Insight-oriented therapy is a talking therapy in which you first work to build trust and a bond with your therapist and then work on exploring yourself. This means that you spend sessions of 45-60 minutes 1-3 times per week for 3-24 months with your therapist. The length and duration of therapy depends on you, your goals, and the complexity of the situation, as most IOT is delivered on a personalized and needs basis. This means you’ll get a different program depending on your initial assessment during intake and your program will be updated as you progress (or don’t) along the way.

The primary goal of insight-oriented therapy is to understand how past experiences and patterns limit and cause problems today, so that you can take steps to change those patterns.

over a period of months or even years. That’s significantly different than many approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy, which may deliver the entire therapy in as little as 10-15 sessions. Therefore, your relationship with your therapist, your long-term adaptation, and growth over time all become important.

Insight-oriented therapy is one of the oldest therapies delivered to patients. It’s intended to deliver self-awareness and an understanding of the “gears” that make you tick. That means taking time to look at what’s going on underneath your problems, so you can work on resolving the root causes of issues.

That’s ideal for individuals struggling with mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, personality disorders, mood disorders, trauma, and interpersonal problems. However, it’s not intended to be a crisis intervention. It’s intended to be a long-term look into solutions that help you improve your life, your emotional understanding of yourself, your relationships, and your relationship with yourself.

It’s also ideal for individuals who show resistance to traditional behavioral therapy techniques, where you might need a deeper exploration and understanding of what’s going on to make progress with changing behavior.

Insight-Oriented Therapy is not a quick fix. It’s not ideal if you need emergency treatment right away. Instead, it provides long-term structural support and safety, where you get to explore yourself, your emotions, and how you work and then learn to apply those insights to your behavior while continuing to get therapy. That can make it extremely helpful for individuals with chronic and long-term mental health disorders where longer-term support and room to work through problems has the most benefit.

Take the first step toward recovery today! Reach out to a qualified therapist to discover how Insight-Oriented Therapy can guide you on your journey to healing and self-discovery. Your path to a healthier, more fulfilling life starts now!

Before diving into strategies for communication, it’s important to understand mental illness. Mental illnesses are health conditions that affect a person’s thinking, mood, and behavior. These conditions can range from depression and anxiety to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and more. Each illness comes with its own set of challenges, but one common thread is that they can deeply affect the way a person interacts with the world around them.

People with mental illness may:

These challenges often make it harder for them to reach out for help or talk about what they are going through. That’s why having open, honest, and supportive conversations is essential for both their healing and your relationship.

Supporting a loved one with mental illness can be emotionally draining. It’s important to remember that you can’t pour from an empty cup. Make sure you’re also taking care of your own mental health during this process. Consider seeking support from a therapist, counselor, or support group for family members of individuals with mental illness. Taking time for self-care allows you to show up as your best self for your loved one.

Conclusion

Talking to a loved one with mental illness can be difficult, but it’s also one of the most important ways to show your support. At Redeemed Mental Health, we believe that open, empathetic conversations can play a crucial role in the healing process. By approaching your loved one with patience, empathy, and a willingness to listen, you can create a safe space where they feel heard and supported.

Remember, you don’t have to have all the answers. Just being there, offering your support, and encouraging them to seek help when they’re ready can make a world of difference.

The first step to moving on from abuse and from trauma is to recognize it and to frame it. If you go to therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy, much of your treatment is based on the concept of framing things that happened to you in a way that allows you to acknowledge them, regain control, and move on.

That often means:

A narcissistic parent may mean that you have trouble not telling yourself you’re just blowing things out of proportion, that they are fine and you are taking things badly, that things didn’t really happen that way, etc. You’re likely not used to being validated that things were bad for you and that it’s okay to feel bad about them. But, that’s an important step, even if your parent doesn’t agree.

If you’ve grown up with a narcissistic parent, you’ve probably learned not to trust your own experiences or your memory. That means it’s important to figure out how to rebuild trust in yourself and in how you feel. Going to therapy is a good start. However, most people also benefit from steps like recording experiences, going over them later, validating experiences with others, and working to have healthy experiences and conversations with others.

• Write down how you feel and keep a mood journal or a diary
• Ask to record conversations if you feel you’re being gaslit
• Build a network of supportive people you can talk to and talk about things with
• Validate your feelings and acknowledge that you feel hurt, even if you aren’t sure what the situation was.

