What Are Emotional flashbacks?

"Emotional flashbacks—sudden and often prolonged regressions ("amygdala
hijackings") to the frightening and abandoned feeling-states of childhood.

They are accompanied by inappropriate and intense arousal of the fight/flight instinct and the
sympathetic nervous system.

Typically, they manifest as intense and confusing episodes of fear, toxic shame, and/or despair, which often beget angry reactions against the self or others.

When fear is the dominant emotion in an emotional flashback, the individual feels overwhelmed, panicky or even suicidal.

When despair predominates, it creates a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and an urgent need to hide.

Feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also common in emotional flashbacks.

Such experiences are typically overlaid with toxic shame, which, as described in John Bradshaw's Healing The Shame That Binds, obliterates an individual's self-esteem with an overpowering sense that she is as worthless, stupid, contemptible or fatally flawed, as she was viewed by her original caregivers.

Toxic shame inhibits the individual from seeking comfort and support, and in a reenactment of the childhood abandonment she is flashing back to, isolates her in an overwhelming and humiliating sense of defectiveness.

Clients who view themselves as worthless, defective, ugly or despicable are showing signs of being lost in an emotional flashback.

When stuck in this state, they often polarize affectively into intense self-hate and self-
disgust, and cognitively into extreme and virulent self-criticism."