Welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast.

I'm your host, Josephine Hartman.

I'm an intuitive healer and certified Akashik Records reader and teacher,

driven by the purpose of helping others become more powerful by reconnecting to the healer within.

To explore my work or connect with me, you can visit josephinehardman.com.

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I so appreciate your presence here, and I'm honored to serve as a guide or companion on your path for a little while.

Now, on to the episode.

An emotional flashback is a sensory, full-body experience of regressing back to a previous emotional state. I first learned about emotional

flashbacks while I was reading a book on complex PTSD. I was doing this over the holidays.

So in that context, emotional flashbacks are defined as a regression into an emotional state from childhood.

I want to read you some of the words from this book, which is called complex PTSD from

surviving to thriving, written by author Pete Walker.

So he says, emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged

regressions to the overwhelming feeling states of being an abused or abandoned child. These feeling

states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief, and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight,

flight instincts. So that's the end of the quote. And while I was reading this book, I realized we could

actually expand this definition of an emotional flashback to cover not only regressions to

childhood emotional states, but also to emotional states from adolescence, from being in the womb,

from experiences we've had in adulthood, and even from past life experiences because we can definitely have emotional

flashbacks that take us back to a time before this current lifetime, to a past life trauma

or to trauma that we experienced as teenagers or adults. What happens is that there is a trigger, so something triggers us, and then that trigger sends us

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