Have you seen anyone else or talked to anyone else about your child experience? My flashbacks are not as auditory but they come and go ever since I decided to address the past again when my abuser had done this to me. I see different places clearly and see what he had done with me. I can't seem to shake it off like I could in the past, it's always there most of the time now. Not all the time but way more often than I'd like.
It might not hurt for you to write down everything that happened and to write your feelings then and how it makes you feel now. I am sorry that your family does not know so they yelled at you for whatever reason. Try the counting trick by counting backwards from 50, and it helps to create a safe place in your mind to go to when these flashbacks come. Write it down on paper, and read it when you start to feel uneasy and like your going back to the past experience. It's not much but I'm sure there will be more to come on soon and help you with some more ideas. Hugs and remember you are not backin that moment, and hopefully you don't continue to see this person in your dads life.

As much as outsiders would love to help me *just get over* my flashbacks, getting past them remains a do-it-yourself job. Sharing about them instead of repressing them anew helps, but the healing is up to me.

This post strikes me as a healthy step toward helping yourself. Do you have any other therapy tools you are plying to the phenom? "Just breathe" remains my most effective therapy tool. Flashbacks interfere with my breathing enough that just regulating my breath is quite therapeutic and it is simple enough that it is nearly impossible to break.

Gentle support while you work it out, EL. You are not alone.

As I said to someone else here today, I wish I could say your description of your experiences--both the rape back when and the shakes it gave you now --were unfamiliar to me, but they're not. My family of origin was violent with each other weekly. Then they invited criminals into the home by renting rooms to recently released convicts. Those ex-cons preyed upon us kids: me first, then a couple of years later, on my sister.

Here's an example from a week in my family life growing up. My father put my mother in the ER, and as I've written here before, he made the mistake of getting too close to her as she lay on her gurney in the hospital's hallway. She reached out and got him by the groin and took him down to the floor in agony right there in front of doctors, nurses, and other ER patients.

In my family there wasn't just one abuser; both gave as good as they got. When the two of them ganged up on one of us kids, it was brutal. They put bars on bedroom windows so there would be no escape, and then they drew blood with no remorse. In therapy my doc and I concluded both were probably untreated for mental illness. He probably had bipolar disorder, she probably had borderline personality disorder. Then they brought all kinds of ex-con psychopaths into the home renting them rooms.

No wonder my cousins ended up being taken away by social services. I wished for that for me, too, as a kid. But my parents escaped that by moving us overseas out of the reach of the USA's social services--into 3 war zones, mind you, to enjoy more chaos. In the 3rd one, though, the country's authorities caught them breaking the law and kicked them out back to the States. By then, though, I'd fled to the States on my own.

Telling your story again in detail like that is hard but I find it's healthy, I don't like reliving those years and years of violence in my family. But repetition brings mastery, my doc says, and I find it's true.

The first time I tell the story of one of those brutal moments, it's almost as painful as the day it happened. But if I start telling it again and again in the larger setting of my whole life, it becomes smaller in context. Every time it's re-told, it has less power and I have more power. As author I get more authority over it.

Hope it gets to be that way for you. Keep sharing as much as you need to; we're here. Notice I mentioned my therapist helped me make sense of all of the years of chaos? I really recommend having one, and making sure she or he is a PTSD specialist. It made all of the difference for me.

um i left out a lot of part because it got very bad... that guy who did 39ish years old and i was only 8/9 years old... my dad was never home he in the military and law school my adopted mom the one home all the time.. she let that babysitter do it... then she would do her turn yelling at me... callin me a slut, whore, stupid, f..k child,... she said i was nothing. she said i wish you were never born. then she would slap me, kick me, yell at me some more. the whole time that was my younger sister who was about 6 years old would stayed in the closet with our adopted bothers who were 5 and 4 years old... i would bring them food, change there dipers, exc.... it cepted happening.. all that year... in one of those moments my sister saw me getting hurt she ran to screaming get off her then that guy took her and raped and molested her in front of me.. we were crying and struggling.... then mom tryed to hurt my sister but she could you wanna know why i jumped ontop of her pulling her. hair the i bitt her on her neck she started bleeding very bad.. i ran to the room to help my sister...