When the Feeling Comes Without a Picture: Emotional Flashbacks

Not every flashback is a scene. Some come with no picture at all — no memory you could name, nothing your eyes can see — only a sudden, drowning flood of terror, or grief, or a smallness so complete that you seem to shrink inside your own body. One moment you are folding laundry at the counter; the next you are gasping beneath a feeling far too vast for the quiet room you are standing in. And because there is no image to explain it, you turn the blame inward: There is no reason for this. What is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you. There is a reason — you simply cannot see it, and that is exactly what makes it so bewildering, and so lonely, to carry.

This is an emotional flashback: old feeling arriving precisely on time, but with no memory fastened to it. Somewhere inside, a part is remembering in the only way she can — not in pictures, but in the body, in the pure and wordless language of how it once felt. The terror is not lying to you about now. It is telling the truth about then. It is a great wave that set out from far offshore, long ago, and has only now reached the sand — and like every wave, it will crest, and break, and slide back out to sea.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. — Isaiah 43:2

You are not being dragged back to drown. You are being carried through. The feeling is a messenger, not a sentence — and you are not, not for one moment, alone in the water.

Rest Here.