10 Tips to Boost Your PTSD Recovery

Recently a survivor wrote me a note about the fact that she was beginning therapy, finally. "I know there's a lot to do," she wrote, "Do you have any tips for how to approach the work of posttraumatic growth?"

Do I have tips? You bet I do.

How to Boost PTSD Recovery and Healing

My best advice, all gleaned from my own journey:

1 - Participate and engage in the process. Ask questions, suggest areas to focus, share what is really the toughest thing for you to cope with, remember or manage. The therapist is there to guide and facilitate for you, but you are the one who needs to do the work!

2 - Work between sessions. Ask your therapist for suggestions of what you can be doing between your meetings. Recovery happens 24/7 not just in one 50-minute session per week.

3 - Balance yourself. PTSD recovery is tough work. Make sure you give yourself time off and lots of love and self-care to provide relief.

4 - Try new things. There are lots of approaches to recovery; be open to trying new things to either augment what's working or get you on a new track when things stall or get worse.

5 - Build your support system. PTSD and recovery can be very exhausting and isolating. Make sure you have support (even if that's only one person) in whom you can confide and feel comforted by.

6 - Set recovery goals. The work of recovery can be overwhelming. Chunk it down! Make your goals reasonable and manageable so that you control recovery (as much as possible) instead of it controlling you (Anxiety and PTSD: How to Set Goals, Heal Trauma and Find Anxiety Relief).

7 - Build your self-esteem. Confidence is often in low supply with PTSD. But recovery depends on you accessing your most resilient and best self! So, find ways to access that part of you by building your self-esteem and worth.

8 - Create healing beliefs. If you think you can't make a full recovery, you won't. Now is the time to get really clear on what you believe is possible; this is what you will eventually achieve, so make it good!

9 - Get clear on what you want. Saying, "I want to feel better," is a very vague goal. Start out your recovery with as much clarity for what you want the end result to be. "I want to be rid of all nightmares, able to sleep deeply and restfully, at peace and full of joy," for example, is more clear. You can develop your goal statement with as much detail as possible. This will help guide you to achieve it even if you make some pit stops along the way.

10 - Take action. Recovery only happens because you happen. If you remain passive so will your recovery. Taking actions toward each goal is imperative and helps build momentum.

Whew, I hope that wasn't too much! It was a great question and really got me thinking. I could keep going but I'll stop here as those are the foundation elements of PTSD recovery.

Have you discovered tips you would add? Feel free to post them as a comment...

Michele is the author of Your Life After Trauma: Powerful Practices to Reclaim Your Identity. Connect with her on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and her website, HealMyPTSD.com.