PTSD: Runaway trigger sensitization effect?

[Gritches]

So, like many of us, I have pretty bad PTSD of the complex subtype. My biggest problem living with it is that I have literally hundreds of triggers for flashbacks, to the extent that I'm basically having flashbacks all day long. I didn't used to have the sheer amount of triggers I have now, and I wondered why that was the case in the relative absence of further traumas. I think I just figured it out and now I'm panicking a little bit about what to do about it:

So dig this, I'm in a flashback almost constantly, caused by one of my many triggers. But see, I reason that the number of triggers is growing because I unintentionally create new triggers during the flashbacks. What I mean is this: Let's say I'm in a flashback brought on by hearing the words "my man", triggering Bad Memory #1. If I see something random during the flashback, like a grape Jolly Rancher, if it imprints on my mind I will now launch into the very same Bad Memory #1 every subsequent time I see a grape Jolly Rancher. And if I'm in Bad Memory #1 caused by seeing a grape Jolly Rancher and a pair of yellow gloves catches my eye, seeing yellow gloves will now trigger Bad Memory #1 as well.

You see how it grows? It's a runaway effect that I suspect will continue to grow to infinity, and it seems clear to me that I have to learn how to stop this trigger-tethering and undo the process, though as of yet I've been totally unable to teach myself to decouple the stimulus from the memory as a trigger. Problem is, I've never heard of this, but I do suspect OCD may be a factor in the process.

I guess my question is, has anybody heard of this? Has anyone experienced this? Is this typical? Does anyone have any ideas on what to do? Absolutely anything and everything is appreciated, thank you.

 

[Mia]

This is going to seem like 'more of the same' kind of advice. I experienced similar triggers for several years, three years of loudly noticeable PTSD symptoms when the phone rang anywhere, anytime, over-reactions to loud sounds. Anger and rage generated by chain saws, car and motorcycle backfires, helicopters, jets, loud voices. The list goes on and on. Certain words, sentences, that trigger memories. I've yet to get a handle on it all. They seem to create new triggers as you've mentioned, even the memory is changed each time.

An old therapist I had suggested that I 'live in my head' and that I had to 'live in the now.' What I began to do is re-title, rewrite the flashbacks/memories from "You are scared, hurt, in pain" to "I was scared, hurt, in pain". Resigning them to the past in a way.

Then I used grounding techniques, touching something, smelling something like peppermint oil, (slapping which I don't recommend) eating an orange, and bringing myself back from the intrusive thoughts. Feeling, hearing, smelling, touching, all bring me back to the present. This has helped immeasurably. Also find that using my body, in sports, exercise, or in a way that I treat myself well, and take care of myself, helps a great deal. Doing something only for me has aided in this long road to recovery.

 

[Amy Susan Rose]

I haven't experienced what you have regarding flashbacks, triggers and creating new triggers. However I have a tendency towards rerunning my awful childhood/adolescence through my head which does nothing for me other than flip me into depression. My doc prescribes me a small dose of antidepressant and I no longer waste time ruminating on painful episodes. I believe that my mental torture of playing and replaying these awful scenes in my head are a source of OCD which certain antidepressants are able to stop. And let me tell you, life is great without reliving the past. The present is the place to be for it's all we have and with a clear positive mindset I am now able to appreciate it to its fullest.

 

[Joel's Hear]

I've gone through periods of having many flashbacks, and every day I have a few (though not as many as you are having). I have little advice, except for that they will eventually slow. Also, some flashbacks can be informative, having keys to past events to look at in a different light in the future. I would say the majority are just uninformative ticks of the brain/mind.

 

[Ronin82]

I would have to second the recommendation to work on grounding to the present. I used to have horrible flashbacks due to PTSD, both kinds, and would frequently create new triggers until I couldn't find work because it ALL triggered me! Finding mindfulness and grounding techniques worked wonders, and I can now walk into stores without experiencing the past again, even if the store is COMPLETELY unrelated.

Being purposeful about reclassifying the flashbacks as past memories and experiences, then bringing yourself back to the present moment through sounds, smells, sensations, tastes, and sights and keeping your mind on the present will help the flashbacks gently reduce in number and intensity. I use this technique with myself and anyone who has a flashback they can't control when I'm with them (its happened before).

 

[Lady Penelope]

I seem to have managed to keep flashbacks at bay until very recently where a new incident caused me to relive the old ones.
However, rather than flashbacks during the day, I am experiencing nightmares where I wake up with a start and remember the nightmare vividly and revisit each incident in detail. I also tend to be 'in my head' which magnifies everything and with a touch of OCD whatever I have a focus on becomes what can only be described as an infinity loop...
I believe it is my subconscious working through what I have previously ignored and convinced myself never occurred. I.E. if I don't acknowledge it then it never happened; a very sophisticated technique....

