Treatment of PTSD

If the sibling abuse continues into adulthood, it may be a good idea as the a step to a mentally healthier life, to break the contact with the abusive sibling. It will give an unstable brain a chance to recover and return to a normal operation. But one should keep in mind that it might take a long time to recover from years of mental abuse. One should expect that it may take as much as five years or maybe even longer.

Just as there are both psychological and physical aspects of PTSD, there are also both psychological and physical treatments of the symptoms.

Psychotherapy

All effective psychotherapeutic techniques for PTSD focus on the traumatic experience – or experiences – rather than your previous life. You cannot alter or forget what has happened, but you can learn to think differently about it, the world and your life in general.

You have to try to remember the traumatic events as completely as possible, but without simultaneously being overwhelmed by fear and anxiety. PTSD treatments will help you to put words to your experiences. By remembering the incident in question and go through it and the emotions that arise in the recalling memory safely with a trained PTSD therapist, it will make your brain able to process the traumatic event in such a way that it no longer affects your living in the same negative way anymore.

When you are starting to feel more secure and have gained more control over your emotions, you do not have to avoid your traumatic memories as much. Then you will be able to think about them only when you want to and they will not be able to suddenly and in an unwelcome manner force their way into your consciousness anymore.

Group therapy

This means that one under the supervision of a trained therapist will arrange meetings with several people who have been through the same or similar traumatic event, then sit together and discuss what they have been going through. It can sometimes be easier to talk through one’s traumatic experiences with other people who have gone through similar experiences.

CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a treatment that can help us understand how our habits and ways of thinking can make PTSD either worse or even cause the symptoms. CBT can help you change the thoughts that are keeping your brain in a negative and unbalanced state and make you aware of your behaviour patterns and thus help you feel better.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

This is a technique that uses eye movements to help the brain processing the involuntary flashbacks and making the traumatic experience understandable on an emotional level. It may sound strange, but it has been proven to work.

Medical yoga (meditating yoga) and meditation

Yoga Medicare (medical yoga) has been shown to relieve many of the typical symptoms of PTSD that exists and is a quiet, deep-acting form of yoga where the emphasis is on breathing. It is a question of performing simple, gentle and empathetic body exercises/positions and using effective breathing and concentration techniques, where you can practice to relax and where moments of meditation are included.

In meditating yoga, the yoga sessions are designed in such a way that everyone, according to their own preconditions, has the ability to perform them. The exercises are therefore for the most part performed in a sitting or lying position.

The exercises provide a basic balance, physically, mentally and emotionally. They also raise the energy and increase the self-awareness of what is happening in your own body. This improves the mobility, the muscle strength, the posture and the body awareness. Yoga training influences in other words, the entire body at many different levels simultaneously, for example; breathing and lungs, the musculature, the digestive system, the glandular, the lymphatic and the nervous system and the brain in a positive way and gives as a result, feelings of well-being.

Sadly, EMDR and mediyoga only exist as private alternatives in Sweden, which may be perceived as costly to the individual. When the therapy is expensive, it is especially important that you as a patient receive a good and professional treatment by your therapist. If you don’t or do not have faith in him/her, it is better to switch to a new one.

Unfortunately the effects of the abuse will never completely disappear, but it can be relieved.

Now the entry is over for this time. Please, take care of yourself and others. Thank you. See you if you wish to, next week.

Helén

© Helén – text and photo

Sources:

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/problemsdisorders/posttraumaticstressdisorder.aspx

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Post-traumatic-stress-disorder/Pages/Complex.aspx

http://www.stockholmspahalsostudio.se/yoga/