Behavior Therapy for People With PTSD

BEHAVIOR THERAPY FOR PEOPLE WITH PTSD
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PTSD AND CBT
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD is a mental condition that occurs mainly in people that have experienced severely stressful experiences, either directly or indirectly. A diagnosis of PTSD requires one to come into contact with stimuli that evoke emotion caused by the traumatic event, such as a loud touch or an accidental touch. They usually tend to relive their experiences either through nightmares or flashbacks. The most effective way of treating people with PTSD is cognitive behavior therapy. A person's beliefs and feelings shape reality. Changing one's negative ideas will almost certainly change one's experience. Mindfulness, meditation, talk therapy, and a few more strategies are used in CBT. All of these methods ensure that the client is aware of their surroundings. This is fundamentally what CBT is all about and how it comes in to help PTSD patients. It is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have witnessed or experienced an event that they perceive as traumatic such as a terrorist attack, an accident, robbery, childbirth experiences, combat in war, rape, or a near-death experience (Patra & Sarkar, 2013). It can occur immediately after experiencing a disturbing event or even take days, weeks, months, or even years to manifest. People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts after the traumatic experience has ended.
Symptoms of PTSD are classified into four major categories. First, there is the classic avoidance, where the victim stays away from reminders of the traumatic experiences as a coping mechanism to shield them from memories of the event. This could happen by avoiding places, people, memories, activities, objects, or even situations that evoke those memories. Secondly, there are the different reactive tendencies. Some people living with PTSD may exhibit reactive symptoms like irritability, anger, outbursts, violence, self-destruction, lack of sleep, being overly watchful of one's surroundings, being easily startled, and engaging in risky behavior (Torres, Nelson & West, 2020). Thirdly, there is the subtle intrusion, where the victim suffers from intrusive memories, flashbacks, nightmares or distressing dreams, and involuntary memories. In some instances, the intrusions are so overwhelming that the victim seems to be in a trance or is experiencing an out-of-body experience.
In some cases, the victims suffer from a lack of concentration. Finally, there is the disruptive altered mood and cognitive functions. Here, there are instances when the victims experience altered reality whereby they blame themselves for the traumatic event. They may also exhibit distorted beliefs about themselves, or others distort the truth about the actual occurrences of that experience, fear, guilt, regret, shame, and detachment from activities they previously enjoyed.
In some cases, victims suffer from a lack of memory of the event (Torres, Nelson & West, 2020).The article Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Self-Care in Heart Failure Patients. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(11), 1773 by a team of scholars led by Freedland, offers an in-depth view into CBT.
Summary of Current Research and Thi...