A Realistic View On What Post-Traumatic Growth Looks Like
When it comes to needing PTSD treatment, what some people think will help and what will actually help them can be two different things. In this letter, I’ll talk about 3 critical steps you can take towards healing and recovery, whether it’s on your own or with the guidance of a PTSD therapist who can walk you through it…
And when you do want help walking through it, if you’d like to make sure you work with a dedicated and compassionate PTSD therapist, read this.
What Do You Do With Trauma?
No two ways about it: ask the typical person with trauma what a major way of coping has been for them and they’ll put some kind of avoidance (distraction, dissociation, etc) among the top of the list.
But here’s the thing: we all know deep down that avoiding “reality” is one quality that—at best—has nothing to do with stable, recovering, long-term mental health. And,. at worst, it can make more problems down the road for people with anxiety and PTSD. We could all probably imagine why…
Sure, “avoiding” works to get some calm or stability in the now in the short-term… and it can even keep going for awhile. But the cognitive research shows: at some point in the future, coping strategies like avoiding don’t stand the test of time… and that’s because the ways you think deep down about the trauma, yourself, and the future do not change. Luckily…
Cognitive Therapy Can Help You, Your Trauma, And Your Future
What can someone with trauma aim for when it comes to treating trauma for the long-term? First, I’d definitely recommend therapy for PTSD because one of the best ways it can help is by changing “hot” traumatic memories to “bad” traumatic memories, as it’s called in cognitive therapy. That’s one of the benefits you can find in PTSD therapy over time because it’s a process that goes deep.
But in case you can’t make it to trauma therapy, here are 3 key steps to reducing your anxiety and PTSD symptoms that you’d do in cognitive therapy with me, according to Aaron Beck*:
Step #1: Heal Your Negative Beliefs
If you’re recovering from trauma, you deserve a lot of compassion, because how you grow beyond hard-wired thinking about what the trauma means is a great struggle within PTSD. Your success in managing PTSD symptoms—and keeping it going for the long term—actually lies in re-shaping and re-constructing your belief systems. In what you believe about the world, other people, the trauma, your symptoms, the future, and you.
(People with trauma are facing a lot as they try to live with and make sense of traumatic experience, and they deserve assistance.)
In more specific terms, you need to address the limiting beliefs that hold you back from achieving your brighter future… the future you’ve always imagined for yourself. This means working on new beliefs that have the qualities to support you in getting that future, no matter what they may be.
Which leads me directly to…
Step #2: Define What You Want To Remember
This one’s as simple as it sounds… Before you can break free from the negative influence of your trauma, first you need to heal what you remember. This is something you can get started on right now: clarifying your personal “vision” of what memories mean in a fulfilling way.
Once you do that, guess what… the trauma memory will stop confirming those negative beliefs I talked about in Step #1. Cognitive research shows that you can heal a lot of your distress by organizing a meaningful and complete memory of trauma.
And if you need some extra help figuring out how to best organize your memories, I offer the cognitive therapy to do so, easily and at your own pace. We’ll work on bringing out the hidden qualities that naturally produce resilience. But more importantly, I’ll also take you through how to process any unresolved memories. You can read more about cognitive therapy for PTSD here.
Step #3: Improve How You Might Cope
Some people with trauma cope in unhealthy or destructive ways. And it’s all just because they’ve been practicing counterproductive responses over and over. In other words, if you’re a traumatized person who has problems in personal or work relationships, you can improve and refresh how you function. If you’re someone who copes with trauma by using a substance and it causes challenges, you can examine how else to calm what you’re self-medicating.
Basically, when it comes to treating your trauma, you would benefit from honestly and bravely taking a look at how you might cope more constructively in the future. Only then can you build hope and resilience over the long-term: when your habits, routines, and behaviors support a life of recovery from trauma.
I hope these 3 key steps give you a picture of some ways you can treat your trauma. In cognitive therapy for PTSD, we’ll spend a lot of time on modifying negative beliefs, trauma memories, and unhealthy ways of coping. And I’d be honored to have the opportunity to help you grow after trauma, so please reach out.
*Footnote 1: See Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders, p. 539.
Find out more about PTSD Treatment.
About The Author
John Younes, JD, MA, LPCC, NCC is a trained counselor who owns a private practice in Denver, CO. In general, he specializes in depression treatment, anxiety treatment, and PTSD treatment using existential and cognitive therapy practices.
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