Hello everyone!

It is Canada Day and I'm celebrating this great country and the fact that I have finally been diagnosed with PTSD and getting help. This is all new to me. I have been suicidal and have been living on high alert and in an agitated state for some time. Now, with medication and counselling I am doing much better and finally becoming optimistic about recovery. Here is my question for anyone who wishes to respond. In the last year, my flashbacks have become more severe. I believe it has been due to the fact that I have seen my "threat" in public and have felt like my sense of security has been threatened at work. Every day I would see my "threat" constantly whether real or not in the faces of every man on the street. It was insane! I now 40 but as a child he threatened my life physically and verbally on several occasions and he is now an old man but I have been seeing the younger version of what I remember everywhere I go. I left my job a few weeks ago for a better work environment and I have notices the flashbacks and visions of my attacker have died down. For all of you who have experienced this can you give me a sense of how you overcame it?

I didn't do anything unique to overcome my flashbacks... I simply put up with them and worked on the trauma aspects instead. I discovered more so that the flashbacks where anxious aspects and triggering aspects of the pre-predisposition of my trauma endured. Work on the trauma and suddenly you just notice.... no more flashbacks, no more nightmares... no more constant symptoms period.

When I'm having a bad flashback, I find it helpful to repeat who I am (in 2008) over and over to myself. A bad flashback can bring me into the past, making me think and feel like the abused teenager I once was. If I keep reminding myself that I'm now an adult, and go over key aspects of my current identity, I tend to work my way through the flashback.

I worked on my trauma (counseling and therapy) and worked on taking everyday stressors I had control over to a manageable level. Eventually they came less and less and it has been quite a while since having one. Speaking to myself or trying to calm myself during one was never a possible scenario as I was "not present". I just had to go back over it in a controlled environment before I finally started to get a grip. Not that the grip is that damn firm