What is psychotherapy and how can it help treat PTSD?
Psychotherapy is meant to help with a person’s emotional, behavioral, or mental distress. In practice, psychotherapy is the relationship between a professional psychotherapist and a client who work together to make changes in the client’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. How the psychotherapist goes about helping a client will depend upon the client’s goals and the therapist’s training and theoretical orientation. Theoretical underpinnings can determine what techniques a therapists uses and the focus of therapy, and they can affect the psychotherapist’s style of interaction. However, sometimes a person’s diagnosis will influence the decision about what type of therapeutic orientation the person should engage in. PTSD is a good example of this type of diagnosis because there are many psychotherapeutic treatments that have been designed specifically to treat PTSD. A client’s response to treatment will have a lot to do with the unique values, hopes, and personality factors of that indiv
