I am suffering from PTSD flashbacks. I start to feel my heart race, rapid breathing, and then BAM I am back to the place it happened as if I am there. Everything I feel, see, smell, etc...I am there. When I finally come out of it, my muscles hurt everywhere as if I was just running a marathon or something, sometimes I even pass out. I sometimes feel sick to my stomach or like I might throw up. It sometimes feels like I felt the day after the incidents happened.

It feels as if I just had it happen all over again, but I only remember bits and pieces and almost like snapshots from what happened like it's watching a movie in fast forward mode, or sometimes like it goes forward and back a bunch of times...and sometimes pauses or freeze frames on significant terrifying aspects of the trauma.

Is this typical of a flashback? Do other people feel like this?
What do you do to cope? what do you do to try to stop it before it starts? How do you know it's coming before you are in the middle of it?

any advice would be really appreciated. I feel so alone in this.