This was good that you wrote this out like this. This is in the "now", but it triggered you because something in your past "hurt" you and it probably is a similar scenario where someone else is under pressure and took it out on "you".

I can experience these triggers myself, and I don't always know what is being triggered from my past that makes a "now" situation like this have such a crippling affect on me. This is the "intrusiveness" that PTSD can present and what is also described as "ghosts".

What you have described in this experience is how this man/boss took his stress out on you, actually, that is also one of his ghosts too. Truth is EVERYONE has these ghosts, it's just when one suffers from PTSD, these challenges are "magnified" and can be completely disabling.

I think dissociation is coming from how a situation like this was handled in one's past. When we are young children and something like this happens, we simply do not have any life experience in how to respond, so a child learns to dissociate. I think about how in Charlie Brown cartoons the parents voices are just sounds without real words. I think it's comparable to being around people that speak a foreign language and you only know a few words that you can identify here and there, but you can't understand the complete message.

I think that often some of our "ghosts" are when we felt threatened or afraid but we did not have anyway of storing that with all the words that we finally learn to have and develop into our adulthood.

One of the things I noticed is that when I have a flashback from when I was a young child, I see a lot of pictures and I "feel" things and sometimes my adult me can get "loud" when my adult mind is finally VERBALIZING whatever I was incapable of saying at that age.

The behavior this individual chose to present, "taking his frustration out on you", is his "learned behavior" that he is probably not consciously aware of.


My very worst flashback is when I was just a baby. I was in my crib, that much I could tell, and I was crying and crying and when I have this flashback my stomach hurts so bad I feel like I am going to die and I also get the chills really bad. I hated that flashback the most, I felt so helpless and it was the one flashback I could not say, "I remember that, it's in the past, not now, I am safe now".

Thank god for my therapist because he told me that when babies wake up they are "wet, cold, and hungry" and their stomach really hurts, that is so the baby will cry to sound an alarm so the baby will be fed and changed. When I thought about it I remember that my mother had two other small children, she was often overwhelmed and I think what probably happened is that I would wake up crying and extremely hungry and she did not get to me and I probably had to wait in that state of extreme hunger, wet and shivering. I did always struggle with stomach issues when I was stressed growing up. Every part of our history is there in our mind/subconscious. It could very well be that happened a lot to me because of how my mother had two other children where she could not always get to me right away. I was the youngest of three.

Once my therapist helped me with that, the severity of that flashback significantly reduced.

This situation is triggering something in you from your past where someone else's issues "hurt" you in some way. By writing down whatever is happening in the now that is triggering you, sometimes it helps you figure out the trigger, but to also see that this man's behavior is "his" problem and you can learn how to help yourself slowly give his problem back to him instead of how "you" are absorbing it that somewhere in your past did stress/hurt you.

I am not in anyway saying this is "easy" either, but, identifying is the first part of the puzzle where you can begin working on developing your ability to overcome that trigger.