When something within us awakens, we return. Then-and-there moves through the here-and-now. The alarmed aloneness that once had no response reaches again toward an Other, toward connection, toward what was not available the first time.
Inspired by Joanna Lindenbaum
When Connection Feels Unsafe:
The Push-Pull of Emotional Flashbacks
A reflection on the inner conflict between longing and fear, and how coming to know our own embodied language of safety can soften the protective patterns formed in survival.
The Wordless Pull of Complex Trauma
There is a truth within the pain and ambiguity of complex trauma. Something not easily discernible, and certainly hard to conceptualise. We might describe it as a wordless pull that makes no sense, yet it shapes and pushes our very sense of being. Indeed, this something is a felt sense from within, an embodied, ungrounded not-knowing that leaves us searching for the grounded known, recurrently looking for the logic that might soothe the inner alarmedness that often feels as though it penetrates the soul.
Yet even with all our manners of making sense, the intensity of this inner alarm remains. We find ourselves caught within an inner battle of confusion and overwhelm, of Self-doubt and Self-blame, grasping for answers and solutions, feeling the pressure to fix and amend what feels fragmented and unpredictable. This pressure often shows itself as a push-pull of embodied aloneness. A paradoxical movement between approach and avoid, fear and longing, protest and apology, wherein our minds speak a language of sense-making, while beneath it another language moves, embodied, wordless, and older.
Emotional Flashbacks and the Body’s Memory
Perhaps we can call this an aspect of alarmed aloneness, a fear without solution, yet a longing from within for the solution that might bring peace. This felt sense of no-sense is what is known as an emotional flashback. Unlike visual flashbacks, emotional flashbacks are affective and ambiguous. They move through implicit, somatic, non-declarative memory, activated by subtle sensory cues well before explicit or declarative recall becomes available.
There is a certain something within a relational interaction that cues a threat to our systems. The cue comes without context, and what remains is a felt sense of being alarmed and alone. Within our bodies, our past becomes our present, and a fragmented fear begins to permeate our sense of being. We struggle within ourselves to grasp something, anything, that might help us find our ground again.
We tell ourselves that logically this is that, and that cannot be controlled, predicted, organised, relied upon, nor hoped for. We offer ourselves rational explanation and understanding. Sometimes we move between protest, despair, and numbing detachment before circling back to logic and analysis, declaring certainty amidst the inner chaos. Yet, however much reasoning we bring, we still sit within the alarmed aloneness, fear without solution.
A Relationally Embodied Dynamic of Survival
I am here to let you know that this is a relationally embodied and embedded dynamic of survival. A relational matrix that, in some way, reflects a preceding pattern of attachment, a disorienting dynamic of frightened and frightening relationship.
This experience is sometimes described as fearful patterns of relating in adulthood, where Others feel confusing and the Self feels confused. I think of it as a lived rhythm of safety and fear moving together, a push and pull that formed in service of survival and moves within us still.
This is the emotional flashback of what might once have been called disorganised or disorientated attachment: the implicit memory of threat and helplessness, reactivated without conscious recall. It is the embodied reminder that at one point, the very person you relied upon was also the source of fear and alarm. Importantly, this is something that took shape within particular relationships, across time, rather than a category a person belongs to.
The Ambiguity of Safety in Relationship
It is important to recognise the ambiguity of safety in relationship. Safety resides within our own systems. It is a felt sense, unique to each of us. Another cannot determine what feels safe within us. And so, when we speak of frightening and frightened relationships, we speak to a wide range of experiences.
Frightening relational interactions may include instances where the Other is overtly threatening, hostile, abusive, or critical, and subtler forms such as silent freezing, intrusive looming, or unpredictable withdrawal.
Correspondingly, frightened refers to an interpersonal relationship wherein the Other is themselves fearful, often due to unresolved trauma, loss, or dissociation, their fear becoming a signal of danger in and of itself.
In both cases there is an impossible dilemma: approach the Other and experience fear, or withdraw and lose safety.
Turning Toward Embodied Knowing
It is this dilemma that now emerges as an emotional flashback. In the felt sense of no-sense we are alarmed and alone. And that push to figure-it-out is the way we learned to survive. To figure it out is to seek certainty within uncertainty, to predict the unpredictable, to ground with sense what could never have made sense, then-and-there, and here-and-now.
Yet perhaps now something is shifting. A want, a willingness to move deeper, beneath the rational logic the mind offers and into the felt sense of our own systems, scaffolding what was never offered: the embodied knowing of safety.
Perhaps here lies the invitation to turn inward. To pause and to notice. To place a hand on your heart and check in with your body: ok, not-so-ok, not-ok. To listen beneath the logic of the mind, toward the felt sense of safety moving within us.
When we notice the not-so-ok and not-ok, we can offer a small gesture of acknowledgement, a hand on the heart, arms wrapped around the self, a weighted toy resting on the chest. To pause, connect, give space. Once, and again, and again. Through repetition our systems begin to learn predictable, containable connection.
This, of course, is easier said than done. Cultivating safety is an ever-emerging process, distinct from a destination to be reached or another rote practice to be perfected. What is sought is a felt sense of safety within the Self, something that may be returned to again and again along the journey toward equanimity. A unique and individual noticing of sensation, perception, and interpretation, allowing us to know our Self in all our known knowing.
The Paradoxes of Emotional Flashbacks in Relationships
Complex trauma is, indeed, complex. That fragmenting, wordless pull that makes no sense yet shapes and pushes our being, it arises from a swirl of embodied memories. An emotional flashback where, once upon a time, the route to survival was to seek safety through sense-making, and where that route remains available to us still. And sometimes, when we feel that pull to figure-it-out, that very movement is the way our systems say: something here feels familiar and unsafe, I need connection now.
