PTSD Group Therapy - Post One

Day 3 -

Essential Points:

Prolonged Exposure Therapy - One of the options I have to treat my PTSD; PET helps stop me from using avoidance as a coping strategy.  This treatment actually encourages me to me to constantly revisit those things I want to avoid.

Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE) is an evidenced-based, manualized protocol effective for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Numerous well-controlled studies over the past two decades have shown that PE significantly reduces the symptoms of PTSD as well as co-morbid symptoms of depression, anger and anxiety. Besides reducing symptoms, PE also instills confidence and a sense of mastery. Clients are better able to discriminate safe and unsafe situations, and experience improvement in many areas of daily functioning.

PE is based in Emotional Processing Theory, which posits that PTSD symptoms arise as a result of cognitive and behavioral avoidance of trauma-related thoughts, reminders, activities and situations. PE helps the client interrupt and reverse this process by blocking cognitive and behavioral avoidance, introducing corrective information, and facilitating organization and processing of the trauma memory and associated thoughts and beliefs. This is accomplished through in vivo and imaginal exposure.

Since I've been going to group therapy, I have to say things have gotten a bit better for me.  At least the voice inside my head has settled down.  I'm listening to positive mantras on a daily basis. Television is pretty much little to none.  I realize television keeps the voice alive.  Television keeps the voice LOUD!  

There was a time I could watch television show after television show without any visible remnants of stress or MESS.  I'm sure it was there but I didn't know.  Now, I may spend one or two nights watching one or two shows at the maximum.  

I really can't do anymore than that now.  Oh, and another thing I am working on doing away with, that's SOCIAL MEDIA.  If I didn't have a business to run on social media, I'd probably be done with it all together.  Social media has also  gotten to be a bit much, don't you think?  So, to mitigate the stress of social media, I'll limit my use to my business BLOGS, business Facebook posts, and business emails...every other day.

As time progresses, I may skip two days in between usage.  My mental health depends on it.

Thoughts?