Psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorders
Psychotherapy for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) can be very helpful and help the patient in his difficult situation to participate more actively in life again. Since psychotherapy for PTSD patients can be designed very differently, it is important that each patient decides individually with his or her therapist which form of psychotherapy is best suited to him or her. One form of psychotherapy for PTSD can be behavioral therapy, for example.
Here, the patient learns to reflect and change his or her behavior despite the stressful events in the past that triggered the post-traumatic stress disorder to such an extent that he or she is able to participate more actively and self-determinedly in life again. Another form of psychotherapy for PTSD is the psychodynamic procedure. Here it is primarily about the patient dealing with the stressful events of the past and thereby better understanding the background and causes of his or her own suffering and illness, in order to be able to cope better with the mental illness and understand it better.
Since each patient is very different from the other, it is very important that each patient also works out his or her own adapted form of psychotherapy for PTSD with his or her therapist. Some patients, for example, do not benefit from researching the exact cause of the post-traumatic stress disorder, but it helps them more to work out possibilities with the help of a therapist in order to get out of the sad and stressful mood and actively change their own behavior. Psychotherapy can successfully treat obsessive-compulsive disorders and help patients to give in to their compulsions less often.
A form of psychotherapy that is also called behavioral therapy is particularly suitable here. The main aim is that the patient learns to reflect his own behavior better in order to change it bit by bit and thus not to have to give in to his compulsions anymore. In psychotherapy, for example, obsessive-compulsive disorders can be treated by the patient learning that he/she may only check four times a day, for example, whether he/she has really turned off the stove.
Or the patient learns through psychotherapy to perceive his obsessive-compulsive disorder as such in the first place and can therefore understand after several therapy sessions when he really has to control or do something because it is important and when he controls or does something simply because he feels the compulsion, but not because it is absolutely necessary. In general it is usually difficult to cure an obsessive-compulsive disorder completely and forever with psychotherapy. As with all mental illnesses, it is a long process and the patient may never be able to make his OCD completely disappear, but with psychotherapy the patient can get the OCD under control so that it no longer interferes with his daily life.