Citation

Zepinic V. Psychol. Behav. Sci. 2018; 7(1): e21.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Science Publishing Group)

DOI

10.11648/j.pbs.20180701.15

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In clinical practice healing traumatic memories is fundamental for the entire treatment of complex PTSD. Clinicians are united in opinion that PTSD becomes treatment resistant when the patients process traumatic memories partially or fragmented. We emphasized that traumatic memories in complex PTSD are made up of information imprinted during traumatic event and activation of one aspect of them facilitates retrieval of one part, but inhibits the retrieval of others. While working on traumatic memories, the clinician is faced with the patient's images often being reported as if the event is occurring again with olfactory and auditory intrusions, intense emotions, sensations, and maladaptive physical actions and behaviours. Vehement emotions - the intense arousal evoked in trauma - prevent adaptive information processing and impair efforts to formulate the traumatic event into explicit narrative. Therapy techniques presented in this paper are part of the Dynamic Therapy model [1] - trauma-centred and patient-oriented therapy designed for severe and complex stress-related disorders.

Language: en