[doglover1979]

I see on here sometimes that people view therapy as damaging to PTSD patients. It really bothers me when I see this. In my experience, its exactly the opposite. Therapy really helped me by confronting and taking control of my trauma.

Therapy can absolutely reduce symptoms. It can be painful, but with a good trauma therapist painful and scary memories can be filed away in your mind.

It was explained to me that PTSD is kind of like a computer with fragmented files. This memory over here, that physical sensation over there. A trigger comes up, internally or externally, and one of the memory fragments comes to the forefront, seemingly out of nowhere.

With good therapy the files can be organized and stored away. The memory loses power, and eventually the once overwhelming memory is simply something distasteful. You can access it as a whole memory, and you can begin to have more control. You begin to realize that the memory has less power than you thought. You can gain the confidence that simply thinking about trauma is not going to destroy you.

The therapy that I went through is called Prolonged Exposure Therapy. It was painful at the time, but it was kind of amazing how I progressed from one week to the next by telling my story in vivid detail and then exposing myself to it throughout the week.

Just when I was at my limit and thought I couldn't take it anymore, something just shifted and I got through a session without being in pain. I still have emotions about what happened to me, but they can be controlled with coping skills. I am now rarely triggered, and never to the point of panic or flashbacks.

Whats even more amazing to me is that even though only one traumatic memory was directly addressed ( I have multiple major traumas), the other memories kind of fell in line.

I'm not cured, no one is ever cured from mental illness. But I am positive that it would take some major new trauma for the worst PTSD symptoms to be shaken up.

[Parley]

I need to defrag~

[Open Eyes]

I agree that there are psychotherapists out there that do not do their job well and can actually do more harm than good.

However, there "are" good therapists out there that actually "do" help their patients. Each person is different depending on "what" caused their PTSD and what their personal history is too. While PTSD does affect the entire body, it often challenges the emotional part of the brain leaving the person struggling dealing with emotional challenges whether they want to or not. We are, after all "emotional beings" and our emotions are an important part of our survival as a species.

Therapy is not about re traumatizing. However, often as doglover is saying, while it can be very hard at first to trust enough to finally get help with sorting out our emotional challenges, it can lead to "healing' and improving ourselves and the quality of our lives.

[Hellion]

To each their own, but that does not sound like something that would do me a whole lot of good. Not so sure I could handle the stress it would cause, not just the overwhelmed mind feeling but all the physical crap that would go with it...that would likely just land me in the psych ward.

[doglover1979]

Prolonged Exposure Therapy is different from talk therapy. There is evidence that it actually creates permanent changes the brain.

This link is a pretty good general overview:
Prolonged Exposure Therapy - PTSD: National Center for PTSD

PET involves talk therapy, you have to discuss your feelings and experiences while undergoing the harder parts of the therapy. You definitely need a therapist that can work with you on Distress Tolerance skills. It is very hard to go through, but it is safe to do with a good therapist.

[Parley]

Thanks for speaking up about your therapy. It helps.

[doglover1979]

I'm glad this thread was fixed and reopened. I really enjoy having a discussion about what helps. Sometimes we suffer so much that we can only focus on what hurts, its nice to look towards what offers a possibility of relief and healing.

[Parley]

Originally Posted by doglover1979

I'm glad this thread was fixed and reopened. I really enjoy having a discussion about what helps. Sometimes we suffer so much that we can only focus on what hurts, its nice to look towards what offers a possibility of relief and healing.

I second this and my apologies for my part in getting your thread shutdown.

I hope some of the other posters will return and express their opinions, again, but in a manner that will allow the thread to stay open.

[doglover1979]

Originally Posted by Parley

I hope some of the other posters will return and express their opinions, again, but in a manner that will allow the thread to stay open.

Me too!

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.