Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a condition that can affect anyone who has experienced or witnessed trauma.
When a traumatic experience takes place, it’s normal for it to have an impact on your daily life immediately after. Someone who gets in a major car accident might be jittery when they hear the sounds of vehicles approaching, might not want to drive for a few months after the accident, and might have difficulty sleeping for the first few days or weeks.
Eventually, however, these symptoms will diminish.
In cases where they don’t, it can lead to the development of a post-traumatic stress disorder where symptoms not only do not dissipate but increase in severity, leading to disruptions to daily life, problems sleeping, hypervigilance, elevated resting adrenaline rates, and even flashbacks.
The majority of people have experienced at least one traumatic event throughout their lifetime, and these events don’t necessarily have to be things that have happened to you. A military veteran can experience PTSD because of things they witness, a first responder might experience PTSD because of what they see and deal with at work, and a mother might experience PTSD after her child was attacked even if she only heard about it after the fact.
In any of these cases, whether it was something that happened directly to you, to someone you love, or to someone you witnessed, getting treatment is essential to your long-term well-being. Elevate Point is a substance abuse treatment center offering treatment for PTSD as a co-occurring condition.
– Joel Samuel, CEO
Elevate Point in Brooklyn is proud to work with most major PPO & POS insurance plans that offer out-of-network coverage. To find out your personal options for treatment, contact our caring admissions coordinators to request a free verification of benefits.
At Elevate Point, our PTSD treatment involves trauma-informed approaches and educational resources alongside your typical outpatient treatment program. Our facility provides partial hospitalization programs and intensive outpatient programs for adults and adolescents who have struggled with trauma and need appropriate therapy to process that trauma and take back control.
Several studies have found that individuals with PTSD can adjust their diet in order to better control symptoms. Microbiome research has found a link between diet, emotions, and PTSD, with some studies indicating that the Mediterranean diet, in particular, is heavily associated with decreased PTSD symptoms. For example:
Foods and eating habits that control inflammation can be particularly beneficial for people with PTSD, as chronic inflammation exacerbates symptoms.
At Elevate Point, our goal is to provide nutritional education as part of our treatment programs so that those who are struggling with PTSD can learn more about the way certain foods and eating habits can exacerbate symptoms and, on the other end, the way healthier foods can control symptoms and improve overall well-being.
Another form of care is Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). The US Department of Veterans Affairs and the World Health Organization have approved it as the primary form of treatment for PTSD. So how does it work?
This type of therapy helps you reprocess and resolve memories that may be improperly stored. It is a viable alternative to traditional treatment in that you don’t have to sit and talk about the trauma but instead bring the traumatic events to the forefront of your memory while following eye movements.
Your therapist will help you better store traumatic memories. For many clients, it’s easiest to think of this as a computer:
If your brain is a computer, all of your memories are files that have to be properly saved and stored in the correct folder. But traumatic memories don’t get saved correctly, which makes it difficult for the computer to function, shut down, sleep, or properly access those memories. EMDR helps to properly store the memories so that triggers do not continue to cause unnecessary reinforcements
Under normal circumstances, the things you do during the day, like going to school or work, making food, or talking to friends, all get stored in your brain as memories. Traumatic memories, however, don’t get stored properly; they get disrupted, and that makes it difficult to heal from them. With changes to your eye movements, you can change the neural links that improperly store those memories and, as a result, do away with the fear, anger, or anxiety that might be linked to those triggers.
Living with PTSD can greatly inhibit your daily life, leaving you feeling helpless, putting you at risk for developing secondary mental health conditions like anxiety disorders, and causing behaviors like avoidance techniques, which can severely disrupt social and occupational function.
If you are struggling with PTSD or someone in your family is, it’s important that you get treatment as soon as possible so that you can manage these symptoms and recover from the trauma.
PTSD does not completely go away on its own. With proper PTSD treatment in New York, however, you can see substantial improvement and recover from your symptoms. You might still struggle with things like triggers, but you’ll have the tools to manage them.
Yes, outpatient therapy is an effective way to treat PTSD. With our flexible outpatient programs, we give you more control over your schedule so that you can fit your treatment in and around other obligations like school or work. At the end of each day, you get to return home to a safe and stable living environment while adopting the tools and practices you learn in your therapy sessions in real-time.
The sooner you get treatment for PTSD, the sooner you can take charge of your symptoms and work to resolve them.
We provide trauma-informed care for our flexible outpatient programs and are here to help you on your journey to positive mental health.
Get help today. Call Elevate Point at 212.285.2022 to learn more about our addiction and PTSD treatment in New York.