Ptsd medication series#
While you bring the details of that memory to mind, your therapist will guide you through a series of side-to-side eye movements. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)Įye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy that uses repetitive eye movements to interrupt and re-pattern some of the trauma-related memories you have.Īfter talking about your history, you and your therapist will select a memory that you find particularly difficult. For that reason, treatments that focus on the brain and nervous system have been found to be particularly effective at restoring function and reducing symptoms. Many of the long-term effects of PTSD are neurological. You’ll learn that your thoughts and memories related to the trauma are not actually dangerous and do not need to be avoided. Over several months of treatment, you and your therapist will work together to help you face your fears, allowing you to practice new coping skills. You will not progress to the next level on your hierarchy until you and your therapist are satisfied you can handle each one. You’ll start with things you find slightly scary and progress to more intense fears - possibly those related to the trauma you experienced. Once you’ve learned self-calming techniques, you and your therapist will create a hierarchy of fears. Your therapist will equip you with skills to calm down and cope when you face something frightening. To change your fear response, prolonged exposure therapy begins with some education about PTSD symptoms. Like CPT, prolonged exposure therapy addresses the tendency to adopt unhealthy thinking patterns in the aftermath of a traumatic event.įor example, as a result of trauma, you may have developed a fear response that’s out of proportion to the dangers you face. This kind of therapy usually takes place in around 12 sessions, during which you and your therapist work together to process what happened through talking or writing about the experience.
You might, for example, decide that it’s not safe to trust anyone, or you might believe that you’re to blame for what happened.ĬPT aims to identify those incorrect conclusions and restructure them in healthier ways. In trying to understand the event and how it affected you, you might later come to conclusions that are not healthy. Cognitive processing therapyĬognitive processing therapy (CPT) is based on the idea that immediately following a trauma, you were probably not able to fully process what happened to you. Most of them are based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a kind of talk therapy that aims to identify and correct unhealthy and unrealistic thought patterns. Some forms of psychotherapy - also known as talk therapy - are effective treatments for PTSD. Here’s what’s known about the treatment options for PTSD and what research tells us about the effectiveness of these treatments. When the effects of trauma do not go away or disrupt daily life, you may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Īround 10 to 20 percent of people who experience a trauma will develop PTSD symptoms afterward. Trauma can cause physiological, neurological, and emotional effects - some short-lived and others much longer- lasting. Your field of vision may narrow, your short-term memory may seem to go blank, and you might feel a sense of panic. In response, your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens, and your muscles tense. When you experience a traumatic event, your hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal systems release a surge of hormones to prepare you to fight, flee, or freeze. This is because people respond to trauma differently, and the effects of trauma can be complicated. What works for one person may not help someone else at all. Recovering from trauma can often be difficult and slow going.
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