Why Therapy is So Effective For Trauma

Trauma Therapy

If you have been through a trauma, you may feel isolated. You want and need to process your feelings, but depending on your situation, either no one around you can really grasp what you are going through, or they are traumatized as well and are not in a position to help you.

Trauma changes your thinking. It leaves you in an unsustainable state of constant vigilance for further trauma. Trauma therapy can help you process what you have been through and change your thinking yet again so that it is not dominated by the trauma.

Cognitive Processing Therapy

For many people, cognitive processing therapy is an effective treatment for PTSD and other conditions. It teaches you to identify the thoughts and beliefs that are perpetuating the trauma and to change them. One of the many reasons it is such a powerful tool is that it restores agency to people again after a trauma that may have made them feel as though they lost that agency. With CPT therapy, you can start to rewrite the stories that you tell yourself.

One way that CPT differs from talk therapy is that it is a highly structured therapeutic approach, designed to be completed over a period of 12 sessions.

How CPT Therapy Works

People with dealing with trauma often have intrusive thoughts about the trauma while at the same time doing everything they can to avoid thinking about it and the emotions that it creates. One of the first goals of cognitive processing therapy is teaching them to deal with the traumatic event or events.

This is helpful because it brings to the forefront many of the negative, unhelpful or untrue beliefs that people may associate with traumatic events, such as believing that they deserved what happened to them or that the trauma is likely to happen to them over and over again. These are just two of many different beliefs that people may have developed.

Once these thoughts have been identified, a trauma therapist can start to demonstrate strategies for dealing with them. For example, if you are undergoing treatment for PTSD, a therapist might ask you questions that help you see the error of a particular thought, such as the belief that you deserved the trauma.

Not only will this teach you how to better manage the specific thoughts that you deal with while working with your trauma therapist but it gives you the tools to handle thoughts and situations that will arise later as well. The therapy that you undergo teaches you strategies that you can use for the rest of your life.

The Underpinnings of Trauma Therapy

Trauma has a way of making you feel as though you have been severed from the world you thought you knew. There is often a "before" and "after" quality to your belief system in which after trauma, the world seems like a far more dangerous place than you ever imagined.

The beliefs that you develop may seem helpful to you, and in the case of some types of trauma, they might even have been helpful in surviving certain situations. However, afterwards, you can get "stuck" in a kind of cognitive loop in which your brain is still trying to convince you of the truth of these ideas that are no longer useful or true. With cognitive processing therapy, you can change those ideas, first by being guided by the trauma therapist to question them and then by learning how to question them yourself.

When you have gone through CPT therapy or another type of therapy to help you with your trauma, the memories of what you have been through no longer overwhelm you or cause you to be emotionally numb because of your inability to cope with them. Instead, they are integrated into the rest of your life without dominating it.

Therapy for trauma restores your sense of control and your ability to trust and build relationships with other people. After treatment for PTSD and other types of trauma, people are able to once again experience feelings of happiness, security and contentment.

 You can learn about trauma therapy and PTSD treatment here: https://www.truepeacetherapy.com/trauma-treatment