Mia makes some good suggestions which I have recently read in a book about dealing with anxiety. 'Grounding' techniques to remind your body to focus on the present and effectively bring yourself out of the flashback / anxiety attack.

 

[Gritches]

@Lady Penelope I used to get nightmares until I started taking Prazosin (Minipress). Now sleep is actually my break from bad memories.

 

[Lady Penelope]

@Lady Penelope I used to get nightmares until I started taking Prazosin (Minipress). Now sleep is actually my break from bad memories.

Thanks, i just looked that up. There are a lot of side effects... have you found any?
I'm also hypersensitive to medication and being petite I'd be that 1% who get the side effects... I've tried herbal remedies without success and I'm trying breathing exercises and yoga and meditation ... but my body sees meditation as organised time to let all the thoughts in my head loose like taking the lid off a jar of flies.

Presently I'm aiming to focus on what i think my subconscious is trying to tell me. I really should address the issues of the trauma but i was so adamant at the time that i was not a victim that i blocked out the events...or so i thought. Left unresolved it festers... insidiously.

I also didn't think i had triggers but turns out i have lots. I actively told my body to ignore them and focus on something else. My current nocturnal friend reveals a new detail each time which adds to the trigger list. But my trigger list is more like a list of things i then obsess over rather than flash to the incidents themselves. In daylight hours i feel like the incidents happened to someone else but in the nightmares it's me. My flashbacks are when my eyes are closed and i can't move or switch focus.

 

[Cloudyday]

Hi everyone,

I can relate to this topic because I'd been having flashbacks to times of conflict and for a long time I thought I was simply filling up with fragments of misunderstood emotions, rather like when the waste bin on the desktop of my computer needs emptying. I began to feel that I had more than fifty years of resentments many of which I could not even remember very clearly. However what I discovered when I typed a search for my periods of insomnia and tension I came across the term "Head Arguments."

A 'head argument' is a sort of theatre inside your head that takes what someone said or what you thought they meant and your inner voice tries to win the argument with them. It's the "What I wish I had said," thing, but the problem is that the imagination conjures a reply from the other person. I was reading about head arguments and one website suggested that the average person can have between 40 and 200 of these a day. I expect most of them are work related: "What I should have told my boss," etc, but it seems these head arguments can spring up out of nothing. I was amazed to find that everyone has them and they have some use in resolving tension but sometimes they just carry on. Some of these conflicts were five or more years old and I would say that objects and sounds and scents did trigger them.

I have a long-running sibling rivalry and reading about head arguments has helped me with that. Understanding head arguments has not helped me resolve the past however, which might be a much bigger job, or helped me with social interaction. What this little discovery did was help me take charge of a small part of my peace of mind. Some advice on a medical site was to have your own side in the argument thank the other, as in a martial arts contest, and this has worked for me. A YouTube video covered this topic too and had some very practical advice which was: 'Try having arguments with real people.'

 

[Gritches]

@Lady Penelope I haven't seen any side effects at all. I just looked up the side effect profile and I haven't experienced any of even the common (4-10%) side effects. In fact, it's my understanding that Prazosin is one of those drugs that reliably causes a sudden plummeting in blood pressure upon standing, resulting sometimes in fainting. Not even a hint of that, and I've quit a few other medications just because of the fainting. Therapeutic dose is 1-4mg; I'm big and tall so I'm on 4mg, so for you maybe 2 mg, though it should be noted that I noticed a palpable effect at the 1mg starter dose.

Any which way, it couldn't hurt to talk to your doctor about it. None of the side effects are permanent or damaging and due to the pharmacokinetics they should cease very quickly after discontinuing the drug. Note that the first dose can get you pretty high, but that's only for the first dose and doesn't happen to everyone. The way I see it, the risk vs. reward ratio is pretty good here; low-to-no risk to try it with potentially fantastic rewards.

I agree that it's best not to live in denial about past trauma. The subconscious knows what the score is. Fighting it is a losing battle.

 

[Prince Aspien]

yes to the suggestions of mindfulness training.

Recently I concluded most of my experience was flashbacks. It was only after staying in London for study that I realised my later night terrors were memories of staying in the London accommodation. I wonder if the night terrors I've had for the last 30 years are simply memories.

 

[WereBear]

I was just reading about how untreated phobias lead to more phobias, just as @Gritches described. The article recommended desensitization therapy for the first trigger, which helps with the subsequent triggers.

The theory about PTSD that I find most compelling is that the mind is in such a panic state that it doesn't "process" the information, come to a conclusion, and file it away. There are techniques for doing so I am not familiar with, but it would be part of desensitizing to it, to some extent.

