Last week I said that, “a flashback is the body’s survival mechanism in response to an incident that reminds you of a trauma.”
And I narrowed it to three responses:
This week I’m showing you those responses with a character I know and love. Her name is Emily Jones. She’s a fantastically sweet, tough and brave young woman. Her dad happens to be Indiana Jones, because I love the original series and thought Indy and Marion needed daughters. (I’m also terribly bored with heroes having sons.)
Emily survived a tomb cave in when she was four. She’s got facial scars and is blind in one eye. Emily is an archaeologist like her dad - which means she’s crawling through dangerous tight spaces, facing traps and lethal villains. And she also occasionally in the midst of all these standard action adventure treasure hunt pieces - gets a flashback to her time in the tomb.
When Em has a flashback, here’s what happens….
1. Something in her present…
(As she’s crawling through a tight situation)
…Reminds her body of something in the past.
Em loves her job. She’s choosing to put herself in these thrillingly dangerous situations. She wants to crawl through ancient ruins and find amazing things.
2. The body’s nervous system will decide that this incident in the present has similarities to the thing in the past and it is a threat.
But Em isn’t in charge of her entire nervous system. The nervous system just takes in information and gives it to us. We don’t always get to decide what to do with one hundred percent of that information.
And sometimes our nervous system gives us faulty information that puts us into an overwhelm. This overwhelm trips the survival systems in our brain - and flashbacks happen.
3. The body will react in a way that you couldn’t react in the past to whatever is happening in the present. And the nervous system will not be able to tell the difference between your past incident and the current situation.
This means that a flashback happens and Em is back at four years old and needing rescue, even though in the present she’s a highly capable woman.
One last thing:
A flashback isn’t a phobia. Indy famously mutters, “I hate snakes.” That’s a phobia. It’s one thing that he hates. He isn’t minding his own business eating noodles and suddenly having flashbacks to the snake pit that held the Ark of the Covenant. He just hates snakes.
Em doesn’t hate small spaces. She willingly crawls into them on most occasions. She’s not afraid of small spaces. She knows she’s not in danger she can’t handle. But her nervous system gets overwhelmed at times and decides things for her.
This happens to us all. We get overwhelmed by a nervous system that sending us “Danger!” notifications and flashbacks happen.