Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)

A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Approach to the
Treatment of Trauma

It’s Not You – It’s Your Brain

It happens so fast – like a flash of lightning. Suddenly, you’ll feel anxious or overwhelmed, and the feeling is like it came out of nowhere.

Your brain took over and decided to put you into danger mode or created intense feelings of heat throughout your body.

Perhaps your brain won’t turn off because now you’re continually playing out every possible worst-case scenario and pointing out all the things you did wrong or should have done differently.

You don’t want to be this way. If you could choose, it would be different. But those feelings are like an automatic switch causing you to be out of your control.

The Way You Think Affects How You Feel

There was a split second that changed it all for you. That event happened so fast that it’s hard to see. But when we look closely, we see there was a moment when your brain decided to go left instead of right.

It’s at that moment that we can intervene.

Every second of every day, your brain takes in hundreds of pieces of information from the environment around you. Each bit of information is processed to help you decide if it’s safe or dangerous – if your brain should go left or right.

At that moment, your brain thinks about what it’s taking in and makes a snap assessment. And the assessment has a domino effect on your feelings, mood, and behaviors, changing everything.

How Your Brain Thinks about What’s Going on Is the Determining Factor

You Think Based on Experience or Previous Learning.

Sometimes, we’ve been thinking a certain way for so long, or the way we feel is so deeply entrenched in us that it is hard even to notice. Your thought process becomes a subliminal message that we tell ourselves. And if we tell ourselves the message long enough, it begins to trick us into thinking that these thoughts are real and factual.

But there’s a difference between what we think and what is a fact.

The way we think is a byproduct of the world around us and our experiences within it. If a baby cries and the adults come in to soothe the baby, the baby learns how to ask for help and develops a belief that “People care about me.” If the baby is left unattended, she might begin to think, “I’m all alone.”

The Past Is Keeping You in the Past

When we develop specific ways of thinking repeatedly, those thoughts become core beliefs and central to our views of ourselves and the world around us. Your thoughts become foundational in how we interpret new information.

If we experience something so painful and so outside of our usual belief system, that experience becomes impossible to process. It doesn’t fit into our way of understanding and thinking about things. As a result, that experience sticks out like a big sore spot and stays at the forefront of your mind long after it passes.

If we continually experience painful and wretched things, we might assume that all things are painful and wretched. That’s how we begin perceiving the world and interacting with it.

That distorted perception causes you to feel perpetually on guard, mistrusting and worried about the next bad thing to happen.

Fight or Flight – Don’t Forget About Freeze

And when that bad thing happens, our survival skills kick into full gear and take over. Fight or Flight!

Your heart races, vision changes, and you scan the environment. Or maybe, you go into full-on freeze mode, stuck inside your own body, and unable to move or make a sound.

In either case, your response wasn’t a choice. It was your body’s most primitive defenses taking over and trying to take care of you.

The trouble is that your brain continued to perceive danger and threat, either because it could not process what happened or because it’s now processing everything as danger. When your brain perceives everything as a threat, it continues to believe you’re always in danger.

And then, you’re stuck in perpetual Flight/Flight or Freeze mode. You can’t sleep, focus, and function because humans can’t function in Fight/Flight or Freeze mode, designed just for basic survival. And that’s all you’ve been doing – surviving – not thriving.

Skills… Skills… Skills!!!

Do you remember that split second we talked about earlier where your brain takes in information and decides if it’s dangerous or not? Well, that’s where we intervene.

We first help you get the skills to reprocess the past in a way that allows your brain to store information correctly. These skills turn off the thoughts about the “coulda, shoulda, woulda” that spin around inside of you. The past slows down, and then, it stops altogether.

When you quit grappling with the past, you pivot to the here and now. We apply those skills to all new and incoming information.

The skills are the same, but a domino effect has happened because you changed how you processed the past. Reprocessing causes a ripple effect on how you’re taking in new information. So, the gains come faster and swifter to you.

Suddenly, you and your world open up, and you feel different.

*Cues Olivia Newton-John* – “Let’s Get Log-i-cal!”

What are these magical skills? Well, they’re skills designed to turn off that primitive area of your brain (called the Amygdala) and turn on the more logical regions (called the Pre-Frontal Cortex).

