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csa-survivor-confessions · 10 months

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Coping Skills: Emotional Flashbacks

What are Emotional Flashbacks?

An emotional flashback is when we are triggered into living in the emotional/psychological state we experienced during our traumatic childhood experiences. We experience a regression to the emotional state of a child in trauma. This can be an experience that we are not aware of, either thinking it is about the current situation or knowing that our emotions are all over the place/disproportionate but unsure where the feelings are coming from.

Example A) You could be in a situation where you can’t easily leave (IE leaving could negatively affect a job, can not get out of a social situation or traffic). This can cause you to feel trapped. This trapped feeling is elevated beyond a normal amount and causes you to be dysregulated and negatively impacts the situation. You then might spend hours in a state of feeling trapped and the knock-on emotional effects like helplessness, fear, agitation etc. This could be because you were often or always physically or emotionally trapped in a situation of abuse as a child.

Example B) At a performance review at work you receive feedback on areas where you could improve. Instead of feeling moderately discouraged, you feel terror and shame even to the point of having trembling hands or crying. You feel a consistent level of fear hanging around. This could be because criticism or not meeting a level of “perfection” often resulted in shaming or punishment.

Emotional Flashbacks In The Brain:

When we experience chronic childhood trauma we have our neurology and biochemistry altered. So when we have external or internal reminders of our trauma those old patterns are activated. We can end up in the emotional state we were in during childhood. We are “hijacked” by our amygdala, the emotional and survival parts of our brain.

Our stress response system is activated (Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn) and we are thrown out of our window of tolerance (hyper/hypoarousal). The neurochemistry of our brains and the hormonal chemistry of our bodies during stressful events cause our brains to encode information differently. Experiences of trauma can leave our body unable to properly process trauma and leave us vulnerable to living in stress constantly. The change in the way our brain encodes information leads to us being able to be triggered into flashbacks.

The repeating of mental and behaviour patterns from our traumatic childhood are also in part facilitated by our Implicit Memory System.

Sings You Are In An Emotional Flashback:

When our emotions are not matching the current situation we are in or the intensity is disproportionate to what we are going through right now is a good clue that you have been triggered into an emotional flashback. Your body is flooded with the brain and body patterns of a younger you.

Common Feelings:

Childlike

Fragile

Helpless

Hopeless

Intense shame

Lost

On edge

Rage

Small

Terror

Unstable

Common Thought Patterns:

Black-and-white thinking

Can be tied to intrusive thoughts

Catastrophising

Confusion

Difficulty finding words to communicate

Distrusting people or situations you have trusted

Judgmental of other

Mind going blank

Self judgmental

Trouble interacting with other people

Common Behaviours:

Disordered eating behaviours

Binge eating

Purging

Restricted eating

Endless scrolling

Getting into fights

Getting lost in fictional stories to the detriment of your relationships and ability to to do self-care

Isolating

Utilising substances to excess:

Alcohol

Misuse of OTC medications

Misuse of prescriptions

Unregulated drugs (heroin, cocaine, etc.)

Triggers of Emotional Flashbacks:

More information and the breakdown of coping under the cut

Triggers can be internal or external and don’t even always make sense right away.

External:

Being in a place where traumatic things happened

Being drunk and/or high

Being somewhere that looks like where the trauma happened

Being with the people who were involved in trauma

Criticism

Crowds

Facial expressions or body language perceived as threatening

Facial expressions or body language perceived as disapproval or disgust

Loud voices

Media depicting events similar to your trauma

Medical with characters who remind you of the perpetrator of the abuse

Others engaged in fighting

Passive-aggressive behaviour or perceived as passive-aggressive

People who are drunk and/or high

People who look like those who traumatised you

Physical touch of any kind

Smells that remind you of trauma

Sounds that remind you of the trauma

And anything else that our brain has linked to trauma

Internal:

Daydreams that drift into visualising traumatic situations

Illness

Injuries

Intrusive thoughts

Physical pain from any source

Rumination on personal faults

Rumination of feelings of vulnerability

Thirst and hunger

and others

Coping With Emotional Flashbacks

These steps are adapted from the work of Pete Walker (LMFT)

These skills do not all need to be done every time, sometimes skipping a step might be necessary or repeating a step.

