Finding a Therapist for PTSD
Trauma therapy in person in Wichita and online across Kansas
What are the Signs of PTSD?
PTSD can make life feel isolated, dark and heavy.
Trauma is a bit of a buzz word these days, both in serious contexts and in jokes. But for people who are living with trauma, it's certainly no joke.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often thought of as a diagnosis that war trauma survivors are left with – and rightly so. But PTSD can also develop from harmful childhoods, abusive relationships, assaults, and even car accidents or medical events. Very simply put: trauma is what happens to your brain and body when something happened that was too terrible and too overwhelming for you to move on from, especially if your life seemed in danger. When that happens, the past becomes continually present. It’s stuck.
A terrible experience isn't necessarily a trauma and doesn't necessarily generate PTSD, though. When things like adequate resources and great social support are present, people can survive events that maybe should be traumatic and yet go on with life as normal. They have not been traumatized because they were supported through the experience enough to metabolize it and move on. But on the flipside, an event that you might be telling yourself “wasn't bad enough to count as trauma,” can be written in your brain and body as a trauma if you didn't have enough support and resources to metabolize it. The measure for PTSD diagnosis is not just in the severity of the event: we're also looking at the symptoms that plague your days afterward.
If you have PTSD, you might be experiencing symptoms like bad memories that pop up and loop in your brain, trying to avoid things that bring up memories, nightmares that leave you exhausted, staying super busy or feeling frozen, feeling like everything is your fault or nobody can be trusted, startling easily, emotional overreactions, and a tense body that can no longer relax. When you have PTSD, it can be a consuming and overwhelming predicament.
But there is hope!
There is hope for renewed life and joy after trauma!
What Kind of Therapist is Best for PTSD?
If you've been diagnosed with PTSD or you suspect it in yourself, let me start by saying that it’s a huge step to just acknowledge that certain experiences impacted you in harmful ways, and that you need healing. It’s a big step to move away from numbing and avoiding it, to facing it! You're on the right track.
Having realized you might need therapy, you may now be faced with the bewildering experience of trying to figure out what kind of therapist can help you get better! If the licensure credential acronyms (LMSW, LSCSW, LPC, LMFT, etc) aren't confusing enough, there's also treatment acronyms to sort through: EMDR, CPT, CBT, SEP, ART, etc. Entering therapy can feel like learning a new language at times.
So let's start with the simplest but most important piece of the puzzle: your therapist needs to be someone you feel at ease with. The therapist should feel like a supportive, safe presence – not someone making it harder. If you feel braced against a therapist or they don't have a soothing impact on you, maybe a different therapist is the better fit for you. Just like nobody can be everyone's best friend, no therapist is the best fit for every client - personalities and life experiences matter. Healing PTSD happens inside the context of a relationship with rapport. So if there's no rapport, keep looking.
(By the way, it's pretty normal to consult with a couple therapists before you find the one that feels right. You're not doing something wrong if the first person you try, doesn't feel right – that's exactly what free consultations are for!)
Don’t worry too much about trying to weigh between licensure credentials – your personal rapport with an individual therapist and the continuing education they've sought is likely going to matter more for PTSD treatment than which college degree they got before becoming licensed. As long as the therapist is licensed and takes your insurance, their experience and continuing education in PTSD treatment is likely to have more impact on your healing journey than the letters after their name.
What Treatments Are There for PTSD?
Trauma treatment can be a step-by-step progression.
There are a lot of treatment options for PTSD, and their acronyms can sound like an alphabet soup just like the licensure credentials. Some treatments have more dollars and years of research behind them than others, some have more devoted followers singing their praises online. Because brain fog is common with PTSD, I'll offer a few of my personal thoughts to help you narrow down what to look into, but know that these are only loose suggestions and your mileage may vary. Just as with finding the right fit of rapport with a therapist, this is a highly individual decision.
Therapists generally think of trauma healing as something with stages, so which modality of therapy is appropriate may depend on which stage you're in. You probably won’t walk in and do EMDR eye movements on day one! Good therapy will walk you through these steps at a highly individualized pace that supports you all along the way so you get better, not worse through treatment. One of the most common models of trauma recovery is from Judith Herman, described in her book Trauma and Recovery. She suggests three stages of trauma recovery that lots of clinicians utilize and that may be a helpful frame of reference for you as you look for treatment:
Safety & stabilization – working on fundamentals like sleep, emotions, coping, and boundaries. This is foundational, critical work for healing! Approaches like DBT, CBT, and somatic work can places to get your foot on the hamster wheel of symptoms, in this stage.
Trauma processing – this is where you’ve gained stability and it’s now time to directly approach the trauma and change how it is impacting your brain and body. A therapist who uses EMDR, CPT, PE, IFS, narrative or somatic work may be a good fit for this task.
Rebuilding – this moves into thriving instead of surviving, post-traumatic growth, and rebuilding life after trauma. A lot of therapy options work with this stage!
Again, there's no rule for which modality is best for which person, and each clinician who treats PTSD tends to utilize their own preferred tool set as clients move through these stages. There’s a lot of routes to healing available! But sometimes people have preferences based on personality or which symptoms are bothering them the most, so perhaps a tip on the following list will help you zero in on what you want to look at first:
If you have a lot of physical symptoms like chronic body tension, you might look into somatic work.
If you spend a lot of time ruminating and blaming yourself, CBT or CPT are good options.
If you don't want to talk through the details (or can't, because it involves confidential information) and you're experiencing both thought- and body-focused symptoms, EMDR may be a great fit.
If your world is shrinking because it revolves around avoiding triggers, you might want to look into Prolonged Exposure (PE).
If you have extensive childhood trauma, you might be interested in a combination of somatics and IFS.
If you tend to dissociate, you may want to look into somatic or IFS approaches.
If you feel emotionally reactive or fragile, you might want to start with DBT or somatic work.
If you want to focus on the future rather than the past, consider looking into ACT.
If you like structured work, you might be interested in CPT, CBT, PE or EMDR.
If you are interested in fluid and experiential work, look into somatic work or IFS.
How Do I Find a Therapist?
You can use a search engine to conduct a search like “EMDR therapist for PTSD near me.” Or, you can also go to www.psychologytoday.com and use the filtering search to find someone based a variety of sorting mechanisms like age, religion, ethnicity, etc, in addition to the treatment modality you're interested in exploring. You can also ask around – your physician, your neighbor, or your friends might have a recommendation that's just right for you!
If you’re looking for help for PTSD in person in Wichita or virtually anywhere in Kansas, I offer free consultations to new clients so you can get a sense of whether working with me is the right fit for you. Reach out today to schedule!
Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.