Treating PTSD: Evaluating Your Goals

Part of setting goals is knowing what to expect when you achieve them. That is, having a set of ideas that will guide you in knowing you have achieved what you want.

Sounds basic, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised how many people are vague about what signs will let them know they have accomplished what they set out to do.

Your post-trauma identity challenge: Define what signs will let you know you have achieved each of your PTSD healing goals.

The key to this sort of work is being deliberate in what will happen when the goal has been reached. For example, in regard to each of your goals you should be able to answer the following questions:

• How will I know when I have achieved this goal?
• What will I see?
• What will I hear?
• What will I smell?
• What will I taste?
• What will I look like?
• What will I sound like?
• What will I feel like?

We take in stimuli from the world around us and filter it through our minds which store a warehouse of information. The achievement of your goals must be in line and recognizable with the systems in your brain that are scanning for these things.

The questions above stimulate your mind to process information through sensory based evidence, which is how the brain encodes, decodes and deciphers its environment. If you give the brain a map (by answering the quesitons above) it will know how to find what it’s looking for and will recognize it when it does.

Another nice effect of this sort of planning: if you’re not making significant movement toward your goal(s) you can look at these questions and find where you need to tweak your strategy.

That’s the whole point of healing, right? To make progress you can really see, hear, feel, touch, smell, taste and LIVE!

BRIDGE THE GAP Exercise

Using the list of questions above, choose your #1 priority goal and answer the questions above. This outline will show you what evidence will let you know you have achieved the goal, and also, put you a little more in touch with what you want out of this whole healing process.

(Photo: Aremac)

Tags: goals, ptsd healing, Setting Healing Goals