If you have experienced something bad, it may not be neatly stored in your memory. Instead of remembering it, you get so-called flashbacks when you are triggered. There are ways to overcome this.
What is a flashback?
A flashback is when an intense bodily sensation or emotion overtakes you, or disturbing images pop into your head. The thing that sparked the flashback is called a trigger. Something triggered you. These can be very different situations. They are often associated with stress: a difficult conversation at work. Or a stressful social situation. Or you are alone somewhere. Or you are unable to do something. But it can also be something essentially nice that triggers this reaction. For example, having sex with someone you like.
What is happening here? Suddenly you have a bad feeling, feel great fear, despair, or helplessness. Perhaps you also see images or fragments of images that frighten and disturb you. Or you may feel pain or other unpleasant bodily sensations.
To understand what flashbacks are, you should know how our memory works. We'll explain this in the following paragraphs.
Cold memories: How does chronological memory work?
Normally, things that happen are processed neatly and stored in what is called chronological memory. This is also called the verbal or explicit memory. You can think of it as a filing cabinet with lots of drawers. The filing cabinet is constantly growing: New drawers are constantly being added on top.
Every new event goes into the top drawer. It's filed away like a story that you remember and are able to tell. The further back an event is, the further away from the top of the cabinet it is. It seems more and more distant. You have a sense of time regarding it. You have a sense of present and of past, and of what was yesterday and what was many years ago.
All these memories are verbally accessible, which means you can recall then, tell them, talk about them. We also call these “cold memories”.
Hot memories: How does my memory work under stress?
Suppose you experience something really bad. Something that overwhelms you emotionally: You get beaten up. You experience sexual violence. Or you're emotionally abused. Or you are abandoned. In such situations, you experience extreme stress. In these cases, the event enters your memory in a different way: Instead of a story ending up neatly in a drawer, all the sensory impressions enter the so-called implicit memory unprocessed.
You can imagine it like this: Everything that you saw, heard, felt, and sensed is wildly thrown together in a pot. There is no order in this pot. Old and new, recent and distant past are completely mixed. We also call this “hot memories”. You have no access to these hot memories in the “I remember” way. You can't recount them. And you have no sense of time for them.
Flashbacks: How do I remember hot memories?
Hot memories are evoked by triggers, as we described in the first section. Something happens that somehow feels similar to the way it felt back then. Maybe because your body is in a similarly tense state. Or because you feel strong feelings of shame, or helplessness, or some other uncomfortable emotion. Or because you are experiencing pain. Or because you are in a place that looks or smells similar. Or you hear a certain song.
Now the hot memories appear: Feelings, sensations, images. They appear, because your brain is linking a sensory impression from today with a similar sensory impression from the past. For example, a buddy makes a snide remark in jest. This triggers a hot memory from back when your father made snide remarks that totally messed you up. So now you're experiencing this really bad feeling. You're totally overreacting. You're immersed in the experience of back then. Back then, as a child, it was totally getting to you.
Today, it normally wouldn't get to you like that. But you're experiencing the past in the here and now, so to speak.
Are flashbacks abnormal?
No. Flashbacks are a normal consequence of the bad things that have happened to you. Having flashbacks does not make someone abnormal. Many people experience flashbacks because many people encounter situations in their lives that cause such intense feelings that they can't be neatly filed away in their memory.
Sometimes something bad happens to another person, and that triggers a hot memory in you – even though you yourself are not in danger. But back then you were. So these memories catch up with you again and again. This is not abnormal, but rather your brain functioning in the way it does in such situations.
Of course, this can lead to problems, because old feelings determine your behavior in the present. You can't help it. And others do not understand your reactions at all.
Why do I only get triggered some of the time?
Maybe your buddy's stupid joke wouldn't have triggered you yesterday. But today you were already stressed. Or very tired. Or overwhelmed. In these states, emotions boil over faster. If, on the other hand, you're relaxed, nothing will upset you this easily. When you're stressed, memories of stressful situations are more likely to come up.
How can relaxation and movement help?
When you are tense, hot memories that were created in a moment when you were very tense, are more likely to be triggered. For example, because you experienced great fear or disgust, or were very alert and on guard. But flashbacks can also occur when you are sluggish, passive, and motionless. In this case, memories that originated when you were powerless, helpless, and immobile, are more likely to be triggered.
In general, flashbacks are much less likely to be triggered when you are in a loose, active-relaxed physical state. We therefore recommend, for example, that all those who have experienced sexual assault engage in active movement during sex, while avoiding states of high tension and lying passively on their back.
How do I control my flashbacks?
You won't succeed in avoiding flashbacks altogether. In fact, they come knocking because they want to be taken seriously: They want to protect you from reliving some bad event from the past. They make you avoid certain situations.
Unfortunately, they don't understand that they belong in the past, and that they should be resting in the filing cabinet of cold memories, neatly and tidily filed away in the past.
How do I clean up hot memories?
To clean up hot memories, you teach them language and an understanding of time. You help them to link up with cold memories from that same time, so that the brain understands: “Oh, this was then, this isn't now”, whenever such an image or feeling pops up again.
This means: You have a look at the hot memories and you connect them to cold memories. This way, they are neatly filed away in the past, and you become free for the here and now. The memories then feel like the past, and you sense: “That was in the past, it no longer affects me today”.
So the goal is not to control the memories, but to file them away neatly in the past so that they don't catch up with you in the here and now. There are various techniques for doing this in psychotherapy or trauma therapy.