What to expect from an Austin Trauma Therapist
Relief and growth after trauma are possible in less time than you think! CPT works its magic in about 12 sessions and just about all of my clients no longer meet criteria for PTSD at the end of those 12 sessions. Reach out today to schedule your free 15-minute phone consultation with an Austin trauma therapist.
I was interviewed as the inaugural guest on the Stories of Hope - Lessons Learned from Trauma podcast. The host is himself a trauma survivor-turned-advocate who has since started a nonprofit called From Victim to Victor. I offered insights as an Austin trauma therapist.
I share a little personal background about my own story as a pediatric cancer survivor as well as my decision to pursue a career in social work.
Here are some highlights from the episode:
I define trauma and explain the different paths from trauma exposure to PTSD.
There are broader and narrower definitions of trauma. The word came into the English language from the Greek word for wound. The most inclusive definition of trauma is any event that overwhelms your ability to cope. To give someone a PTSD diagnosis per the diagnostic manual that sets the standard in the US, a person must have been exposed to (1) actual or threatened death, (2) actual or threatened bodily injury, or (3) sexual violence. Exposure can mean: (1) it happened to you, (2) you saw it happen to someone else, (3) you learned of it happening to a loved one, or (4) you were repeatedly exposed through your occupation.
I briefly discuss Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research and how childhood trauma contributes to all kinds of health issues in adulthood.
ACEs are a set of 10 experiences people have in childhood that set them up for a multitude of health problems later in life. If you want to know more about this research, go here: https://acestoohigh.com/
I introduce Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), how it addresses PTSD, and who is a good candidate.
CPT is a gold standard treatment for PTSD. It targets the way trauma changes your view of yourself, others, and the world. The goal is to find balanced and adaptive beliefs. Here’s a very oversimplified example. You believed people were good. Then you got attacked. Now you think people are terrible. I don’t want you to go back to thinking people are all good because that isn’t true. But I don’t want you to continue believing that everyone is terrible because that isn’t true either. We try to get to a nuanced “some are good, some are neutral, some are terrible” belief and then talk about how to protect yourself from the terrible without shutting out the good.
The role of avoidance and the “just world belief” in maintaining PTSD symptoms.
Avoidance is part of the criteria for PTSD - you don’t get the diagnosis if there isn’t some avoidance present. So urges to avoid are to be expected in any therapy working with trauma. And avoidance is what keeps you stuck in PTSD. Fortunately with CPT, you don’t have to share every nitty gritty detail of your traumatic experience. I’m more concerned with the meaning you ascribe to it. It’s not in sharing the whole play-by-play that people recover. The developers of CPT even did a study where they looked at CPT with a written trauma account and CPT without the account. The outcomes were the same. If you want to write the account, you may choose to and some people do. But it not required and I will not ask you to do it.
The “just world belief” is something we all learn. Maybe from parents, church, school, society at large. It’s the idea that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It’s rigid and concrete which is how child brains work. We unknowingly carry this belief into adulthood even as we learn the world is much more complicated. If something bad happens to you, and you don’t want to change your “just world” belief, then you have to make it your fault that the bad thing happened. Finding flexibility in the “just world” belief allows for acceptance of what happened AND keeping your self-worth intact.
If what you read (or heard on the podcast below resonates with you,) I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation to discuss my approach as an Austin trauma therapist. Go here to schedule a consultation.