A traumatic experience is essentially one of powerlessness. Whether it’s in the context of a physical or sexual assault, medical trauma, natural disaster, or armed conflict, we do not have the power to fully control the situation. The overarching theme is chaos, a loss of control or ability to help ourselves or others in the moment. So, naturally, after events like these, we desperately seek to take back control. We go over the events again and again, trying to create a flawless mental model that can explain it all and give us insight on how to prevent it from happening again. We reflexively develop rigid views and rules about how to protect ourselves moving forward, how to control our surroundings, and who we can trust and interact with.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence-based treatment that helps identify the ways that traumatic events can shape our beliefs about ourselves and the world. This includes the meanings and interpretations that we make about the event, and the rules we believe we need to follow, based on these meanings. These beliefs and attitudes, or “stuck points,” prevent us from being able to process the raw emotions that naturally accompany trauma of all kinds: fear, terror, pain, sadness, and grief. They keep us stuck in a cycle of rumination, blame, and guilt, and stuck in patterns of avoidance, hypervigilance, and overcontrol.
If you’ve suffered a trauma, do any of these “stuck points” sound familiar?
Beliefs about the event and what it means about me:
- It was my fault, I could have prevented it
- I deserve the shame and anxiety I’m feeling
- I’m worthless
- I’m permanently damaged
- I’m helpless
- I don’t deserve anything good in my life
Beliefs and rules about the world/future:
- The world is a dangerous place
- No one can be trusted
- If I let others get close, I will get hurt
- I must prevent all mistakes in order to stay safe
- I’m no longer able to trust myself, so I can never let my guard down
One defining characteristic of CPT is the focus on the meaning of the traumatic events, without the need to go into detail of what exactly happened. The process of therapy is highly structured, compassionate, and paced to accommodate and respect the difficulty associated with such distressing topics. After identifying your specific stuck points, you learn ways to expand your views of the situation and consider alternative perspectives. Various worksheets are used to explore how our stuck points were partially or predominantly shaped by how our brains function under high emotional distress, and therefore distort and omit important information.
Through repeated exercises, you’ll increase your awareness of how the stuck points haven’t been telling you the whole story, how they’ve been affecting so many areas of life, and how you can start to make meaningful changes. Your provider will then help you bring this awareness to explore the specific ways that trauma has affected your sense of safety, trust, power, control, self-esteem, and intimacy.
Cognitive Processing Therapy is a way to get unstuck. By developing new strategies of understanding and coping, we learn to give ourselves the right to fully participate in our own lives again. For more information on CPT, please check out these resources:
https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand_tx/cognitive_processing.asp