How to Cure PTSD: Treatment Options

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Body Keeps The Score" by Bessel van der Kolk. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you want to know how to cure PTSD? Are there ways to cure PTSD and help with trauma?

There are many treatments that are effective in how to cure PTSD. Your options include different forms of therapy and medications.

Keep reading for ideas on how to cure PTSD and treatments that may or may not work.

How to Cure PTSD

As we’ve discussed, trauma haunts survivors with flashbacks, triggering psychological and physical reactions that are out of the sufferer’s control. The goal of treatment is to regain control of yourself and your thoughts, feelings, and body. Generally this involves four steps:

  1. Learning how to be calm and focused
  2. Finding a way to stay calm in the face of sensations (images, sounds, smells) associated with your trauma
  3. Learning how to be present and engage with the people around you
  4. Not hiding things from yourself, such as the ways you adapted in order to survive during and after your trauma

Learn to Remain Calm

So what’s the solution for how to cure PTSD? Although the author insists that talk therapy does not heal trauma, trauma survivors eventually need to face the facts of their traumatic event in order to move past it. However, they shouldn’t do so until they learn to cope with the emotions and sensations the memory triggers, so that recalling the event doesn’t retraumatize them. 

As we explained earlier, trauma lives in the emotional brain, which triggers physical responses and is not governed by logic as the rational brain is. Consequently, you can’t start by approaching your trauma with logic (e.g. “it wasn’t your fault,” “you were just a child,” “you had no control over the situation”) and you can’t reason your way through your emotions: Understanding why you feel something won’t prevent you from feeling it. But understanding that your trauma is triggering certain emotions can help you begin to resist intense overreactions to everyday situations (e.g. exploding at your spouse for an innocent comment that reminds you of your abusive father). 

Therapy for trauma must help patients reestablish a balance between the emotional brain and the rational brain, instead of letting the hyperreactive emotional brain send them into overdrive or cause them to shut down in response to minor threats. In order to do this, patients must practice self-awareness, or interoception, to notice what’s going on inside themselves. 

Manage Hyperarousal

This is one day to day way that may help you learn how to cure PTSD in the long run. As we’ve discussed, trauma survivors remain hypervigilant, are easily sent into a fight-or-flight response, and take longer to calm down after a perceived threat has passed. To heal, they must gain control over their arousal system through mindful breathing and movement’ slow, deep breaths with long exhales trigger the parasympathetic nervous system to slow your heart rate. Yoga, changing, martial arts, and rhythmic drumming can all help trauma sufferers gain and maintain a sense of calm, even in the face of traumatic memories and flashbacks and the emotions they arouse. 

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness means having a self-awareness of your emotions, your body, and your responses. Traumatized people are haunted by seemingly ever-present sensations remind them of their traumas, so they’re constantly either avoiding them, repressing them, or succumbing to them. Self-awareness gives trauma survivors the power to face those sensations and then move on from them. This may be a powerful tool for how to cure PTSD.

It begins by merely noticing how you’re feeling; as you pay closer attention to your emotions and the ways they shift — based on your thoughts, perceptions, breathing, or body posture — it becomes clearer that feelings are short-lived. That realization takes the power away from the emotion and gives you the option to decide how to respond, rather than feeling like a victim of your emotions and resorting to the habitual reactions you’ve developed to survive and cope. 

Once you’ve begun noticing your feelings and physical sensations, label them and notice how certain emotions are tied to specific physical reactions. Again, noticing and identifying these sensations gives you the power to endure them, because you know that they are temporary and that you even have the power to change them. 

Mindfulness has many documented benefits, including 

  • Easing psychiatric and psychosomatic symptoms such as depression and chronic pain
  • Improving physical health by boosting the immune system and lowering blood pressure and stress hormone levels
  • Boosting the brain’s ability for emotional regulation
  • Calming the amygdala — which we described earlier as your internal smoke detector — and decreasing reactivity to perceived threats

Relationships are Vital for Resilience and Recovery

Humans are hard-wired to connect with others and be engaged members of communities. As such, strong, supportive relationships are the best protection against trauma and the biggest factor in healing from trauma. By the same token, trauma at the hands of a person who’s supposed to be a source of love and support is the most damaging because it undermines your ability to form new relationships that are necessary for healing. 

How to Cure PTSD: Treatment Options

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Here's what you'll find in our full The Body Keeps The Score summary :

  • How your past trauma might change your brain and body
  • What you can do to help your brain and body heal
  • Why some trauma survivors can't recognize themselves in the mirror

Carrie Cabral

Carrie has been reading and writing for as long as she can remember, and has always been open to reading anything put in front of her. She wrote her first short story at the age of six, about a lost dog who meets animal friends on his journey home. Surprisingly, it was never picked up by any major publishers, but did spark her passion for books. Carrie worked in book publishing for several years before getting an MFA in Creative Writing. She especially loves literary fiction, historical fiction, and social, cultural, and historical nonfiction that gets into the weeds of daily life.

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