Talk Therapy for PTSD
“PTSD is one diagnosis for which the psychotherapy modalities, which are evidence-based, are shown to be far more effective than any medication,” says Scott R. Hunter, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist in Santa Monica, California. Those modalities include therapies like prolonged exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy, and eye movement desensitization (all described later).
“A core component of the most effective therapies is that you talk to someone who helps you learn how to manage your symptoms yourself,” Dr. Hunter says.
Essentially, the idea behind talk therapy is that it can bring out a patient’s fight-or-flight response. It can then help them move thoughts from survival mode to the intellectual processing areas of the brain, like the frontal cortex, Dr. Yeager explains. That process, in turn, helps the patient process his or her experience on a logical level. He says it also helps to reframe the traumatic experience so they no longer blame themselves or make statements like “I should have …” or “If I had only ….”
You may undergo just one type of talk therapy, or your doctor may use a combined treatment approach. “Depending on the traumatic experience, biopsychosocial issues, symptom presentation, and patient preferences, a carefully selected and sequenced approach to providing therapy may be necessary,” Connors explains. Because PTSD might show up in a number of different ways, providers have to make complex decisions on how to treat it, including addressing a number of different ongoing stressors to help manage patients’ condition, she says.
Hunter also cautions that talk therapy can be a misleading term because all effective therapies for PTSD have a behavioral component to them.
Below are some of the different types of talk therapy that can treat PTSD.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Mental imagery, writing, or a visit to the location where the event occurred may be used to help you face and control your fears.
“What helps is essentially, through repetition, changing the physical and emotional response you have when you are reminded of the trauma,” Hunter says.
You may even use a virtual reality device that allows you to virtually re-enter the trauma setting.
Cognitive Processing Therapy
Cognitive processing therapy helps people address unhelpful thoughts regarding the trauma. It may help you gain a new understanding of the traumatic event, leading to fewer ongoing negative thoughts and symptoms.
For example, if a patient has an inaccurate belief, like “Nobody follows the rules, so the world is not safe,” this type of therapy would help them find alternative explanations for that evidence, and see their own biases of interpretation, Hunter explains.
Stress Inoculation Training (SIT)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP)
CPP is a form of psychotherapy for children up to age 5 who have experienced traumatic events or who are experiencing trauma symptoms, difficulty bonding, or behavioral problems, Connors says. One of the main goals is to support and strengthen the relationship between the caregiver and child to protect the child’s development and recovery from trauma, she explains.
Strengthening Family Coping Resources (SFCR)
This is a trauma-focused, multifamily, skill-building intervention. SFCR offers trauma treatment and therapeutic strategies to help improve families’ abilities to cope with ongoing stress and threats of re-exposure, Connors says.
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