Rebuilding being able to trust that your emotions are valid, that your experiences are valid, and that your experience of things is not something that should be brushed off is important. That’s even true if you also have mental health problems because you don’t have to be right or to remember things correctly in order to be hurt.

Get Professional Help

It’s important to talk to your doctor, to look into mental health treatment, and to get professional help with trauma. That often means starting at your doctor and being referred into a mental health treatment program that can help you work through your experiences, their effects, and help you to feel more in control of your life and your emotions. It might also include family therapy, which will help you better understand your relationship with your parent and to work out how to have a healthy relationship together. Eventually, that professional support may mean working through your experiences and problems and cutting your parent off, or getting them into treatment and working to build a future together. However, that will depend on you, what you want, what your parent wants, and what they are willing to invest in.

Narcissistic personality disorder is extremely common. It can also be difficult on everyone around you – because people with narcissism have difficulty managing their behaviors around others. That can mean you have a parent who is entitled, manipulative, envious, and lacks empathy – even if they care about you a great deal. Eventually, that can and does result in trauma and it’s important that you take steps to acknowledge that and to get treatment, so you can recover and live your life.

In most cases, the side-effects of trauma should go away on their own in about 2 weeks after the trauma occurs. In other cases, it can take up to about 2 months. Here, it’s often recommended to seek out counseling. For example, many police departments offer counseling to individuals who have experienced trauma. It’s also more and more common for emergency service responders to receive trauma counseling as part of response to traumatic events.

Counseling means that you have someone working with you from day one to identify any blockers to recovery, to help you talk through the traumatic event, and to recognize if things are not going well. That means you have someone on-hand to help you recover so you might not need ongoing therapy or more intensive treatment.

Dialectal behavioral therapy or DBT is a branch of CBT. It was originally designed to help individuals with personality disorders such as schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder by focusing on acceptance of things as they are, minimizing symptoms that are there, and improving emotional regulation. The focus of the therapy is not “recovery” but improved quality of life. As a result, it’s not a primary treatment for PTSD. However, it’s a line 2 treatment for individuals who have complex PTSD that has been shown as resistant to other treatments. Here, you work to learn to understand symptoms, to learn tactics to reduce symptoms, and to learn tactics to manage and prevent symptoms where you can. Together, these can have a powerful impact on quality of life.

Conclusion

There are more therapies used to treat trauma and PTSD. In addition, there’s no one best option. For many people, choosing the right therapy means going to a doctor, getting advice, and being referred to a specialist in trauma and PTSD. From there, you’ll be given a program that tackles your unique experiences, personality, and trauma, so you may receive a mix of treatments. However, CBT is the most common treatment for PTSD, so chances are very high that if you have trauma, PTSD, or complex PTSD, treatment will start there. Good luck getting help.

Boundaries are important for reducing the amount of hurt you feel in the future. For example, if you see someone often, you may want to set boundaries around insensitive comments.

A good boundary politely establishes a line that should not be crossed and then establishes a consequence if that boundary is crossed. Here, it’s important to follow up on consequences.

For example:

Some people will be very receptive to receiving boundaries and others will not. Unfortunately, there’s very little you can do when people are not but exercise your boundaries and practice the consequence you set. Good consequences include things like:

You should never set a consequence that you are not willing or able to follow up on or practice. If it comes time to exercise the consequence and you can’t do it, your boundary is manliness. So, boundaries have to be set with care.

Most people don’t make insensitive comments out of malice. Instead, they’re likely to be ignorant of issues, to feel insecure or defensive, or even to feel invalidated by how you are being treated versus how they are being treated. The result can feel extremely bad for everyone involved. If you’re not managing that, if you don’t have the resources to talk to your loved ones or to try education, or if you fall apart when you hear this kind of thing, you will need help. In addition, comments are very often based in truth, such as you not being able to handle things – which may be a sign that you do need more help than you’re getting. Talking to a professional, getting insight, and working to improve your ability to manage comments and people in your life is always going to be the right way to go. Good luck.

Post-traumatic-stress disorder is a diagnosis in which trauma continues to affect the brain and the body after the trauma. In most cases, that means the side-effects of trauma have not gone away within about 2 months of a traumatic event. Not everyone exposed to trauma will develop PTSD. Instead, personal resilience, coping strategies, genetics, environment, support, and the intensity and duration of the trauma will all impact the risk of PTSD.

