What to expect when doing Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy...
What is PE?
The aim of PE is to safely process the traumatic event with the support of a trained professional counselor. PE interventions will empower you to safely recall the memories of your trauma and the situations that are associated with these memories. This can be a powerful way for you to separate experiences of trauma, and the situations that are associated, allowing you to navigate them in your day to day life in a non-triggering way. Through this process, you learn to take control of your trauma memory and reclaim your life.
- A therapeutic technique to help trauma survivors emotionally process their traumatic experience.
- Proven method of reducing trauma-related problems.
- PE has the same origins as exposure therapy for Anxiety. In exposure therapy, individuals are helped to confront safe but anxiety provoking situations to help decrease the excessive fear of that situation.
- PE is rooted in Emotional Processing Theory, which emphasizes that special processing of the traumatic event must happen in order to reduce trauma symptoms. PE aims to help a person engage in emotional processing to reclaim their life from trauma.
- What does PE include?
- Education regarding common reactions to trauma, what maintains your trauma symptoms, and how PE works to reduce those symptoms.
- Repeated real-life exposure to situations, objects, or people that are objectively safe but that is often avoided due to the traumatic experience. These objects, people and situations are often avoided due to the emotional distress that they cause as reminders of the traumatic event
- Repeated “imaginal exposure” to the trauma memories. This takes the form of revisiting and recounting the trauma memory in a person’s imagination. This happens mostly in session, and is followed by processing the details of the event and the emotions and thoughts that the person experienced during the trauma. The individual is asked to record this and listen to it between sessions for homework.
- Education regarding common reactions to trauma, what maintains your trauma symptoms, and how PE works to reduce those symptoms.
- Real-life exposure and imaginal exposure are the core of PE treatment. There is much evidence that these techniques reduce anxiety and distress in people who suffer trauma related difficulties.
- PE has also shown to reduce other trauma related problems such as depression, general anxiety, substance use, and anger.
The aim of PE is to safely process the traumatic event with the support of a trained professional counselor. PE interventions will empower you to safely recall the memories of your trauma and the situations that are associated with these memories. This can be a powerful way for you to separate experiences of trauma, and the situations that are associated, allowing you to navigate them in your day to day life in a non-triggering way. Through this process, you learn to take control of your trauma memory and reclaim your life.