Talk therapy has been hugely helpful for helping me with much of my PTSD symptoms. My therapists have used various modalities--none of them profess to only use one particular type of therapy--which I think may be one reason things have improved for me. My therapists took me where I was and used whatever techniques they felt best addressed areas that would be most helpful for me. I would say it has mostly been a combination of behavioral and psychodynamic therapies over the years. My current therapist leans heavily toward behavioral therapy, but not a specific type, so he uses aspect of CBT, REBT, and DBT as he feel they are needed and at times we work more in a psychodynamic mode depending on what is going on.

None of my therapy was retraumatizing. My therapist very specifically went over his philosophy of working through traumatic memories so to do everything to prevent possible retraumatizing. He worked a great deal with me on grounding techniques, on recognizing my own dissociation as it starts happening and how to ground myself so I don't get completely sucked into that dissociation anymore. We by no means explored every traumatic memory. He doesn't feel that is at all necessary. But when issues came up that required exploring, yes, we did go there, but very carefully, always with a plan in mind on what we were looking for and why, and only deeply enough and long enough to get that information.

Ultimately, being able to look at those specific memories lessened their power for me. They became no longer traumatic to look at, and are now honestly just memories like any other memories. That was a HUGE improvement in my life as when those memories became just memories for me instead of these huge, scary, threatening scenes that seemed so real, my PTSD symptoms started to fade.

I rarely have the nightmares, the flashbacks, the dissociation, the reactions that I used to have anymore. It isn't all completely gone, but it is so much more manageable. Now when those things happen, they don't set my world spinning for days and weeks on end like they used to. I can recover in a matter of hours or even minutes now, and my quality of life has greatly improved.