You can recover.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a first-line treatment for trauma and PTSD and substantial studies have shown it to be highly effective.

CBT treats trauma in part by re-evaluating thinking patterns and assumptions with the goal of identifying unhelpful patterns in your thoughts that are preventing you from moving forward in recovery.

Some examples of common unhelpful thoughts are:

  • I can’t trust anyone
  • The world isn’t safe
  • I’m a failure
  • It’s my fault/I deserved it
  • Could have/should have thinking

Here are some of the methods that we can use to help you overcome what’s keeping you stuck:

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)

This is a highly structured and standardized program that lasts for 12 or more sessions. It has been proven to be highly effective in dealing with trauma.

We will work together in challenging and modifying unhelpful beliefs and thoughts related to the trauma. The result will be that you will create a new understanding of the trauma so that its ongoing negative effects are reduced.

CPT begins with psychoeducation of PTSD, which is essentially studying how PTSD affects you and common points that will keep you stuck and prevent recovery. This will help you to become more aware the relationship between your thoughts and emotions, and you’ll begin to identify automatic thoughts that may be maintaining the negative effects of the trauma.

One main reason that people suffer the effects of trauma long term is due to avoidance. A key aspect of CPT is formally processing the trauma by talking about what happened and how you feel about it.

This is a normal way that we all process what’s happened to us. To illustrate, consider this example:

You’re walking in to work when an irresponsible driver nearly runs you over in the parking lot. When you get in, you share what happened with your coworkers. For the next few days, you continue to share the experience with others as it comes up naturally in conversation.

But what happens later on, maybe a week after the experience?

You stop talking about it frequently, and you don’t really think of it so much. You might even get a little bored with recounting the experience. To you, it becomes old news and you lose interest in sharing it with everyone.

This is how we naturally process events. Once they’ve been processed, we lose interest in them and move on.

With CPT, we will process the trauma systematically in a way that lets you move on and put what happened behind you.

The Index Trauma

Since many people have experienced more than one trauma, the thought of discussing every experience can be very unpleasant.

With CPT, however, only one trauma is focused on. This is the main trauma that is responsible for the large majority of your negative thoughts and emotions. By processing this trauma, you will be able to overcome what’s keeping you stuck. We call this the Index Trauma.

I will help you identify what this is, and we will focus on this one trauma event together in a systematic way that will allow you to move on and recover.