I don't know if I'm having flashbacks

[dirzted]

When i was around 15 I got a hold of an eighth of shrooms and I was a complete moron and took them all by myself at my house and made no plans for the day (please hold off on the scolding I am quite aware of how stupid that is thank you very much).
To be brief, I basically felt the worst I have ever felt in my life, worse then when I found out my mom was a heroin addict or when my parents got divorced, worse than ANYTHING I have EVER felt.
Luckily I was able to call my brother and he came over and took care of me and I slowly came out of it and was ok afterward, but still for a solid hour I was curled up in the corner of my living room wanting to die.
Fast forward to now, about 4 years later.
I didn't have any bad feelings or depression at all after the trip, but now, external forces seem to sort of "turn on" that spiraling terror I felt on that day. It's getting to the point where it's almost debilitating and making daily life much more stressful. I don't necessarily start tripping out or anything, I mean I feel a slight alteration of consciousness, but mainly it's just this frightening anxiety sort of feeling. It isn't quite as bad as it was on the day of the trauma, but it's still pretty bad.
So I'm wondering if this is still considered a sort of "flashback" because I don't have any visual distortions or anything, I just start feeling a lesser degree of that terror I described above.
Any responses would be much appreciated.

 

[Solipsis]

Well not exactly, if you have a flashback you relive not only a feeling but a memory, because something that happens may trigger a memory that is extremely strong or traumatic (what happened when you were 15 sounds like it would certainly qualify) and that brings along the feeling.

It seems like you are having something related though: something about tripping in general seems to make you anxious and this can be something you 'learned' from the very bad experience. You may now have associations, probably wired into your limbic system, that can make you alert, anxious, scared (or name other negative and stressful emotions) because you have learned that you need to watch out when tripping. I guess that is an evolution-favored mechanism teaching you to protect yourself on a very deep and hardwired level and it is tough to turn that switch off.

Many people IMO mistake HPPD or emotional associations or other phenomena more or less related to flashbacks as actually being flashbacks. That I deny this does not mean that I think these other things are potentially any less severe, I just differentiate between them. All these kinds of things together can be reason for people to be appprehensive about tripping, and from ignorance there is one fabled word most familiar and that is the 'flashback'.

Actually flashbacks may not be so bad in all cases. I had an extreme experience with mushrooms when I was 18 or 19 that scarred me for life. Months later I had a flashback triggered by hearing the one and only song that I put on when the experience was over and I found out that my life that I had suddenly seen as an illusion, would continue.
But the flashback was not scary, I was not anxious, even though that trip had been a full on spiritual near death experience that jarred me to my core. But I was reliving a part of it, it was really flashing before me in a way.

The emotional association you seem to be dealing with is also not a phenomenon that is by definition bad because it is related to learning and we can be happy to avoid making the same mistakes in a lot of cases. This is not so much cognitive learning as learning to attach emotional labels to experiences, most of which just determine our likes and dislikes but some make us really run away or towards something.

The road will probably be or can be a bit long and hard to change something that is set in such a harsh way. By slowly building up a dose with psychedelics or weed (also a psychedelic of course), and really taking a look at what it is you are feeling and why... that can loosen it up. Over time you may overwrite those associations by teaching yourself that there can be very positive sides to tripping. I guess this approach is related to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (read about it), and in every situation here the event and behavior and feeling are all the same:
You take a psychedelic, you start feeling anxious / frightened or something like that.
The next step is analyzing, understanding and fully realizing why (I think you have found that out yourself already but there is a little more to it, which I just tried to explain).
Realizing this can make the feeling less fixed in place. Because failing to understand or acknowledge something freezes something and then the feeling has you instead of the other way around.
Open yourself up (gradually, slowly, and highly preferably with a good trusted friend to talk with), in a lot of cases the unresolved feelings from that bad experience at age 15 will start to come out - in my experience this is painful but also extremely relieving, it is called catharsis - , then you are definitely on the path to be healed but take it easy and be honest with yourself about it.
Trying to skip it because you want to have an unburdened happy trip may or may not be possible before you start working on this, because your associated memory-emotion will likely conflict with that and that will often lead to malaise and confusion about why that keeps happening.

 

[Foreigner]

^ This is great advice. The one thing I'd like to add is that sometimes tripping a second time, but under ideal and completely supportive circumstances, can help to reframe the first trip which was a nightmare. Psychedelics have the beneficial quality of enhancing novelty and creativity which allows you to reframe a lot in your life. Just like psychedelics can cause trauma, they are also used in experimental therapy to heal trauma... so it can go both ways.

I'm not telling you to go out and do a psychedelic in order to get better. There are other things you can do that can achieve that. My point is, if you decide to do a psychedelic again, you can try setting up your environment to be really supportive and nurturing, and invite a good friend to be with you. Having a really good trip can undo trauma from a previous trip. My first experience with mushrooms was a nightmare, but in later trips I had really rewarding breakthrough experiences that rendered the first bad one irrelevant.

 

[dirzted]

I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to engage in another psychedelic experience just yet but thinking more about it and talking about it seems to be a good idea-
Thanks so much for the advice guys really appreciate it

 

[phatlyter5]

It sounds like hppd and probably PTSD combined. When I ate 8 grams of blue dragon hydroponics it stayed with me till even today. But I'm happy its still there it reminds me of where I used to be before ego death. Now after ego death I see thing cleaner and clearer! And to be reminded that I am a perfect being and I don't need "things" to be happy all I need is myself. Everyday. Shit life aint that bad. So realize what that day meant to u. I got stuck in a time loop for 20 mins thought I was in it for 3hrs. They clock time kept changing from 7:32 to 8:03....

 

[dirzted]

I know this is a super old thread and no one will probably see this but your recommendations to slowly build up the confidence for another psychedelic experience stayed with me over the past few years, until just recently I decided to give it another go in a better setting (this time with about 150ug of LSD). I was able to experience what an actual "good" trip is this time, with the increasing intensity resulting in a visionary experience (my visual field entirely dropped out, couldn't tell if my eyes were open or closed) that prompted feelings of intense fear that I was able to confront, relinquish control over, and consequently rectify, thus healing a lot of the trauma I described in the above post. This was truly a healing experience for me and my motivation to do this was originally brought about by the writings in this post, and for that I'd really like to thank you Solipsis and Foreigner for the advice, it really helped me reach a catharsis that seemed to relieve a lot of negative emotion I had previously been holding on to since my original experience with mushrooms nearly 8 years ago. On top of that I have now been able to enjoy psychedelics, a drug class I felt I had completely neglected and yet is one of the most important to experience.
Thank you.