Brian Klassen, Ph.D.: How to Heal from Trauma and Take Your Life Back - Trigger Avoidance and PTSD

What I would say it's like to live with PTSD is that life becomes small and this is largely because of avoidance. You know clinically this is a symptom of the PTSD diagnosis but the way I describe it is that life just begins to shrink. It's like you lose relationships. There's certain things you won't do anymore, certain places you won't go anymore, certain conversations that you won't have anymore, and life just becomes quite small. After trauma, where people can get into trouble is if they begin to organize their lives around avoidance and around avoiding anxiety, around avoiding discomfort, around avoiding reminders of trauma, and really the work that I do is quite simple. It's really helping people reverse that natural course. Prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy are deeply optimistic treatments about people's ability to recover from trauma. They're difficult. They're no joke. But really they're quite simple because we're just asking someone to counteract the natural tendency to avoid these these painful thoughts and feelings. So when I'm sitting down with a veteran to embark on this treatment of prolonged exposure it's often difficult because, I think, for the veteran, it's very uncertain. It's very anxiety-provoking, you know, being asked to recount these horribly painful experiences but we know that once we find that people do, and in the context of a safe relationship, where you know we can approach these things together, we can make sure it's not too much or too little like it's just the right amount of intensity that there's healing, that there's relief right around the corner so that they can take their life back and take their relationships back.

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