My husband and "kids" often spot my episodes before I do. Perhaps routinely. My sons are adults now, but they responded to my episodes from infancy. Crying babies might have been my first clear and reliable indicator of when I was having episodes.

Personally, I strive to be grateful for the indicator and get myself to a node on my support network as quickly as possible. I strive to forgive myself for any discomfort I caused and to make amends for any damages done. Tragically often, that remains more goal than accomplishment. Still a work in progress...

Just me. Hope you find yours, Sean. Thank you for the important question. I will be reading other responses with hopes of new insights.

I described elsewhere today in a post in a different thread how I had intense flashbacks at the lunch table with other faculty at work this past Monday. As always, my skin was crawling, my breathing was shallow, I felt hot and cold flashes, I got dizzy, and my stomach got butterflies all before I knew what was happening.

As I mentioned in the other post, it didn't take much to trigger me. Never does. I'd had a little less sleep the night before, and there was a little more work stress at school this week because the holidays are here.

I never get any warning. I've learned how to fake a coughing fit when I'm in the middle of flashbacks/panic attacks in public. Hate to fake anything, but I'm glad we can tell each other the truth here.

I have nothing to apologize for because I don't act on the flashback in any negative way. I just divert attention away from its being a mental experience I'm suffering through to a physical one--a coughing and choking fit. Which isn't hard to fake because, like all of us, I really can't breathe during a PTSD panic attack.

Just recognizing it's a flashback, like a serious gas attack but not in the stomach and in the brain instead, lets me not act on it toward anyone. As much as a cramp in the stomach may hurt, I know passing gas will get it over with. Nobody ever died from a fart, and I never tried to forestall a fart by cussing at anyone or hitting anyone.

I try to treat my brain farts the same way. They come way too often for me to be popping sedatives every single time, or acting on them and then apologizing and making amends. It would be all I did all day every day.

The only way to the other side for me is to go through them giving up as little to them as possible, and then getting on with life. That's life as I know it with complex ptsd, and I stay high functioning that way most of the time.

There are those rare times when it won't stop, and then I have to take a sedative or even be hospitalized for a few days. But nothing ends them forever. I just take them in stride as much as I can as I rarely have ever had a day without them. I'm in intensive therapy with a PTSD expert, do support group work regularly, meditate, sleep well, and do everything I'm supposed to do since dx in 1995.


That's the score for me, and it's plenty good enough and something I'm grateful for, really. I survived. In my case, some people really tried to kill me (as in a car bomb, for instance), and I'm alive. I saw the guy who threw the bomb that exploded on my car. He saw me, too. We locked eyes. He an adult in a riotous moment of combat, me a kid in a car stuck in the chaos. And the bastard saw there was a kid in the car and threw the bomb at me anyway.

I'm here in spite of that guy. And others like him, including my own abusive parents. I know it's not use to explain it at work when flashbacks overtake me, but I'm entitled to have flashbacks after all of that. Geez. Who wouldn't?

I'm not going to ruin the fact that I survived worrying about what other people think of my flashbacks now. I just keep them to myself as much as I can and don't act on these flashes from my past in the present.

I like that phrase, Lilly, "deflating the anxiety." That's like my bad gas analogy. Deflate the brain farts, as it were. I know it's crude, but I try not to judge myself for these cramps in the brain any more than I would judge myself for cramps in the gastrointestinal tract of my body.

Deflating the anxiety, as opposed to inflating it. That's good. Let the air out of it. Find ways not to escalate it. Cope. Function.

Good stuff. Glad it worked for you today, Lilly.

One of my environmental contracts was within the search for a new landfill to accommodate the explosive growth in Central Texas. Everybody wants their commercial packaging, but nobody wants the excessive waste in their neighborhood. NIMBY. Not In My Back Yard.

The most dangerous aspect of a landfill is methane gas from decomposition. It can cause underground explosions, all the more dangerous when compacted in order to get maximum usage out of an existing landfill. The problem was being handled by monitor wells and built in vents within the design I was producing graphics for.

During this contract back in the 90s I began to think of my PTSD as an emotional landfill, composed of stuff nobody wants to admit even exists in the world, much less in their backyards. Within this analogy, "brain farts" and "deflating anxieties" are downright poetic.

LOL.

Muji

Lilly, good idea with the note card. I taped such a thing to my refrigerator door. Helps.