Making Even The Smallest Mistake Filled Me With Terror. Then 2 Little Words Changed My Life.

I want to stop this, but I can’t.
Instead, I look at the alarm clock across from my bed: 3 a.m. I’ve been awake for hours. Sweat glistens on my skin. I clutch the sheets as my heart gallops so hard I feel my carotid artery pulsing in my neck. My body hungers for air, yet all I can muster is a shallow inhale. Punishing thoughts race through my mind. How could you be so stupid? Now they’ll see exactly who you are and kick you out.
Nine hours earlier, I’d replied to an email from one of my professors. New to graduate school, this professor and my coveted assistantship, I wanted to make a good impression. But I’d typed “their” when I meant “they’re” and only noticed the error after it was too late to unsend the message. Panicking, I dashed off a second reply, apologizing for the mistake.
At first, the mea culpa felt like enough. Soon, whispers of doubt washed in, then more and more, until the swell became a tidal wave that overwhelmed me with the urge to apologize yet again for this mistake, for cluttering my professor’s inbox with a second email, for being accepted into a master’s in counseling program, and maybe even for existing.
I want to dig a hole, crawl in and never resurface.
Eventually, my body gives in to exhaustion and I fall into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning, my professor replies, “Great work. Don’t worry about the typo. I’m sure you’ll find one of mine soon enough.”
I exhale. Humiliation replaces my terror as I realize I made a big deal out of nothing. Again.
That incident happened in 2009, yet I’d repeated this cycle endlessly throughout my life. In the middle of a dinner where it’s clear my friend doesn’t like the restaurant I’ve chosen. Hours after asking my boss for a raise. The night following a big reading, my mind stuck on a word I stumbled over. The nakedly vulnerable moment I clicked the link for my first publication. Every single one left me quaking as I succumbed to a terrible, yet familiar force. A wise part of me knows this is an overreaction — that whatever I’ve done is either benign, no big deal or possibly good — but to my jacked-up nervous system, these events are death-penalty-level infractions.
If I talked about it to my therapist at the time, I probably said something like, “I was triggered last night.” That I felt possessed by something beyond my control is a detail I’d never offer. Besides, I knew I didn’t have to. I’d learned to mask this problem so well most people never knew my struggle.
Phrases used to describe me included beacon of calm, so confident, destined for success. I coped by working harder than my peers and always striving for perfection, which felt like the safest course of action. Externally, it seemed like I had everything under control. Internally, I lived with the shame of struggling despite knowing so much, especially after my 2012 graduation from my counseling program.
By that point, I’d spent 13 years in therapy, hoping to one day reach the mountaintop of full healing where I’d leave this all behind. Over those years, I’d CBT’d myself to better coping skills and 12-stepped beyond codependence. I knew the origins of my pain so well I could write my own case study. I had a treasure trove of psychological tools that should have kept me from feeling so activated. Yet, when my brain gets hijacked, it’s like I’ve learned nothing at all.
It wasn’t until reading Stephanie Foo’s memoir “What My Bones Know” that I began to build language around this experience. She calls it The Dread. I call it The Doom. The clinical term is emotional flashback.
Learning those two little words changed my life.
Flashbacks are common for people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Many people are familiar with the Hollywood version of them. A soldier newly returned from war hears a car backfire. Suddenly he’s transported back to the battlefield. Sometimes flashbacks work this way for the approximately 6% of the U.S. population diagnosed with PTSD, but emotional flashbacks are more common for people diagnosed with complex PTSD (CPTSD) where chronic childhood traumas like neglect, physical or emotional abuse, or illness are prevalent.
Shirley J. Davis shares about the living hell that emotional flashbacks can be in an article for the CPTSD Foundation, in which she cites the author of “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.” She writes: “According to Pete Walker, emotional flashbacks are a complex mixture of intense and confusing reliving of past trauma from childhood. It is like living a nightmare while you are awake, with overwhelming sorrow, toxic shame, and a sense of inadequacy.”
According to somatic experiencing practitioner Kirby Moore, emotional flashbacks commonly arise when trauma occurs in the preverbal period, prior to age 3. These early psychological injuries lead to a “tangled knot of distressing emotions and malignant beliefs, such as ‘I must be bad, unlovable, wrong, dirty, trash, a piece of shit, etc.’ The nervous system becomes wired to mistrust and to see the world as a dangerous place.”
Scores of children have no choice but to rely on caregivers low on coping skills and ill-equipped for the role. Psychologically, we can’t rely on something unsafe. So the brain contorts reality to fit its needs: If my caregivers can’t be the problem, it must be me.
Psychologist Ingrid Clayton calls this twist of logic “a genius move that allows us to survive.” And it is. But in adulthood, survivors often live with the fallout that trauma’s rewiring causes.
