Pete Walker

Grieving restores our crucial, developmentally arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress.

One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”

As we move out of early recovery, we begin to observe that internal triggers are even more common than external ones. Such triggers are commonly the nasty spawn of the inner critic. Typically they are thoughts and visualizations about endangerment or the need for perfection. The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive. Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking.

ecognition further aids us to handle unavoidable triggering situations. Forethought allows us to prophylactically practice flashback management before we get activated, as I did in the performance anxiety situation mentioned earlier.
Recognizing the moment of triggering is even more important than recognizing the trigger itself. This is because flashbacks sometimes start out subtly and then progressively become more intense. Early recognition therefore helps us to invoke the steps earlier, and decrease the intensity and duration of the flashback.

intense flashbacks this magnifies into feeling so ashamed that we are loath to go out or show our face anywhere. Feeling fragile, on edge, delicate and easily crushable is another aspect of this. The survivor may also notice an evaporation of whatever self-esteem he has earned since he left home. This is a flashback to the childhood years where implicit family rules forbade any self-esteem at all.

Another common clue that we are flashing back is an increase in the virulence of the inner or outer critic. This typically looks like increased drasticizing and catastrophizing, as well as intensified self-criticism or judgmentalness of others. A very common example of this is lapsing into extremely polarized, all-or-none thinking such as only being able to see what is wrong with yourself and/or others.

my own mid-level recovery, I learned that when I was feeling especially judgmental of others, it usually meant that I had flashed back to being around my critical parents. The trigger was usually that some vulnerability of mine was in ascendancy. In response, I then over-noticed others’ faults so that I could justify avoiding them and the embarrassment of being seen in a state of not being shiny enough.

Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them. Here are two common instances of this: [1] a minor upset feels like an emergency; [2] a minor unfairness feels like a travesty of justice.

When we are not mindful at such times, we can erupt against ourselves in self-disgust and self-hatred, or we can unfairly explode out against the relatively innocent other.

As recovery progresses, you notice more subtlety in the triggering process. As you do, you become more mindful of your inner critic’s hard-to-detect triggers. You also discover that some triggers are indiscernible. This is especially true of triggering that occurs during sleep.