Therapy for PTSD is not fun. It’s not fun for you and won’t be fun for me as your therapist either. I do think it is very rewarding and you will feel better eventually. I like to think of it as a recovery process. The trauma can never be undone. Whatever happened happened and we’re not going to erase your memory or the past. So the goal for therapy is for you to get to a point where the trauma doesn’t have to haunt you. We don’t want your trauma driving your decision-making. But the memories for sure will always be there and likely they will always leave you feeling somewhat sad when you think of them.
The first step with trauma therapy is to deliberately think of the things you wish you had forgotten. We have to find those horrible memories which you have pushed to the darkest corners of your mind and talk about them. And I am so sorry that you have to go through this process. We want to shine light on the memories and really look at what happened and make sure that you are remembering things correctly, without judgment but rather with honesty.
Once we “reality check” the memory we can then start looking at the emotions associated with the memory. We want to validate your emotional experience when the event happened and look at how that impacted your behavior at the time and your memory of the event. We want to look at how your emotions about the event impact your behavior today.
And then you get to tell the story of your trauma again. It may have changed; you may have remembered something new or remembered something differently. Hopefully you are starting to think about it differently.
We’ll go through this process a few times. You may notice that initially you think about the trauma more and/or have more dreams about it. Hopefully, as you start deliberately turning towards the memory, the intrusive thoughts will happen less and less. Your brain will give you a break from the PTSD symptoms because you are dealing with the trauma in a healthy and productive way.