The Felt Sense of Dodging Bullets
Post-traumatic flashbacks and implicit memory
People with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can re-experience traumatic events as if they were occurring in the present. These flashbacks are sometimes depicted in film and television as full dissociative episodes, an almost psychotic departure from reality into the world of vivid memories.
But flashbacks do not always include explicit memories. If they did, they might be easier to recognize. The moment a person becomes consciously aware that she is having a flashback, she can start to utilize whatever coping tools she may have developed for this, such as grounding and distraction practices.
Part of what makes trauma tricky to treat, though — especially early, chronic, and complex trauma — is that, contrary to popular belief, flashbacks do not always come wearing a name tag. Let’s consider for a moment that while PTSD can heighten one’s recollection of certain memories, it can equally obscure others, creating gaps in memory. The survivor may have blacked out or dissociated during the events, or their mind may have hid those memories from view afterward. This is adaptive. Dissociating and forgetting are ways that the brain copes with overwhelming sensations such as terror and helplessness. If the traumatic memory was never clear to begin with, how could a flashback be vivid?
Even when memories can be recalled with precise detail, a survivor can still have re-experiencing flashbacks or dissociative episodes that don’t clearly present themselves as such. To understand this, consider the differences between explicit and implicit memory.
Recall a significant event in your life: your graduation, wedding day, the birth of your first child — or any memorable story you could easily tell again and again. Your recollection is explicit: you recall what happened, with whom, when and where. You could describe what happened from beginning to end. That’s explicit memory.
Now try to remember your grandmother’s house when you were three years old. If you’re like most people, you don’t have explicit memories from that age. If you do have any noteworthy stories to tell, you likely heard them from your relatives. But your grandmother’s house at age three — what was the vibe? Is there a vague sense impression?
Perhaps you recall the aromas of dusty books and chamomile tea, or dappled sunlight shining through the kitchen window, or nana’s wispy gray hair tickling your ear when she picked you up and held you in her arms. In their precision, those are all explicit memories, though they do not comprise sequential stories. These sense impressions you recall surround something more essential, yet harder to name. How did it feel to be there? Did your body relax, or clench up? Did you feel ease, excitement, delight, fear, or hesitation? Was this place safe, fun, boring, nauseating, or soothing?
Those implicit memories live with you. Those somatic sensations come to mind whenever you recall what grandma’s house was like to you as a small child. But if you pay close attention, you may find that the familiar feelings waft in and out of your day-to-day life like a faint cologne you cannot trace. You may not be thinking of grandma’s house at all, but the feelings of joy or dread that you first discovered there live with you in some form or another to this day, and your body reacts accordingly.
Implicit memory in PTSD is like that — a felt sensation, perhaps barely understood and processed by conscious awareness. Even if awareness is online, the connection may not be drawn. Implicit memories can be subtle.
The felt sense of dodging bullets
One of my recurring sensations under stress is the feeling of being pelted, as if with bullets. There is no hallucination, no vivid flashback, nothing that takes me fully out of the present. But if I pay close attention to how I am feeling, my body wants to wince, clench, curl up, duck and cover. Though my actual skin feels no real irritation, on another level, it feels as if my skin is being wounded — the outer layer of me is under attack, and I am helpless to do anything about it. This sensation has come up lately when I have, to use an apt metaphor, come under fire for expressing certain beliefs in the public view. The rapid assault of insults and metaphorical injuries has felt like a stream of bullets. On some level, it makes sense that anyone might feel this way in my shoes. But could it be that the reason I feel this way is because I was once actually pelted?
The year was 2001. I was a naive but headstrong (do some things never change?) 16-year-old runaway who had handed her life over to radical political activism and thought she knew how to achieve justice. I was marching in the Black Bloc, my face masked with a black bandana long before it was cool. It was a Mayday protest, ostensibly about workers’ rights, as if I knew anything about that. I hadn’t broken any laws, but the crowd I belonged to must have appeared menacing, and I can’t say for sure that no one threw, tagged, or otherwise attempted to destroy any property.
