moments, it may not occur to you that what you are experiencing is a flashback at all. It can feel like this reaction is just “how you are.” 

If you’re experiencing these symptoms, and if you can, try to take a step back and notice whether the reaction is proportional to what’s in front of you from a logical standpoint.

This is not a moment to fix, but just to notice and observe. Sometimes awareness in the moment can help even if just a little. 

Sometimes, recognition sometimes comes later and that’s ok. If you pause and reflect afterwards, you may realize that your response was not proportional to the situation. The intensity belonged to something older.

You may look back on a conversation, a conflict, or a day where everything felt difficult and suddenly realize that you were responding from an past deeper emotional state.

This delayed awareness can be frustrating. It can lead to self-criticism or the belief that you should have known better.

But delayed recognition is common, especially with hidden emotional flashbacks. Awareness often develops gradually. Noticing after the fact is still progress.

Hidden emotional flashbacks can be especially isolating.

It can feel like your pain is incomprehensible to others, even to people you know also live with CPTSD. You may struggle to explain what you’re experiencing or feel that no explanation fully captures it. This is part of the trauma lens.

Whatsmore, when your nervous system is in fight-or-flight, isolation can feel safer. Pulling inward may feel protective, even though it leaves you feeling alone.

Another part of this isolation comes from the lack of comparison points. Many people with CPTSD rarely see their internal experiences reflected accurately. Without shared language, it can feel as though your experience is uniquely broken.

Until there is more awareness around CPTSD, this sense of isolation can be strong. Please know there is a way through this, and yes, others experience this too.

You may feel like you don’t belong in the same world others live in.

Emotional flashbacks often feel rare or unusual, not because they are uncommon in CPTSD, but because there is so little lived-experience information available.

Many people don’t yet have language for what happens internally when they become dysregulated. In addition, large clinical sites tend to dominate search results for complex trauma while missing these quieter, but very real, internal realities.

As a result, emotional flashbacks can feel confusing, extreme, or difficult to place, even though they are a common part of CPTSD.

Even when emotional flashbacks aren’t hidden, they can make healing feel especially discouraging.

You may feel as though you are losing progress or starting over, particularly if you don’t immediately recognize what’s happening.

This adds to what I call the Failure Loop Trap. Each episode feels like evidence that nothing has changed or that healing isn’t working, even when it is. This is even more the case when you don’t realize you’re having a flashback and attribute it to something “being wrong with you” when there isn’t.

To learn more about the Failure Loop go to Why is Trauma Healing so Exhausting: The Failure Loop Trap.

Healing is not linear. Learning safety happens in layers. Recovery is not always the immediate absence of flashbacks. It often looks like recognizing them a little sooner or recovering a little faster than before. And, attributing them to a nervous system response.

If nothing seems to resonate right now, it’s okay. 

Simply knowing about and realizing that you may be experiencing an emotional flashback can be powerful. It shifts the burden off of you as a person and places it where it belongs, on a nervous system response shaped by past experiences.

Awareness creates space. It allows you to respond with a little more compassion rather than self-blame. 

You don’t need to fix anything in that moment. Recognition alone is often the first step toward safety.

You are not broken and your system is doing the best it can. You are responding to something old and deep, and your body did what it could to survive.

Warmly,
Allie C. | CalmFire™

When you’re triggered, finding the right words can be hard.
I created the free CalmFire™ Companion to hold the words for you. It includes specific scripts for safety and neutral grounding to serve 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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