What is Prolonged Exposure?
A gold-standard treatment for post-traumatic stress: approaching what trauma taught you to avoid, gradually and safely, until it loses its grip.
After trauma, avoidance feels like safety: avoid the memory, the places, the reminders, the conversations. But avoidance is also what keeps trauma alive — the memory never gets to be experienced as a memory, so it keeps operating as a present danger.
Prolonged Exposure reverses this, carefully and collaboratively. In imaginal exposure, you revisit the trauma memory in session, in a controlled way, until it starts to feel like something that happened rather than something happening. In in-vivo exposure, you gradually re-approach the safe situations your life has been organized around avoiding.
The pace is always set together. You are never pushed past what you have agreed to — and decades of research have made PE one of the most strongly supported PTSD treatments in existence.
How it works
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Build the foundation
How trauma, memory, and avoidance work — and a hierarchy of what has been avoided, built together.
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Approach the memory
Imaginal exposure in session, revisited until the memory softens from threat into history.
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Reclaim the territory
Step by step, the places and situations trauma took are returned to your life.
Prolonged exposure can help with
- Post-traumatic stress
- Trauma-related avoidance
- Hypervigilance and being constantly on guard
- Lives reorganized around reminders
PE is demanding work, and it repays the demand. I offer it when avoidance has taken enough territory that reclaiming it is the treatment.