
If trauma is affecting your life and you are overwhelmed and unable to cope at home or work, you need professional support. However, everyone’s experience with PTSD is different, and due to this, treatment will also vary. Your therapist will determine the best way to handle your trauma, depending on your symptoms and condition. Liz Chelak helps you return to work, and live an active, fulfilling life with the best PTSD treatment. With the right combination of therapies and medication, she relieves your symptoms and gives you a chance to enjoy activities you love.
Begin personalized therapy, online or in-person, in West Palm Beach, and Boca Raton, FL.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a type of anxiety disorder that can occur following a deeply threatening or scary event. Even if you were not directly involved, the shock of what happened to a loved one can be so great that you find it hard to live a normal life. It can take a real physical and emotional toll on you and your family.
If you have PTSD, you may end up with insomnia, flashbacks, low self-esteem, and a lot of painful memories and unpleasant emotions that make you feel as if you will never get your life back. You might constantly relive the event or lose your memory of it altogether. Fortunately, PTSD can be treated, and its symptoms can be cured.
PTSD therapy has three main goals. It focuses on:
- Improving your symptoms
- Teaching you skills to deal with it
- Restoring your self-esteem
Treatment Options for PTSD
The idea behind PTSD treatment is to change the thought patterns that are disturbing your life. This might happen through talking about your trauma and concentrating on where your fear comes from.
People with PTSD need holistic and individualized treatments that focus on their needs and preferences, emotional and physical safety, and strive to provide a higher level of care where necessary. Depending on your situation or unique needs, you may benefit from group or family therapy along with individual sessions.
Some of the common components of PTSD treatment include learning coping skills, telling your story, re-teaching yourself what is safe vs. unsafe, confronting beliefs you have developed about yourself or the world around you since your trauma, and making sense or meaning out of your experience.
Best PTSD Treatments – How Do They Work?
There are different kinds of treatments for PTSD that makes therapists identify, understand, and change your thinking and behavior patterns.
They include:
Cognitive Processing Therapy
It is a specific type of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps you learn how to change and challenge unhelpful beliefs related to the trauma. You may start to believe that what happened was your fault or that the world is an unsafe place. CPT targets these stuck points and comes up with ways so you can get unstuck and move forward.
The therapist encourages you to talk about the traumatic event and how your thoughts related to it are affecting your life. They ask you to write in detail about what happened. This retelling and writing enable you to rethink about your trauma, understand it and accept that deep down it was not your fault so you can figure out new ways to live with it. You will also learn ways to cope with upsetting thoughts and examine them in a way that will help you frame how you see the trauma more healthily.
Prolonged Exposure
It is a very effective treatment for PTSD that encourages you to face the difficult memories and situations you have avoided for so long. It is another form of CBT that relies more on behavioral techniques so you can gradually approach trauma-related situations and emotions. It focuses on exposures to help people with PTSD to stop trauma reminders. This is done by teaching breathing techniques and coping skills.
PE uses imaginal exposures, which involve recounting the details of the trauma experience, as well as in-vivo exposures, which involve repeatedly confronting trauma-related situations or people they have been avoiding. This therapy helps you regain control over your emotions and find the strength to face things that have previously triggered trauma memories. PE usually lasts around 3 months, with twice-a-week sessions. It has successfully treated a wide range of traumas.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
It is a form of psychotherapy that involves processing upsetting trauma-related memories, thoughts, and feelings to help people recover from the symptoms and emotional distress. You might not have to tell the therapist about your experience. Instead, the trauma therapist asks you to pay attention to either a sound or a back-and-forth movement while thinking about trauma memories. As you think about something positive while you remember your trauma, it can reduce the vividness and emotion associated with the stressful memories.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT)
TF-CBT is an evidence-based treatment model designed to assist children, adolescents, and their families in overcoming the negative effects of a traumatic experience. It uses many of the same psychoeducation, learning coping and grounding skills, and a gentle form of exposure where the child recreates a story about the trauma. It treats trauma in a very developmentally appropriate way so the children experiencing the emotional effects of trauma can address and resolve these effects successfully.
Present Centered Therapy (PCT)
It is a type of non-trauma-focused treatment that centers around current issues rather than directly processing the trauma. PCT provides psychoeducation about the impact of trauma on your life and teaches problem-solving strategies to deal with current life stressors.
Stress Inoculation Training (SIT)
It is another form of trauma therapy that reduces anxiety by teaching coping skills to deal with stress that may accompany PTSD. SIT can be used as a standalone treatment or may be used with another type of CBT. Its main goal is to guide you to react differently to your symptoms. Your therapist will teach you different types of coping skills, including, but not limited to, breathing, muscle relaxation, cognitive restructuring, and assertiveness skills.
You may need to try different types of treatment before finding the one that suits you. Your therapist will work with you on this. These treatments may also include medications to help you stop thinking about and reacting to what happened, including having nightmares and flashbacks. They can also encourage you to have a more positive outlook on life and feel normal again.
What We Treat
What Should You Look for in a Trauma Therapist?
The significance of finding a therapist you feel comfortable with cannot be overstated. It is the most important thing in counseling, especially when you are dealing with something as sensitive and impacting as trauma treatment, and you need a therapist with who you feel safe.
For more information about our counselors or to schedule an appointment for your therapy, call our office by number:
(561) 363-7994The therapist should be knowledgeable and caring and put your anxious mind at ease. Most importantly, they should not judge you. Research shows that the single most important factor that determines how soon an individual gets better throughout counseling is the fit and the relationship between the client and the therapist. Finding someone who feels like a safe space for you is critical for your healing and long-term wellness.
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If PTSD has affected your life or someone you care for, it is important to seek professional guidance. PTSD is a treatable condition, and timely treatment can get you back to normal life. Call Trauma Therapy Center to find a safe place and begin your healing journey today. Liz Chelak helps people of all ages and from all walks of life heal from trauma, grief, anxiety, and overwhelming stress and provides quality, evidence-based mental health services. She understands how trauma can disrupt your life and uses the best therapies to ensure you heal from trauma and find inner peace.