01/12/2025
Treating Trauma: Exposure Therapy versus Accelerated Resolution Therapy
“What is Prolonged Exposure Therapy?
Prolonged Exposure therapy is often used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to encourage individuals to face specific traumatic events “head on”, overriding the patient’s tendency to avoid anything that reminds them of the trauma.
These sessions are often very anxiety-producing. A therapist must work intensely to ensure a safe environment is provided for the client while the client learns about how their trauma manifests in day-to-day life and helpful coping mechanisms for when it arises.
Harper noted how potentially painful, difficult, and retraumatizing prolonged exposure therapy was for the client. This seemed counterintuitive to her role as a practitioner whose job it is to arrange a safe space to encourage the healing process. She found PE did not suit her style and looked for a more compassionate and less invasive way of working with clients.
How is ART different from Prolonged Exposure Therapy?
Like Prolonged Exposure Therapy, ART uses Imaginal Exposure, where the patient is required to recall the traumatic instance over and over again as part of continuous Exposure. Unlike prolonged Exposure Therapy, the patient is not required to share out loud the details of their experience. When discomfort and physiological sensations occur, the therapist may use a number of different effective therapies or rapid eye movement to reduce the sensation.
Next, the therapist will engage the patient in imagery rescripting. In this stage the patient will imagine a new, more attractive way to visualize their event as if they were the director of their own movie, exercising their ability to rewrite the ending using one of ART’s many metaphorical scripted interventions. The combination of eye movements and the memory rewrites allows memory to become changeable in a short amount of time, while the old, traumatic memories are weakened. As a result, cognitive distortions that occur from the trauma are counterbalanced and emotional numbing, hypervigilance, fear, and avoidance are eliminated or greatly reduced.
Unlike Prolonged Exposure therapy, the process can be done without “homework” and no continuous exposure to triggering events as assignments. Results can be found in as little as one to five sessions, unlike the standard once a week for three months in PE.
Harper recounts in her talk the personal success through practicing ART in her own life, reaching levels of peace she had not experienced before. In her practice, she witnessed her clients, including victims of animal attacks, injuries, and sexual assault, regain peace, strength, and hope for the future, all without the potentially uncomfortable retraumatization from Prolonged Exposure therapy.”
Watch Yolanda Harper’s Tedx talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhOts-IjxI&t=277
From: The Rosenzweig Center for Rapid Recovery
