Avoidance is one of the most significant features of a traumatized person. It makes sense, doesn't it, that if you had a horrific experience, and you are suffering from it, you wouldn't want to experience it again. The problem is that you've never had the opportunity to address the emotional aspect of the trauma. In fact, you've found yourself not only emotionally stuck, but also at times unable to avoid the spontaneous re-experienceing of the trauma. Re-experiencing can happen in your dreams, in your thoughts, or sudden reminders can make it seem that you are experiencing the trauma all over again. The trauma has created a life of it's own within your psyche.

Your attempts to protect yourself have failed. Counter to your plan to avoid the memory of your trauma, the emotion of your trauma, research with thousands of trauma survivors has shown that the path to relief is to feel your feelings. As long as you suppress the memory and feelings they will reside in unconscious functioning. You become unable to anticipate when those memories or feelings will suddenly occur again.

You have been come hyper-sensitized to reminders of your trauma.

The way out is to have a trained therapist help walk you through the trauma in a safe way, and to release the memories and emotions associated with it in a controlled way.

Prolonged Exposure and Emotional Processing Therapy for PTSD

Best treatment practices for childhood-originating PTSD is based on the tenets of emotional processing theory.

Prolonged exposure is an evidence-based treatment for PTSD. This does not mean exposure to persons who are the source of PTSD, but exposure to stimuli that PTSD you may avoid. They are the cues to distress. It could be the avoidance, such as social anxiety stemming from their trauma(s), creates problems in your social growth, obtaining a job, or seeking education.

It may be that the exposure must happen in "imaginal exposure." Imaginal exposure is a pairing of relaxation (sometimes hypnotic experience) paired with exposure to the feared event, place, person(s). Since both extreme relaxation and extreme excitation cannot exist concurrently, eventually after several sessions the fear is extinguished to a large extent.

Your therapist will lead you in emotionally and cognitively processing what has happened to you. This involves articulating and elaborating on what you have experienced, normalizing your emotions and actions around the trauma, and corrective learning. These activities are very important to the process and includes thought replacement and restructuring.

Relaxation is a prescribed behavior that, as evidence shows, with regular use diminishes the density of the amygdala (the center of anxiety, fear, excitation) for better regulation of emotional experience.