How I am using CPTSD triggers and emotional flashback triggers to get healthier

 Hello friends. This is part two of  my post on CPTSD triggers and how to use them in recovery. Today I'm looking at  how to use emotional flashbacks and childhood trauma triggers. I defined a trauma trigger as anything, anyone, any place, any event that activates an emotional flashback (a sensation of being back in the original experience with associated feelings). In childhood trauma, these emotional flashbacks take us to negative, dangerous and hurtful experiences with unpleasant feelings and thoughts. I flashback to abuse, neglect, dysregulation, exploitation, manipulation, parentification, coercion, scapegoating, abandonment, endangerment and gaslighting from two narcissistic parents and their equally abusive spouses (my "stepparents".)

Triggers take me back to those initial experiences. I feel the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that original experiences of abuse, neglect and especially parentification, endangerment and abandonment, caused. And each time adds another layer as the older I get the more of these emotional flashbacks I accumulate. 

They activate muscle memory and autonomic responses and coping mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze and fawn, mostly fawn). I'd even add fake and fix. I go into an unnatural brittle "fake cheerful" mode that my husband and I have dubbed perma-grin. I scramble to please and placate. I start doing  weird dysregulated things. It's my repertoire of defense and coping mechanisms that I've built up from decades of use. 

And because the thing that triggers the emotional flashbacks seems or is unrelated, it makes no sense to anyone with me, why the heck  I'm melting down like a little kid. It's because in that flashback, I am a child or teen. And my inner kid is going into coping mechanisms I did in childhood. 

But as weird as they are, coping mechanisms served a purpose, just as triggers do. Triggers are red flags that something isn't safe. Or resembles something unsafe. Or just requires some closer scrutiny, to see if it isn't. I used the example of being triggered by my son's violin lessons because the people at the church they were held at had treated me so poorly. All that required was paying attention to the panic attack feelings, doing the math and getting him out of that situation. He hated the violin lessons anyway, which probably should have been another wake up call. 

The feelings of dysregulation, panic attack, associated with triggered emotional flashback are helpful too. They generate a sense of urgency to get the heck out of danger. To pull my hand away from the fire instead of keeping it there and letting it burn me as I'd been taught to do. They help me understand that coping mechanisms were all I had as a kid. But now I can create a toolbox with healthier options than flying, fighting and especially freezing, fawning, fixing and faking.