Trauma Therapy Types That Actually Work for Your Healing Journey

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The trauma is not all the same, and the trauma treatment is not all the same. One episode of violence kind of reacts to treatment differently than decades of childhood neglect. Combat trauma is not similar to medical trauma. The stressed person who closes down must be approached differently compared to the emotional person who bursts. Having an understanding of the trauma therapy types that are available and what each type of trauma therapy actually does will position you in a much better place to make informed choices regarding your own healing. This blog discusses evidence-based therapies for trauma, how they work, and their appropriate use.

Trauma Therapy Types That Work for Your Healing Journey

More precisely, trauma therapy is not a single approach or field but a multitude of different, evidence-based approaches. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center of PTSD reports that cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure, and EMDR, all of which have the strongest research support, all have a single objective: assisting the brain to process traumatic memories in a manner that limits the continuing emotional and physiological effects of the trauma. The difference between them is how they attain such an objective.

Why One Method May Work Better Than Another for Your Recovery

The results of the studies on trauma treatment therapy are reliably the same in that all the major evidence-based therapies yield similar outcomes on average; however, the variation in individual response is significantly different. Other individuals believe that the formal cognitive labor of CPT is transformative.

It is intellectually stimulating to others, and they react better to bilateral stimulation of EMDR. Others are unable to work with exposure-based methods until their nervous system has been more regulated, and it is best to start with somatic work. Clinical assessment often dictates the ideal approach, and in some cases, it is dictated by a trial of the first-offered approach, with the flexibility to change should a poor response be obtained.

Cognitive Processing Therapy and Reframing Traumatic Memories

The cognitive processing therapy (CPT) is a mode of treatment structured into 12 sessions, which involves the distorted beliefs, known as stuck points, formed around traumatic experiences and continue to uphold the PTSD symptoms. CPT has been developed to address sexual assault survivors and has since been proven to be valid among many groups of trauma survivors, such as combat veterans, disaster survivors, and childhood abuse survivors. Themes that are commonly treated in CPT are:

• Self-blame
• Permanent unsafety
• Damaged identity
• Global distrust
• Hopelessness

Exposure Therapy: Confronting Fear Through Controlled Progression

The whole concept of exposure therapy is anchored upon a simple yet effective principle, which is that avoidance sustains fear and approach diminishes it. Avoiding all things related to a memory affecting the trauma will provide a temporary relief, but an ultimate fixation of the fear reaction. Exposure therapy is the opposite, and it works in a progressive, step-by-step approach to the material that is avoided, making sure that the anxiety response diminishes as a result of habituation. The most researched and widely applied exposure protocol to PTSD is prolonged exposure (PE), developed by Dr. Edna Foa, and is both imaginal and in vivo based.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR is effective for PTSD, anxiety disorders, and trauma involving excessive sensory elements. The World Health Organization, VA, and the American Psychological Association all recommend it as a first-line treatment of PTSD.

EMDR is distinguished from other forms of trauma therapy in the sense that it does not involve the recounting of the traumatic experience in great detail or the use of conscious mind worksheets. EMDR is specifically effective in:

• One-time trauma and explicit memory.
• Individuals who are hyperaroused by discussing the trauma in detail.
• Childhood trauma in which the memories are non-verbal or fragmented.
• Trauma involving excessive sensory elements—intrusive images or sounds, or physical sensations.
• Individuals who have attempted and failed to respond to CBT-based interventions.

Somatic Experiencing and Your Body’s Stress Response

Somatic experiencing (SE) was invented by Dr. Peter Levine and is rooted in the fact that trauma is unprocessed in the nervous system as unfinished physiological awakenings rather than necessarily as a narrative. When the animal gets out of the danger, it will finish the cycle of the stress response physically: to shake, run, or fight. This cycle is often interrupted by the human being, so that the activation that gets stored in the human body is chronic tension, hypervigilance, and a nervous system that is not able to relax fully.

Building Coping Mechanisms for Daily Emotional Healing

Trauma therapy sessions usually occur on a weekly basis, and hence most of the healing takes place during the intervals in between the sessions. The development of effective coping techniques to deal with trauma reactions between sessions is a key component of the recovery process and not an incidental issue. Particularly, trauma recovery coping techniques to use between sessions include:

• Paced breathing 
• Safe place visualization
• Movement and exercise
• Structured social contact
• Journaling with containment

Trauma-Informed Care at Nashville Mental Health

Successful treatment of traumas begins with a detailed evaluation of the history of the trauma, symptomatic manifestation, and personal objectives of the person and constructs a treatment plan that fits the correct method to the appropriate person. Nashville Mental Health offers evidence-based treatment based on trauma-informed care, including CPT, exposure therapy, EMDR, and somatic treatment with clinicians trained in all of them. There is no universal trauma therapy, the one that fits all histories, responses, and goals of recovery. It is the one that fits your history, your response, and your recovery objectives.

Contact Nashville Mental Health today to speak with a trauma-informed care specialist and find the right therapy approach for your healing journey.

FAQs

Which trauma therapy type works fastest for PTSD symptom relief?

EMDR and long-term exposure always demonstrate the quickest symptom reduction schedules in clinical trials, and a great many individuals have reached considerable advancement after 8-12 sessions. EMDR is more likely to yield results within a shorter period of time in cases of single-incident trauma that have well-defined memories, whereas PE yields similar results in a similar time duration in avoidance-based PTSD. The best results are achieved when the therapy is well-adapted to the individual’s presentation and, at the same time, they participate in regular between-session work.

Can somatic experiencing reduce physical anxiety symptoms without talking about trauma?

Yes, somatic experiencing is achieved mostly by following and discharging physical sensations as opposed to verbal narrative processing, which implies that individuals can undergo considerable lessening of physical anxiety symptoms, such as chronic tension, hypervigilance, and startle reflexes, without verbal explanation of the traumatic incident. This is why SE is especially useful with individuals who become overwhelmed to the point of shutting down when questioned about their trauma and those with memories that are pre-verbal, fragmented, or more of a sense than a story.

How does cognitive processing therapy differ from exposure therapy for trauma recovery?

CPT is conducted at the cognitive level mostly, i.e., recognition and disproving of distorted beliefs created around the traumatic event and substituting them with more realistic and balanced thoughts. Prolonged exposure acting mainly on the behavioral and emotional level—this causes avoidance to go down and emotional reaction to the traumatic memory to go down as a result of repeated and controlled involvement. They are both effective, and some treatment programs are based on a combination of the elements of the two, yet CPT is typically used in trauma, in which the belief distortion is the most noticeable, and PE, where avoidance and emotional numbness are more prevalent.

What coping mechanisms help when trauma triggers occur between therapy sessions?

The best between-session coping strategies to use when faced by triggers of the trauma are grounding methods, which interrupt the dissociation and reconnect to the present moment, specifically sensory grounding, physical movements, and deep breathing; and a simple, focused method of containing the contents until the next session, including writing it down and closing the journal. The contact with a trusted individual is also very effective socially since the interpersonal safety directly down-regulates the threat response of the nervous system compared to solitary coping mechanisms.

Is EMDR effective for childhood trauma or better suited for recent incidents?

EMDR is useful with childhood trauma as well as with recent trauma, and in a sense is especially well adapted to childhood trauma since the therapy takes place at an implicit, sensory level that does not involve the development of a coherent verbal narrative, which may be missing in early childhood experiences. Complex or chronic trauma cases of childhood will need further preparative work before active EMDR processing can be initiated; however, the treatment itself shows good evidence in both single-incident trauma in an adult and complex early-life trauma.