[Friendinneed16]

I am suffering from PTSD flashbacks. I start to feel my heart race, rapid breathing, and then BAM I am back to the place it happened as if I am there. Everything I feel, see, smell, etc...I am there. When I finally come out of it, my muscles hurt everywhere as if I was just running a marathon or something, sometimes I even pass out. I sometimes feel sick to my stomach or like I might throw up. It sometimes feels like I felt the day after the incidents happened.

It feels as if I just had it happen all over again, but I only remember bits and pieces and almost like snapshots from what happened like it's watching a movie in fast forward mode, or sometimes like it goes forward and back a bunch of times...and sometimes pauses or freeze frames on significant terrifying aspects of the trauma.

Is this typical of a flashback? Do other people feel like this?
What do you do to cope? what do you do to try to stop it before it starts? How do you know it's coming before you are in the middle of it?

any advice would be really appreciated. I feel so alone in this.

[Skeezyks]

Hello Friendinneed: It appears you're a 3 year member. But this is your first post. So... welcome to active participation here on PC.

I'm sorry you are having the difficult, confusing experiences you are having. Unfortunately I can't be of help. Hopefully there will be other members, here on PC, who will have some thoughts they can share. You didn't mention whether or not you're in treatment for your PTSD. Hopefully you are. That really is the best way to figure out what is going on with you & what you can do about it.

Here are links to 4 articles, from PsychCentral's archives, 2 on the subject of PTSD & 2 on flashbacks:

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Understanding the Effects of Trauma: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Why Do Flashbacks Happen? | After Trauma

Coping with Flashbacks

I hope you've found being a member here on PC to be of benefit & that we'll see more of you in the forums.

[roadartist]

I don't imagine you're the only one, no. I have miserable flashbacks. As I understand it flashbacks are actually a large part of PTSD.

[Sporty McDaniel]

Yes I go right back there to the way I must have felt when I was, say, 9. But now I'm 62 and think Holy cow, this is no way for a 9 year old to have to experience life, but I guess that's how I felt. Really cruel to put a little kid through what I went through, and the feelings are alive and well in me. Like yesterday, I was in a really bad day-long flashback, and I don't remember yesterday at all, hardly. I must have been blanked out.