The Essentials of Creative Hopelessness for PTSD
Booz Allen
Department of Veterans Affairs
Yale University
University of Nevada, Reno
Key Points
- Unwillingness to experience thoughts and feelings related to the traumatic event plays a key role in PTSD.
- Help the client contact for themselves the ways that control has gotten in the way of their recovery.
- Identify the strategies the client’s already tried.
Materials Downloads
Transcript
As I’ve pointed out throughout this course, experiential avoidance or unwillingness to experience thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, whatever related to the traumatic event play a key role in the development of PTSD and other long-term posttraumatic problems in living.
For this reason, it’s often important early on to help the client contact for themselves the ways that control and avoidance have gotten in the way of their recovery and may have even caused more problems in their life. It’s one thing for you to explain this concept to them. It’s another thing entirely for them to be able to connect and resonate and understand in their own experience how these concepts apply.
