What Is Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for PTSD?
Dr. Kathryn Graham
Dr. Kathryn Graham is a staff psychologist at the Gordon Therapy Group where she provides tele-health only therapy to adolescents and adults, and in-person neuropsych testing for all ages. She offers Friday and weekend availability for testing, and she is particularly skilled in helping neurodiverse indivduals and folks with OCD.
Dr. Kathryn Graham
Dr. Kathryn Graham is a staff psychologist at the Gordon Therapy Group where she provides tele-health only therapy to adolescents and adults, and in-person neuropsych testing for all ages. She offers Friday and weekend availability for testing, and she is particularly skilled in helping neurodiverse indivduals and folks with OCD.
Have you experienced a situation in which you feared for your own safety or the safety of a loved one? Following this situation, have you suddenly felt intense feelings of anger, shame, guilt, sadness, or fear? Do you ever feel as though you are mentally transported back to that event and are reliving it? Do you often feel numb or detached from your body or from your current experiences? Do you find yourself second-guessing most of your decisions?
If this feels like you, you may be experiencing symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Traumatic events, or situations in which something happens that leads you to fear for your own safety or the safety of a loved one, can alter how we view the world, our sense of safety, our ability to regulate our emotions, and our trust in others. Symptoms of PTSD may arise shortly after a traumatic event or they may appear after years of experiencing adverse events in childhood, such as abuse, neglect, maltreatment, or significant stress across childhood such as a contentious parental divorce.
What Is Cognitive Processing Therapy?
One of the primary treatments for PTSD is Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), a brief, structured, evidence-based treatment for teens (14+) and adults. CPT focuses on targeting thought patterns and emotional responses that maintain symptoms of PTSD and requires that patients actively practice skills between therapy sessions. CPT typically lasts between 12-18 sessions. While this treatment was originally developed for adult survivors of sexual assault, it has been applied to a wide variety of traumatic events and is considered effective both for victims of single traumatic events and multiple traumatic events.
What Happens in CPT
CPT starts through educating patients on the PTSD cycle and how PTSD alters our perceptions of the world and our emotional responses. Early in treatment, patients will write an impact statement, which involves their description of why they think their most distressing traumatic event occurred and their beliefs about themselves, others, and the world following the traumatic event. This is not an exposure-focused exercise in which the patient is asked to describe their traumatic event. Instead, the goal is to unpack how trauma may have changed their thoughts and emotions. The goal of therapy is then to learn new cognitive skills and emotion regulation skills to challenge these trauma beliefs and process the world in a new way. CPT starts through focusing on the past and gradually shifts to focusing on the present and the future to lead to lasting change. In CPT, special emphasis is also placed on a patient’s beliefs about safety, trust, power/control, esteem, and intimacy. These are specific beliefs that are often altered following a traumatic event.
Do You Have to Talk About the Trauma in CPT?
Throughout CPT, there is no emphasis placed on sharing details of the trauma unless the patient chooses to share. Instead, we emphasize recognizing the harmful thought patterns and emotional responses that occur following a traumatic event and focus on changing these to recognize current safety, trust, and self-respect with a goal of increasing your self-confidence.
What Changes After CPT
Patients typically report feeling more confident regulating their emotions, advocating for their needs, recognizing who they can trust, and increased self-worth following CPT.
Getting Support After Trauma
If you are looking for support processing a traumatic event, we are here to help!
Our licensed clinical psychologists offer trauma therapy, including CPT. We meet in person on the Upper West Side near the 1/2/3 and B/C trains, or by HIPAA-secure telehealth for residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
If there’s any concern for immediate safety, yours or your loved one’s, please contact your doctor, call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or dial 911 now.
Kathryn Graham, Ph.D.
Staff Psychologist, Gordon Therapy Group
If you are from Long Island and are interested in working with Dr. Graham in-person, she is also available through Hearthside Psychology in Smithtown, New York.
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