help me find a different way to think about this...

so, since I'm in DBT there is a big focus on mindfulness, which I have found to be really helpful to me in some ways (observing my emotions, for one). Lately I've been flooded with a lot of flashbacks and memories of past trauma, and my T has been talking a lot about mindfulness the last couple of weeks.

For example, when I'm having a flashback, to remind myself that it's not happening NOW and to do grounding to keep myself oriented to the present.

It sounds a lot like she's saying "if you would think about it differently, you wouldn't suffer so much when the flashbacks happen". It feels like it's my fault for suffering, because I'm doing it wrong. The negative, self-hatred type feelings just snowball from there. It makes me not call her when I should, because I feel like I shouldn't NEED to call her, if I was doing mindfulness "right" then I'd be FINE and I wouldn't NEED to call her, you know?

I know this is probably some sort of cognitive distortion on my part, some way in which I need to challenge my thinking. I believe my T is trying really hard to help me and god knows I want to do whatever I can that will make this time easier on myself, I just need some help here.

i think your looking at it how I would. Thats the problem with being a certain "type" of therapy, sometimes things judt need to be as they are and talked "with". Sorry i'm not mich help, becaUse when i'm im flashback its so severe at times I've just got to allow it to run its course and only then can I be mindful of what was happening.

it could be - a cognitive distortion. AND it could be that in flashbacks something else needs to be in place first. I am uncertain. I have dealt with flashbacks - and come through. And now group therapy is DBT oriented. Today, in fact, he was talking about suffering and how we make ourselves suffer more than we need to. Now had i heard this while i was in flashback mode, i probably would have told him to stuff it. He hasn't ever had a flashback so I don't feel he'd really know.
That said... I can kinda see where he is coming from (now that I am several years without the terrible cycles of flashbacks).
I am trying to remember what helped me with those... I don't think it was anything my Ts did. I found tangeable things to be useful - lavender oil to cut through the past with its sharp scent, and then calming after-scent. A stuffy or stone to hold on to. Repeating my name, current age, current residence, current phone number, and saying "I can be safe". Not "i am safe" because clearly in that moment the mind does not feel safe and lies are not helpful. There is also a pressure point between the last 2 fingers that you can lightly squeeze that helps with the anxiety. Deep breathing to calm the heart also calms the mind.
Personally, i think that when in a flashback, the mind is trying to get OUT of the body, so mindfulness about being IN the body and aware of surroundings (when the mind believes the surounding to be dangerous) is counter-intuitive.
Perhaps mindfulness can be useful once the flashback has ended as a self-soothing technique.
Also, for me body mindfulness creates panic and flashbacks because I spent so much time out of my body, since the body was "dangerous". But that is just me and my current work.
Anyway, feel free to ask questions or PM me anytime. Hope things get better for you!!!

Zoopra-
I'm sorry that you are having such a tough time. I think that you are expecting too much of yourself. You are in T to learn how to use the skills that are provided (mindfulness etc.). You seem to be expecting yourself to be perfect at it (ie expecting to be able to use your skills from DBT to help you with your flashbacks perfectly every time.) All skills take time to learn. These will too. That is why your T is available to help you when you need it. Doing mindfulness and breathing exercises and cognitive restructuring are much easier to do in session than when we are out on our own dealing with the flashback at the moment. With practice it gets better. But at the beginning it wont be easy. That is why T is available to help and you should call and reach out. You should reach out to T so that you can get help when your skills need a boost. She will be able to help you put them into practice at the time you are having problems.

I hope that you are feeling better and you should talk to your T about your reticence to call her when you are having problems. I just did this with my T. And while it still is hard to call and ask for help, I know with talking about it over time it will get easier for me to ask for it. I often feel the same way that I should be good enough to be able to deal with it on my own. It takes strength to ask for help.

wow, that really struck a note with me, Kiya. I don't feel safe in those moments and part of that is because, clearly, I don't always know when to feel safe. That is, bad things have happened to me in the past when I felt safe, so how do I know what safe IS?
I like "I can be safe", it feels much more authentic to me.

I've been with my T for 15 mos now and I still have trouble with calling her, still feel like I shouldn't be calling her when I do, but I do it anway. Sometimes, lately, I feel like I do it too much, but I try not to. It's always really hard for me to decide what is worth calling her for and what isn't.

I have to play the tape in my head of her saying, as she has many times, "the answer to that is, if you think about calling me, call me!"

yep - it feels authentic to me too. I am also learning to be my own parent - the safe parent I never had (omg i totally get "being hurt when i thought i was safe"). So when the child inside gets scared and cries or panics, I am learning to say to her "I've got you, I've got you". Not "you're ok" because clearly she is not ok and the situation is not ok. and she is learning to trust be because I am being authentic and not telling her "lies".

