If you think you’re dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), you will need an official diagnosis before you can find the best therapy for your condition. Even if you already have a formal diagnosis, you might not know how many different kinds of therapy are available for this disorder. It can take some time to explore PTSD therapy options before you find one that works well for you.
When you partner with an appropriately trained mental health provider, you will have a safe space where you can explore the emotions, circumstances, and behaviors you find challenging in daily life. Perhaps the biggest of all the benefits of PTSD therapy is finding your way to a healthier, happier life.
Understanding PTSD and Therapy
Choosing the right therapy for PTSD requires understanding the condition. Any individual who has suffered trauma can wind up developing PTSD, and trauma can result from being in combat, going through a natural disaster, or witnessing or being subjected to mass shootings, sexual violence, and other violent crimes. PTSD is classified as a psychiatric disorder, and it’s one in which sufferers cannot forget their trauma. Over time, the human brain diminishes memories of certain things, but the opposite might occur with PTSD. Traumatic memories might be amplified with time. Effective therapies for PTSD work to reverse and correct this.
PTSD treatment can help sufferers manage their symptoms and restore their quality of life. PTSD therapy success rates are often highest when they deal with all the characteristics of the condition. These include:
- Avoidance: PTSD sufferers avoid anything that reminds them of their trauma, including objects, places, people, things, and circumstances.
- Hyperarousal: People with PTSD might find themselves uncomfortable in situations where they feel like they’re cornered because they can see all potential threats from such an angle.
- Intrusive memories: Repeated thoughts and involuntary memories can be nightmares or flashbacks that make people relive the trauma they experienced.
- Negative thoughts: These include guilt, shame, and other distorted beliefs.
Preparing for future problems and threats is a crucial life skill, but individuals afflicted with PTSD often overestimate both the severity and frequency of those future threats. Their condition changes how they see potential threats and impacts their ability to assess things accurately.
Overview of Evidence-Based Therapies
Evidence-based PTSD treatments are often considered the gold standard in providing care to clients afflicted with this condition. These treatments are based on deep research and customized to suit the cultural expectations, personal preferences, and individual needs of the clients undergoing treatment.
The research behind evidence-based treatments involves randomized controlled trials across multiple case studies, and the results have demonstrated high effectiveness. When a mental health provider organizes evidence-based care for a client, they choose specific therapeutic techniques based on what research has found useful for a specific problem as well as their own training.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for PTSD
Cognitive behavioral therapy for PTSD is based on significant volumes of research indicating strong potential to restore the quality of life and functionality of clients who go through it. Many studies highlight CBT’s effectiveness as equal to or greater than that of medications, and the results are seen in both clinical evidence and research. CBT has a handful of core principles based on the belief that psychological problems have roots in problematic behavior and negative thinking patterns. The treatment strives to alter how clients think, so they can learn better methods of coping with their trauma and symptoms. The techniques involved aim for improvements in self-esteem, motivation, and problem-solving.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR therapy for PTSD is a process in which a client moves their eyes in specific ways while they are processing memories related to their trauma. The goal is to help clients heal from the trauma impacting them by eliminating the distressing experiences from their lives. This is a relatively new technique compared to other PTSD therapies. Developed in 1987, it had its first clinical trial in 1989. Several dozen trials have followed up and highlighted the effectiveness of this therapy. Some of them suggest that clients can heal faster with EMDR than other methods.
Exposure Therapy for PTSD
Exposure therapy for PTSD helps clients confront the fears in their lives. Avoidance is one of the common characteristics of PTSD, and sufferers might go to great lengths to keep from dealing with circumstances, locations, things, and people that trigger their fears or remind them of their trauma. Such actions can have short-term benefits in temporary emotional management but can also compound fears into something worse over longer periods. In exposure therapy, mental health treatment providers expose clients to their fears in a limited fashion in a safe environment to start minimizing them. Over time, avoidance becomes less of a pattern.
Trauma-Focused Therapies
Trauma-focused therapies are safe spaces where clients can discuss issues, emotions, thoughts, and experiences in confidence with their provider. Someone suffering from PTSD has likely gone through or witnessed something that creates an ongoing disruption to their feelings, functioning, memories, and capacity to relate to other people. A mental health provider’s role is to help clients understand what they’re going through to express themselves and cope better over time. Trauma-focused therapy identifies the warning signs of trauma in clients before empowering them to avoid future trauma and cope with any suffering resulting from their original trauma.
Factors to Consider When Choosing Therapy
If you’re suffering from unresolved trauma, you could have PTSD. There are many factors to consider when choosing therapy, including the availability of resources, your personal treatment goals and preferences, and the kind of trauma and its severity in your life. When deciding how to move ahead, you can narrow your choices by answering these questions:
- Could therapy be advantageous to me?
