PTSD Therapy Includes Multiple Approaches

Nov 02, 2017

The timer is on. You have 30 seconds to come up with eight ways PTSD therapy can help you. 30, 29, 28 ... Ding! Really? Hey, no one can shout out eight therapeutic approaches to PTSD in 30 seconds. You may not have even heard of all eight. Thanks to the National Center for PTSD, we're going to list them for you right here:

• Prolonged Exposure therapy helps you gain control over what’s going on in your head (flashbacks, nightmares, etc.) and in your body (outbursts of anger, sudden nausea or dizziness, etc.) by facing your negative feelings. You talk through your trauma with a therapist. When you’re ready, you do some of those things you used to enjoy but have avoided since the trauma occurred.
• Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) trains you to reframe negative thoughts about the trauma. You talk through the negative thoughts and complete short writing assignments.
• Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) helps you process and make sense of your trauma by talking about it while using both sides of your brain. While you describe the trauma, you also pay attention to a back-and-forth movement or sound (like a finger waving side to side, a light, or a tone).
• Brief Eclectic Psychotherapy (BEP) teaches you relaxation skills you use as you talk about the trauma, reframe your negative thoughts, write a letter, and hold a farewell ritual to leave trauma behind so you can move forward.
• Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) helps people who have experienced ongoing trauma for months or years. These individuals put all the traumas in order and write a story about them.
• Written Narrative Exposure gives you alone time to write a story that you discuss with the therapist at the end of the session.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps you look objectively at self-defeating or unhelpful behaviors and thoughts so you can change them.
• Medications, especially antidepressants, can boost or regulate naturally occurring chemicals in your brain to help you become more composed and able to cope and move toward healing.

And these are just eight of many more therapies and pharmaceuticals that are in the works. Why? Because caring people see your suffering and really, really want to help.

To talk more about this, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.