PTSD Treatment and Trauma Therapy

What is PTSD?

PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a response your brain and body have in response to an event or events in which you felt or witnessed a physical or emotional threat to safety or well-being. The resulting symptoms included intense unwanted feelings, thoughts, and/or bodily sensations. You may have flashbacks, avoidance of the place where the event happened, or feel unable to “let go” of these very unpleasant feelings, feelings of impending doom, or a sense that you are not safe. An incident might be: Being bullied by classmates or reprimanded by a teacher (women with ADHD often have these experiences) or witnessing bullying, a car accident, a sexual assault, a sudden unexpected death of a loved one.

How will I treat this?

With TIR (Traumatic Incident Reduction). This is an evidence-based treatment for the unwanted “sludge” that you feel after a traumatic event, or a series of them.

How is this different from regular talk therapy?

In most talk therapies, you usually talk about what is keeping you feeling stuck. You talk about your thoughts and feelings about a stressful event or situation. The therapist may reflect on what you said and give you their interpretation of how you are feeling or reacting, and they may give strategies for calming yourself. This can be helpful in giving you support or ways to cope with your feelings, thoughts and sensations about the trauma, like putting a band-aid on a wound. However, it is not as effective at treating the root cause of your PTSD, which is the charge of it on your brain and nervous system.

Let’s imagine that you were in a car crash. Since then, your body has a hard time resting. You startle with sudden noise. Images, sounds, even smells from the accident keep running through your head. You may have trouble sleeping. You are afraid of getting into a car again, and you may be avoiding cars.

It may help to tell a therapist about these symptoms, because you don’t feel so alone. They may tell you this sounds like a trauma response, and they may empathize that this is hard to cope with. They may give you some strategies for self-calm and positive self-talk. You might spend weeks or months talking about your symptoms and how they are affecting your life. You may have found ways to deal with the symptoms, and the symptoms might have lessened a little bit, but they are still there.

With TIR you don’t talk “about” what happened. You will re-experience the incident with me in a safe, structured, and uninterrupted way, from start to finish. We repeat the process, each time letting more charge come off, until you feel mostly free of the charge, which we call an “End Point”. A TIR session is not a band-aid. It’s more like a match that “burns off” the kerosene, or charge, of the incident. It’s targeted, intense, and provides faster relief of your symptoms.

How long is a typical TIR session?

The length of time on this varies, but most TIR sessions can be done in 90 minutes. There is no set end-time to a TIR session. When you are stabilized and have reached an Endpoint, you are done with the session. This is also why we plan the session in advance. You want to do this when you have a good window of time, and some time after the session to allow for rest and recharge.

How many sessions will I need?

This depends upon the nature and intensity of the trauma. It may be as little as six sessions, especially if the traumatic incident was a short, discrete one. A few sessions are spent on getting more information and me learning of your concerns or anything else you are interested in working on with me, before we do the actual TIR session or sessions.

If the traumatic event is more long-term, such as a harrowing workplace or life situation, we might work longer to help reduce the charge or distress around them. For example, if you were bullied in your workplace, you might have trauma from the bullying incidents, but if you also find that you have lingering attitudes or wrong messages around them, we may need to work through those to. The unwanted feelings and beliefs may be related to earlier incidents. We will work to get relief from that charge, too.

In short, there is no “set in stone” number of sessions. When you feel you are in a place where you can function more fully in your life, and your PTSD symptoms are lessened (or gone), we are done.