Who Suffers From PTSD?
Symptoms of PTSD can occur after you experience a traumatic event, even though many people don’t develop these symptoms immediately after a traumatic event. However, experiencing distressing symptoms could interfere with how you function in your day-to-day life. Whether you meet the criteria for PTSD or not, don’t ignore any symptoms that could be negatively impacting your life. By taking a cognitive behavioral approach, We can help you or a loved one process past traumatic events and learn powerful tools to live a healthy, fulfilling, and purposeful life.
Symptoms Of PTSD
The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder include recurrent, distressing memories of the traumatic event and experiencing negative changes in thoughts and feelings. Sometimes this can lead to angry outbursts. People also commonly avoid thoughts, feelings, and stimuli associated with the traumatic event and could have flashbacks. These symptoms cause distress and could interfere with functioning at home, work, school, or relationships.
PTSD often occurs with other disorders, including depression, anxiety, and substance use. We offer CBT for trauma including prolonged exposure therapy to help you identify these symptoms and effectively treat them.
How We Can Help As a CBT Therapist
By focusing on trauma focused therapy, we work with people to help them overcome traumatic experiences. Prolonged exposure, a CBT technique, is the gold standard treatment for PTSD. Medication is sometimes used in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy for PTSD. We will help you sort through these options and we will work together to develop the best treatment plan for you.
CBT Therapy/Prolonged Exposure: The Gold Standard For PTSD
When you constantly suffer from the trauma you’ve experienced, it can seem like you don’t have any control over your thoughts, your emotions, or your life. Prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD is a process to help you confront the thoughts, feelings, and memories associated with the traumatic event. This emotional processing helps you learn that you are safe and that these memories, thoughts, and fears are no longer dangerous. Prolonged exposure is completed gradually over a number of sessions and may include imaginal exposures or in vivo exposure, which involves directly experiencing feared stimuli. This CBT for PTSD technique has proven to be very effective.
Contact Dr. Michelle Peacock
Don’t suffer any longer. We can work together utilizing powerful CBT tools and techniques to help you gain control of your life again. Contact us at any time to learn more about my qualifications and services.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a psychotherapy approach designed to help individuals process and alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories and experiences.
During an EMDR session, the therapist guides the client through a series of bilateral stimulation techniques, which often involve rhythmic eye movements, auditory tones, or tapping. These techniques are believed to mimic the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, facilitating the brain’s natural processing of traumatic memories.
EMDR aims to help individuals reprocess distressing memories in a way that reduces their emotional charge, allowing them to integrate the memories into their life narrative without triggering intense negative emotions. The therapy involves a structured eight-phase approach that includes history-taking, preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation.
Research suggests that EMDR can be effective in treating conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related disorders. It is believed that the bilateral stimulation helps to rewire the brain’s responses to traumatic memories, leading to decreased distress and symptoms associated with the trauma.
Call us today to schedule a consultation or an initial appointment to get started with EMDR therapy.