Various health experts have agreed that treatment for victims of sexual abuse should be done with an interdisciplinary team’s support. The need for a combined job for these patients becomes even more apparent when they are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD requires high-quality treatments to be faced since the complexity of its manifestations, and the severity of its impact generates intense alterations in people’s mental health. The combination of techniques, such as relaxation to reduces the level of psychophysiological stress. Also, cognitive restructuring, psychodynamic psychotherapy, the use of psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, among others, is recommended.
Below, we have enlisted five things that show sexual abuse treatments are effective and therapeutic intervention methods.
Sexual Abuse Treatment:
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment for Abuse: In this type of treatment, the victim is given strategies with which to advance in his/her life and to be able to manage day-to-day life, although it is true that, in most of these cases, it will be accompanied by other techniques that address the cause, that is, the trauma. This treatment includes:
- Education on sexual abuse and healthy sexuality (in case of abuse as a reason for consultation)
- Treatment of sexual abuse and maltreatment Psychodynamic: programs based on psychodrama and play therapy (especially in minors)
- Humanistic and Gestalt treatment: this treatment attempts to enhance the patient’s self-acceptance and self-realization. Various techniques of different humanistic currents are used to improve the health of the patient.
EMDR Therapy for Sexual Abuse: In EMDR treatment, the psychologist helps the patients select the abuse facts that still disturb them in the present. What might affect them in the future, and choose the most important and distressing aspects of these events? Once the “facts” or “targets” to be worked on have been selected, bilateral stimulation is carried out. They use eye movements or other techniques so that the patient begins to “clear the victim’s memory,” leaving it where it should be, in the past. How does it work? The connection between the two cerebral hemispheres produces bilateral stimulation. The information processing achieves freeing the mind of the emotional load and completing an adaptive resolution of the facts.
Clinical Hypnosis: in this treatment, the patient can return to when the events occurred in a safe and non-retraumatizing way. To clean up the traumas that free themselves from current suffering and current maladaptive behaviors. With hypnosis, what is achieved is to modify negative experiences and beliefs by positive suggestions that the therapist introduces. Some techniques used in hypnosis are:
Symbols with meaning for the patient, so that resources are installed to improve life and leave the trauma behind, and symbols representing the events suffered to overcome them.
Metaphors to modify bodily and emotional sensations and modify associated beliefs for other more adaptive ones that do not generate suffering. In this way, the victim is “empowered” to control his/her body, emotion, and thought. “
- Work with the Inner Child: the child’s perspective is retaken in child abuse or mistreatment, to add in the present resources and thoughts of the adult, stronger and self-sufficient.
- Safe Place: also used in EMDR, it is a real or imaginary place where you feel security and well-being.
Mindfulness: with this technique, we help the brain to stay in the present moment without being invaded by intrusive images, traumatic memories, or emotions of guilt or shame. Mindfulness improves the patient’s quality of life since its good results have been proven in problems such as anxiety, depression, suicidal ideas, and certain psychological disorders.
Things That Shows Sexual Abuse Treatments Are Certainly Effective
- Coping skills training
- Gradual exposure to the traumatic event in imagination
- Restructuring of the cognitions and emotions associated with the event
- Personal safety and self-care skills
- Reduced symptoms.
- Change maladaptive or distorted thoughts and beliefs.
And all these come together to help increases the quality of life of the patient.
Different treatments are applied to trauma, which is proven to be effective, used by our health experts at Intensive Therapy Retreats. According to each victim’s needs, we always adapt to the person in front of us, their particular history, fears, and needs. Each person is different, and at Intensive Therapy Retreat, our psychologists try to be human, empathetic, and understandable.
