An Affective Cognitive Neuroscience-Based Approach to PTSD Psychotherapy: The TARGET Model
by ATS Staff on 02/23/15
An Affective Cognitive
Neuroscience-Based Approach to PTSD Psychotherapy: The TARGET Model
by ATS Staff on 2/23/15
Julian Ford, PhD
University of Connecticut
Health Center
Adaptations or alternative versions of
cognitive psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are needed
because even the most efficacious cognitive or cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies
for PTSD do not retain or achieve sustained clinically significant benefits for
a majority of recipients. Cognitive affective neuroscience research is reviewed
which suggests that it is not just memory (or memories) of traumatic events and
related core beliefs about self, the world, and relationships that are altered
in PTSD but also memory (and affective information) processing. A cognitive
psychotherapy is described that was designed to systematically make explicit
these otherwise implicit trauma-related alterations in cognitive emotion regulation
and its application to the treatment of complex variants of PTSD—Trauma Affect Regulation:
Guide for Education and Therapy (TARGET). TARGET provides therapists and clients
with (a) a neurobiologically informed strengths-based meta-model of
stress-related cognitive processing in the brain and how this is altered by
PTSD and (b) a practical algorithm for restoring the executive functions that
are necessary to make implicit trauma-related cognitions explicit (i.e.,
experiential awareness) and modifiable (i.e., planful refocusing). Results of randomized
clinical trial studies and quasi-experimental effectiveness evaluations of
TARGET with adolescents and adults are reviewed.