Let's take a look, starting here:
What if the "if you would think about it differently, you wouldn't suffer so much when the flashbacks happen" part were actually true -- only you weren't ready to appreciate it and kept turning it into something else with, "It feels like it's my fault for suffering, because I'm doing it wrong"...?

It seems to me that a flashback, or anything else, is a lot easier to live with and let go of when you can let it be just a flashback -- and a lot harder when you take it as a sign that you're doing something wrong and are at fault.

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Ding! To continue, please deposit another two cents.

(((((((zoo)))))))

I've been in flashback mode lately too.

I think it's important to remember we aren't doing anything WRONG. We're not saying "hey, I want to get out of the present and get lost in the past". It's not a choice, and it sucks.

So. I think that trying mindfulness is great...it's good to have a tool to use to try to pull ourselves back to the present. But learning ANYTHING takes practice. AND nothing is guaranteed to work every time, no matter how much we've practiced it. So maybe sometimes it will work and you'll move on, and other times it won't work, and you'll call T (I love what she said to you about calling her!).

NO ONE expects us to be perfect except ourselves. You are working hard, and you are doing the best you can. That's ALL anyone can expect of you.

Lots of to you!

I agree that your T is trying to help you, but it sounds like she is being klutzy at it. I suspect it would be more helpful for you if she said something like, "try to remind yourself" and "try to do grounding", and if she added something like, "you won't succeed every time right away, but if you keep trying, it will work more often and you will suffer less when the flashbacks happen," and maybe even, "try to notice any little bit that it helps, and that will help you learn this skill."

I have often had discouraging feelings and thoughts similar to yours when I've encountered "helpful" suggestions, whether in person or in reading. I eventually realized that I needed to modify the suggestions by adding the types of things I mentioned above. Another phrase that has helped me is to say to myself, "Every little bit helps," and picture little drips eventually filling a bucket. So I would suggest that you consider trying to add these (to me more realistic) additions to the suggestions. My suggestions might not be exactly the right ones for you, but the idea is to figure out what variation would be helpful for you (for example, the one Kiya suggested). And maybe it might help to ask the therapist to add them -- that they would help you persist rather than get discouraged. (But bear in mind that it may take her a while to learn to say them. But if you see she is trying, that can make a big difference. And if she has trouble learning, that can give her some accurate empathy for your difficulties, too.)

I hope this helps.

I think you're right, that if I could, in those moments, let go and just let it be a flashback and know it's not happening now and that I'm safe now and that I survived it already (something my T is always reminding me, that I survived it!), it would be easier to live with.

And so it's my mind at play against itself, my inner "punishing parent", that turns that around and makes it a failure on my part when I'm not able to do that. Only now I feel I've not only let myself down, but I've let my T down too, that I'm not doing it right, that I'm not listening to her, not following her advice or using the skills she has taught me in DBT, that somehow I'm *choosing* to suffer and bringing her into that suffering with me. So do I have the right to call her for help, to ask her to spend yet more time and energy with me? ugh. it's this big mess of thoughts that go around and around in my head.


thanks for that, tree. You're right, and I'm sure my T doesn't expect me to be perfect at all. Again, it's that inner "punishing parent", that way that I can be so hard on myself and hate myself for being weak and needing help and all that.
I think in some ways I expect my T to be like my mother, never satisfied, always disgusted with me, never believing me or believing IN me. I guess I have a lot of that tied up in all of this, trying to please T like I always tried to please my mom, and was never, ever able to. I didn't realize that until just now. No wonder it causes me a lot of angst and anxiety.


she actually does say things like that, she compares it to someone preparing themselves for sports, say a tennis player. That person has to get out on the court and hit balls for hours and hours to build up those muscles. She tells me to think of myself like that, building those muscles. And that every time I notice a thought or emotion, that IS mindfulness, and noticing that I noticed it, that is mindfulness too. That's doing it.

So far, so good! So when...
...I say that's just another kind of flashback -- and fair game for mindfulness:When stuff like that comes up for me I'm as likely as not to say, "Oh, hello, inner punishing parent, I've been expecting you. Here's your hat, what's your hurry?"

I'm afraid your T is right, zoo. You're welcome to try to convince me otherwise but I'm not planning to be easily convinced.

I haven't been here for a long time, however your post hit a nerve. Sometimes I think T's use mindful stuff when they don't know what else to do. Let your T know that you need something else right now. If you like your T let him or her know. I did some of the mindful stuff and I have always been able to call my T whenever I need to she has never judged my reasonsWe may need one thing for awhile then something else.

