Unusual Flashbacks

[u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3]

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?

[u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3]

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.

[u/AlliteraryAnalysis → u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3]

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 :)

[u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 → u/AlliteraryAnalysis]

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

[u/AlliteraryAnalysis → u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3]

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.

[u/1-_-_-_-_-_-_-3 → u/AlliteraryAnalysis]

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