1) Say To Yourself: “I am having a flashback”

When you realise you are feeling a flashback it can feel very frightening and placing yourself in time can be very hard. You can feel helpless, by acknowledging you are in a flashback you can know you are in the now

2) Remind Yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger”

You are scared, but that does not mean you are in the same place you were when you were hurt. You are in the now, and you have the power to make decisions now.

3) Own Your Right to Have Boundaries

You can explain to people that their behaviours are upsetting you. You also have the right to leave situations that are causing distress.

4) Speak to Your Inner Child

Imagine your inner child and tell yourself what you needed to hear in the past. Emotional flashbacks are pulling from past fears, your inner child deserves to be treasured with unconditional love. Tell the little you that you will be there for them now. They are not abandoned. If there are specific messages you ache to hear from others, offer those reassurances to the inner child.

5) Deconstruct Eternity Thinking

Challenge the idea that this feeling will last forever. The pain was long in the past and now you can be in charge of moving forward. Again try and hold that this is a flashback and therefore not forever.

6) Remind Yourself You Are In An Adult body

You have control now, you are bigger and can make your own choices. You have the power to act now in ways you didn’t have in the past. Like with eternity thinking you can practice reminding yourself of this regularly to increase the ability to hold this truth during flashbacks.

7) Ease Back Into Your Body

Work through the dissociative state that flashbacks put you in.

Breathe deeply: focus on the pace of our breathing and how it feels.

Gently work with your body to promote relaxation: Try progressive muscle relaxation: Tighten each muscle group starting from the feet or forehead. Breathe in and hold as you tighten and then breathe out as you release the tension

Slow down your movements: Try to reduce the stress you’re putting on your body and move out of protective mode.

Get to a safe place: If you can get to a place where you feel relatively safe and can take time to soothe your body. Warm blankets, calming music, stuffed animals, and low-sensory environments can all help.

Feel fear without acting on it: Let the energy in your body move while in a place that feels safe. Attempt to not act out to the point of harm on the strong emotions. If to remain some action is necessary try to make sure the movement is not overexercising. You want to discharge the activation without hurting yourself. and then have plenty of time to rest. The goal is to be able to feel the fear without compulsive activity or shutdown.

8) Resist Drasticizing & Catastrophizing

Use thought-stopping: When thoughts that are degrading to yourself or trying to predict that things going forward will be horrible think stop and/or say stop. Putting pressure on your body as you think it, clapping your hands, or stomping your foot can help this be effective.

Use thought substitution and correction: Over time you can learn to replace the negative thought patterns with statements you memorise to counter the automatic thoughts. Statements that promote your self-efficacy and accomplishments.

9) Allow Yourself to Grieve

If you are in a place where you are safe, bringing grief into the moment can be efficacious in reducing the power of flashbacks. Feel the emotions brought up and offer yourself compassion. It’s okay to recognize and over time validate the pain and unfairness you have faced in the past. If helpful for you can imagine consoling your inner child.

10) Cultivate Safe Relationships & Seek Support

It’s good and healthy to learn to be able to handle flashbacks on your own. However, this does not mean it’s wrong or weak to reach out to others. Co-regulation, being with another person who helps you come back to a calmer and more engaged state, can be very powerful. Having people who you can reach out to during tough times with emotional flashbacks will help you to internalise the ability to manage yourself as well as be a lifeline if your symptoms are more overwhelming than normal.

You are not a burden by asking for help and sharing what helps you cope. It is important to be reciprocal with the help if the person is a friend, partner or family member (as opposed to professionals), this does mean that needing support makes you selfish or a bad person. Healing through bonds with other people is part of being human.

11) Learn The Triggers That tend to Provoke Emotional Flashbacks

Pay attention to what situations, people and thought patterns precede emotional flashbacks. Keeping a log can often be very helpful.

It can also be efficacious to consider which of these are non-essential activities, situations, and relationships (in the case of internal feelings or thoughts that can learn to deal with). The triggers that are not necessary for your life can be avoided or minimised. It’s not cowardly or wrong to step back from things that are only causing distress and not giving you anything you need.

Things that are necessary or unavoidable can be learned to be coped with or even modified. Learning coping skills to deal with different aspects of flashbacks, anxiety, dissociation, intrusive thoughts and sensory distress is key here. Managing the symptoms will make life easier as you learn them, generally before you can get to processing the more narrative aspects of trauma. Dealing with nervous system distress and vulnerability is generally very useful to do during recovery.

