These common treatments for PTSD are essential because, trauma, unchecked, changes you. The stress of it seeps into your mind and body. You feel it in your body. You experience it again and again. You see your trauma, smell it, taste it, sense it. But you are not alone. With the help of a trained and compassionate therapist, treatment and recovery are entirely possible.
Consider the four most common treatments for PTSD:
Two of the most familiar and traditional therapies fall under the cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, category.
1. Cognitive Restructuring therapy is designed to help you address the way you think about your trauma. The idea is to identify and reinterpret thoughts that are amplifying your stress and reinforcing your PTSD symptoms.
This therapy will walk you through the memories and help reveal areas of misperception and misplaced guilt or shame.PTSD often injects a false sense of reality regarding traumatic events. Cognitive Restructuring, which is one of the common treatments for PTSD, can help provide a balanced, realistic view of the events, hopefully, leading to corrective, supportive thinking about the event.
2. Exposure therapy is designed to help you face your fears. The idea is to learn to control it and cope through the safe re-experiencing of the events endured.
Sometimes you’ll be “flooded” with exposure. Therapy may include visits to the site of your trauma or mental imagery in an effort to provide context and lessen the fear response to reminders and memories of the trauma. Other times, your therapy will call for a process of “desensitization,” which progressively exposes you to progressively worse memories. In this way tolerance to the activating trauma is built.
Another form of exposure involves exposure you to the activating event through a verbal or written trauma narrative. Children and adolescents are often treated in this way. The following therapy is the only one of the most common treatments for PTSD that focuses on reprocessing the information of your trauma.
3. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is designed to help you access disturbing memories and events that reduce the brain’s ability to adapt. The idea is that through simultaneous bilateral stimulation like rhythmic eye movements, hand taps, or tones, proper mental processing and recovery is restored.
Trauma that you have stuffed down is systematically unpacked and reorganized. Traumatic information, negative thinking, and erroneous beliefs may be broken down in 8 phases. One piece at a time, you reprocess your trauma until it no longer intrudes on your view of yourself or your interaction with the world. This final treatment option is a more holistic and body focused approach.
4. Somatic therapy is designed to help you make sense of how your body manifests trauma. The idea is that trauma is stored in the body and must be addressed before wellbeing can be restored.
Our response to traumatic events change the body's structure as well as emotions and thoughts. For example, sadness is held in the heart or anger in the mouth. If held too long, body symptoms and pain will become chronic.
Through somatic therapy, these indications of trauma left in your nervous system are addressed by bringing awareness to tension held in your body to increase resiliency. Reliving the trauma usually comes with the territory when it comes to common PTSD treatments. With somatic therapy, gentle guidance toward tolerance of the physical sensations and bottled-up emotions that lead you to feeling unsafe or anxious is preferred.
The goal is to reset your inner balance and heal your physical pain. Working with a therapist is often invaluable for PTSD sufferers. You can take control of the trauma.Talk to someone soon who can help you determine which treatments are the best fit for you.
If you are looking to work with a psychotherapist or would like more information about Treatments for PTSD, please contact me for a free consultation to learn about how I can be of service.
To find out more about my services click here: PTSD Treatment. Serving Boulder, Longmont, Denver.
