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Getting Help
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I. Helping yourself…
During, and just after, a traumatic event
Through the first few days and weeks
During, and just after, a traumatic event:
Don’t be alarmed if you find yourself feeling shocked, confused, disoriented, or helpless. Terror and fear can be overwhelming, but these feelings will gradually subside. Look to others for support and to help you reorient yourself.
Trust your body’s natural reactions. It knows what it’s doing!
Don’t be alarmed if you notice that…
your heart is beating faster
your blood pressure has gone up
it’s more difficult to breathe
you’re sweating
your stomach feels tight
your muscles feel shaky…
…These are the ways your body discharges excess energy and regains balance.
You might find it hard to believe that the traumatic event has actually happened.
Or you might suddenly feel very emotional and experience strong feelings of rage, anger, fear, guilt, sadness, or other powerful feelings. Allow yourself to have these experiences. They are perfectly normal responses.
Through the first few days and weeks:
Don’t isolate yourself. Accept that your reactions and feelings are natural and expected. Share them with others.
Remember that people respond to extreme events in different ways. There is no right or wrong way of reacting.
Allow your family and friends to help and support you. Talk about your experience and feelings with people who you trust and with whom you feel safe. Talking can relieve stress and help you to make meaning out of what you experienced.
It’s okay to feel angry. Feelings are not the same thing as actions. There’s a difference between expressing feelings of anger and acting out in ways that can harm yourself or others.
Take care of yourself. Don’t neglect your basic needs for food, rest, and exercise.
As soon as you feel ready to do so, return to your usual routine.
Allow yourself to participate in activities that you find soothing and relaxing.
Find an activity that helps you feel empowered.
II. Seeking professional support
If you are having difficulty returning to your usual level of functioning at work, school, and/or in relationships after four to six weeks, you might find professional help useful in your healing process.
In Israel, contact us at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma and we will set up an appointment for you to meet with one of our therapists, or refer you to an experienced therapist closer to your area of residence.
Outside of Israel, check out one of the following links:
National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: www.ncptsd.org
Or in the United States, call the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, 1-800-507-PTSD (7873).
Therapy methods:
To help you be an “informed consumer,” we’ve provided brief summaries of some effective treatment methods for post-traumatic stress reactions. These summaries are intended to help you work together with your therapist to create a suitable treatment plan that works for both of you.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT):
CBT forms the basis of the most effective post-trauma therapy treatments in practice today. Like its name suggests, this type of therapy focuses on a person’s thoughts and beliefs and the resulting behaviors. For example, sometimes people have irrational thoughts or non-adaptive behaviors, but they find it difficult to let go of these thoughts or actions. If they play close attention to what goes through their minds, they might discover a series of thoughts that occur so quickly and automatically that they usually don’t notice them. Many things can trigger these types of thoughts, such as something that reminds one of a difficult or traumatic experience, or of a particular detail from a difficult or traumatic experience. CBT helps you to become aware of these types of automatic and often irrational chains of thought and helps you to alter your behavior as a result.
Somatic Experiencing:
A short-term therapy method developed by Peter Levine, PhD
Somatic Experiencing is a treatment method which integrates mind and body in the process of healing from traumatic experience. It views human beings as endowed with a unique instinctual capacity to heal themselves. Somatic experiencing developed from observations of the ways in which animals in the wild are “immunized” against post-traumatic phenomena, even though they repeatedly encounter the threats and dangers of the animal kingdom. After being threatened or attacked, animals have natural mechanisms for returning their over-aroused bodies to a state of equilibrium.
Humans, too, possess similar mechanisms, but their thoughts can inhibit their bodies’ natural mechanisms for overcoming devastating traumatic experiences. It’s as if the body remains frozen in a state of over-arousal, pain, anxiety, and recurring thoughts and images. Somatic Experiencing helps people who feel stuck in their traumatic experiences to discharge the frozen energy in their bodies. By becoming aware of physical sensations and to allowing them to occur naturally until the frozen energy can gradually be released, people can help their bodies and minds return to their usual states of healthy functioning
Exposure Therapy:
Exposure therapy is often used for treating post-traumatic stress responses and other types of anxiety, like phobias and intense fears. Exposure therapy is a way of confronting painful situations and memories in a secure environment through imagining them or talking about them. In exposure therapy, much of the therapy sessions are dedicated to reliving a traumatic event over and over again, but in a way that is different from the recurrent and uncontrolled memories that trauma survivors might experience. The difference is that in exposure therapy, you relive the experience in a way that empowers you and gives you back a sense of control.
In exposure therapy, you’re encouraged to describe what happened in the present tense, noticing more and more sensory details, and becoming emotionally involved in a way that was impossible at the time of the traumatic event. This type of reliving helps make the fear become less overwhelming and more manageable and changes traumatic memories into more ordinary memories. It also allows you to make new meaning out of the traumatic experience. Today, several varieties of exposure therapy are used.
EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing:
EMDR is a technique used in many post-trauma therapies to help people relive and reprocess the trauma experience in a more integrative way. For some people, when they remember a traumatic event, it feels as if it happening right then and there. The sensations are as intense as when the event actually occurred and the person feels like he or she is stuck in the event. EMDR uses eye movement to help the brain unfreeze itself, and work through the experience. It is unclear exactly how this method works, but it seems to help activate the natural healing process, enabling people to reach a resolution of the traumatic event.
For more information, check out these links:
EMDR International Association: www.emdria.org
Or the EMDR Institute: www.emdr.com
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