“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” ~ Robert Jordan

Resiliency, to summarize, is the ability to bounce back from difficult circumstances. People living with mental health challenges often have high resilience to the opposition because they have grown resilient through trial by fire.

This piece will focus on what is going on in the brain with resiliency and perhaps a few suggestions on how we can help our brains form it.

The Different Aspects of Building Resiliency

First, let us discuss what scientists believe are the building blocks of resilience. In one paper written in 2013…

Much research has been done on the topic of this series of posts in February 2021. Scientists want to understand how people who go through sometimes horrific events often overcome adversity and seem to thrive afterward.

In this first part of the series, we’ll discuss what resiliency is and answer some common questions about this interesting topic.

What is Resiliency?

Everyone experiences traumatic events, yet some people seem to encounter more than their fair share of events that change their lives forever. …

Emotional flashbacks are a common symptom for people living with the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. Because of this fact, I thought it vital to delve into how to overcome them.

Emotional flashbacks take a horrendous toll on those who experience them. To feel like you are in danger with all the emotions that accompany it, fear, anxiety, startle, and a myriad of other feelings without understanding where they are coming from is both frightening and debilitating.

This piece will examine emotional flashbacks and methods to defeat them.

CPTSD and Emotional Flashbacks

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) afflicts many people who were traumatized in…

One of the most egregious behaviors a parent or other caregiver can do to a child is to abandon them, allowing them to suffer alone. The damages done to the child when grown are significant and should not be ignored.

In this article, we shall examine together what childhood abandonment is, how it affects adults, and ways to mitigate the power it has over our lives.

What is Abandonment?

All children are entirely dependent upon parents or caregivers for their safety in their environment. …

Emotional flashbacks are troubling and often disabling events that cause a person to experience alarming and crippling bursts of strong emotions. Emotional flashbacks are experienced without the linked visions from the past that accompany average flashbacks.

In this article, we shall examine together what is going on in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) of those experiencing emotional flashbacks.

What is Trauma?

Trauma is a normal response to abnormal situations such as a car accident or other life-altering event. The best definition I have ever read for trauma is a quote by Cody Wiggs, LPC and it states:

“Trauma is an event, or series…

In our first piece in the four part series on emotional flashbacks, we discussed the definition of emotional flashbacks and how they change survivors by interrupting their daily lives.

This article will attempt to explore what it is like to have an emotional flashback and the 13 steps to manage them proposed by Dr. Pete Walker.

A Short Recap

Before we delve deeper into our topics for this piece, we must take a moment to recap the definition of emotional flashbacks.

Flashbacks are definable and connectable to a singular traumatic event and include a reliving of the event through the five senses. …

Everybody forgets that is a fact of life. You might forget where you placed your car keys or where you last saw the dog’s leash; that is ordinary forgetting.

Dissociative amnesia is different. It is a condition that is trauma-based and can disrupt a person’s life.

This article shall examine dissociative amnesia, its causes, and treatments, plus how to cope with this dissociative disorder.

In Brief, What is Dissociative Amnesia

Dissociative amnesia (DA), once known as psychogenic amnesia, is a dissociative disorder where a survivor loses or does not retain information into long-term memory, such as autobiographical memories that happened in the last hour or perhaps…

You walk into your living room after getting out of bed in the morning feeling apprehensive and afraid, but there is nothing to be afraid of that you can observe. An overwhelming sense that something terrible is about to happen permeates your thoughts, and you do not feel at all safe.

You have just experienced an emotional flashback.

This article will examine the definition of emotional flashbacks, their causes, and some grounding techniques to help you when they attack.

What are Emotional Flashbacks?

To explain the definition of emotional flashbacks, it is first necessary to define what are flashbacks.

Flashbacks are what we all…