Understanding PTSD: Flashbacks and Triggers
In popular culture and regular parlance, flashbacks and triggers are incredibly misrepresented. As a survivor, I’d like to set the record straight and explain what it is actually like.
Flashbacks in pop culture are generally seen as if they are coherent, faithful reproductions of what happened, and that they immediately cause the survivor stress and pain. We are all familiar with the movie flashback where something triggers the character to remember a painful experience, and they essentially see it right before their eyes, right like it happened. This doesn’t often match the reality of flashbacks and of other PTSD symptoms.
A flashback isn’t an interruption of daily life
The first misconception is the idea that flashbacks are a coherent, definable event, like a cut scene in a video game, that interrupts daily life. I’m not magically teleported back to when it happened, watching the whole thing again as if on a movie screen. This may be a handy plot device in media, but it’s not very realistic.
Rather, I often feel as if I am moving through two narratives at once — my current daily life, and the traumatic experience — where both are equally real in that…
