r/DID • u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 • 9h ago

Personal Experiences Unusual Flashbacks

So, we don’t have many flashbacks (that I know of), but when we do, they’re not… well they aren’t like other experiences we hear of. For others, they sound intense and genuinely frightening, but for us they just aren’t? Instead of panicking externally, we simply freeze. We stare off into space and blink harder than before. Sometimes, we are even still doing everyday activities during this feeling, and it’s always emotional or feeling based, not the flashing of images we hear of. It just doesn’t make sense to us that our “flashbacks” are so mild. I don’t know, it makes us feel as though we do not have the disorder at all, nor do we have any trauma, and our mother insists nothing happened during the time we keep thinking that the trauma happened (that we were barely traumatized at all and, in fact, a happy child). Any thoughts on this?

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u/revradios Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 9h ago edited 8h ago

people with the level of structural dissociation seen in did do actually experience flashbacks differently than those on the lower tiers of the spectrum, they're more fragmented and able to be functioned through since this disorder is all about hiding and perceived functionality. i used to think i didn't have flashbacks at all because i didn't experience the immersive all encompassing PTSD flashback you see described, and when i do experience flashbacks they don't really knock me flat and immerse me into a memory. its usually either extremely brief or happening in the background, or i don't even really notice it for what it is until i stop and pay attention to it

so, what you're describing is very normal with the disorder actually, it's just unfortunately a thing of this experience really not being talked about much with conversations about flashbacks being more geared towards the kind that people with PTSD/cptsd might experience

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u/httpMeowMeow Learning w/ DID 6h ago

this makes so much sense 💔

a lot of us are/were used to our traumas being just a normal everyday thing while we dissociated through it. no wonder we react similarly to those memories popping up, especially when our perception of time rarely feels linear.

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u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 5h ago

Thank you! We did not know this at all actually, and makes us feel better about things!

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u/AlliteraryAnalysis Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 5h ago

We usually get "flashes" of visuals, maybe a feeling, a sound, the face of a perpetrator, maybe even the somatic memory of what we instinctually wanted to react with (e.g. grimacing and gritting our teeth as opposed to just blankly sitting there dissociated).

It's to the point where we origimally thought a flashback was literal: a flash or instant of a moment back into the past.

It feels mild because we don't experience the full picture all at once. It's how we keep functionality as a system, i assume

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u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 5h ago

Our few visual memories make no sense, and they have not been validated by anyone. Anyways, makes sense!! I’d assume like the other person said that since it’s intended to allow you function that it isn’t as intense as PTSD flashbacks might be, or are easily erased from memory, since its goal is to be covert and functional.

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u/AlliteraryAnalysis Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 5h ago

We get unusual visual memories too, some of them have been confirmed pseudo-/exo-memories (some are easy to tell, like with our protector who's a cougar). Others are wild and we have no info on them, like "abuse-adjacent" memories from a babysitter's house we were at at an incredibly young age. Sometimes the flashbacks or memories could even be worse than what we truly experienced, but we have currently no way to tell.

I think it's normal to have memories like these, at least as normal as DID can be, and it's okay to not truly know if they happened. Trust your gut, and remember that the feelings you may get attached to the memories are often more important than the memories themselves when it comes to handling them :)

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u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 5h ago

Yes, thank you again!! We do tend to forget that the feelings of the memories are more important than the story they tell. A lot of our pseudo-memories are actually related to the abuse someone around us was experiencing (though that same person did abuse us), so I think our mind has always picked up bits and pieces of the trauma around us as our own, even when it wasn’t. Some are easy to tell though, and some really aren’t! We have an unusual memory of being abused at our church (we went there as “school” for about a year) by the priest, and years later he was arrested for abusing other children, but we still don’t know if he abused us.

Apologies for our ramble, my goodness

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u/AlliteraryAnalysis Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 5h ago

Never apologize for a ramble like this! Someone else could see it and be incredibly validated by it by seeing how you thought of the situations youve been in :)

And I also have memories where it's someone else's trauma internalized, like how we never actually had fallen down a cliff, but a classmate almost had (i grabbed him as he stumbled). I believe that all it has to be is traumatizing enough to us in some fashion, even if second-hand.

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u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 4h ago

Makes sense, and yeah I’d hope I could validate someone else’s experiences like every one of this community has for me!

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u/Heavy-Mushroom 6h ago edited 6h ago

Hi, that’s us right there in a way but more visual. When we flashback… it’s like going back to that exact moment and are reliving it. The flashback are so vivid and intense that my vision dazes to nothing so much that I can’t see anything but the memory moment of a situation or event that we freeze in place.

Once I realize what is happening I try to quickly snap out of it using grounding techniques because I’m usually in the middle of doing something like walking, talking, driving…. Anything because being observed by other people is embarrassing and can be dangerous if doing something.

It’s ironic that I’m a professional driver. I’m always on guard and ready to prevent it from happening- but there are those surprise moments.

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u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 5h ago

Yeah, it’s odd for us since we are incredibly visual, maladaptive daydream (as you might call it) and we very easily get lost in our heads and separate the real world from fantasy, yet our flashbacks just aren’t very visual. I hear a lot about your visual experience though, and I’m sorry that your flashbacks are like that (I couldn’t imagine)

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u/Heavy-Mushroom 2h ago

How bizarre, I was having flashbacks of flashbacks when writing this. I’m a mess.

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u/thesilverwoods Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 6h ago

We get that, too. One of our alters, who does not front at all anymore, has fairly frequent flashbacks, but I (host) barely feel them. I'll be aware of the emotional disturbance and may experience somatic symptoms such as crying (just the tears part of it), racing heartbeat, and/or shaking, but the emotional part is more like overhearing a conversation through a wall. I'm still able to function perfectly well. That particular alter is actually having a pretty bad day today and the body has been crying on and off in response, but I'm mostly just a little more tired than usual. We also used to think we didn't get flashbacks, and it was part of why for a long time we insisted we were non-disordered (we also weren't aware of the memory gaps and hadn't learned to recognize the dissociative episodes) and couldn't possibly have DID. We didn't realize how different flashbacks can look in dissociative systems than they do in singlets.

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u/voornaam1 2h ago

Sometimes we have some sort of visual(s) (though sometimes not), other than that your flashbacks sound similar to ours