I have complex trauma and I resisted all sorts of methods for dealing with my flashbacks and nightmares for a very long time. I thought the methods offered me sounded stupid and simplistic. I thought the therapist who was suggesting them had no clue as to the extent of trauma I was re-experiencing. I thought that the only way to deal with these things was to get help from an outside person at the time I was having the flashbacks and nightmares, But I found out that I am the only person with me at all times. And that nobody else in the world is going to be available to help me at all times. And even if I had a list of 10 people to help me, it was possible that nobody would be available to help me with that particularly difficult flashback or nightmare. I also ended up with a therapist who does no emergency phone calls. She often emails, but does not answer every email, and often answers hours or days later. She does this to keep people from becoming overly dependent on her. And it works. I see her two or three times a week. But, I can self-soothe in between. And she helped me develop a method that we use for putting away volatile stuff at the end of therapy sessions. And I also started using that method at home for nightmares and flashbacks. It was in no way an instant fix and took me many months of practicing many times everyday, but now I am pretty successful at putting the flashbacks and nightmares away until I want to journal about them or talk about them in therapy. This stuff sucks in the biggest way imaginable and it seems crazy that such simplistic sounding things can really help, but if you can figure out a reasonable sounding scenario for you, and you and your therapist can practice it, it is so helpful. I will say that it does not work all of the time, and somedays, I do that method again and again, like every 10 seconds, but it has been very helpful, even when at first it seemed that it trivialized what I had and was going through.