- What are my needs?
- How crucial is the relationship between the client and the mental health provider?
- How much will therapy cost?
- What format of counseling do I prefer?
- What are my goals for therapy?
- What questions should I ask when interviewing a potential therapist?
- What sort of mental health provider do I need?
- Where can I find therapy?
Effectiveness and Benefits of Therapy
Pursuing therapy generates positive results for roughly 75% of clients that make it part of their lives. Depending on their circumstances, they improve their resilience in processing trauma by developing coping skills and getting a newfound sense of control in life. Therapy can help clients manage PTSD and other conditions. It can also help them navigate challenging life circumstances and relationships or deal with emotional symptoms that shouldn’t be left to fester. Specific benefits you might find through therapy include:
- Behavioral management
- Better sleep
- Contentment with life
- Coping skills
- Enhanced interactions with others
- Feelings of empowerment
- Higher levels of productivity
- Improved communication skills
- More days spent working or attending school
- More satisfying interpersonal relationships
- Physical well-being
Considerations and Success Rates
PTSD therapy involves several considerations, including the duration of treatment, challenges associated with the condition, and correcting misconceptions that clients have about it. The specific treatment duration varies from one client to the next based on the severity of their condition and the specific therapies applied. This needs to be an early conversation between a client and their therapist, and the tentative schedule needs to be revisited throughout treatment. Treatment shouldn’t be considered final until both the client and therapist agree that the initially stated goals have been met. Longer courses of treatment tend to produce better results. Someone dealing with PTSD alone might need multiple months of treatment, but a client with co-occurring conditions can expect to be in therapy for a year or more.
Clients face two significant potential challenges in terms of PTSD treatment. The first is the stigma associated with it, and the second is staying in treatment. Many people feel like treatment is a signal that they are weak or deficient as individuals. Many working adults fear the possibility of losing out on professional opportunities if word gets out about their participation in therapy. Among those who start therapy, staying committed to the entire process can also prove challenging, especially with exposure therapies that lead them to relive their traumatic experiences.
Misconceptions about PTSD abound, and many people believe the myths. Some individuals dealing with PTSD have to put up with people who tell them things are just in their heads and aren’t real. Others assume that PTSD occurs only in people who have experienced combat or lived in a war zone. Traumatic events can happen to anyone, and they’re not something you can walk off over time. Another widely spread misconception is that PTSD occurs immediately after the triggering trauma. The truth is that it can also manifest later in life. The idea that people who have PTSD can’t function in the world as individuals is another misconception. You can have this condition and still live independently, especially with the right therapy.
The success rates of PTSD treatments vary, but these therapies do help many recover from their conditions. According to the National Center for PTSD, over 40% of clients who take medication for their condition attain a state of remission. Over 50% of clients who undergo EMDR, exposure therapy, or cognitive processing therapy improve dramatically. Combinations of multiple therapies seem to provide the best results, with over 90% of participants demonstrating substantial reductions in their symptoms.
Popular Therapy Approaches for PTSD
Many traditional PTSD treatments are available, but complementary treatments are proving to be popular options that work well with conventional techniques. Cognitive processing therapy, or CPT, helps clients learn ways of challenging and then modifying unhelpful personal beliefs about their trauma. Doing this helps them conceptualize their trauma differently so that it has less of a negative impact on their life moving forward.
Prolonged exposure therapy, or PE, involves clients approaching their trauma triggers with a gradual and monitored approach. Over time, they learn that situations, feelings, and memories related to their trauma aren’t dangerous cues that they must avoid. This technique helps clients confront their fears in manageable steps rather than reinforcing their fears.
With many clients, PTSD turns into chronic exhaustion due to the persistent trauma playing itself out over and over. Mindfulness-based therapies attempt to shift the attention of clients away from this by having them focus on their purpose in the here and now. It involves acceptance of the condition and its symptoms and making peace with them. PTSD can leave a person to participate fully in life, and that can create a whole new layer of stress. By dealing with their chronic fatigue, clients start addressing the adrenal exhaustion that often develops when too many stress hormones are produced. Awareness exercises, relaxation techniques, and meditation can all help clients manage their anxiety.
Explore Your Options
PTSD can be a crippling condition to deal with, but treatment is possible. Multiple therapies are available for anyone afflicted with this mental health disorder, and many of them are effective in helping you or someone you love restore a good quality of life. Granite Recovery Centers helps clients suffering from PTSD, trauma, and substance use disorders, and our clinical work aligns well with the 12-step curriculum. We help individuals identify their trauma and then process it. To find out how we can help you or someone you care about, call our team at (855) 712-7784.