You can also figure out if the situation would allow you to bring aids like fidget toys, other stimming aids, ear defenders, things to colour/write with etc. If the situation itself can be modified, like allowing you to take more breaks. You can also request to be warned if triggering subject matter, flashing lights, group projects or other triggers are going to be a part of lessons/work so you can prepare yourself.

If the situation is with a job, reaching out to HR or a disability coordinator can be helpful or if in school there are usually offices that deal with disability and accommodations. However, a diagnosed mental illness might be necessary to make these options open to you. But the above-mentioned things like stimming aids, warnings and other things might be able to be negotiated with people without a diagnosis.

If you are dealing with interpersonal relationships you can do internal work to set up boundaries. This can start with what you will do to handle specific upsets and what actions you are willing to do. If safe you can share some of your boundaries so they are aware of where you stand. And you can even figure out if they are someone you can work together with to strengthen your relationship through ongoing dialogue about boundaries and supporting one another’s health and well-being.

Dealing with people who are not going to work with you or are very hurtful to you can be very hard. One way to deal with this is to decide how much of yourself you are going to invest. If it is unavoidable that you have to be with them, like extended family or colleagues, you can back away from putting in more time and feelings. You don’t have to put in extra work or hours than you have to. You can share less of your emotional world and perspectives. Conversation can be kept to a minimum. This does not mean you need to be rude or mean, you can be polite, but you try to make your emotional wellness not tied to them.

You can also figure out what is intolerable for you, what will cause you to leave an interaction with them or even cut off contact completely. It’s good to know what behaviour violates you psychologically and/or physically. It’s important to think this through, to make sure the line is drawn at a reasonable point and that you have ways to keep yourself safe should people cross it.

12) Figure Out What You Are Flashing Back To

This step should be done with caution if you are not out of the traumatising situation (IE living with the perpetrator[s] or with other abusive parties).

What triggers flashbacks and what emotions are being experienced can give you clues as to what wounds you are carrying with you. Our community has generally experienced CSA, but it is still important to learn what emotions these experiences have left in you. Recognizing the emotion can help you work through it in conversation, writing, art, and finding the best coping skills. If you seek professional help it can lead to what treatment might work best. Knowing what feelings you have and their origin can also help you grieve and offer yourself compassion and understanding. It can make working with your inner child and/or inner world more healing.

It can help with re-parenting, if this is something you need to do, to know what deficits and abandonment you are still carrying with you.

Knowing what triggers bring up with strongest responses, and the kind of response can make metabolising these memories easier. Being able to reconnect the emotional, somatic, and narrative properties of experience can help us feel more fully human and healthy.

13) Be Patient & Kind to Yourself During Your Journey

Recovery takes different amounts and time and styles of coping for every person. The trauma was individual, your DNA and body are unique so is the help (or lack thereof) you got after the trauma. Do not be mad at yourself for having flashbacks and other trauma responses. Work to combat blaming and shaming thoughts when they come up. Let yourself move through all the facets of your story and heal as slowly or quickly as is right for you.

You can heal and will get there, and it’s okay whatever that looks like.

Citations:

Braman, L. (2022, May 5). The Difference Between Emotional Flashbacks & Flashbacks. Lindsay Braman. https://lindsaybraman.com/emotional-flashbacks/#what-are-emotional-flashbacks

Bruce Duncan Perry, & Oprah Winfrey. (2021). What happened to you? : conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Flatiron Books.

Davis, S. (2019, July 1). The Living Hell of Emotional Flashbacks. CPTSD Foundation. https://cptsdfoundation.org/2019/07/01/the-living-hell-of-emotional-flashbacks/

Der, V., E R S Nijenhuis, & Steele, K. (2006). The haunted self : structural dissociation and the treatment of chronic traumatization. W.W. Norton.

East Bay Therapist. (2005, October). EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS | Healing & C-PTSD. Healing and C-PTSD. https://www.healingandcptsd.com/emotional-flashbacks

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger – healing trauma : the innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences. North Atlantic Books.

Levine, P. A. (2015). Trauma and memory : brain and body in a search for the living past : a practical guide for understanding and working with traumatic memory. North Atlantic Books.

Walker, P. (2021). Complex PTSD : from surviving to thriving : a guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma (first Edition). Azure Coyote.

