Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD)
Sometimes traumatic events can leave us feeling like a shadow of the person we were before. We feel low or depressed, stuck with terrible memories, and trapped in trying to avoid anything that may trigger them. Therapy can help us to reclaim our lives, and this page provides information about how we can achieve this safely together.
What is PTSD?
The British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapists defines PTSD as:
"a debilitating mental disorder that follows experiencing or witnessing an extremely traumatic, tragic, or terrifying event. People with PTSD usually have persistent frightening thoughts and memories of their ordeal and can also feel emotionally numb, especially with people they were once close to".
Common causes
Some of the common causes of PTSD may include:
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military combat
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violent or sexual assaults
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terrorist attacks
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serious accidental injury
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serious transport accidents
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natural disasters
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witnessing violent deaths
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being in a fire
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(https://babcp.com/what-is-cbt/cbt-for-specific-problems/ptsd/)
Typical Symptoms
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Repeatedly re-living the trauma in the form of nightmares and disturbing recollections during the day. The nightmares or recollections (sometimes called flashbacks) may come and go. You may be free of them for weeks at a time, and then experience them daily for no particular reason
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Not wanting to think about or talk about what has happened
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Feeling unsafe
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Problems with sleeping, depression, feeling detached or numb, or being easily startled
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Losing interest in things you used to enjoy, and have trouble feeling affectionate
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Feeling irritable, more aggressive than before, or even violent
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Seeing things that remind you of the incident may be very distressing, which could lead you to avoid certain places or situations that bring back those memories. Anniversaries of the event are often very difficult
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(https://babcp.com/what-is-cbt/cbt-for-specific-problems/ptsd/)
Treatment Planning
If you have read this far, then well done! Because you've already overcome a huge hurdle of avoidance that is a key marker of PTSD and of trauma generally. When working together to get your life back, we'd break our time into phases of treatment, which would roughly look like this:
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1. Education & stabilisation: understanding the nature of the problem in terms of how we process trauma, how our body remembers it, and how we go to great lengths not to experience the pain again (even if this means the processing gets corrupt!). During this phase, we learn how to keep safe whilst talking about that which feels inherently unsafe.
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2. Having explored how you have processed the traumatic event to date, and gently challenged some of the beliefs and assumptions of the time, we will safely revisit the trauma together with new beliefs and assumptions, based on what we know to be true today, and on what we know actually happened, or is happening around us right now.
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3. Over time, as we build new beliefs together, we will gradually begin to test these together in the real world; after all, that's the point! We may go to visit difficult places and learn firsthand how powerful it is to have confronted those memories head-on, challenged the beliefs, and learned to live in a world that can hold two truths at once:
"This awful thing happened once, and it shaped my life, and today I am safe, and I can live my life".
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For more information about whether therapy with SixtyOne would be helpful for you, book a free initial online consultation by clicking the link below.