Hi!

I hope you are doing alright!

I have this new issue that has been occuring more and more the last couple of days and I am wondering if it has something to do with PCS and if anyone has experienced something similar to it.


The thing is that my thoughts starts racing and everything I look at I automatically associate with something that it reminds me of, in an ocd kind of way.

It is normal to associate things with other things in a normal non disturbing way, but this is something new. Everything I look at, hear or even think, and I mean EVERYTHING, the slightest shadow, colors, shapes, textures, all objects, faces, feelings, thoughts, words, lines etc etc, I compulsively associate with something in my mind that makes the thing feel familiar(it feels like I don't recognize the object fully until this strong association thing is complete, which takes just a fraction of a second but long enough for me to notice the process).

I see the color blue and in an instant I see memories with blue incorporated, I feel the blueness, I think of something more or less related to that blueness, and maybe one second later I move on to associating to the next thing my eye or ear or mind picks up. It feels like this usually happens in the unconcious mind more and bigger associations happens on a more concious level, but I notice all the small associations and my mind freezes up on one thing until I am done associating stuff with it. I am not feeling like I am doing this on my own, it is happening without me interfering but when I get the slightest stressed it starts up all crazy and I just feel like I am completely losing my mind.

I have always been a person who very strongly associates and focuses on how I percieve things, maybe due to high anxiety levels for most of my life and fears of being attacked in my family and such. It may be like a protective thing, I don't know, but it has just become crazy these past few days and maybe before it was something I focused on of say 15% of my mind constantly and now it has become a 99% thing.

It feels like confusion mixed with anxiety, paranoia and ocd all in one crazy soup.

Could this be a PCS thing? Have you felt like this? Any ideas on what to do about this? I have noticed my other PCS symptoms getting worse over these past few days aswell, like saying one thing when I mean another, veeery tires, unfocused, headachy etc.

I haven't experienced this, but I have been having constant flashbacks of random memories from my childhood and teens ever since I hit my head. I mean, not even moments that were big events or anything...the most random stuff ever.

Like...I drive by the bagel shop and suddenly remember that I once ate a cheese bagel on my break at my first job. Just weird stuff like that. I also have anxiety, so I couldn't tell you what it's from.

What's really weird is that I used to remember barely anything from my childhood and now I remember the stupidest little things.

I can relate to having memories from my childhood that I have not thought of in years. It is like you memories were stirred and new ones have come to the top.

I have taken the same holiday for 6 years in a row and the year after my head injury I remembered things I could not remember the year before. It is really bizarre.

I've had the same thoughts, a little maudlin really, past memories and stuff coming back. I think it is anxiety, seems to be the common thread with PCS, it takes different forms as the PCS plays out, first it's panic attacks, nausea, fast heart beat, then it calms down and becomes general anxiety like the brain is over excited and trying to process too much info. Maybe it's internalised fear that we're dealing with?

This! Wow. I feel like I'm way too focused on the past. I know I keep feeling like I need to share all of these memories of random nothingness with my kids and I feel like it's strange. I get flooded all the time with memories of the past that I've never thought about before.

And, flooding is perhaps a very apt descriptor.

Dr. Claudia Osborn in her book, Over My Head, a self-disclosed account of her own TBI life experience, was the first to speak of flooding to me.

It still grips me from time to time, the neverending tape replay from past life, memories.