TREATMENT
So you’ve got your PTSD diagnosis - now what? Learning about what ails you cannot be complete if you don’t research your treatment options. PTSD is not like having a burst appendix, in which case the universal answer is, Take it out! No, PTSD is a little more interesting and colorful. It’s more wily and precocious and so we have to become wily and precocious in our efforts to recover from it.
Since we aren’t suffering from something that a little penicillin will fix, before we begin healing we need to study up on the options. To get you started, or to jump-start your recovery, here’s a brief overview of popular PTSD treatments (click on blue highlights for more in-depth information):
Talk Therapy - Psychotherapy that emphasizes the client and practitioner speaking on the conscious level about the trauma and its resulting problems, issues and solutions. Psychotherapy may utilize insight, persuasion, suggestion, reassurance, and instruction so that patients may see themselves and their problems more realistically and have the desire to cope effectively with them.
Behavior Therapy -A form of psychological treatment based on the premise that emotional problems are learned responses to the environment, and that these maladaptive behaviors can be unlearned. From the perspective of behavioral therapists, the reasons behind behaviors are not as important as the fact that the behaviors can be changed.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy - Short-term psychotherapy based on the concept that how we think about things affects how we feel emotionally. If we change how we think, then we change how we feel; ultimately, this changes our behavior.
Exposure Therapy - An approach based on the principle that we get used to things that are just annoying and not truly dangerous. This is called ‘habituation’, and it occurs naturally in over 95% of people. Exposure therapy asks patients to confront - in a safe way - the very situations, objects, people and memories they have attached to the trauma (and are probably very consciously avoiding).
Information processing - Our experience of trauma creates new neural pathways in our brains, which create perceptions and behaviors that are not necessarily correct nor relevant after the trauma ends. Changing our perceptions of events on the subconscious level changes our thoughts, which in turn changes our emotions and thus our behavior. In this type of therapy the present is stressed and the past not deeply discussed.
Hypnotherapy - This type of therapy also focuses on changing perceptions of events on the subconscious level. However, rather than severing neural pathways with processing techniques, hypnosis achieves its goal through the power of suggestion. In this form of treatment, too, the PTSD experiencer does not need to deeply focuses on rehashing the past.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) - NLP techniques sever and recreate neural pathways by using language to reframe, redirect and reorganize the coding of experience in the brain.
Self-Empowered Therapy - A process of recovery motivated and directed by the PTSD experiencer in which he takes responsibility for healing, participates in the process, and consciously engages in choosing actions designed to progress recovery.
Group Therapy - Connecting with other survivors in a therapuetic setting can be an especially powerful way to address issues, learn from others’ experiences, and build a sense of belonging with the PTSD community.
It is important to remember that no single therapy is guaranteed to completely heal PTSD symptoms. The task is to find which combination of therapies leads to success.
[NOTE: While not covered on this site, medication is also a viable and sometimes necessary option. The use of pharmacological agents in treating PTSD largely focuses on controlling symptoms of anxiety, depression and insomnia so that the sufferer can better use and focus energy toward healing. Such agents include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, mood stabilizers and sleeping medicines. Ask your therapist or primary care physician for more information.]
(Photos: BIJI KURIAN, lvmft01, tootdood)