PTSD itself is characterized by failure to recover from a traumatic event. That often means remaining in a psychological and biological state of heightened awareness and stress response. And, that means that treatment often requires identifying pre-exposure risk factors that led to failure to recover.

That’s often significantly more important to recovery than the specific reactions of the brain in PTSD.

The HPA Axis is only partially in the brain. However, it’s part of the body’s response to stress and to PTSD. This system regulates the stress and adrenaline responses including cortisol and adrenaline. IT’s the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system. During PTSD, this system is often dysregulated, meaning that it over-produces stress hormones, leading to a constant state of stress and anxiety.

That can translate to elevated heart rate, being on edge, inability to sleep, hypervigilance and awareness, and irritability. That all makes sense because the body is producing hormones that should only occur when something is wrong.

Neurotransmitter Imbalances

PTSD often results in an imbalance of neurotransmitters throughout the brain. These include serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine which allow the brain to send signals, to process signals, and to create reward for activities. For example, serotonin is largely known as being responsible for people feeling good after activities or when in love, dopamine is largely known for its role in providing motivation and feeling good around motivation. Reducing levels of these transmitters in the brain can have significant and meaningful impacts on the individual and their ability to recover. For example, over time, it leads to symptoms of anxiety, depression, and increased hypervigilance.

Getting Help

How do you get help for something that affects the way your brain functions? Does behavioral therapy help? The good news is that yes it does. The bad news is that it can take a long time for your brain to return to normal even with treatment. In most cases, treatment for PTSD involves a short-term course of medication to reduce the symptoms and flashbacks – so that you can benefit from treatment. From there, you’ll receive behavioral therapy like DBT, CBT, and counseling. Over time, these will allow you to reframe experiences, expose yourself to trauma, to reframe reactions, and to get emotional regulation under control. And, over time, your brain and body will heal and will return to normal.

PTSD significantly impacts the brain including the function and the structure of areas of the brain. Everyone with PTSD will see changes in neurotransmitter processing, connectivity, and activity across the brain. Those changes can mean that it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. But, with treatment, you can mitigate those symptoms and give the brain space to begin to heal.

If you or a loved one is still experiencing symptoms of trauma more than a few months after a traumatic event it’s important to reach out and get help. That means talking to your doctor and looking for a specialist that can build a custom treatment plan, identify the pre-risk factors of PTSD, and then work on helping you through the changes you need to make to recover. Full recovery will always take time, but it starts with taking steps to heal.

Telehealth or virtual health typically means delivering mental healthcare via a phone or video call. That can also mean chat with mental healthcare sessions via video calls, phone, and even on messenger apps. This delivery method makes healthcare more accessible, reduces concerns surrounding mobility and affordability, and means that even very busy people with responsibilities can access mental healthcare. Telehealth has increased in prominence, especially following the Covid19 pandemic, when video calls and platforms enabled many people to continue receiving treatment. Today, it’s considered a good second-line treatment or follow-up to in-person treatment and may be used as primary care for individuals with lighter needs.

This can include software-based interventions for behavioral treatment. Here, telehealth is delivered as part of an app that delivers diverse treatment including behavioral health programs.

While most patients will never see it, technologies like blockchain and IOT are increasingly used in mental healthcare. For example, blockchain integrates to offer increased security and privacy for data records, enabling more secure sharing, and giving patients better control over their data. IOT means devices automatically share data, so, for example, trackers automatically upload data, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself. In each case, you get a smoother and more informed approach to mental healthcare, even if you rarely see the actual technology at work.

Conclusion

New technologies will continue to arise and change the mental healthcare market. Today, most changes involve digitization, in which the availability and delivery of healthcare is increasingly moved online. This enhances accessibility. Other innovations improve personalization and hopefully effectiveness, such as genetic analysis and using AI to diagnose and predict better potential treatments.

Eventually, technology will always revolutionize mental healthcare. Whether that’s by enabling online therapy sessions, ensuring you can access behavioral therapy programs with an app, or giving you tools to talk to a chatbot and ask for help 24/7 doesn’t matter. Hopefully, these innovations make it easier, more accessible, and more affordable to reach out for help and to get the care you need.

