682: Ten Sessions
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From WBC Chicago, it's this American life. I'm out of class. This is kind of therapy for trauma, victims of sexual assault, soldiers with PTSD, where instead of taking years and talking and talking and talking on some couch to a therapist with no end in sight, you basically knock it out, all the treatment, in just 10 or 12 sessions. Two weeks, you can do it in two weeks, and it's effective. Studies have shown that. This therapy has been around since the '80s, but I think lots of people who might find it useful don't even know it's an option for them. Like, for instance, Jamie Lowe, who's a writer and reporter and a good candidate for this treatment. I was sexually assaulted when I was 13, almost 30 years ago. And for most of those 30 years, I didn't really talk about it. Not because I didn't want to or need to, but because I didn't know how and no one asked. Jamie Lowe decided to do a story where she would go through this therapy herself and record all the sessions, which never happens. Like most therapy, usually the treatment is in private, not on the radio. And hearing how it works, it really is kind of remarkable. My mom was a therapist, I've been in therapy, this is so different from what I have ever heard. And that's gonna be our show today. We're gonna hear it step by step, this sometimes life-changing process, and how that can happen so quickly. A quick warning to listeners before we start about content, this story does mention the sexual assault of a teenager. Here's Jamie Lowe. - I thought because I didn't talk about the assault or even think about it much. Everything was as resolved as it could be. But then after Donald Trump and grab him by the pussy and Harvey Weinstein and all of them, it's not that specific memories of the assault would pop up. I just felt immobilized, anxious, protective of my body. And I realized my sexual assault wasn't resolved at all. Around this time, I heard about a therapy for sexual assault survivors called Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT. A researcher described it to me as short term and expensive, practical, like learning a skill. The typical way to deal with trauma in therapy is to talk about the incident over and over
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