Healing PTSD Requires Truth Exposure

There is a different conversation going on in this country and this is one we've been having for a while. Exposure therapy works for some folks but not all of them. As a matter of fact, not even the majority of them yet it has been pushed on far too many PTSD veterans. What works is what therapists have been doing for decades, talking and teaching their bodies how to relax again. Still the best experts add in one more thing when PTSD is inside a veteran. They add in spiritual help so the mind, body and spirit are treated with equal importance and then they see healing instead of numbing by medication alone. This article looks at exposure therapy.

Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis, New York Times, Richard Friedman, July 17, 2015

Anyone who doubts the need for psychotherapy research should consider the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, for which the mainstay of treatment has been exposure therapy.

This requires patients to re-experience the circumstances of their traumatic event, which is meant to desensitize them and teach them that their belief that they are in danger is no longer true.

But we know that many patients with PTSD do not respond to exposure, and many of them find the process emotionally upsetting or intolerable.

Dr. John C. Markowitz, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, recently showed for the first time that PTSD is treatable with a psychotherapy that does not involve exposure. Dr. Markowitz and his colleagues randomly assigned a group of patients with PTSD to one of three treatments: prolonged exposure, relaxation therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy, which focuses on patients’ emotional responses to interpersonal relationships and helps them to solve problems and improve these relationships. His federally funded study, published in May’s American Journal of Psychiatry, reported that the response rate to interpersonal therapy (63 percent) was comparable to that of exposure therapy (47 percent).
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