The Evil Hours by David J. Morris

Author:David J. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Prolonged Exposure, one of the VA’s top-tier or “Schedule A” PTSD therapies, is one of the most thoroughly researched and empirically validated psychiatric treatments in existence. The body of science supporting its use is over a century old and reaches back to the very dawn of psychology, when the fledgling discipline was still trying to carve a niche from the fields of philosophy and literature. It is no exaggeration to say that PE has the best scientific pedigree of any trauma therapy protocol. Derived from the classical conditioning or “learning” theories first described by Pavlov in the late 1800s, the principle behind PE is very simple: almost all human behaviors are learned, and they can be unlearned by manipulating the stimuli that a person is exposed to.

Applying behavior learning theory to PTSD, researchers have created an extensive model of how the disorder develops and persists. These theorists posit that once exposed to a traumatic stimulus, a person suffering from post-traumatic stress will continue to avoid situations reminiscent of the original trauma, a process that can prevent the victim from ever healing or moving on. In time, the original traumatic stimulus can begin to evolve, metastasize, to include a number of random stimuli associated with the trauma, until vast swaths of the world become fear inducing. This effect is depicted in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where the narrator, talking about the aftermath of 9/11, says,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.