Flashbacks Aren’t Just Visual: Recognizing Emotional and Somatic Flashbacks

When you think of a trauma flashback, you likely picture a cinematic scene: images flashing, a character freezing in place. For many trauma survivors, however, the most common and confusing flashbacks aren’t things they can see – they are things they feel. Sometimes when we recall memories, we can remember facial expressions and what our surroundings looked like. There are many instances, though, that give us a very different experience in recalling a memory.

What Somatic Flashbacks Feel like

Think of a somatic flashback as any physical sensation you may feel that is a result of your body remembering a traumatic event. Usually, some sort of stimulus will trigger the body memory. In the example of the soldier getting a war flashback – perhaps it’s a certain sound, a phrase – or the smell of smoke. The body remembers these cues as warnings that harm was coming. A soldier who has been to war may notice a physiological response to a trigger: muscles tightening, flinching, racing heartbeat, sweating, or shaking. They may even experience an odd sensation reminiscent of pain, despite being in no physical altercation.

Somatic flashbacks don’t just happen in cases of remembering physical harm. Think of a child who was neglected and left in a dark room without their needs being met. Being hungry, or sitting in the dark may trigger a similar somatic flashback. Perhaps they might hear sounds that aren’t there, like hearing an auditory memory of yelling.  

Somatic flashbacks are your body’s way of trying to protect you, which is why it often involves flooding your system with adrenaline, throwing you into that “fight, flight, freeze or fawn” response. This can be very uncomfortable to deal with, which is why it becomes important to work with a therapist who can help you target some of these bodily responses to calm your nervous system and let your body know it is no longer in danger.

What Emotional Flashbacks Feel like

The concept of the “emotional flashback” is most famously and thoroughly described by Pete Walker in his work on Complex PTSD. In his book “Holistically Treating Complex PTSD” he refers to emotional flashbacks as a sudden regression to the intense, overwhelming emotions of childhood trauma. Many may mistake emotional flashbacks for just being dysregulated or “overreacting”, but it’s much more nuanced than that. In the world of emotions, our main categories are anger, sadness, joy, fear and disgust. In times of trauma, those negative emotions are the ones that take over your amygdala, particularly fear. Fear is perhaps our most vulnerable emotion, and it’s likely one of the main emotions we feel in times of trauma. There can be an intense avoidance when it comes to our willingness to be in a state of fear, so it is common for us to quickly adjust to a state of anger to cover fear.  

Imagine, if you will, someone with the traumatic memory of their father walking out of the door for the last time before abandoning his family. The child who witnessed this may grow up to have an intense fear of their partner abandoning them, and witnessing their partner disengage and walk out the door becomes a trigger of that memory of their father. Initially, the emotional flashback comes and there is an intense feeling of fear seeing their partner head for the door. As a defense mechanism, anger may take over, and the individual may start verbally lashing out at their partner, or aggressively standing in front of the door, preventing their partner from leaving.

The key difference between an emotional reaction vs an emotional flashback is the intensity of the emotion, duration of the emotion, and mismatching of present context. Emotional flashbacks also involve regressing to a much younger age, emotionally. Think of how children display things like anger, fear, or sadness. It is much less controlled, and often involves more grandiose expression. So, if an adult experiences an emotional flashback, you may see them behave childlike. This can look like tantrums, curling up in a ball while rocking and weeping, or in more rare cases, even speaking like a child would.

Sometimes the emotional reaction of disgust gets glossed over when talking about emotional flashbacks, so allow me to provide an example of what this emotion might look like in an emotional flashback. A child who grows up with their parent looking disgusted every time he or she cries may cause that child to grow up having a reaction of disgust when he or she tears up in emotion. I have even heard people create verbal cues like “ew” when they feel themselves becoming emotional and tearing up, fanning their eyes to stop the crying. This, in essence, is an emotional flashback. One might inquire as to why this might be called “trauma” to experience a disgust reaction when one cries. The answer is that clinicians and researchers have highlighted the concept of “traumatic invalidation” where chronic invalidation itself is seen as core trauma. When chronic invalidation is severe, long-lasting, and compromises a person’s sense of self-worth, the idea is that this kind of social trauma is proposed to play a role in the development of PTSD.

Trauma isn’t just stored in our visual memory. It is stored in our body via sensations, “gut feelings”, and emotions. Often times, the initial step is to simply observe, from a nonjudgmental perspective, what our bodies and emotions are telling us.