It’s estimated that 3.6% of adults in the United States experienced some form of post-traumatic stress disorder in the previous year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. If you’re facing this or another type of trauma, getting help is an option. Treating trauma, after identifying its presence, is a critical step in reclaiming your life.
How Psychological Trauma Is Treated
Treatment for trauma is always very specific to the needs of the individual. A group of therapies may be used on their own or together to help a person overcome the most impactful elements of trauma.
There’s no way to forget or to erase what the trauma has done to you. However, with therapy, it may be possible to rebuild your life.
Most people benefit from a combination of treatments offered by licensed and accredited providers. You shouldn’t try to deal with trauma on your own.
Treatment Through Counseling
Treating emotional trauma requires talking. Counseling, in both one-on-one sessions and group therapy, can help people get to what’s causing their pain.
Generally, your therapist works to uncover the true cause of your symptoms, which may include the actual traumatic event. In a safe setting, a therapist works with you to talk about that event, what it did to you, why you think it happened, and what the presence of it in your life today means.
Key components of this type of therapy may include:
Cognitive Processing Therapy: In this approach, a person works through a number of therapy sessions where they discuss the event, write it down in detail and examine what feelings it creates. The goal is to figure out a new way to manage those feelings or thoughts surrounding this event. The benefit is that you can start to retrain your brain’s reaction to the trauma.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy: Some people benefit from short instances of exposure to the trauma they are suffering. This is generally done for situations that bring on anxiety. You learn how to breathe through them, slow down your mind and face the recounting of these events in your life.
Treatment Through Medical Integration
While most people think psychological trauma treatment is simply talking through the events, there’s an important physiological connection too. Sometimes, the trauma symptoms a person has are directly related to physical ailments.
Some diseases or medications can create sensations of anxiety, fear and the powerful emotional reliving of events in your life. Illegal substances can also create these types of experiences.
For that reason, it’s essential for a person to receive a full medical workup. This component ensures physical needs are being met properly in the course of providing care. Appropriate treatment for any underlying medical condition is important as well.