We got swarmed by the police and were soon not only surrounded, but backed into a corner. Behind me was a building that was part of a long, continuous block. To my left was a wall about 4’ high; on the other side was a steep drop of perhaps 20’ down to the sloping ramp of an underground parking lot. There was nowhere to go, and clearly we had to surrender, but for some reason the police continued to shoot rubber bullets at us. I and one other person were ducking behind the slim trunk of a palm tree, barely big enough to cover one of us. Dozens of others were crouching in various positions. All around me, I heard people yelping out in pain. Later, I would see a young man with a black eye, half his face swollen and blue, clearly in need of medical attention as we were all getting arrested (later to be released with no charges). While ducking, as I heard nearly everyone around me getting shot, it seemed certain that it had to be my turn next. To my surprise, I never got hit. But I remember the wincing and clenching, the squatting and shielding, the helpless anticipation of a painful attack on my body as I remained frozen and cornered in a trap. I remember empathically feeling the pain of those around me as each one got shot. I don’t know how long this went on. It could have been less than a minute, but it felt like ten.
We have all dodged a few metaphorical bullets in our lives. Some of us have dodged literal ones, too.
It’s not often that I consciously — explicitly — recall that terrible time long ago. It’s a memory I would usually much rather forget. But the implicit sense memory remains part of my schema. And it’s a place that my body goes under stress, when some circumstance has triggered my fear of being under attack.
My story may be unconventional. There aren’t a whole lot of functioning adults who grew up marching in the Black Bloc and went on to become professional healers who write about personal experiences in cults and other reasons to be wary of groupthink, ideology, and political agendas. But any survivor of physical abuse is all too familiar with the clenching, wincing anticipation of the blows of the fist, paddle, or belt. And anyone who has been in actual political or gang warfare has memories of dodging bullets far more deadly than the ones that nearly hit me.
Whatever the assault or threat thereof may have been, those memories imprint into our subconscious and form part of our blueprint of reality. The mind automatically becomes vigilant on the lookout for other possible dangers. While this is called hypervigilance in the diagnosis of PTSD, the prefix hyper indicates that the vigilance is excessive. However, it is only excessive when it is no longer needed. Otherwise, the vigilance may well be appropriate; it’s an adaptive response. Recovery from PTSD must include a process of discovering for one’s self that the coast is truly clear, and can reasonably be assumed to remain so. This may sound straightforward enough, but life is rarely so simple. People with complex trauma often continue to re-create their circumstances, or otherwise have difficulty finding the social, environmental, material, or psychological resources to build a new life that is safe and secure. This is what makes it so hard to break the cycle of complex trauma. As the saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
Mindfulness, healing and recovery
All things considered, I’m one of the people fortunate enough to have created better circumstances than the ones I originated from. My life today is safer than my childhood was. I also have more love, abundance, and security than I felt growing up. Healing the vestiges of complex trauma is an ongoing process involving self-awareness and corrective experiences. We must be able to digest and assimilate those corrective experiences, integrating them into our being so that the newer, better reality settle into our bones.
Mindfulness helps here: paying attention to what is happening in the present moment…
Here and now, I am safe and loved.
Here and now, I am secure, comfortable, rested, and nourished.
Here and now, my partner is working quietly to my right. To my left, the tea is still cooling. Out the window, the sky is grey and bright. I don’t have to be anywhere today. I’m a bit hungry.
We can also use affirmations that are counter-intuitive, yet powerful. Consider:
“We live in such a safe and pleasant world.”
We cannot rely on news sources or doom-scrolling to tell us that. We hardly need to seek out evidence that we live in a dangerous and wretched world; it is everywhere, and many billion-dollar industries are eager to capitalize on our resultant fear and insecurity. But consider what a big, diverse world we live in, and what miraculous brains we have, capable of viewing through so many different filters and creating so many different narratives about what we see. What we look at and how we interpret it govern what we believe to be possible. Could it be that “we live in a safe and pleasant world” is no less true than “we live in a dangerous and wretched world?” Training ourselves to seek out evidence to confirm the former, rather than the latter, can be transformational.
