Studies have found that one-third of adults develop PTSD at some point. Many struggle with several traumatic events and eventually need PTSD treatment. But can PTSD really be treated?
Water Gap Wellness Center is a mental health treatment center in Pennsylvania that can help. Speak to our admissions team today to learn more about available treatment options.
PTSD Treatment Options
Tthere are several options for PTSD treatment. The traditional form of treatment is talk therapy, which can be psychotherapy, psychoeducation, CBT, DBT, and other approaches. Each of these can be grounded in a trauma-centered approach that helps avoid retraumatization.
For those who don’t necessarily want to sit and talk about their traumatic event, EMDR is a highly successful alternative. PTSD medications can also help clients who are undergoing traditional trauma therapy or EMDR by offering acute management strategies.
Trauma Therapy
The primary form of PTSD treatment is trauma therapy. Trauma-informed approaches to mental health have the overarching goal of avoiding retraumatization. Qualified treatment centers like Water Gap Wellness Center helps to prevent retraumatization in your daily sessions.
This is highly personalized. Triggers for one person might include:
- Sounds
- Words
- Touch
- Smell
- Music
- A door opened or closed
Trauma therapy functions the same as individual or group therapy sessions but with trained professionals who understand how to identify triggers and avoid retraumatization while enabling clients to process their traumatic memories in a healthier way to move beyond them.
Trauma therapy can be applied to settings like family therapy if you need or want to include your loved ones, and it can be combined with several other forms of treatment like EMDR, PTSD medications, and holistic care to help you better manage triggers.
EMDR
EMDR therapy is an evidence-based practice where you don’t have to sit in a chair and talk about your traumatic experiences in detail but rather sit with your eyes closed and just think about the details. Recalling the memory, rather than sharing it out loud, with a therapist provides a chance to reprocess your emotional attachment to those memories and the triggers they have.
Negative memories and traumatic events from your past, which remain unprocessed, work like an error message in the brain. Your brain can’t function properly because there’s a constant flag of something wrong, but with EMDR therapy, you can resolve those memories and your reaction to trauma in order to remove that error message and bring your brain function back to normal.
This type of PTSD treatment involves changing the way your eyes move when you think about your traumatic memories. You’ll follow a trained therapist as they lead you through different eye movements with sounds that come from headphones or a handheld device. This will help stop any unnecessary reinforcement of your PTSD symptoms by changing the way your brain links those traumatic memories and triggers with things like fear or anxiety.
The WHO and the US Department of Veterans Affairs rely on EMDR as their primary form of PTSD treatment. EMDR offers fast and effective relief for PTSD:
- Many individuals who experienced one traumatic event that caused PTSD can see benefits from this form of treatment within as few as three sessions.
- Individuals who experience multiple traumatic events that have caused PTSD only take an average of eight sessions before they see results.
PTSD Medications
In many cases, PTSD medication is prescribed in conjunction with trauma therapy or EMDR. PTSD is related to changes in the brain that make it difficult to manage stress after a traumatic event. Certain neurotransmitters change in terms of how much you have in your brain, and that imbalance can cause several of the primary PTSD symptoms.
However, PTSD medications can bring balance back to your neurotransmitters and help restore normal brain function. Some of the most common medications include:
- SSRIs like Zoloft or Paxil
- SNRIs like Effexor
These are similar medications to what gets prescribed for mood disorders, anxiety disorders, or depression. This can mitigate mood and stability and neurochemical imbalances, treating concurring mental health disorders as well.
Water Gap Wellness Center PTSD Treatment
If you are ready to start trauma therapy, interested in knowing more about EMDR or considering PTSD medications, reach out to our facility. With Water Gap Wellness Center, we provide individual assessments for those in need of mental health treatment.
We offer several forms of outpatient mental health services and work with you as a potential client to determine which type of treatment and forms of therapy might be best for your situation.
Let Water Gap Wellness Center help you find PTSD treatment today.
