WEBVTT

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-Typically, what happens is that

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individuals with PTSD

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work very hard to avoid talking about or thinking about

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or being in the presence of things that remind them

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of their traumatic experience.

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But in this treatment, through writing,

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you're actually confronting the trauma memory

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in a very tolerable way,

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and in that sense, we thwart the avoidance that typically happens

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or comes with PTSD.

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And if you do that repeatedly,

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then what we tend to see is a significant decline

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in PTSD symptoms

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that are sustained for a long period of time.

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-What we find happens is that,

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as you're writing something down,

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it starts to change the way that you think about it.

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Sometimes, just seeing something in black and white

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or being able to write out the whole story of what happened,

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including the whole context of it,

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you just start to see things in a little bit different way.

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So, I've had a patient who really blames themselves

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for an assault,

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and as they were writing out the whole story of what happened,

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including what happened before and after,

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it really started to shift how they were noticing,

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"This really wasn't something that I could have prevented

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or that I did something wrong to cause this."

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So there's just something helpful

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about that process of writing

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that allows people to start to shift how they're thinking

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about an event in a more helpful or positive way.