Trauma Focussed CBT

So, I'm of course a huge therapy advocate. I've been seeing this therapist since October and I'm appreciating being further into "young adulthood" and getting to sift through my still in-progress but more developed thoughts on my utter dysfunction. I like that, with age, I can tell I actually have trained myself (and healed myself) enough to become slightly less sensitive, and slightly more aware. Though, the more I figure out, the more I realize I still have a very long way to go.

I like my current therapist because she's a lot younger than therapists I've had in the past. Which makes her more relatable and less intimidating. She's also a "no bullshit" kind of person which I dig, because I don't really enjoy being coddled or half listened to. 

Despite the fact that I feel a lot of progress has been made, I still feel totally enmeshed in my day to day anxiety and bummed-outness about feeling inherently unlovable and gimpy. A lot of the PTSD stuff gets in the way of me having a functional day and feeling like and be fun and interesting and not exhausting to people. Trips to the gyno are way too traumatizing, people who sneak up from behind me to hug me terrify the shit out of me, and I have this assumption that eventually….I'm just going to get kidnap-rape-murdered. It's all very upsetting and unsexy. 

People frequently recommend I do something other than talk therapy. Which, honestly I always take as an insult  because I find therapy useful and don't feel like I'm some plateaued asshole who likes to listen to someone tell me I'm constantly right and fine and valid. I participate, ponder, and try to change behaviors. I don't always succeed, but I'm 22, so fuck it! I'm still doing pretty alright. EMDR is something that's usually recommended, which is a method of retraining your brain to reduce triggers. That weirds me out, probably in part because I'm unhealthily bonded with my triggers. They're like my freckles. Also, if I earned the triggers, I want to earn the right to say I healed myself….not that some mumbo jumbo weird overly simplified stuff did. Then I'd just feel silly. Hypnotism has also been recommended to me. That also sounds just plain awful and insulting. Though perhaps valid to some people, I'm not ready to hop on that train quite yet. 

My therapist recommended something called "trauma focussed CBT" which is cognitive behavioral therapy…..with a focus on trauma. My understanding of CBT was that it was all very low intensity and focussed just on thought patterns and behaviors- not the stories behind them. With this therapy, it sounds a bit like the opposite. What I'm supposed to do is go in each week with my current therapist (because she's trained in this type of therapy) and we sit together and first create a timeline of all the traumatic events that have ever occurred in my life. That I can remember. Then, we go back and pick one memory for the week and I write down/explain every single detail I can remember, down to the weather and the smells and whatever other horrific senses are involved. Then I read it back to her. She reads it back to me. We discuss it. Then I go home and read it to trusted (pre selected) friends and "family" over and over every day for a week. Then I go back and repeat the same process with the next memory. Until I run out of memories to discuss. It sounds both horrifically awful and gloriously relieving. I'm figuring word-vomit blogging out the process may be constructive, or at least sort of calming. Prepare yourself.