This post discusses emotional flashbacks, dissociation, grief, loss, suicidal thoughts, and intense emotional distress…

The other night, I had a meltdown. A big one. A bigger one than I have had in a long time.

The details of what triggered it are not particularly important. What matters is how it felt.

I felt completely overwhelmed by a sense of despair that seemed far bigger than the situation itself. It was as though every fear, every painful memory, every insecurity I have ever carried decided to come at once. I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t regulate my emotions. I couldn’t stop crying.

I realise now that I was experiencing an emotional flashback. Though, at the time, it felt as though these feelings came out of nowhere. Since my Complex PTSD diagnosis, and starting trauma therapy, I have learned a lot about emotional flashbacks and how they rarely come out of nowhere. Your body remembers your trauma, even if your mind doesn’t.

Beneath all of the emotions I was feeling in the moment, was a very familiar feeling: nobody sees me.

As you can probably imagine, I spend a lot of my life being unseen due to being physically disabled and a trans man. It is so easy for people to look over me, ignore me, disregard me.

People look at me and they see her.

The girl that was forced on me.

They use her name, her pronouns, only allow room for her.  As though I do not exist.

Rarely does someone truly see me. Rarely am I met with unconditional love and acceptance. People only love the version of me that they created.

In fact, the only person who ever showed me what I understood to be unconditional love died seven-and-a-half years ago. I have never felt love like it since.

And yet, I was still too scared to reveal who I was to her.

We’d spoken about trans issues a lot, and she was so educated, accepting and understanding.

I knew wholeheartedly that she would accept me.

I knew she was probably the only one who ever would.

But I was paralysed by fear.

And now it’s too late…

That grief was all-consuming.

At the time, I thought I was just grieving a person. But looking back, I think it was much more than that: I was grieving the only relationship I have ever had where I never felt I had to earn love. The only relationship in which I felt accepted exactly as I was, even if I never gave her the chance to know who I really was underneath the mask.

When she died, I lost more than a person. I lost a sense of safety. I lost the one place where I believed I could never be too much.

Too obsessive.

Too emotional.

Too broken.

Too hard to love.

And nobody will ever understand what that felt like. Nobody will ever understand the love we held for one another. Nobody will ever understand the pain of losing it.

And maybe that is why the feelings that came over me the other night felt so overwhelming. Because they weren’t new feelings. They were old ones. Very old ones.

They were the kind of feelings that bubble away quietly under the surface for years until something cracks them open.

The fear that nobody really sees me.

The fear that nobody really knows me.

The fear that I am only loved conditionally, as long as I remain who other people want me to be.

I felt overwhelmed by emotions that felt impossible to hold. Grief, loneliness, hopelessness, anger, shame and fear all collided at once.

But then there is a blank space.

The last thing I remember is crying hysterically and punching my head to try and self-regulate.

Everything after that has been reconstructed through what my sisters told me. 

Apparently, I spent the rest of the evening speaking rapidly, laughing uncontrollably, not making much sense and as though I was on some sort of emotional high.

I remember none of it.

The next thing I remember is waking up the following morning. Empty. Numb. Exhausted in every meaning of the word.

When people hear of dissociation, they think of it being dramatic. Noticeable.

Sometimes, it feels like crying one minute and waking up the next.

This is not the first time this has happened. But yet, what still strikes me is the contrast between what happened and what I remember.

This time, I spent hours laughing and talking non-stop, apparently.

The version of me that woke up the following morning felt utterly empty.  

I feel like everyone talks about trauma as though it creates overwhelming emotions, but nobody talks about the numbness that follows.

People see the tears. The panic. The meltdown.

What they don’t see is the aftermath. The exhaustion. The disconnection. The memory gaps.

Through trauma therapy, I am starting to understand that these responses are not evidence that I am weak or broken but they are evidence of a nervous system that has spent years trying to survive in the only way it knows how.

That does not make the responses any less frightening or painful, but it does help me understand them. And I am trying my best at self-compassion, but it’s hard.

Perhaps that is one of the most important things I have learned through my trauma therapy: the end goal is to not stop feeling, it’s not to erase the past or never have another emotional flashback or nightmare. The goal is to recognise what is happening when those wounds resurface, to understand that the intensity of the feeling doesn’t necessarily belong in the present moment, to recognise that sometimes I am grieving more than the situation at hand, sometimes I am grieving every version of myself that felt unseen…

Every moment I felt rejected.

Every time I was made to believe that I was too much, too complicated, or too hard to love.

Every time I was made to believe I had to earn love… by being her.

The other night felt unbearable whilst I was living through it. I wanted to die just to make the pain stop.

But looking back, I can see it wasn’t really about one moment, but years of fear, grief, loss and loneliness colliding as one. And perhaps there is something comforting in understanding that, not because it makes the pain disappear but because it reminds me that there is a reason it hurts so much.