I'm glad you've turned this recording on.
You're having an emotional flashback right now.
You might be feeling fear or terror,
Shame,
A feeling of hopelessness.
This is a response in your amygdala,
In your primitive brain.
It's hard to say what triggered it at this time.
These don't work quite the same as memories of past events.
We often don't have specific images or memories.
This happened,
This person was there.
With an emotional flashback,
It's more that we have the feeling,
The felt sense of what it was like back then.
We might find ourselves kind of collapsing into a shame posture.
We often have the same beliefs we had back then.
There's something really fundamentally wrong with me.
It's my fault.
If only I was smarter or more lovable or something else,
I'd be able to fix everything around me and I'd be safe.
Right now in this moment,
Notice your whole physical body.
Notice your feet on the ground,
Your seat.
You could clasp your hands together and rub them together.
Notice the warmth of your hands.
Open your eyes,
Look around the room.
Notice five things that are the color red or name five things out loud that you can see.
Go to the emergency practices page for more ideas about ways to ground and center yourself.
This is an emotional flashback.
It's something that happens with people who have had trauma and it's not going to feel like this forever.
You will get through this and you're going to feel better.
If it feels okay to take a few deep breaths,
Do that.
You might want to move your body around a bit,
Do some shaking.
Lift your arms up and throw that old energy down into the ground.
Let it release out of your body.
You might put your hand on your heart and offer yourself some reassurance.
An emotional flashback is a flashback to something that was very familiar when you were a child.
And you're actually not in that situation now.
You're safe.
You have a lot more options.
You're not living with somebody that's scaring you.
You can have a job,
You have financial resources,
Emotional resources.
Your brain has developed into an adult brain.
This might feel discouraging when the emotional flashbacks keep happening.
One thing we could do is really notice this is what it must have been like.
This is what I felt like.
It's a little bit of an echo.
It's not even probably as fully intense as it was back then.
When you bring up an age or an image of yourself at a certain age,
Imagine what it was like then to have felt this way.
You didn't have any support.
You didn't have someone who could hold your hand or bring you into their arms and just let you know that it's going to be okay,
That you're safe and you're loved.
And now as an adult,
We can do that for ourselves.
You turn on this recording.
That's a wonderful thing because now we can come back to our present moment,
To the experience in the present moment,
Our body,
Our breath.
We know what we can do to help ourselves feel better.
We might connect with that child who's scared.
Hold their hand or bring them into a hug.
Let them know they're okay,
That you're here with them.
They're not alone any longer.
They're safe and it was never their fault.
Let yourself feel that through all the cells of your body.
You're having an emotional flashback.
It's not going to last forever.
There are many things you can do to maintain your awareness and groundedness in this moment in time,
In the present.
And anytime you start to feel that familiar sense of being in an emotional flashback,
You have tools that you can use.
You have 5,
4,
3,
2,
1 senses or you could get up and shake it out or you could move around the room or take a few deep breaths.
You could reach out to a safe person or a pet.
You could sit with yourself and attune with kindness to how you felt at that age.
From this moment in this time,
We can heal.
You could make a recording yourself to play.
You could play this one.
Connect with your own inner kindness.
It's going to be okay.
You're safe now.
