Healing from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) is all-encompassing and requires not only a cognitive part and re-learning calm in our body and nervous system, but also the mental processing of split-off and repressed feelings.
For this reason, I work with different approaches and not just one single therapy method.
I like to call myself a trauma coach, because a large part of healing is actually training and learning. In the cognitive and physical areas of healing, I work with cognitive and dialectical behaviour therapy. In my opinion, learning mindfulness is a very important part that enables us to quickly recognize when we are moving in old behavioural patterns or why we are finding it difficult to take a new path.
Another, from my perspective important building block of healing is developing compassion for ourselves and our inner ‘parts’. It is not easy to approach the inner part, which, for example, destroyed your marriage, with gratitude. That only becomes possible when you understand that this inner part was stuck in childhood and thought it was ensuring your survival. Healing also means taking responsibility for our inner parts and ‘reparenting’ them. Working with ‘Internal Family Systems’ and ‘Compassionate Inquiry’ is particularly suitable for this part of the healing journey.
A therapy method that is important to me personally is ‘Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing’ (EMDR). The approach of bilateral stimulation using the eyes, touch or even sounds is one of the so-called body-related ‘bottom up’ methods. While cognitive methods, in my perspective, work more on the ‘software’ of people and reprogram our minds, ‘bottom up’ methods work directly on the deeper layers in the body. Bilateral stimulation makes it possible not only to reprocess past experiences very efficiently, but also to integrate positive belief systems and to create within ourselves the support that we lacked in the past. With this method, the actual contact with the negative feelings of the past is minimal and, in my experience, the results are very good. An important prerequisite for working with EMDR is mindfulness and heightened awareness of oneself. For this reason, in my experience, working with EMDR should be supported with cognitive methods especially mindfulness.