If you recognise yourself in this push-pull, know that you are not alone in it. Fearful patterns of relating in adulthood often move through paradoxes that appear contradictory, and that make deep sense when sensed through survival. These are the embodied imprints of once-impossible binds, movements that formed within us long before words were available. They also move between us, taking shape within the relational atmosphere of two systems meeting, rather than within one person alone.
Below are some of the common paradoxes that can emerge within this way of relating, offered as gentle reflections, as invitations toward awareness and compassion for the inner movements that can so often leave us feeling both too close and too far all at once.
- Fear of Closeness and Fear of Abandonment Longing for connection moves alongside a fear of engulfment or rejection. We reach toward intimacy, and when closeness meets us, our systems perceive danger and withdraw, still, or protest. “Come close, but not too close; I need you, and I cannot trust you.”
- Vulnerability Moving Beneath Compliance or Apology A deep need to be seen and accepted moves alongside an implicit knowing that showing need may bring harm, shame, or rejection. Vulnerability then moves beneath apology, appeasement, humour, intellectualisation, or Self-blame. “I’m sorry for needing you; I shouldn’t feel this way.”
- Desire for Care Coupled with Distrust of Care The longing for a safe Other moves alongside an expectation that care will be unreliable or unsafe. When help is offered it evokes suspicion, and even where care is accurate and kindly meant, it may not yet be something our systems can take in. “You’ll hurt me if I let you help, and if you don’t help, I’ll be alone.”
- Anger Toward the Other Alongside Guilt and Fear Anger or protest arises toward those whose care is unavailable or harmful, and moves quickly into guilt or Self-attack. Both the protest and the helplessness may be lived from the inside, sometimes within the one conversation. “I hate you; please don’t leave me; I’m sorry for being angry.”
- Push–Pull Between Self-Reliance and Dependency Self-reliance moves alongside collapse into helplessness, each pole protecting against the terror of the other. This often reflects early relationship in which one and the same Other is a source of comfort and of fear. “I don’t need anyone; I cannot survive without you.”
- Need for Control and Fear of Being Controlled Attempts to manage the relational atmosphere through compliance, care-taking, or defiance move alongside a dread of being controlled. Safety is sought through managing what happens between us, and that same managing can begin to feel like confinement. “If I don’t manage you, I’ll be hurt; and if I do, I’ll lose you.”
- Idealisation and Devaluation of the Other The same person may be experienced as saviour and persecutor, often in rapid alternation. Each perception feels entirely true while it is here, and as the Self-state shifts so does the Other who is perceived, well beneath deliberate choosing. “You are the only one who understands me; you are the same as all the others.”
- Longing to Be Known and Terror of Being Seen A wish for authentic recognition meets the fear that being truly seen will expose shame or evoke attack. In therapy this may appear as sudden withdrawal or dissociation following moments of deep connection. “Please know me; please don’t look too closely.”
- Confusion of Responsibility and Shame The distress of an Other becomes internalised, and with it the meaning that our own needs or feelings cause harm. Where the Other remains needed, it can be safer to locate the fault within the Self than to live alongside an Other who cannot be relied upon. “If I had been better, you wouldn’t have hurt me.”
- Love as an Awakening of Fear Affection, care, or tenderness can evoke panic or disorganisation, where love and danger formed together within implicit memory. What is longed for becomes the very thing that awakens alarm, often with no explanation available to us. “This feels good, so something painful must be coming.”
- Longing for Repair Alongside Dread of Repair The wish to be returned to moves alongside alarm at the closeness that returning requires. Repair asks for the very proximity that awakens the original fear, so the reaching back is often avoided at the point it becomes possible. “Please come back to me; please don’t come near this.”
- Intensity Experienced as Connection, Steadiness Experienced as Absence Where alarm and conflict are the moments of being noticed, calm can register as nothing happening. Steadiness may then evoke a felt sense of being forgotten, and something within us reaches for intensity to confirm that we are still here between us. “You must not care, because nothing is happening.”
- Inner Knowing Alongside Doubt of Our Own Knowing What our systems know moves alongside a learned expectation that this knowing will be contradicted. Where our perceptions are denied, named wrongly, or explained away, we learn to look outward for the truth of our own experience. “I know what I sensed; I have been told it was not so.”
- Needing Rest Alongside Dread of Stopping Exhaustion moves alongside an alarm that arises the moment vigilance eases. Where staying alert is how we remain safe, rest can register as exposure, and stillness can bring forward what the activity has been outrunning. “I am exhausted; I cannot stop.”
These patterns are the ways our systems learn to survive. With awareness and compassion, the same movements that protect us may begin to soften, allowing space for new forms of safety to emerge. Change moves slowly, through staying present with the truths our systems speak. One small moment of safety at a time.
Welcome, my name is Chele, I am a therapist primarily specialising in Trauma – specifically as it presents as Burnout and Breakdown. As a psychotherapist & PACFA & CCAA Clinical Counsellor I work individually with beautiful humans such as yourself who feel alone, lost, confused, & overwhelmed; those of you who are longing for something different.
As such, I offer my knowledge, skills, and inherent gifts with ears that listen to hear, and a heart open to receive who you are, no matter the suffering you bring; to support you in an exploration of how your past has impacted you and the ways that shows up presently. Together we will rediscover your hope and your sense of Self; we will reconnect you to what matters reclaiming the joy and delight in life you so deserve.
I welcome you to view my services or connect with me to explore how I can assist you in your journey.
