Coping skills

[Dyess]

What are your coping skills for going out in public and trying to not be triggered? What do you do if you are triggered?

[Dyess]

Found some good info on Pete Walker's site
http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS 
by Pete Walker

1. Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback." Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.

2. Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present." Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.

3. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior. 

4. Speak reassuringly to your Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally– that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared. 

5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless—a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before.

6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback.)

7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into "heady" worrying, or numbing and spacing out. 
Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain.)   Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger.)   Slow down. Rushing presses the psyche's panic button.  Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap.   Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it.

8. Resist the Inner Critic's catastrophizing. (a) Use thought-stopping to halt its exaggeration of danger and need to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying no to unfair self-criticism. (b) Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.

9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate—and then soothe—the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection. 

10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate those close to you about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.

11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable. 

12. Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still-unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met.

13. Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradual process—often two steps forward, one step back. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback. 

Copyright © 2009 Psychotherapy.net. All rights reserved. Published September, 2009


The reason I was looking for information on this is that someone said that my isolation is feeding into my triggers and I need to know how to go out in public and deal with these flashbacks. It's just always been easier to stay at home, wander around the house and end up in bed when things got bad. So I'm going to try some of these things and try, I said try, to get out of the house more.

[Dutch Uncle]

Great for you, Trace. 

Trying is 'good enough'. Small steps at a time.
See also Walker's #13 step.

[Dyess]

He is a very smart man. Wish other T's had his expertise on CPTSD.

[arpy1]

pretty much in the same place re going out, Trace.  i know i am going to have to get to the point where i start trying again but at the moment it feels very, very frightening.

i just about manage the gym a couple times a week, and the supermarket. but i do make myself get up in the mornings by offering to go and give my son lift to work, so at least i see someone most days. he isn't scary, and it does him a favour so it feels good.

i did join the National Trust recently, which gives you entry for free into all sorts of interesting places of historic interest. that was nice, before i started in on this bad patch with changing meds. i am planning to start visiting places again as and when i feel more stable.  the advantage of this is that i can just get in the car and go somewhere nice, without having to interact too much, maybe pass the time of day with the odd person but no scary conversations if i don't feel like it.  that means no or very few flashbacks.

i have to say, i have no idea how to handle EFs when i am in public. if it happens i finish up what i am doing asap and head home fast!

it's a conundrum becos i know that the longer i self-isolate, the harder it will be to get back into real life. as Dutch Uncle says, small steps are good enough.

[tired]

Triggered right now

Good question!

[Kizzie]

I just went really slowly Trace and tried as much as possible to make every trip include something positive, however small. At first it was short little drives (where we live is beautiful and I love going for drives), so that was very pleasurable and no intereaction or triggers from other people.  Then we moved to longer drives, eventually including sitting out on a patio having a tea, then lunch, then longer outings always doing something fun in the time we were out.

It was a series of baby steps, all positive just so I felt the world was a better place than my fears would have me believe, that it was okay to stop hiding in the closet (which at one point I was actually doing things were that bad).  I've written quite a lot about this in past posts, but it was delibrately enticing my IC to come out of hiding and calming the ICritic by doing positive things out, so that I looked forward to going out rather than with a sense of dread that seemed to do the trick.

So that was the emotional part, in terms of thinking my way out of that closet I kept Walker's story about having difficulty going to put the garbage out lest his kindly, always postive neighbour  see him at his most vulnerable uppermost in my mind becasue that was exactly what I was feeling. Because he did recover it gave me a huge sense of hope.  In part he did so by working through the emotions of his trauma and being kind to himself, and in part by trying to change his mind (Inner Child's mind?) about the fear.  He is a bit of hero to me you can probably tell lol, but truly I thought of that whenever I felt the fear rise up, and just considered the possibility that maybe my thinking was off because of what I had grown up with, that I needed to try and (slowly) think differently about what made me afraid (as in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). Eventually, I did an online CBT course once I got my feet back under me enough to get thru one and that helped a lot because it was for Social Anxiety specifically. 

Anyway, doing the two things together, making going out a positive experience emotionally and questioning my fears slowly, bit by bit is what seemed to help me get out of the house and feel more at ease with doing so.

Hope something in this is helpful 




   

[tired]

What happens to me is feeling small, stupid, insignificant because of triggering events.  Someone seems to mock me .  I cope by withdrawing into myself and telling myself, I'm not connected to these people, what they think doesn't matter, I'm me and I can go home and look at who I am when I'm alone in my own space.  Maybe no one else will see who I am but I am ok with myself.  Then I have the second thought that people have to see something good in me otherwise I can't support myself so I have to imagine/remember that other people like me. 

The triggers might be sort of delusions; it could be that someone who likes me and is connected to me is just making a dumb joke but in that moment I feel crushed and lost and alone and abandoned. 

[Cocobird]

I recently learned something about coping and self-punishing behavior. I lost my wallet, which gave me a lot of extra things to do, and I try to keep my life simple.

I was telling myself that I couldn't cope with going to get a replacement drivers license -- it's always crowded there, noisy, and can easily lead to a panic attack. Then I realized that what I really meant was I couldn't cope with that today, but maybe I will be able to tomorrow. I used to beat myself up for the things I couldn't cope with, and that made things worse. Since I've been doing this it's helped.

[Dutch Uncle]

Then I realized that what I really meant was I couldn't cope with that today, but maybe I will be able to tomorrow.

Wow. Nice one. Thanks.