Edward Cooper

About

The belief I most often have to correct is that this gets worse before it gets better, and that treatment therefore requires a period of deliberate suffering. That idea keeps a great many people out of a room they would benefit from. It is not accurate. PTSD treatment done in the right order should feel manageable throughout, and a sustained worsening is a signal that the sequencing is wrong rather than evidence that it is working. We monitor that explicitly. If something is making you worse, we change what we are doing rather than pressing on for the sake of the method. I have inherited enough clients from badly sequenced work to be firm about this. Suffering is not the mechanism. If you have been told it has to get worse first, that is not what a competent course of this looks like. Manageable throughout is the correct standard to hold it to.