There are others here more expert than me in this, and there are difference schools of this, some religious, some not. But the turning point for me has been learning from meditation.

I know that may not be up your alley. I did it for purely practical reasons. I was tired of being powerless when racing thoughts came on.

Meditation has always been about learning to observe your own mind when things like that happen. It's not the same as dissociating. It's just the capacity to not add fuel to the fire when triggered. I know many people at DS PTSD are old hands at it. I hope they'll offer their insights to you here as they've done elsewhere. You don't have to search far back to find their threads, either.

Oh, on the light side. In ancient meditation they had a word for the mind when it gets racing thoughts going: monkeymind. Ha!

I use foreign languages to help me through this one. I translate my repetitive thoughts into one of my less developed languages and let the repetition serve as practice. When I am able to finally let the thought go, I have a new skill in its place. I believe this is the instinct which caused monolingual wordsmiths to invent political correctness.

Works for me. Hope you find what works for you.

Suffered with this and could not sleep. Then came medication that helped. Finally weaned off medication and doing fairly well but not great.

In addition to meditation and meds, my on the spot approach is to just put my attention on something - to switch the focus of my attention. Sometimes I just start doing practical chores around my place, but even reading news on the internet, or playing a simple computer game (like Pool Practice, free on Yahoo games) has the ability to distract me and allow me to begin to feel just normal flow of thought again.

In the same way Arfie uses foreign language translation, just finding something else that will absorb your attention for a little while until the wave passes - because the wave WILL pass.

Thanks guys. :) I took an awesome course in meditation that originally cut time out of years of almost continuous panic attacks, and made it possible for me to bear the more severe events that caused my (or the more severe part of) my PTSD. I should get back into the practice of it. Feels hard. But I remember it feeling like hard work at first, my therapist said I was exercising a new (mental) muscle. Maybe it's easier than the horrible overwhelming thoughts, lol.