If you’ve experienced a traumatic event, it’s important to talk to your doctor. That means discussing your health and mental health with someone who is both qualified to talk to you about it and who can set up next steps for you. Doing so right away means you’ll understand the options available to you and your doctor will know they might have to make next steps for you in the future. That will simplify the process if you end up needing help later.

Here, you want to discuss:

If it’s already been some time since you experienced trauma, you’ll also want to discuss whether you’ve made any progress, any actual symptoms, and if things are getting worse.

Trauma means you’re at increased risk of stress, stomach and digestion issues, sleeping issues (sleeping too much or too little), cardiovascular problems, and complications like PTSD. Sitting down with your doctor to discuss those risks, your recovery, and your options will allow you to decide what the next steps for your health should be and what you can do to support recovery.

In most cases, if you’ve experienced a traumatic event, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor. From there, you can make decisions about getting treatment or not based on your history of mental health and potential complications. You can also make sure your doctor is aware of what’s going on, so if things don’t improve, they can help you take the next steps. If you have a history of trauma, it’s probably best to immediately look into treatment. In addition, if you have a mental health problem such as depression or anxiety, that can make recovering from trauma harder. Individuals who have experienced violent crimes are also more likely to experience complications, which means you should typically take advantage of counseling offered by emergency care services.

Otherwise, the best option for deciding on treatment is to wait. Talk to your doctor about what you can do to improve things in the meantime. Then, give your brain and your body time to heal. If you’re not seeing improvements after about a month, it’s a good idea to go back to your doctor, discuss next steps, and to start looking into treatment. Everyone recovers at their own pace, but staying on top of how you’re doing, looking for improvement, and taking action if it’s not there is critical no matter what your recovery process looks like. Starting out by talking to your doctor or your therapist is always a good step. In addition, if you have the option, getting preventive care for trauma is often a good way to ensure you have the tools to prevent complications and recover as quickly as possible.

Eventually, most of us experience trauma. Recovering from that takes time. Depending on you and your mental health, recovering from trauma can take months. For some of us, that won’t happen without therapeutic interventions and counseling. There’s no single path through trauma or trauma recovery. However, it’s important to be able to reach out and get help when you need it and that means talking to medical professionals, understanding what recovery should look like, and taking steps when nothing is changing. Hopefully, this helps you create a strategy so you have that support available to you and you can get help if you need it.

An intensive outpatient treatment program means that you attend a treatment program at a clinic for part of your day while having the freedom to go to work, to go home, or to attend responsibilities like childcare or school in between. Programs vary considerably; however, you can expect:

Outpatient treatment essentially means you get to continue going to treatment and therapy – while having the space to pick your life back up.

Moving into an IOP program is often a relatively simple step of talking to your doctor, getting approval from your insurance, and going to a local clinic. The intensity and duration of your program should also vary depending on your diagnosis, your history of treatment, and where your mental health is at when you start going. For example, if you’re mostly fine but want to manage and maintain your progress, you might have relatively light program based around building life skills and improving on what you have. If you’re struggling with symptoms, you might end up in a program that’s 12+ hours per week where you work to reduce the impact of bipolar disorder on your life. In either case, good luck getting treatment and with managing bipolar disorder over the long-term.

Anosognosia is characterized by an inability to recognize that something is wrong. That can mean:

Diagnosing anosognosia normally starts with a questionnaire to assess whether someone is aware of having problems. The Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder (SUMD) is the standard used here. After this, you may receive a CT, EEG, or MRI scan to check for physical damage to the brain. Often, there are no physical signs, especially in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

People with anosognosia are unable to acknowledge that they have a mental health problem. This may be total (they never realize they have a mental health problem) or it may come and go (they take meds for months and then suddenly believe they are well and are taking medication for no reason). In every case, the best approach is to get that person to a doctor where they can be diagnosed and given treatment. Often, the challenge is keeping that person in treatment because they won’t normally see anything wrong with themselves. That means talking to them about goals like work, living alone, taking care of themselves, etc., and then working out reasons that mental health professionals can help with that. You won’t get anywhere trying to talk someone with anosognosia into believing they are sick. However, you can talk them into getting help for other reasons by normalizing mental healthcare for normal life. Good luck getting treatment.