Post traumatic stress disorder is a condition that impacts mental health. It's triggered when a patient experiences or witnesses a traumatic event or multiple events.

Not everyone who goes through or sees a traumatic event has PTSD. But, through no fault of their own, many people have long-lasting, negative symptoms of PTSD that make it difficult to live a full, healthy life.

While not everyone who endures traumatic events will develop PTSD, it's still crucial to know the signs and symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. Understanding symptoms and risk factors will help ensure you get PTSD treatment if you need it.

The most common symptoms of PTSD include:

• Intrusive memories: This can look like flashbacks and persistent memories of the traumatic event. This symptom can also present as nightmares or severe reactions to anything that reminds you of the traumatic event.
• Avoidant behaviors: You may avoid any activity, person, or thing that reminds you of the traumatic experience or traumatic event.
• Negative thoughts and moods: This can look like hopelessness, emotional numbness, and difficulties with relationships.
• Emotional and physical reactions or changes: These symptoms include hyper-vigilance, self-destructive behavior, irritability, insomnia, guilty feelings, and issues concentrating.

If you're dealing with these symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, seeking help from a mental health professional can help you address the traumatic memories and improve your mental health.

As mentioned above, post traumatic stress disorder is often associated with combat and even used to be known as shell shock. However, many other situations can be a traumatic event and lead to PTSD.

Some of the most common risks factor and causes of PTSD include:

Experiencing sexual assault

Witnessing a violent act

Being threatened or physically assaulted

Seeing a traumatic accident

Being a victim of childhood abuse

While these can all be considered a traumatic event, this isn't an exhaustive list. People react to difficult situations in many ways, and many circumstances and risk factors can cause mental health issues like PTSD.

No matter the causes or reasons for having traumatic memories or developing PTSD, a mental health professional such as Jeremy Magin can help you process traumatic memories.

While people with PTSD share certain symptoms in common, each person is an individual. As such, there isn't one specific type of PTSD treatment that works for everyone. Instead, there are a few different therapeutic options that tend to work best for PTSD based on long-term studies and evidence.

Let's review the most common types of therapy used for PTSD.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most common therapeutic approach in PTSD treatment. CBT helps the patient deal with negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to change these for the positive.

Cognitive behavioral therapy also has many offshoots that are similar but with more specialized approaches.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)

Cognitive processing therapy is a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps patients challenge unhelpful beliefs related to traumatic events. This is a short-term therapy done over 12 sessions and seeks to help the patient recontextualize the traumatic event or events to reduce negative impacts.

Prolonged Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy is another kind of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps patients address trauma-related thoughts and memories they may be avoiding.

The process takes about three months and helps the patient face the traumatic event in order to process through it, instead of just avoiding it.

Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive therapy is another derivative of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this approach, the therapist helps the patient disrupt negative behaviors and thought patterns that interfere with their life.

Cognitive therapy can be done in an individual or group therapy setting.

Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR therapy is another option that may work for some individuals with post traumatic stress disorder. This therapeutic approach is quite a bit different from CBT.

During EMDR, the therapist assists the patient in focusing on the traumatic event while at the same time experiencing eye movements. The goal is to create new pathways in the brain by replacing the traumatic associations with more positive, safe ones.

Living with PTSD can be debilitating. This trauma disorder can make it challenging to go through your daily life, and even more difficult to enjoy yourself. You deserve to find relief from PTSD symptoms.

OneLife Counseling provides options to treat PTSD. Jeremy Magin will tailor the therapy sessions to your needs and use the therapeutic approaches that make you feel safest. By combining his professional knowledge and experience with your valuable insight, you'll get help managing PTSD and finding healing.

Call today to request an appointment or to learn more about PTSD therapy options.