what are flashbacks

Flashbacks are vivid re-experiencing of a past traumatic event, where a person feels as if they are reliving the event in the present moment. During a flashback, a person may experience a range of sensory and emotional elements, including images, sounds, smells, physical sensations, and intense emotions.

Key characteristics of flashbacks:

• Re-experiencing: Flashbacks are not just memories; they are a reliving of the event as if it is happening again. This can cause extreme distress and physical reactions.
• Sensory and Emotional Intensity: Flashbacks bring back the raw sensory details and emotions of the trauma, sometimes without the logical narrative or context.
• Triggers: Flashbacks can be triggered by reminders of the traumatic event. These can be internal cues, such as a feeling or thought, or external cues such as a place, person, sound or smell. Sometimes, flashbacks can happen without an obvious trigger.
• Dissociation: During a flashback, the brain can go into a state of dissociation, where the person feels disconnected from themselves and their surroundings. This can include a sense of being in a dream or feeling unreal.
• Impact on Brain Function: Brain scans have shown that during a flashback, activity in the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area), which is responsible for speech, decreases. This deactivation can make it difficult for people to put their thoughts and feelings into words during a flashback. The right side of the brain, associated with visual imagery, becomes more active. The thalamus, which integrates sensory information, may also shut down during a flashback.
• Emotional Response: Flashbacks can be accompanied by a strong emotional response, such as terror, helplessness, and a sense of being in danger. The emotional response can feel as if the original event is happening in the present.
• Lack of Control: People experiencing flashbacks often have no control over when they occur or how long they will last.
• Fragmented Memory: Traumatic memories associated with flashbacks are often stored as fragmented sensory and emotional traces rather than as a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
• Re-enactment: Flashbacks can also lead to somatic re-enactments of the trauma, where people physically repeat postures or movements that they performed during the original event.
• Time distortion: During a flashback, the brain’s ability to distinguish between past and present is diminished. People can feel as if the past and present are merging.
• Difficulty in processing: Flashbacks occur as part of the brain’s difficulty processing and integrating the original traumatic event. The lack of integration leads to the re-experiencing of the event as if it is happening again.

Flashbacks are often associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and are considered one of its major clinical features. They can also be triggered by difficult past experiences other than trauma, as when a past embarrassment comes to mind. Flashbacks can disrupt daily life, making it difficult for people to focus on the present. They can lead to avoidance behavior and an attempt to control anxiety and the fear of further flashbacks.

It is important to distinguish between ordinary memory and traumatic memory. In ordinary memory, a person recalls an event as something that has happened in the past. When someone fully recalls a trauma, they relive the experience with all of its accompanying sensory and emotional elements.

Treatments for flashbacks often focus on helping people to process and integrate the traumatic memories, reducing their intensity, and enabling a person to regain a sense of control over their experiences. Hopefully by now you understand what are flashbacks.