Despite the use of "gold standard" trauma treatments, the pain of talking about traumatic details can quickly drive clients from your care.
But what if you could quickly and consistently reduce trauma symptomology...without requiring clients to verbalize the details?
Written Exposure Therapy (WET) is an evidence-based brief PTSD treatment approach that produces
clinically significant reductions in PTSD symptoms in as few as five treatment sessions by having clients write about the trauma. It’s efficient, effective,
associated with low treatment dropout rates, and has been found to be
equally effective as more time intensive therapies – all without requiring clients to verbalize the details of their traumas again and again.
This is not a new treatment. It’s a modification of exposure-based treatments to be more efficient and tolerable for the client.
In this brief video, Dr. Denise Sloan and Dr. Brian Marx, developers of the
Written Exposure Therapy protocol and authors of
Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD: A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals, provide an overview of what the first session of this protocol looks like.