Because we are programmed to be chased by a tiger (so to speak) and then be very wary of tigers... should we get away the first time. So some of this is just survival instincts and cannot be reasoned with.

But some of it is that processing through the emotion... letting it be experienced, understood, and understanding (I hope) that this particular threat is no longer extant.

 

[Skootdog]

So, like many of us, I have pretty bad PTSD of the complex subtype. My biggest problem living with it is that I have literally hundreds of triggers for flashbacks, to the extent that I'm basically having flashbacks all day long. I didn't used to have the sheer amount of triggers I have now, and I wondered why that was the case in the relative absence of further traumas. I think I just figured it out and now I'm panicking a little bit about what to do about it:

So dig this, I'm in a flashback almost constantly, caused by one of my many triggers. But see, I reason that the number of triggers is growing because I unintentionally create new triggers during the flashbacks. What I mean is this: Let's say I'm in a flashback brought on by hearing the words "my man", triggering Bad Memory #1. If I see something random during the flashback, like a grape Jolly Rancher, if it imprints on my mind I will now launch into the very same Bad Memory #1 every subsequent time I see a grape Jolly Rancher. And if I'm in Bad Memory #1 caused by seeing a grape Jolly Rancher and a pair of yellow gloves catches my eye, seeing yellow gloves will now trigger Bad Memory #1 as well.

You see how it grows? It's a runaway effect that I suspect will continue to grow to infinity, and it seems clear to me that I have to learn how to stop this trigger-tethering and undo the process, though as of yet I've been totally unable to teach myself to decouple the stimulus from the memory as a trigger. Problem is, I've never heard of this, but I do suspect OCD may be a factor in the process.

I guess my question is, has anybody heard of this? Has anyone experienced this? Is this typical? Does anyone have any ideas on what to do? Absolutely anything and everything is appreciated, thank you.

Hi, I may have experienced similar things. Completely different but similar. I am just a guy so take it for what it's worth.
1. sounds like anxiety, meds and cannabis are great for that.
2. I could see ocd there with anxiety, can be one and the same though. relax i know thats not relaxing to hear.
3. "Look through the trees" you have to let your "triggers" pass, like skiing through the woods each trigger is a tree. Don't look at the trees keep looking forward or a tree will smack you in the face. (The trigger is the same as a physical injury, your brains response is that hurt me it's bad.) Hope this helps.

 

[Skootdog]

So, like many of us, I have pretty bad PTSD of the complex subtype. My biggest problem living with it is that I have literally hundreds of triggers for flashbacks, to the extent that I'm basically having flashbacks all day long. I didn't used to have the sheer amount of triggers I have now, and I wondered why that was the case in the relative absence of further traumas. I think I just figured it out and now I'm panicking a little bit about what to do about it:

So dig this, I'm in a flashback almost constantly, caused by one of my many triggers. But see, I reason that the number of triggers is growing because I unintentionally create new triggers during the flashbacks. What I mean is this: Let's say I'm in a flashback brought on by hearing the words "my man", triggering Bad Memory #1. If I see something random during the flashback, like a grape Jolly Rancher, if it imprints on my mind I will now launch into the very same Bad Memory #1 every subsequent time I see a grape Jolly Rancher. And if I'm in Bad Memory #1 caused by seeing a grape Jolly Rancher and a pair of yellow gloves catches my eye, seeing yellow gloves will now trigger Bad Memory #1 as well.

You see how it grows? It's a runaway effect that I suspect will continue to grow to infinity, and it seems clear to me that I have to learn how to stop this trigger-tethering and undo the process, though as of yet I've been totally unable to teach myself to decouple the stimulus from the memory as a trigger. Problem is, I've never heard of this, but I do suspect OCD may be a factor in the process.

I guess my question is, has anybody heard of this? Has anyone experienced this? Is this typical? Does anyone have any ideas on what to do? Absolutely anything and everything is appreciated, thank you.

Hi, I may have experienced similar things. Completely different but similar. I am just a guy so take it for what it's worth.
1. sounds like anxiety, meds and cannabis are great for that.
2. I could see ocd there with anxiety, can be one and the same though. relax i know thats not relaxing to hear.
3. "Look through the trees" you have to let your "triggers" pass, like skiing through the woods each trigger is a tree. Don't look at the trees keep looking forward or a tree will smack you in the face. (The trigger is the same as a physical injury, your brains response is that hurt me it's bad.) Hope this helps.

 

[WereBear]

"Look through the trees" you have to let your "triggers" pass, like skiing through the woods each trigger is a tree. Don't look at the trees keep looking forward or a tree will smack you in the face.

I love that! It is an awesome and useful analogy.