Memories you know you are remembering. Flashback is memory without you knowing you are remembering.

I get PTSD flashbacks pretty often.

A decade or two ago I might have agreed, Thor, but awareness training has helped me recognize when I am in the grips of a flashback I recognize the phenom with increasing ease. Practice, practice, practice. . .

Stopping those freight trains in motion is an entirely different skill set.
Training in progress.

One thing that I get sometimes that are different than flashbacks & memories is this like ‘emotional flashbacks’ thing where I have started crying for no reason or different emotions that I have wash over me that I believe are ptsd related. no flashback or memories involved but feels like my body is remembering something & I start crying or panicking & needing to breath. I don’t know if I’m explaining it rite.
Big hug <3

I don't know that there is a right or wrong way to explain these things, Missy. In my own senses, most of it lives beyond words.

My own memories, good, bad and all the shades in between, often come in phases. The smell of popcorn can carry me to a movie I particularly enjoyed as easily as it can lead me to rape behind a carnival tent.

Then we get to emotions which boil up for no apparent reason. I theorate that those are my repressed emotions and/or emotions which are still processing. Often, when I gently lean into them, they lead me to profound healing places.

I'm trying to bridge the gap between the 2, Work in progress,,,

A memory is something that pops into your mind or is triggered by an event that takes you back to a past event where you recall events.

A flash back is reliving a past event in the present. When I experience a flash back it’s as though I have time traveled back to the event and it’s happening all over again and I feel the emotion, terror and pain the same as it is really happening. When I come out of the flashback I have lost time.......20 minutes, an hour, etc. It seems related to disassociation, when you go into a fog.

That be another I would have agreed with a decade or three ago, but as I have healed and lost my fear of remembering anything, whatsoever, I have found I can relax my way to full sensory recall of my pleasant memories, as well and I most definitely can lose track of time during the waltz down Memory Lane.

A major diff that is still with me is that I can come back from Memory Lane at will, without that dissociative fog and/or whatever other psycho ticks might care to follow me back from that OCD hell.

Since my personal history is such that I'm bound to have a flashback or two every day, I'm trying to make use of them to journal about them and convert them from bodily sensations to memories with context. Viktor Frankl's Holocaust survivor book Man's Search for Meaning is my guide.

Dissociating's another ball of wax for me. It's hard to find a context for meaning with that.

For me memory I can stop in away and is controllable but flashback is scary and runs stop when it feels like. Flashback sometimes reminds me of things that I have very little memories of. Flashback helps me to put the pieces of memories together. I dissociate also from five years old. Certain things aren't comfortable to talk about.

Since I've learned more about dissociating and grown some control over the phenom, it be another one that comes in handy sometimes. Being able to dissociate from my surroundings takes some of the sting out of a long airplane flight or waiting room vigil. In moderate, controlled doses, it is a handy tool. Lecture all you want, my righteous one. I've gone fishing in my dreams.

I'll buy the control factor as an important diff, Rose. If somebody disrupts a daydream, they'll get a sleepy grin. Disrupting a flashback could blowup in your face.