#blog post #info #informational article #coping skills #our post #ptsd #cptsd #childhood trauma #trauma #flashbacks #emotional flashbacks #abuse recovery #trauma recovery

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stereksummerexchange · 7 years

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Living That No-Neighbor Life

@braedens | AO3 - everybody probably knows by now that ace!Derek is my favorite thing, so bless you for giving me an excuse to write more of it ^u^

by @clotpolesonly

“So the real estate agent makes the assumption that their marriage involves sex. Most people do! Derek sees it on his face the second Stiles decides to be a dick about it this time, but he knows better than to think he can stop it. All he can do is pinch the bridge of his nose and brace himself as the bright, false smile lights up his beloved husband’s face.”

The first place was an apartment and it was too cramped. The second was a duplex but wasn’t nearly nice enough for the price. The third was a tract house that may or may not have been the set of a horror movie in the past, or if it hadn’t then it was missing its chance. By the fourth place, Derek was starting to lose faith in their frazzled but determinedly perky real estate agent.

“This next one is a real zinger,” she said after each flop. “Best of the bunch! I’ve been fighting people off with a stick!”

Stiles had snorted the first two times she’d said it, laughed outright the third, and by now he had resorted to mocking her under his breath and shooting exasperated looks at Derek.

Derek could handle the perkiness if he had to—that sort of attitude tended to deflate when it ran into his natural stoicism anyway, at least after a while—but Stiles’ tendency towards earnest-sounding sarcasm just added fuel to her fire when she didn’t recognize that it was sarcasm. She took it at face value and genuinely thought that he was as excited as she was.

With this mistaken camaraderie in mind, she seemed to have taken Stiles as more of a new friend than a client she needed to be professional with. She kept whispering asides to him conspiratorially, thinking Derek couldn’t hear her, which made the both of them roll their eyes as soon as she turned away to espouse the virtues of the newest property.

It was never anything bad or mean-spirited, at least. Just gossipy.

“No worrying about landlords here, no sir! Only so many times you can lie about the dog before you lose your mind, am I right?”

“The owner says these are the original floors, but between you and me? Definitely repanelled. Twice!”

“Hell of a catch you got with this one, kid. Hubba-hubba!”

That last one was a little cringe-worthy, but it was far from the first time Derek had overheard comments like that about himself. He was used to it, and even Stiles had taken that one on the chin with a smile and a “Yup, he’s all mine!”

But then they reached the seventh place on the agent’s never-ending list. It was a gorgeous two-storey house with an open floor plan, a backyard that bordered a small strip of woods, and an isolation that drove the price down where they could afford it without dipping into the Hale insurance money. Derek was smiling almost as soon as he got out of the car, seeing wide windows perfectly positioned to let in the kind of light he would need for his painting. Stiles bumped his shoulder on the way up the drive and took off to explore as soon as the agent got the door open.

“It’s a bit out of the way,” the agent said apologetically. “But the road’s got a straight shot into town and the school zoning is excellent, for whenever that comes up for you two. This house is definitely big enough for a few young ‘uns! Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, more than enough!”

“Der, this place has got a trap door to the roof. How cool is that?” Stiles called as he came clomping down the staircase. “You can see over the trees for like fifty miles in every direction.”

“Fifty miles?” Derek repeated. “Really?”

“Maybe slightly hyperbolic,” Stiles allowed, “but that’s totally not the point. There’s no one around anywhere.”

For a growing pack of werewolves with a penchant for getting into fights, that could only be a good thing. Fewer witnesses, fewer potential civilian casualties, fewer people to notice when the inevitable second generation started teething with actual fangs.

The agent though, humans as she was, set about apologizing again right away, listing all the compensating features ad nauseam. Derek was content to ignore her, focusing all his attention on watching Stiles flit around the spacious living room, running his hands over all the display furniture and poking his head out all of the windows.

But then the agent ended her sales pitch with a nudge to Stiles’ side and a sly, “And no nosy neighbors? No shared walls? That just means you can be as loud as you want in the bedroom, am I right?”

Derek saw it on his face the second Stiles decided to be a dick about it, but he knew better than to think he could stop it. All he could do was pinch the bridge of his nose and brace himself as the bright, false smile lit up his beloved husband’s face.

“Yes!” Stiles said definitively. “Yes, you are so right! God, Derek, that’ll be such a relief, won’t it?”

