Arife you aren't alone. Sending you support

arfie, I've been experiencing lately a difference between a memory being more in the mind and the brain and a flashback being more in my body outside of my mind and my brain. It seems I'm experiencing how the body has its own PTSD memory, too. I'm getting feedback these days from the places where my body was tortured by the Uruguayan professional military torturers when I was a missionary kid. I don't mean to complicate the question, but that's what's going on with my most recent experience of PTSD and my past coming into my present.

i was still suffering full trauma induced amnesia when i started psychotherapy in 1972. when i first started learning about flashbacks, i, too, would have included those full body sensations as a diff between a memory and a flashback.

as i have regained more and more of my memory function, i have grown to believe that i have full sensory recall of the pleasant memories, as well. in 1972, trauma flashbacks were all the long-term memory function i had to work with. these days, remembering the dog days of august can warm me on a cold winter day.

Wow, arfie, thanks for affirming that experience I'm having these days of something in my body that's between a memory and a flashback. It doesn't fit our usual mind/body language, so it's great that it came across.

I do have the pleasant body memories, too, as you say. I went dancing here in Mexico two weeks ago for the first time in 10 years, and it was amazing how even on a cane my body remembered how it's done. :-)

back when combat ptsd was still being called, "shell shock," the question was already circulating of why some soldiers got shell shock and others did not. there was a theory floating around that the condition is connected to an eidetic memory which goes beyond the widely advertised ability to look at a page in a book and remember every word. is there a full sensory eidetic memory which can create what is now being called, "a ptsd flashback?"

just theorating, but as my healing has progressed and i have lost that psychotic drive to forget EVERYTHING, i seem to be accumulating evidence that i do, indeed, possess the gift of eidetic memory, albeit scarred and damaged from the multicultural joys of child prostitution.

i hestiated to respond but


I kinda think of flashbacks as memories that take over our bodies' reactions, and we have excellent recall for things we'd love to never have known. It's been a lot of years, but a nurse BP cuffed me yesterday and I flipped out. My brain knew it wasn't a threat, but my brain also was telling my body "Threat!" and it got very chaotic for everyone for a few minutes., I nearly punched a nurse. If Hubby hadn't grabbed my hand, i would've. She wouldn't *listen* and take the cuff off when I said it hurt. Me-now-here knew she was just a bi*chy nurse, but also got tangled up in me-then-there.

I've resorted to describing it as time travel, only the time travels within us, and we don't travel within *it*. Which is nonsensical, so I bow out, with great respect for your ruminations.

This is a fascinating discussion to me, and not just involving PTSD. As a kid I learned English by age 6, and then my family became missionaries and we moved to Mexico and Uruguay and I learned Spanish--two very different versions of Spanish, too. And then I went to a British School in Uruguay in which American slang was forbidden, and so I had to learn to operate in a very different version of English as well.

Then, because Uruguay has the most populated border with Brazil of any South American country, Portuguese entered the picture. In high school I had to choose a "second" language academically, so I chose French, which I really used a few years later in college when I hitchhiked alone across France.

With this rich stew of languages I marinated in growing up, it's no wonder I earned a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese and had my first 12 year career teaching them as director of Latin American Studies at Drake University. During more than a decade I reflected on how we learn language. Some of us, like me, seem to have that photographic memory arfie mentions here, some of us seem to learn language more by ear like music. I was lucky to seem to have both, and so I learned languages with relative ease. I learned to help students who aren't gifted like that, though, and teach them from a more analytical perspective, which was a real growing process for me.

Then I changed careers and became a hospital chaplain assigned to a neurosurgical unit. There we had a lot of stroke survivors, and guess what? They had to learn to speak all over again from scratch, like when they were kids. I wasn't their speech therapist, of course, but as a language professor I got to be close to ours and to be in a position to encourage folks not to give up learning to speak again. If they didn't, life was frustrating and isolated and they became dispirited, so encouraging them to express themselves again was part of my spiritual care.

And that's just language and memory, not trauma and memory. This whole topic is deeply fascinating to me. Thanks for discussing it here.

time travel fits my sense of flashbacks, be they traumatic, pleasant or simply informative.

language has an intense place in my own ptsd, as well. i was nearing adolescence before i could speak well enough to speak any human language.. i could read and write proficiently long before i could speak reliably i considered myself multi-lingual because i talked to animals in their own language all the time, but humans are so narcissistic when it comes to language. i believe i remember the pre-verbal language all humans are born with. proof unavailable and i surely don't want to argue the theory with a board of academians.

fast forward to the late 80's and early 90's and you find me in the most intense phase of psychotherapy and translating my most vicious thought loops into foreign languages for the sake of reframing. my shrinks had very little opinion on the technique because every single one of them was far too language phobic to have many opinions on the potential. if nothing else, it turned my intrusive thought loops into beneficial language practice. he said, she said, it said, you said, they said, we said,

in the late 90's a name for this theory bubbled out of the stockholm brain institute. "rerouting neural pathways." learning a foreign language is one of their favorite tools for routing new neural pathways around damaged brain centers.

