I had a flashback last night. I've had quite a few since I started HRT, but none to the degree that this last one.
Since my girlfriend and I are long distance, she tries her best to help me ground myself when she can through a phone call. In the past this has worked well, I keep her on a speaker phone and do whatever she tells me to do in her grounding exercises. Last night was different. She did the usual grounding exercises, but I was completely unresponsive to them. I did what she said, but nothing helped bring me out of it until it went away on its own, and after it went away and my girlfriend continued the grounding exercises, I got ANGRY.
One of the ones that she used to tell me to do during flashbacks was taking a deep breath and holding it for 3 seconds while only focusing on the breath, but last night my brain was moving so fast that I couldn't only focus on the breath no matter how hard I tried. It took 5 minutes to take 5 breaths that I could even remotely focus on. Of course I was frustrated from not being able to do it properly, and I was frustrated that nothing was working like it used to.
I ended up snapping at my girlfriend, just acting very childish and insisting on going to bed because I was angry.
I made it clear that I wasn't angry at my girlfriend, I told her I was more frustrated at myself and the flashback than anything but she doesn't listen when it comes to stuff like that. No matter how much you tell her otherwise, she'll insist that your anger is directed at her and she'll apologize for being "useless." She dealt with a lot of emotional abuse at the hands of an ex girlfriend and her family as well, so she has a lot of feelings of inferiority. And this kind of stuff can affect her for a long time afterward.
I worry that my flashback and my reaction may have changed our dynamic. I don't want that. I don't want her to blame herself for things she couldn't have known but I don't know how to get her to stop doing that. I know I can't stop her myself, she has to be willing to try to stop and to get help.

I don't know, I'm just scared I guess. I dont want to have ruined everything.