A better question is: What can't therapy do for you? It is not possible to heal PTSD without some sort of professional support, guidance and interaction.
Which is not to say you have to spend thousands of dollars ricocheting from practitioner to therapist.
There are several free, professional on and offline offerings that can do an incredible amount to educate you about how to cope, manage, treat and heal on your own.
Onsite counseling can be extremely effective in how we learn to push our thoughts forward by the benefit of an outside perspective.
If you cannot afford this route, take heart, there are still many options for you.
The most important aspect of healing PTSD is making the commitment to find the therapies and practices that work for you.
Our healing paths intersect and mirror each other, but they are their own individual journeys.
This means hearing how others have healed can give you ideas for how to progress your healing, but they don't ensure your path will be exactly the same as anyone else's.
What Part of the Brain Needs To Heal? To begin a thorough examination of popular PTSD treatment approaches, let's break things down into two camps: the conscious and the subconscious.
Our conscious mind is our literal assimilation of stimuli.
It's logical, rational and analytical.
The subconscious mind is exactly the opposite.
It is our 'animal' mind, driven by emotion, thoughts, instincts and memories of which we are not always aware.
Which do you think is the stronger part of your brain? If you said the subconscious mind you'd be correct! The conscious mind is actually only 12% of our brain, while the subconscious mind makes up a whopping 88%.
This means that everything we do is really motivated by the part of us that houses our memories and emotional cache.
What's the bottom line here? When a trauma occurs, we cannot just get over it because it has made an impression in the subconscious that it holds onto.
Think of the beach: Your feet leave footprints in the sand.
Long after your foot has moved on the sand holds onto the shape your sole left behind.
The subconscious mind is like this, too.
Long after the trauma is over the subconscious holds on to the impression left behind.
Until a wave erases the impression your footprints remain on the beach; the same goes for the impact of trauma in the subconscious mind.
And here's another pesky fact: the subconscious sees its job as keeping you safe.
Put this together with the idea that the impact of trauma remains fresh and you've got a really fabulous recipe for virulent PTSD.
Believing that you are still in danger, the subconscious mind gets to work protecting you by keeping your mind and body in a constant state of alert.
Healing means getting the subconscious mind to stand down.
How Do We Heal? Despite all of the clinical and scientific evidence of how PTSD functions in both sides of the brain, many people approach therapy as if all that's necessary is having a linear chat and all will be well.
However, the secret to healing trauma and PTSD lies in approaching both sides of the brain, not one or the other.
Each segment has reasons it needs healing attention.
If we only deal with the conscious mind, then the memories and emotions stored in the subconscious mind will continue to affect us regardless of what we consciously learn and understand.
If we only deal with the subconscious mind, we don't fully learn how to communicate what is most troubling us and so we may not wholly reach the problems on the subconscious side.
A powerful approach for healing PTSD is combining approaches so that each side of the mind is addressed.
What Therapy Can Do For You Therapies that address the conscious mind (i.
e.
talk therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy) give us powerful tools for learning about ourselves, our trauma reactions, our thoughts, feelings, emotions and, most importantly, our fears - and then helps us develop language and tools for coping and strategizing our healing.
Therapies that address the subconscious mind (i.
e.
information processing techniques, hypnotherapy) speak to the subconscious mind in a deeply effective manner.
They are the waves that erase trauma's imprint that moves us closer and closer to healing.
The crux of what a combination of therapies can do lies in combining the synergy of both sides of the mind into a paradigmatic shift so that our perceptions of trauma are reduced to their rightful size and we become free to live not as survivors or victims but as people with past experiences - just like everyone else.
Which is not to say you have to spend thousands of dollars ricocheting from practitioner to therapist.
There are several free, professional on and offline offerings that can do an incredible amount to educate you about how to cope, manage, treat and heal on your own.
Onsite counseling can be extremely effective in how we learn to push our thoughts forward by the benefit of an outside perspective.
If you cannot afford this route, take heart, there are still many options for you.
The most important aspect of healing PTSD is making the commitment to find the therapies and practices that work for you.
Our healing paths intersect and mirror each other, but they are their own individual journeys.
This means hearing how others have healed can give you ideas for how to progress your healing, but they don't ensure your path will be exactly the same as anyone else's.
What Part of the Brain Needs To Heal? To begin a thorough examination of popular PTSD treatment approaches, let's break things down into two camps: the conscious and the subconscious.
Our conscious mind is our literal assimilation of stimuli.
It's logical, rational and analytical.
The subconscious mind is exactly the opposite.
It is our 'animal' mind, driven by emotion, thoughts, instincts and memories of which we are not always aware.
Which do you think is the stronger part of your brain? If you said the subconscious mind you'd be correct! The conscious mind is actually only 12% of our brain, while the subconscious mind makes up a whopping 88%.
This means that everything we do is really motivated by the part of us that houses our memories and emotional cache.
What's the bottom line here? When a trauma occurs, we cannot just get over it because it has made an impression in the subconscious that it holds onto.
Think of the beach: Your feet leave footprints in the sand.
Long after your foot has moved on the sand holds onto the shape your sole left behind.
The subconscious mind is like this, too.
Long after the trauma is over the subconscious holds on to the impression left behind.
Until a wave erases the impression your footprints remain on the beach; the same goes for the impact of trauma in the subconscious mind.
And here's another pesky fact: the subconscious sees its job as keeping you safe.
Put this together with the idea that the impact of trauma remains fresh and you've got a really fabulous recipe for virulent PTSD.
Believing that you are still in danger, the subconscious mind gets to work protecting you by keeping your mind and body in a constant state of alert.
Healing means getting the subconscious mind to stand down.
How Do We Heal? Despite all of the clinical and scientific evidence of how PTSD functions in both sides of the brain, many people approach therapy as if all that's necessary is having a linear chat and all will be well.
However, the secret to healing trauma and PTSD lies in approaching both sides of the brain, not one or the other.
Each segment has reasons it needs healing attention.
If we only deal with the conscious mind, then the memories and emotions stored in the subconscious mind will continue to affect us regardless of what we consciously learn and understand.
If we only deal with the subconscious mind, we don't fully learn how to communicate what is most troubling us and so we may not wholly reach the problems on the subconscious side.
A powerful approach for healing PTSD is combining approaches so that each side of the mind is addressed.
What Therapy Can Do For You Therapies that address the conscious mind (i.
e.
talk therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy) give us powerful tools for learning about ourselves, our trauma reactions, our thoughts, feelings, emotions and, most importantly, our fears - and then helps us develop language and tools for coping and strategizing our healing.
Therapies that address the subconscious mind (i.
e.
information processing techniques, hypnotherapy) speak to the subconscious mind in a deeply effective manner.
They are the waves that erase trauma's imprint that moves us closer and closer to healing.
The crux of what a combination of therapies can do lies in combining the synergy of both sides of the mind into a paradigmatic shift so that our perceptions of trauma are reduced to their rightful size and we become free to live not as survivors or victims but as people with past experiences - just like everyone else.