When you’re in the primitive area of your brain, it’s impossible to be practical or logical (I’m sure you can attest to that), but the inverse is also true. When you manually turn on the logical regions of your brain, the primitive part of your brain quiets down, and so does fear, self-criticism, and irritability.

The approach is legit neuroscience, and you can hack it and your brain!

The skills you receive allow you to hack your brain by teaching you how to slow down that moment between your environment, thoughts, and feelings.

You learn to stop automatically processing those moments and how to drive your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the manual (I can’t drive a manual car, but manually driving my brain is the shit!).

Learning Skills Requires Practice

The skills seem simple at first glance, but don’t let looks fool you. Remember, you’re changing the way you have made sense of things for years. Homework is so essential because practicing those skills reinforces the development of those new neurological pathways and helps them take hold.

The techniques you will learn are challenging and sneaky. They force you to question how you think by making you more pragmatic, and thoughtful. I realize that it is a weird skill, but you need to think about what you are thinking. This weird skill is called Meta-Cognition.

Once you’ve mastered Meta-Cognition, you learn even more skills to override past thoughts and instill whole new patterns. Slowly, the new method becomes quicker and more comfortable.

Let’s Get to the Core

The process of inserting new skills into your life does not occur willy-nilly. We target when, where, and how we intervene in your thinking.

We precisely choose which thoughts we want to affect, in what order to intervene, and how to meet your unique needs. Creating this road map gives you an individually tailored and precise plan of approach for changing your life.

We find the core of your beliefs, the epicenter of your pain, and apply the skills to that wounded part of your thoughts. The core affects your beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world around you.

When you begin to heal, the change creates a ripple effect that gently heals all the other wounds that core belief later affected. Those areas are Safety, Trust, Power/Control, Esteem, and Intimacy.

Cognitive Flexibility – What Doesn’t Bend Will Break

My therapy isn’t a magic pill. It cannot suddenly erase your past. And it won’t give you a pair of rose-colored glasses where you’ll only see sunshine and rainbows.

This type of therapy is about giving you a choice, agency, and ownership over your brain.

You have been living on automatic, believing certain things about yourself, making assumptions about your environment, and feeling things that were overwhelming and leaving you feeling out of control.

To avoid this feeling, you limited your world by restricting exposure to the things that would set you off. You numbed yourself from your feelings when they became too much. Bit-by-bit, you began living smaller and had fewer options.

This type of therapy allows you the opportunity to choose from which part of the brain you want to operate. It gives you the power to make proper decisions for yourself and flex your thinking in ways that give you a better range of motion and life.

The Results Change Lives

Kelly* used CPT to help stop her brain from flooding with memories from the past. She learned to slow down her thinking and take charge of her emotions. As a result, she could remember her past without reliving it.

Theresa* stopped being afraid of men and started focusing more at work, which helped her be more productive. She felt safe in her own body for the first time in years.

Stacy* could sleep again, after years of tossing and turning. Finally, she could rest her head at night without being overwhelmed by fear. Her behaviors became less rigid, and her kids felt more at ease around her.

Kacie’s* past stopped defining her. She saw how what happened to her was a chapter in her story, but only one part of the story. Her journey was beginning, and she was excited to expand back into the world, use her voice, and take up space.

The Proof Is in the Pudding – and the Research!

Here’s the best part of the therapy I use. It works!

This type of therapy has been researched over and over and proven to work very well. Such verification is known as an Evidence-Based Practice – which means we are practicing therapy proven to have positive results.

This therapeutic approach is the Best Practice for the treatment of PTSD. It’s scientifically backed and endorsed by:

• The Department of Veterans Affairs
• The Department of Defense
• The American Psychological Association
• The National Council on PTSD
• The International Society for the Traumatic Stress Studies

So, it’s a big deal in the world of PTSD treatment.

Reach Out Today!

There’s a path forward from your past. The pain, worry, and intense feelings don’t need to be a way of life any longer.

Start a new journey today. Take Back Your Brain and Take Back Your Life.

*All the women mentioned here are composite vignettes of multiple women I have worked with over the years. I changed the names and all identifying details to protect their privacy.