This whole post is very interesting. I get so confused about all this stuff , (I’ve been going through dissociation pretty heavy this week, so I’m sorry if anything I write doesn’t make much sense)

I’ve had (well still do) such a confusing time understanding what the heck is going on with me & difference between flashbacks, emotional flashbacks -which is one of the more mysterious things I go through personally, memories, body memories & then stuff that some doctors have explained to me that my muscles have memories from the trauma & violence? I really hope some day to figure it all out, or a little bit out.

Arfie that’s funny I really understand what you are talking about with talking to animals

I’m bilingual English & Spanish, (also understand fair amount of Portuguese, French & Creole from living in Haitian neighborhoods- i do get French & Creole kinda mixed up though since Creole is kinda French too)

I also understand different kinds of Spanish like you say Mujica. I speak Caribbean Spanish like a Puerto Rican, (also understand some Taino words & symbolism- Taino is our Indigenous Puerto Rico) but from different experiences & places I’ve lived I can speak Spanish more Mexican style too. I noticed Puerto Rico vs Mexico we literally use different words for different things. Also Peruvian & Columbia & so on
... sorry I’m going on


When my Papa (grandfather) had a stroke in NY, after his stroke had to learn to respeak as well. The one thing I noticed was that when my Papa got out of the surgery after the heart attack, he could kinda speak a little but only Spanish. His first & native language is Spanish but he definitely knew a fair amount of English. But when he was out of the surgery I had to translate to the nurses for him because they only spoke a little Creole & English, & he was only speaking in Spanish. After the surgery he could speak in Spanish but was slurring. So what I did after that surgery for a while was speak in Spanish to him & after a while the slurring got better & then after a while he started speaking more English again- interesting how the brain works ?


But anyways for me there are certain words in Spanish (especially some slang words) that has definitely actually brought me back to certain moments & flashbacks actually , Well English too actually.
But when I get overwhelmed especially in therapy I get all different languages mushing together & i tell my therapist, I’m starting to go dissociative & bilingual & she knows it’s time to slow down. I’m sorry I really hope I’m making any sense.

I think being able to speak to animals is special :)

Big hugs <3

wow, missy, this might be the most words i've seen out of yet and you are making perfect sense to this twisted sister. i'm not sure if that is a good thing, or not, but? ? ? let's save that for a different thread.

i was 48 years old in 2002 when i took the leap into spanish fluency with my first language immersion tour in south america. the tour included immersion in ecuador, bolivia and peru for the sake of exposure to multi-dialect aspect of american spanish. as a community service worker in the US, i have been exposed to virtually all of those dialects. i still can't hear the diffs in those dialects very well, but i frequently find myself translating -in my "gringo" spanish-- between those dialects. go figure. . . rumor has it that spanish is a phonetically perfect language. how did this phonetically perfect language develop hundreds of dialects/accents?

anyhoo. . .

i'm not sure how language plays into this from a ptsd context, but i have no doubt that it does. during my university studies in ecuador, i leaned heavily on alanon to help me maintain my emotional stability during the experience. i still have no words to describe the impact of carrying my familiar alanon therapy into a foreign language. "rerouting neural pathways" remains the best descriptive i have found so far. works still in progress.

thank you, guys, for engaging the dialogue. it is not often i get the opportunity to talk about ^it^.

for what it's worth
yea, being able to speak to animals is gratifyingly special, but if i am translating correctly, they are forever complaining about my homo sapient accent.

Thanks for this thread discussion, y'all, and the different ways it's branched out. I was in alanon, too, arfie, so I really took notice of how you related memory and foreign language to "rerouting neural pathways" in Alanon recovery. It makes sense to me as a description of my own recovery process.

speculating wildly here, muji, i find myself wondering if it matters that your war trauma happened in spanish. could that trauma find a more thorough closure **in spanish?**

just wondering with incomplete data. . .

for sure, mexico has a rocking alanon scene. i got to attend the 2009 national convention in mexico and the enthusiasm was impressive, to put it mildly.

Yeah, I retired to Mexico for primarily financial reasons, like a lot of retired gringos down here, arfie, but secondarily it IS turning out to be coming full circle in Spanish in a really neat way as your describe. Perfect place for me to be now as a gringo Alanon.

i highly recommend you stay with the spanish speaking groups. after decades of working alanon in american english, working it in american spanish was the ultimate reframing.

for what it's worth
to my senses, america is not a country. it is two continents and a whole bunch of islands. from canada to agentina, todos somos americanos.

another FWIW
here in texas, "gringo" remains a battle cry. the term was coined in the texas war for independence from santa ana's troops chanting across the battle lines, "green go! ! ! green go! ! !" the texas rangers wore green shirts. call me a gringo and i will take my green and go. the grin goes, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOCVFpyI_J0