“Sure it will, honey.”

“Finally, we can put away the gags,” Stiles went on with an exaggerated sigh of relief. He leaned in toward the agent, whose mouth had fallen open in shock; she clearly had not expected him to agree in such sordid detail. “You know, our last neighbors hated us. You’d never believe how many noise complaints we got because of our sex noises. We just—”

Stiles stopped to scoff, his eyebrows doing a complicated wriggling motion that was probably intended to be suggestive. He sent Derek a commiserating look that didn’t falter in the slightest when Derek’s response was less than impressed.

“We just have so much sex!” Stiles said loudly to the scandalized agent. “Like, so much sex! Really, just, everywhere, you know? I’m so glad this place has three bedrooms, ‘cause we’re gonna need ‘em, you know what I mean? And don’t even get me started on that bathtub upstairs! That’ll be perfect for that thing we do every single night with the—”

“Stiles.”

“Won’t it, Der?” Stiles asked, undeterred. “No neighbors, Derek! Isn’t that great for all that sex we’re having? So much sex, I’m surprised we haven’t pulled a muscle, but we’re still young and there’ll be time for more sex-related injuries when we’re old and decrepit and still having sex, right?”

“So you, uh…” the poor agent started to say, but she was so shellshocked that it took her several seconds to rally herself. “So you…like the house then?”

“Of course we do, it’s perfect for having—”

“We like the house,” Derek said, firmly enough to put an end to it. “We’re going to look around a bit more today, if you don’t mind, but we’ll meet you back at your office to finish the paperwork at your earliest convenience. Thanks for your time.”

She bustled out the door without even a cheerful “have a nice day,” and Stiles was laughing the second she was out of hearing range, bent over with the force of it and braced on his knees.

“Aw, man, did you see her face?”

“Was that really necessary?” Derek asked, though the corners of his mouth were turning up no matter how hard he tried to pull them into something disapproving. He could never resist a smile when Stiles laughed like that, even after all these years.

“Sure it was,” Stiles said, straightening up and wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. “If people are gonna make assumptions like that, then they should be prepared to get confirmation of it. Don’t bring up sex if you don’t wanna talk about sex.”

“Assumptions like thinking a married couple probably have sex with each other?” Derek asked. “That’s not exactly out of the ballpark. It’s an assumption pretty much everyone makes.”

“Well, they shouldn’t,” Stiles said staunchly, coming forward to wrap arms around Derek’s waist and pull him close. “Just because we’re married, that doesn’t require sex. Asexuality is a thing and sex-repulsion is also a thing and—”

“And most people don’t know that.”

“They should,” Stiles repeated. “And I will mock them until they do.”

“I appreciate your oblique efforts towards educating the world about my orientation,” Derek said, half joking and half sincere, “but all that? Did you really have to traumatize her with graphic accounts of our fictional sex life?”

“She started it!” Stiles protested. “I just responded in kind. It’s not my fault she wasn’t prepared to hear the answer to her own question. What’s wrong with appreciating the irony here?”

Derek shook his head. “I don’t think that’s quite what irony is, babe.”

“Fuck if I know,” Stiles said with a shrug. “That one song really fucked up my understanding of the concept. If rain on your wedding day isn’t ironic, then what the hell is? Seriously.”

“Not this.”

“That’s very helpful, love, thank you for your input on the subject.”

Despite his snark, Stiles dropped a kiss on Derek’s lips before extricating himself from the embrace. He headed toward the back of the house instead, leaning out the back door to critically eye the yard and moving on to poke around in the kitchen. Derek was content to let Stiles take the lead on the in depth examination; they’d both already decided they were going to buy it anyway. This was just Stiles’ natural curiosity and nosiness at work.

“She was right about one thing,” Stiles said as Derek followed in his wake, already lost in imaginings of Stiles cooking here, bed-headed and in his pajamas, early on a Sunday morning with the sunrise gilding him through the east-facing row of windows.

“What’s that?” Derek asked absently. But his attention was caught fully when Stiles turned back to him with the most beautiful smile on his face, small and soft and brilliantly happy.

“It’s perfect for kids,” he said and Derek’s heart swelled almost painfully in his chest, crowding the sudden lump in his throat.

“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Yeah, it really is, isn’t it?”

