Flashbacks to tiny traumas

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I'm glad to know I'm not alone, but reading these responses made me sad.

The worst memories for me are the times when I did something wrong without knowing what it was, and I only knew something was wrong because of another person's reaction.

Sometimes I'll have random flashes of insight later about what that "something wrong" was; this usually sends a fresh wave of bad feelings through me, and sometimes makes the memory worse -- sometimes I get lucky, though, and those realizations make the memory easier to remember.

Yes! It's a living hell sometimes. I have no good memories whatsoever.

I do this a lot. I have social anxiety, and I think people with social anxiety experience this. We are traumatized easily by a faux pas or bad social interaction or encounter. It really sucks to experience this, and I hope to find a solution soon.

They often cause me to breakdown and get jumpy. I can usually hold it back when I'm in public, but I often feel stressed due to my past

This also happens to me. I can get flooded, not just with the memory, but the feelings that went with it, the visual setting it occurred in, I hear the voices, everything. So these memories are very intense and distressing, they diminish me.

However it doesn't happen every day. I'm not sure what triggers these episodes, probably some subconscious cue.

On a brighter note, it never happens in dreams. Perhaps that's why I like sleeping so much...

All the time, sometimes I wish my long term memory was normal so I could forget these things and move on like normal people.

What plays over and over in my head are decisions I made that at time seemed liked the right thing to do but in retrospect were probably not only wrong but altered the course of my life. But I can't 100% prove that those decisions altered the course my life, I just think they did. That lack of certainty is an important reason why they still haunt. I wrote about them in the "What advice would you give to your younger self" thread 2 months ago. http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf258553-0-15.html.

I stopped that list in the late 1980's. In the last 25 years the decisions that haunt were staying in jobs to long, and not taking seriously evidence of my Aspergers-Autism including being told directly by a boss, and reading descriptions of it that I knew were describing me.

Yes, all the damn time .

I am plagued by this and it is crippling. The memories bubble up to the surface with such vividness that they almost blot out reality. As others have mentioned I feel the urge to self-harm when they come and to verbalise ("NO!") to try and dull the pain.

Some of these memories are ancient - from primary school age. I try to rationalise and say to myself "Big deal - I said some stupid things when I was a child/teenager - who didn't?" This doesn't help at all.

I have considered whether it is a kind of PTSD but the events themselves are only small social embarassments and can't possibly be compared to memories of the battlefield or personal assault. I fear that a professional (or even just a friend I were to confide in) will just laugh at my problem. Many have.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this problem is that it stops me trying new things, of entering "risky" situations because I fear adding a new bad memory to my stock. I know that if I make a faux pas it won't just last for minutes - it will be with me for ever.

duplicate post

Count me in!

When it became apparent that I was an Aspie, I was hit with probably hundreds if not thousands of old episodes like that. I had experienced these kinds of things before, but never in such a non-stop and brutal fashion. It put me into a deep depression for two or three weeks. As I've said many times before, I'm using the word "depression" in its clinical sense (as in-- loss of interest/appetite, sleeping too much, dysphoria, etc.) and not the colloquial sense.

It was as if all these situations cried out for some kind of answer-- "Why did I say/do/act like that?" And, being an Aspie (though not knowing it) my mind couldn't just let it all go without some kind of rational explanation. So all these processes were running-- like background processes in a computer-- running, and running over and over again. Then, suddenly, nearly 50 years worth of undecipherable events clicked at once and I was assaulted by thousands of bells going off at once; each little bell announcing some other old embarrassment-- many ow which I had no conscious memory of, but instantly recognized as my own.

Now, two months on, it seems to have returned to its earlier pattern. When they do come up, I usually find myself stimming. I don't always realize it, though.

Wow, it never occurred to me that this could be part of the spectrum. I constantly have flashes of previous embarrassing, hurtful or shaming past experiences and mumble to myself, "I will not live in the past" One Social Worker I saw who claims to specialize in ASD and ADHD suggested that I change that and stop to thank my brain for recalling the memory. That doesn't seem to work though. I guess I never realized that chanting "I will not live in the past" over and over again was a form of stimming either.