At Chiron, Trauma Therapy sessions align with the NICE guidelines for Psychotraumatology. The evidence-based processes we use include:
Trauma Therapy helps your brain reorganise itself, allowing you to recognise the past as the past, and the present as the present. A large part of the therapy – regardless of the process – is to ensure that you are able to manage the responses associated with traumatic
memories in a safe and beneficial way.
This will help you to make positive changes in your life, establish and maintain healthy boundaries, build positive relationships, and help you to reach your full potential. Trauma Therapy looks to help you get to a point of long-term, sustainable recovery.
This will help you to make positive changes in your life, establish and maintain healthy boundaries, build positive relationships, and help you to reach your full potential. Trauma Therapy looks to help you get to a point of long-term, sustainable recovery.
CPT / CBT
“CPT / CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) explores how an event affects how we behave and what we
think/believe, providing an opportunity for changing these and making new choices”
CPT is a hybrid therapy that involves a cognitive as well as an exposure element.
CPT is a top down process that keeps the pre-frontal cortex connected whilst processing the emotions through exposure. The goal of CPT is recovery from trauma through a change in the survivor’s belief system in order to gain a balanced and realistic view of the event or events.
This is achieved through encouraging the survivor to stop avoiding. Emotions experienced through recollection of the trauma are helped to be processed in a healthy way.
It works by helping the client to re-interpret the event in light of context and facts of the event. It serves to diminish any difficult emotions that may have been based on misinformation or misinterpretation of the event in connection to view of self, others or the world. It thereby enables the survivor to avoid overgeneralising from a single event/person/disaster to the world at large (Resick et al).
NET
“Narrative Exposure Therapy creates an opportunity to unravel and make sense of one’s history”
NET is a treatment for trauma survivors during which the client constructs a chronological narrative of their life in an attempt to integrate often fragmented memories of traumatic experiences into a coherent life story. In the initial sessions clients will lay their “life-line”, making use of flowers (for positive events) and stones (traumatic events) along a rope or ribbon.
Therapy then focuses on reliving these events taking account of physiological, emotional and cognitive elements experienced at the time and interweaving these with the “here and now”, thereby acting as constant reminders that these experiences are in the past and only memories. In the presence of the therapist these memories are reprocessed.
After therapy a copy of their autobiographical life story is given to the client, this document may also be used for human rights advocacy.
As NET involves narrating the entire life story, it is particularly suited to treating Complex Trauma. It was developed by Schauer, Neuner and Elbert and is being used in the treatment of refugees and the victims of torture” otherwise it sounds like refugees are the perpetrators! with projects all over the world. See www.vivo.org for further information
PET
“Prolonged Exposure Therapy examines the trauma in detail to complete the narrative”
PET (Foa and Kozak, 1985, 1986) is a bottom up trauma process recommended for PTSD 1 and other trauma related reactions such as depression or anxiety following any kind of trauma where the sufferer has sufficient recall of the trauma and can describe it with a beginning, middle and end. The purpose is an emotional processing of traumatic experiences through repeated exposure. Fear is regarded as the primary emotion in PTSD 1 which often leads the sufferer to avoid reminders of the trauma, thereby exacerbating the problem.
Prolonged exposure therapy utilises psychoeducation, breathing retraining as well as both in vivo and imaginal exposure in a systematic way in order for habituation to occur. The fear structure is activated during exposure in order for new information to be incorporated. Prolonged Exposure has a large research and evidence base and its efficacy is well documented (Foa, Hembree & Rothbaum, 2007).
To keep it simple, in this type of therapy the trauma memory is revisited in a detailed and prolonged way – this helps the brain to understand that the trauma is only a memory and is not happening now, and any danger has past. Alongside this, therapy also looks to help a person stop avoiding aspects of the trauma in a step by step way.
IRRT
“Image Rescripting and Reprocessing Therapy makes it possible to change the memory of specific events in order that they are no longer troubling memories”
IRRT is an integrative Cognitive Behavioural approach originally designed as treatment for adult survivors of childhood abuse (Smucker, Dancu, Foa & Niederee, 1995), and is recommended for Type II clients where emotions such as anger, blame, grief, guilt and shame are predominant, rather than fear.
With its elements of imaginal exposure, mastery imagery and cognitive restructuring, IRRT seeks to modify images during rescripting and reprocessing of a trauma, and works at the schema level, thereby tapping into the 7 key areas affected by Complex PTSD. The goals of IRRT include the reduction of physiological arousal, eliminating the re-experiencing of distressing imagery, developing more adaptive schemas and beliefs associated with the trauma or traumas as well as to increase the client’s self-nurturing abilities and coping skills; in this sense IRRT is said to go beyond extinction models to facilitate change at the schema level. Since its conception IRRT has been utilised to treat many other forms of trauma as well as co-occurring disorders and is expanding its evidence base (Brewin et al, 2009).
To keep it simple – in this type of therapy an individual is again helped to revisit a trauma, often this may be a childhood trauma, and with guidance from the therapist in a structured and systematic way, is enabled to confront the perpetrator in their imagination and gain mastery over situation and the memory. This therapy helps to process a trauma emotionally as well as cognitively.
ERRT
Exposure, Relaxation and Rescripting Therapy (ERRT) is a cognitive behavioral treatment for trauma-related nightmares.
The treatment consists of 4-5 sessions and runs for 60-120 minutes per session, depending on whether the therapy is being delivered in an individual or group setting.
Parts of the treatment include important psychoeducation about trauma, PTSD, and nightmares, relaxation training, modification of sleep habits, written and verbal exposure to the nightmare, rescription of the nightmare based on trauma-related themes (i.e., power, trust, intimacy, esteem, safety), and rehearsal of the rescripted dream each night prior to going to sleep.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Rescripting is a time-efficient, comprehensive methodolgy for the treatment of the disturbing experiences that underlie many pathologies. It works on the idea that the mind and body can heal itself.
EMDR is an integrated model that incorporates aspects of psychodynamic, experiential, behavioural, cognitive, body-based and systems therapies.
EMDR comprises an 8-phase treatment that includes the use of eye movements. It allows clients to reprocess disturbing thoughts and memories to produce profound and stable treatments effects in a short period of time.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Post-traumatic Growth refers to the phenomenon that between 30-70% of individuals who have survived trauma, report positive changes as a result of the struggles involved in the trauma. Post-traumatic Growth has been defined as the “experience of individuals whose development, at least in some areas has surpassed what was present before the struggle with crises occurred. The individual has not only survived, but has experienced changes that are viewed as important and that go beyond the status quo” (Tadeshi and Calhoun, 2004). That is not to say that individuals would not prefer that the trauma hadn’t taken place, yet some positives are often taken from it.
Research has found that these changes occur broadly in the areas of emotional growth, closer relationships, altered perspective on life, changes in self-concept, living in the moment, and appreciation (Joseph,S, 2013). Follow the links for further information.
Post-traumatic Growth is a very individual and special resource that helps survivors transform their unique Trauma into a new Form, a gift on their path to Recovery.
For more information plese click on: Trauma-Recovery or here: Positive-Psychology