Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health disorder that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event or set of circumstances. The event or circumstances can threaten your physical or emotional health and affect your physical, emotional, or mental well-being.
Common events or circumstances that can trigger PTSD include natural disasters, abuse, serious accidents, war, partner violence, and bullying. After the event, you can be left with intense thoughts, flashbacks and/or nightmares, and overwhelming feelings such as sadness, fear, anger, and guilt, all of which involve your trauma.
While many of us have intense emotional symptoms after experiencing something traumatic, the feelings and symptoms typically subside with time. However, if you have PTSD, the symptoms don’t go away and may even start to get worse, causing you to isolate yourself and avoid anything and everything that’s associated with your trauma.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an incredibly effective method for addressing the intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, guilt, and emotional distress that come with PTSD.
Our psychiatric team led by Venice Sanchez, MD, at Sydea Medical Practice in Newport Beach, California, offers CBT to help you effectively manage your PTSD and overcome your trauma.
CBT is a specific talk therapy technique that helps you discover and name negative and destructive thought patterns that are impacting your actions and feelings. Once you’ve identified those harmful thought patterns, CBT aims to replace them with more constructive ways of thinking to change the way you feel and behave.
This type of talk therapy utilizes several strategies to accomplish this goal, including:
By practicing these things with a licensed professional, you can hopefully see anxiety-inducing circumstances more clearly and realistically, gain awareness of your automatic responses to worrisome situations, and learn to cope in a healthy way with your negative emotions.
When used for treating PTSD, CBT has several sub-methods that are incredibly impactful. Let’s take a closer look at each of them:
This part of CBT seeks to identify those negative thought patterns that have formed due to trauma.
It’s easy to start believing that you’re a bad person or that the world is a dangerous place as a reaction to what’s happened. By forcing yourself to confront those ways of thinking and acting, you can put them behind you and replace them with healthier thoughts and subsequent behaviors.
This part of CBT seeks to expose you to your PTSD triggers by having you reimagine and think through your trauma. By doing this in a safe and controlled environment, you can learn to face your fears head-on and consequently start to gain a sense of control over your responses to the traumatic triggers.
This part of CBT aims to help you reprocess memories, thoughts, and feelings surrounding your trauma in hopes of changing how you think and feel about the event.
You begin by retelling or re-living your trauma by answering questions about what you remember from it. During the session, you create eye movements similar to what occurs in REM sleep by following hand motions or a light source. The goal is to change how you think, feel, and remember memories surrounding the trauma throughout the sessions.
If you feel like PTSD has an iron grip on your life, talk therapy sessions using CBT strategies could be exactly what you need to gain back some control. To learn about CBT and other PTSD treatment methods, schedule a consultation with our team by calling our office or using our online booking feature today.
