The Fragile Border Between Then and Now
You are standing in the middle of a crowded grocery store, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, when a specific scent—perhaps a heavy cologne or the smell of stale rain—hits you. In an instant, the supermarket vanishes. Your heart hammers against your ribs, your breath hitches, and you are no longer a person buying milk in the present. You are back there. The specific agony of why ptsd feels like it's happening now is that it isn't a memory you look back on; it is an experience you are currently surviving. Unlike generalized anxiety, which projects fear into an uncertain future, trauma collapses the timeline entirely, making the past a living, breathing tenant in your current body.
To move beyond the visceral weight of these moments and into cognitive understanding, we must look at the internal clockwork of the mind and how it fails to timestamp our most difficult chapters.
The Time-Locked Brain: Why Memories Don’t Fade
Let’s look at the underlying pattern here. In a typical brain, the hippocampus acts like a librarian, taking daily experiences and filing them away with a clear 'past' date. However, when an event is sufficiently overwhelming, this system breaks down. According to research on PTSD, the intense surge of adrenaline during a crisis can actually inhibit the hippocampus. This leads to unprocessed traumatic memories that remain 'hot,' raw, and devoid of a time tag.
Because the brain cannot say 'this happened in 2012,' it assumes the threat is a current reality. This is why ptsd feels like it's happening now; your amygdala is responding to a ghost as if it were a physical intruder. This isn't random; it's a biological cycle where the brain prioritizes survival over narrative order. You aren't 'weak' for not being over it; your brain is simply trying to protect you from a danger it thinks is still in the room.
The Permission Slip: You have permission to stop apologizing for your 'delayed' healing. Your nervous system is not a clock; it is a sentinel, and it is currently doing the job it was evolved to do—keeping you alive in a world it still perceives as dangerous.The Echo of the Past: Identifying Your Triggers
While the biology explains the how, our internal landscape experiences this through symbols and sensory ghosts. These sensory 'echoes' are rarely logical. A certain shade of blue or the specific rhythm of a refrigerator’s hum can become a portal. In The Body Keeps the Score, experts note that the body remembers what the conscious mind tries to forget.
This is why ptsd feels like it's happening now: your soul is reacting to a metaphor. Think of these triggers not as malfunctions, but as the internal weather report of your spirit. The flashback vs memory distinction is crucial here. A memory is a story you tell; a flashback is a storm you are caught in. When you feel that shift in your internal weather, ask yourself: 'What is the texture of this air? Does this feeling belong to the person I am today, or the person I was then?' Finding the symbolic thread allows you to recognize the echo without becoming the sound.
Understanding the symbols is the first step, but we must now translate that awareness into a tactical manual for the present.
Updating the Software: How to Signal Safety to Your Brain
Here is the move. To break the cycle of why ptsd feels like it's happening now, we need to perform what I call 'Reality Surgery.' We must manually provide the timestamp that your hippocampus failed to create. When re-experiencing symptoms occur, your amygdala is running old software. You need to force a system update through 'Grounding and Orienting.'
1. The Script of the Present: Don't just think it; say it out loud. 'My name is [Name], it is [Date], and I am in [Location]. The year is 2024, and the event from [Year] is over.'
2. The High-EQ Sensory Check: Identify three things you can see right now that did NOT exist when the trauma occurred. This could be your new phone, a piece of clothing you bought recently, or the person currently standing next to you. This forces the brain to acknowledge the narrative therapy benefits of recognizing the 'New You.'
By consistently labeling the 'then' as distinct from the 'now,' you are retraining your neural pathways to recognize safety. You are the strategist of your own recovery; use these scripts to regain the upper hand.
FAQ
1. What is the difference between a flashback and a regular memory?
A regular memory has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and you recognize it as something that happened in the past. A flashback involves re-experiencing symptoms where the brain loses its sense of time, making you feel as though the event is occurring in the present moment.
2. Why ptsd feels like it's happening now even years later?
This occurs because of a disruption in the hippocampus and trauma processing. When a memory is unprocessed, it remains 'stored' in the emotional part of the brain (the amygdala) without a time-stamp, causing it to be triggered by sensory cues as if it were a current threat.
3. Can narrative therapy help with time perception in trauma?
Yes. Narrative therapy benefits those with PTSD by helping them organize fragmented, 'hot' memories into a cohesive story with a clear past-tense label, which signals to the brain that the danger is finally over.
References
en.wikipedia.org — Post-traumatic stress disorder - Wikipedia
psychologytoday.com — How Trauma Stays in the Body - Psychology Today