Today I find myself telling you, dear reader, such different things. On the one hand, I am telling you that the felt sense of dodging bullets is a somatic implicit memory that lives with me and gets triggered when I feel I am “under fire.” On the other hand, I am telling you that we also live in a safe and pleasant world.
Clearly, affirming and reinforcing the belief that we live in a safe and pleasant world is not a magic solution. It is by no means true always and everywhere, but it is absolutely true in some times and places. We do well to notice when it is, and do our part to help create more such goodness.
Meanwhile, in bed with Covid…
As for me, today, as it is for so many others, life is clearly a mixture of safe and unsafe. As I write this, I am sick in bed with Covid-19. I managed to dodge that metaphorical bullet for a whole two years before finally coming down with a relatively mild variant that feels, so far at least, indistinguishable from the flu. Don’t get me wrong, this stinks. Tossing and turning all night with a fever and chills; coughing so hard I’m afraid I’ll puke; having to cancel a week’s worth of clients and miss an important meeting with my web designer — I don’t love any of this. But I can survive it. And I can keep it in perspective:
I’m grateful I caught this variant, and not one of the earlier ones that seemed harder on the system. I’m grateful my partner’s case was so mild that he’s almost back to his normal spritely self and has enough energy to take care of me. I'm grateful I have an amazing assistant who I can easily text with and trust to take over emails and other business for me. I’m grateful I am at a point in life where missing a week’s worth of income won’t kill me. I’m grateful I have enough mental clarity today to write, albeit from bed and with food and tea being brought to me. I’m grateful for Instacart and Grubhub. I’m even grateful to finally get this damn pandemic endemic illness out of the way — to stop living in fear of it as some kind of worst-case scenario, and be able to say, yep, I survived that and lived to tell the tale, just like so many other people did.
And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. There was a time in the pandemic that avoiding catching or spreading the disease was a top priority, and affected decision making in every area of life. Some people never really got on board with that, and continued taking risks; some are still living like hermits. As for me, I was somewhere in-between: highly cautious the first year, decreasingly so the second, and over the restrictions by the time I got sick. The cost-benefit analysis just didn’t pan out. Sure, if the choice were between going to Event X and getting sick, or staying home from Event X and not getting sick, like most people, I’d choose the latter. But that’s not the choice we were given. The choice was, do you avoid Events X, Y, Z, A, B, C, and so forth, in order to avoid the risk of contagion? How far does this go? What are you giving up in order to avoid what has increasingly come to seem like an inevitable fate? I cannot comment on anyone else’s experiences, perceptions, or choices. But in the end, after two years of gradually decreasing levels of caution, the illness I finally, inevitably came down with is about as severe as the flu I had three years ago, back when all I did to avoid illness was sleep well, eat well, and exercise. Would I risk this same level of illness again for the freedom of living an unrestricted life? Yes.
Coming full circle
Today, I am actually physically under attack. There is a war zone in my cells. My immune system is battling it out with a dreaded, infamous virus I’ve spent the last two years dodging and have finally been taken down by.
Today, I am also perfectly safe. I have food, shelter, warmth, love, nurturance, medicine and supplements. I won’t emerge from this unscathed, but the damage will be manageable.
Today, I am psychologically under attack. There are people who are angry with me and trying to destroy my reputation and career. Sometimes, I feel my whole body wincing, my muscles clenching, my heart racing, my skin preemptively hurting in anticipation of a blow.
Today, I am also psychologically safe. I am cared for, respected, and appreciated by many. There are people who have my back and lift my spirits. If I pay attention to all the indicators of goodness, I can breathe again, and unfurl. When I receive the love that’s offered to me, I can laugh, and smile. My heart swells, warms, glows. The cells of my body feel ease, sweetness, softness, delight.
Life is always a mixed bag, and Earth exists somewhere between Heaven and Hell. Sometimes, it is what we make it.