A psychiatrist diagnosed me with PTSD in 2000. I was 25 at the time. Fourteen years later, a counselor specializing in trauma told me what I actually had was CPTSD, though the diagnosis wasn’t officially recognized by the World Health Organization until 2018 and it’s still not in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Still, my diagnosis has since been verified by two other clinicians.
On the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE, quiz, a tool used to determine a person’s risk for challenges later in life, I’m a solid 8 out of 10 — 9 depending on how you allow me to interpret one question. But you don’t have to score that high to qualify for CPTSD, or to experience emotional flashbacks.
The hardest part of having them is feeling the war but being unable to pinpoint the battle you’re fighting. With regular flashbacks, a triggering event transports me to a memory or a moment when bad things happened. Occasionally, I’m immersed in the experience so much I see, feel or smell things related to the scene in my head.
With emotional flashbacks, my brain has an outsize response to a present situation that plunges me into a soul-crushing terror and a sense that I am both worthless and the root cause of every bad thing that’s about to happen. Death is imminent. My world and anything I care about not only can — but will — blow up.
The urge to do something drastic to fix it — which typically means apologizing profusely for a perceived mistake, breaking up with a friend before they ditch me, or offering long explanations about why the thing I did was wrong but how I didn’t really mean it — is so powerful it’s almost impossible to contain. Yet, I’ve learned the hard way that, for the recipient, my response comes out of nowhere and has the opposite effect from what I’m hoping to achieve.
As someone with both a CPTSD diagnosis and clinical training, I know how to communicate about my experiences — even if I sometimes hesitate to do so. But we’re only now building the vocabulary needed to understand CPTSD. When I described The Doom to the therapist I worked with in 2018, her response was, “Oh yeah, that’s CPTSD,” but that was as far as our conversation went. Research on Stephanie Foo’s term, The Dread, led me to the phrase emotional flashback and a conversation with my therapist who agreed that The Doom and emotional flashbacks are one and the same.
Even before I had a name for my emotional flashbacks, I understood they originated in my nervous system. In 2013, I began working to calm it down, first through mindfulness meditation and a mindful-writing practice. In 2016, I attended an online training with self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff where she shared several practices, including Soften, Soothe, Allow. In the first steps, you label your emotions and then identify their location in your body. This creates distance from the storyline you’re stuck in. Afterward, you gently soothe yourself as you allow the emotion to flow through you. The first time I completed this exercise, I finally understood what it meant to reparent yourself.
Yet, I know from experience, as well as the work I’ve done with trauma survivors, that all thoughts and strategies leave when our alarm systems are activated. So, I’ve developed a two-pronged approach to address this problem. Prong one involves daily practices designed to retrain my limbic system, the brain’s seat of emotion. This regimen includes somatic meditations, breathing exercises, journaling, walks in nature, yoga, and work with a somatic experiencing practitioner.
Prong two is where I administer triage to myself when I find my mind and body on high alert. I’ve placed signs in my house, like pictures, quotes and objects that serve as strategy reminders. If I have the urge to blow life out of proportion, I look at one, then work to ground myself by noting five things in my surroundings while looking left, then again while looking right. I wiggle my toes, take a big inhale, and then hum on the exhale, which stimulates the vagus nerve, a part of your nervous system that calms you down. I tell myself this is an emotional flashback and a temporary state of being. Once it passes, I journal about the incident and explore possible triggers. Sometimes I can link the feelings to a childhood event, but that’s not always the case.
Having a name for this phenomenon allows me to build a container around it and reminds me that emotional flashbacks are an experience I’ve had, but they aren’t who I am. Instead of seeing them as a problem of the present, I can now recognize that this feeling is the past knocking on my door.
I want to tell you I’ve pinpointed the root cause of that 2009 emotional flashback, but in every memory I’ve retrieved, that response already exists. I’ve learned that looking backward doesn’t always solve our problems. Sometimes it’s better to focus on the present, which can lead to the future you’re hoping for.
I now rarely suffer from emotional flashbacks. But because of my wiring, I know I’m still susceptible to them. That’s OK. As Kirby Moore says, “Healing is not an arrival point, rather it’s the process of building your capacity.” We build capacity to tolerate, attend to, and be present with the difficult, while embracing the good. The more I do this, the bigger my container gets. Even if I never eradicate my emotional flashbacks, I can hold space for them, reframe them, and escape the shame that once crippled me. Best of all, I can live life without punishing myself.
Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the “Writing Your Resilience” podcast. Her essays and stories have appeared on Risk! and in The New York Times, HuffPost, Hippocampus Literary Magazine, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. She recently completed her memoir, “Please Stage Dive Carefully: How I Survived My Brother’s Suicide and Forgave Myself.” To learn more, see her website.
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