My guest this week is Dr. Carmen McLean, who specializes in treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. She recently co-authored a book called Retraining the Brain: Applied Neuroscience in Exposure Therapy for PTSD. It was great to get Carmen’s take on how effective treatment works and how we can support the body and brain’s natural ability to heal following a trauma. I shared some about my own experience recovering from a traumatic assault, and we explored how powerful it can be to face our trauma-related fears and memories systematically, as we do in cognitive behavioral therapy. Toward the end of our discussion we also talked about a free app that can help with recovery from trauma, which I provide a link to below.

Topics we touched on in this episode included:

• What drew Carmen to treating trauma and PTSD
• The effectiveness of psychological treatments for PTSD
• The natural recovery process following a trauma
• The effects of avoiding trauma-related things
• Therapy as supporting the natural recovery process
• Avoiding unintentionally blaming people for developing PTSD
• The complexity of factors that contribute to recovery from trauma
• Two types of exposure in Prolonged Exposure (PE) treatment
  • In vivo exposure to safely and systematically expand one’s world
  • Imaginal exposure to the memory of the trauma
• Developing greater self-efficacy through facing one’s trauma triggers
• My own experience with recovery from a traumatic assault
• The short- vs. long-term effects of trying to avoid trauma-related memories and emotions
• Mischaracterizations of PE by some practitioners of body-focused trauma treatment
• Common overlap among effective treatments
• Breathing retraining in Prolonged Exposure
• Effects of trauma and PTSD on the autonomic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze)
• What studying the brain might be able to tell us about trauma treatment
• The potential value in understanding how treatment is changing the brain
• Translating effective PTSD treatment to self-help approaches
• Written exposure therapy
• The PTSD Coach app, developed by the VA and available for free

Carmen P. McLean, PhD, is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and researcher in the Dissemination and Training Division of the National Center for PTSD at the Palo Alto VA Health Care System and a Clinical Associate Professor (Affiliate) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Her research examines ways to increase the reach of exposure therapies for PTSD by addressing therapist and clinic-level implementation barriers and testing eHealth and mHealth interventions.

Carmen’s overall goal is to help more individuals with PTSD benefit from evidence-based treatment.

You can follow Carmen on Twitter where she shares information about CBT implementation and dissemination.