“I can just see it,” Stiles said, staring out the nearest window with eyes unfocused. “A little girl with your dark hair, running around out there and clawing her way up trees, growling with her little toddler fangs.”

Derek could see it too. It brought back memories of his childhood, back when there had been half a dozen kids in the Hale family, always playing tag in the woods with his sisters and play-fighting his cousins until one of them tagged out and escaped up a tree just like Stiles was describing. For all that Derek’s life had been marked by tragedy over and over again, at least he could honestly say that he’d had a happy childhood. And he would make damn sure his kids got the same.

Stiles was still lost in his fantasizing. “Or maybe she’ll have Lydia’s hair,” he amended. “I don’t know how this whole suregacy thing works, really. I can never remember which set of genes is doing what.” He shrugged loosely. “Not that it matters. Your and Lydia’s baby is gonna be fucking stunning no matter how the chips fall there.”

Derek had to frown at that. “It won’t be my and Lydia’s baby,” he reminded him. “It’s ours.”

“No, yeah, I know,” Stiles said quickly, turning back to face him. “I can’t not know that, trust me. This may be Lydia’s test run for motherhood, but it’s the real deal for us.”

“Test run?” Derek repeated, eyebrow raised. “Is that what she’s calling it now?”

“Not in so many words,” Stiles said with a laugh, leaning back to perch on the thin windowsill as best he could. “But that’s totally what it is. I think she’s deemed the morning sickness and sore back acceptable, but the way people keep trying to do things for her and make her sit down might be a deal breaker on the whole pregnancy thing.”

“Allison can be a tiny bit of a worrywart,” Derek agreed, thinking back on the last time he’d seen the two of them. Allison had been insisting that she could carry seven bags of snack food from the car to Scott’s house by herself and without any help from her pregnant girlfriend who should really go inside and put her feet up.

“She’s not the least bit concerned about the actual birthing part,” Stiles said. “I’m pretty sure she’s just withholding her final judgment on the matter until she sees how we handle the first few months of newborn stress.”

“I can almost guarantee Cora will have identical findings,” Derek told him, but Stiles was already shushing him.

“No, don’t start saying stuff like that!” he hissed. “You’re gonna jinx it! She hasn’t officially agreed yet, remember?”

“But she will,” Derek assured him. He closed the gap between them until he could take Stiles’ face in his hands. “I know my sister, Stiles. She may be iffy on having kids of her own right now, but she wants me to be happy. And she wants to continue the Hale line as much as I do, one way or another.”

That was something they had talked about together. Theirs had always been a big family, and the thought of it being culled down to just the two of them hurt in more ways than just them missing the loved ones they had lost. Not to mention that the Hales had been one of the oldest, longest-standing born werewolf packs in the country. True strength ran in their blood, as well as a propensity for the full wolf shift. It was such a rare ability nowadays, he and Cora both agreed it would be a shame not to pass it on.

“Even if it means being my baby mama?” Stiles asked.

Derek snorted before he could stop himself. “If you ever call her that where she can hear, I guarantee she will call the whole thing off and also probably kick you in the balls hard enough to prevent you from ever having children with anyone, much less her,” he warned.

“Nah,” Stiles said, unconcerned, fingers finding their way naturally to Derek’s belt loops and pulling him in further. “She loves me almost as much as you do.”

Derek hummed in consideration before leaning in that last little bit to place a kiss on Stiles’ forehead. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I set the bar pretty high.”

Stiles chuckled, his scent warm and spicy and positively reeking of affection, just as Derek was sure his was. Derek couldn’t help but breathe it in and revel in it, hoping to god that they kept hold of this giddy kind of love long enough to embarrass their children with moments like this.

“You know,” Stiles said innocently, glancing up at him in a way that was probably meant to be coy but was far too eager to manage it, “that bathtub upstairs really is perfect for two.”

Taking a bubble bath together, swaddled in intimate warmth and all wrapped up in each other, was a glorious idea, and one that they indulged in on a regular basis even though their current apartment really wasn’t equipped for it. There was just one problem that Derek felt obliged to point out: “I think it’s probably tactless to get naked in a house before even the down payment.”

Stiles’ smirk was completely unrepentant when he said, “I guess it’s a good thing I’m not known for my tact then, isn’t it?”

He shouted with laughter as Derek chased him up the stairs, the bright sound of it echoing loudly all around their soon-to-be home, and for once there were no grouchy neighbors to complain.