I know my T is right, I guess I'm just trying to find a way where I can accept her being right about the mindfulness without it meaning that I'm choosing to suffer. It just feels so much like the message is "you are making the decision to suffer through this when if you would just do xyz everything would be peachy".
I don't know. I took my nighttime meds so maybe right now isn't the best time for me to be writing internet posts about my thoughts and feelings

zooropa, in addition to using mindfulness to cope with the symptoms of your flashbacks, are you also doing any trauma work? As I read your efforts to cope with flashbacks and trauma symptoms, and your T's advice on how to cope, I kept thinking well maybe soon this would be a moot point, if you were also doing trauma work and getting at the root of these symptoms. I remember finding it helpful to just think, whenever I had a flashback, "well, soon these will be fewer and farther between. The trauma work that T and I are doing will release all of this and soon I won't have to have these anymore." Just thinking that helped me cope, because I knew we were working on it, and that my T was a trauma expert who was really committed to helping me. Don't know if that would be helpful for you or not.

thanks, sunrise. Yes, in fact it's the trauma work that I've been doing in therapy that has caused an increase in flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms. We've kind of taken the last couple weeks off in terms of talking about the actual trauma, but that doesn't seem to have helped that much. I have a feeling I just need to get through this. This break in trauma work has been strange, it's almost made me feel like I'm not supposed to talk about it, like I'm not *allowed* to talk about it, and that of course is the story of my LIFE and not a good feeling at all.
therapy, it's so confusing sometimes, isn't it?

OH wow, zoo, I have had this feeling during breaks in the trauma work. I have actually told T that I almost feel like I need to be "invited" to talk about it again. I am so so so so so trained to not tell that it's REALLY easy for me to slip back into "secrecy" mode. AND I start thinking "T doesn't want to hear this stuff anyhow". Ugh!

For ME, if I am taking a break from trauma work and the flashbacks continue, sometimes it means that I actually need to gently allow myself to start working on it again. I don't know if this is the case with you, but it is true for me.

Can you tell T that you are feeling like you are not allowed to talk? That has actually come up for me repeatedly in therapy (even after this last "trauma work" break we took over the holidays!), and it's something I always need to work through with T so I can open up again.

to you, zoo

Like many others, this post really struck a chord with me. I used to get so so so hurt when T would say similar things because it felt like a denial of my experience. I recall once telling him that there was a part of me who hides from him because he scares her and she feels like he is denying her. Ugh. I personally can't buy into the cognitive distortion theory because that is too close to my childhood experience which was full of distortions and denials. So for me, I have to move in the direction of integration with (at least my) full knowledge of the hurting kid inside of me. I do this by continuing to talk with T about everything and anything that comes up. I have recently been better able to stop and notice with my observing self, the incidents in my daily life that trigger my inner child. I tell her she's okay and will be okay. She needs affirmations and lots of them. So the mindfulness part for me (and I DO use it) is for my adult self and allows my adult self to stay present and okay in the moment so I can take care of my child self (not because the child self doesn't exist or lived long ago--she is still very real inside of me). Thank you for your post. It gave me a lot of food for thought. It gave me the starting point to think some of this through. I think I have lots to say in therapy today!

thank you SO MUCH, tree! That was really validating. I have some of the same thoughts, that my T doesn't want to hear it, that it's so nasty and dirty, no wonder she doesn't want me to talk about it, etc.

I have such a hard time sharing those kinds of thoughts with my T. I think I may do better if I call her and tell her that on the phone, I just have a really hard time being that open and vulnerable in session and I can see myself going in there and WANTING to say it but not being able to and then being in misery the whole time.
I think I really should only call her if I'm in crisis, but I can probably make a quick call just to tell her that I'm feeling this way about the trauma work.

thanks so much for that, Miss C. This is exactly the different perspective I really needed in order to look at this mindfulness a different way. Not as a denial of my experience but as a way of better coping while still acknowledging it.

This idea and concept of the inner child has been coming up again and again for me lately, and I really feel like it's a key for me. I have been trying to acknowledge and nuture my inner child in small ways as I begin to have some awareness of her and it does help. It's amazing, how I can feel her inside me, still just a little girl, alone and hurt and scared and needing a mother.

I think calling is a great idea, zoo

Another thing that I used to do before I felt safe enough to bring up those kinds of vulnerable thoughts and feelings was to write them down and bring them to session for him to read.

yeah. i totally get this. i think i have tried to get t to understand she actually has to have me say it. but the words never came out right. i plan and plan to get time to do trauma work. and all i get from t is "we don't do trauma work in here - seems you are unable." but I too am restricted! not allowed! to speak! i dunno. i guess i too will have to tell her she has to invite me to talk about trauma. and not speak maybe or i will just let her fill the silence.

ugh - sorry - hope i didn't hijack

you definitely didn't hijack, kiya!
I have hard, hard time talking about my trauma. There have been sessions where I struggle just to get a couple of words out about it, and that's all I can do. So I understand.
One thing my T and I have learned as we're sort of figuring this out as we go along is that it works a little bit better if she asks a lot of questions and then I can say yes or no or elaborate from there, but if she provides a sort of framework of questions throughout it makes it easier for me.