An Integrative Scientific Guide to Treating Psychological Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders

This book contains two detailed programmes for the integrative treatment of trauma. Integrative psychotherapy represents the third wave in the development of contemporary psychotherapy on the one hand, and is a radical modification of Thorne’s old theory of integration, which prevailed from the 1930s until the 1970s, on the other. That theory had the psychotherapist draw therapeutic techniques from many psychological theories and scientific models with differing foundations, which confused the patient and the researcher when applying the intervention techniques they had learned. It also held that interventions aimed at reducing the severity of suffering in psychiatric patients and in deviant and delinquent individuals were limited to psychotherapeutic intervention, even though there are four other types of intervention that may be more important for recovery, as well as for developing effective skills, abilities and personality traits: developmental, preventive, corrective and rehabilitative intervention. Integrative therapy, from a modern and contemporary perspective on the principles of psychological diagnosis and treatment, holds that the choice of psychotherapy techniques and of clinical examination and assessment methods should emerge from one or at most two theories that share common factors, such as the cognitive and behavioural theories with all their approaches. It therefore presents an integrative psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorders and psychological trauma that proceeds from the cognitive and behavioural theories only; it includes cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, trauma information processing therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and metacognition psychotherapy. The first programme in the book can be applied individually or in groups, and can be applied by the patient himself without the help of a specialist psychotherapist. The second programme can be applied in groups only, primarily with cases of combatants and cases of rape. We therefore believe that this book, which is the first attempt to my knowledge to present integrative psychotherapy, can be useful to psychotherapists in teaching them the skills of applying integrative psychotherapy, and to ordinary people suffering from this complex disorder, who can rid themselves of it without the help of a specialist psychotherapist.