River: Flashback?
So... A week ago I had something that might have been a flashback. I think it depends on which definition you use. It was definitely an adrenaline spike triggered by remembering a stressful incident; N said at the time that the exact definition doesn't matter. One of the definitions given by thefreedictionary.com's medical dictionary is "2. In posttraumatic stress disorder (q.v.), the sensations resulting from strong emotional sequences acting as triggers."
I don't think the association with PTSD is particularly accurate -- I wouldn't describe the incident in question as traumatic, just very stressfull and potentially dangerous. And I don't think I process such things the way other people do. Like previous spikes, it was basically just a collection of symptoms that I've come to recognize. If there was an actual emotion going on there, I didn't notice it. I rarely do.
Also, like previous spikes, the symptoms showed up well after the trigger was over and done with. No idea whether that's "normal", but in most past incidents it made it difficult for me to identify the trigger, and in some cases I never did. Last week's was a bit unusual in that I'm pretty confident that I identified the trigger, while the spike was happening. I may be getting better at that.
I don't know whether any of this is interesting to anyone else; I think it was probably useful to me, so I'll keep on writing this kind of thing from time to time.
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]