If you’ve ever had a flashback, you’ll know how disorientating and terrifying it can be. Flashbacks are known to be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) where the person can literally see and hear the traumatic event as if it were happening again right now. Yet there is also a kind of flashback that may not include visual or auditory aspects, and instead is more of a feeling – as though thrown back into the threatening circumstances from childhood.

Abusive relationships can do a lot of damage to your emotional health and mental well-being.

It can feel painful and deeply distressing — to say the absolute least — when someone you love and trust:

- begins to criticize you or put you down

- tries to control or manipulate you into doing what they want

- becomes physically or sexually abusive

After any type of trauma (from combat to car accidents, natural disasters to domestic violence, sexual assault to child abuse), the brain and body change. Every cell records memories and every embedded, trauma-related neuropathway has the opportunity to repeatedly reactivate.

Most people have some level of awareness of PTSD, particularly as it applies to people returning from the war zones in the Middle East. PTSD was also evident in other soldiers returning from battle in the past, but there was limited recognition of the changes brought about by severe trauma in these earlier wars.

Emotional blackmail describes a style of manipulation where someone uses your feelings as a way to control your behavior or persuade you to see things their way.

Most people are familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that results from a traumatic event, such as a natural disaster or car accident.

However, a closely related condition called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) is becoming more widely recognized by doctors in recent years. CPTSD results from repeated trauma over months or years, rather than a single event.

For those who experience hypervigilance, habits that form in response to certain stimuli can be tough to break. Hypervigilance can make you feel constantly on edge or “high alert,” which can feel frustrating and even exhausting. The habitual reactions seem to happen automatically, as if you can’t control how your body responds.