Pete Walker’s book, “Complex Ptsd: From Surviving to Thriving” is an invaluable, comprehensive resource for anyone with a childhood history of trauma. A few thought provoking ideas about complex trauma and emotional flashbacks are provided below.
· Survivors of traumatising childhood abandonment suffer from Cptsd and are often burdened by the hair-trigger susceptibility to painful emotional flashbacks. An emotional flashback is a sudden and often prolonged regression to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child.
· When you are trapped in a flashback, you are reliving the worst emotional times of your childhood. Because there are rarely any visual components to a Cptsd flashback, you feel overwhelmed and confused. A sense of feeling small, fragile, powerless, and helpless is also commonly experienced during an emotional flashback, and its symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing toxic shame.
· The role of traumatized childhoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous. Pete Walker has been a therapist for 35 years and has witnessed many clients with Cptsd who were misdiagnosed with many different psychological disorders. The key problem with these pathological labels is that they can be incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with. More resources on Complex Trauma