National Center for PTSD

Last week I attended a week-long training put on by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was a rich week, with lots of learning (and sitting) (and powerpointing!), but here are a few things I learned:
1. Anyone who has a traumatic experience goes through a lot of life upheaval, involving emotions, worldview, relationships, etc. It takes a long time to heal from an experience like that, and healing takes a lot of different forms. Some people get stuck in a repetitive pattern that disrupts their lives and the lives of those around them for a much longer period of time--to a point where they or their loved ones try to seek treatment for it.
2. Few people experience "a trauma." Instead (as Eli pointed out a while back on this blog), they experience traumatic experiences. Some of them concentrated around a specific situation, and others around a number of different situations.
3. There are a number of different "empirically-proven" therapies to assist people in gaining a sense of equilibrium or growth (including Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Most of these involve a fairly understandable set of structured therapies designed to assist people in grappling with emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.
4. I don't know if I can do what I want to do with the degree and career path I'm headed for. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) sounds like basically my theological worldview put into a systematized, methodological therapy. That excites me, and I'm reading more about it.

That's about it. I recommend checking out the website if you're interested: www.ncptsd.org

There are a lot of really great people working at the VA, I have to say.