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Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)

What is CPT?
CPT is a specific type of cognitive therapy developed to treat PTSD. It focuses on identifying and challenging "stuck points". These are unhelpful beliefs that formed as a result of traumatic experiences that alter your core beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world around you. Working on these can help clients develop a more balanced understanding of what happened and what it means about them and the world.

Most trauma therapy addresses fear and avoidance. CPT goes a layer deeper. It looks at the meaning you made of what happened, and what that meaning has cost you since. Those meanings often harden into what CPT calls "stuck points," extreme and unhelpful beliefs that keep you from processing what happened and moving forward.

What does CPT treat?

CPT has strong research support for PTSD, complex trauma, and single-incident trauma. It's also well suited for the experiences that often travel alongside trauma: sexual assault, military trauma, and the deep feelings of depression, betrayal, guilt, shame, and self-blame that don't always resolve on their own even when time passes.

What does CPT look like in sessions?

CPT is structured and active with sessions building on each other There is often work to do between appointments. Most of the process involves some combination of the following.

Learning the impact of your thoughts and beliefs from your trauma symptoms on daily emotions.
Exploring the specific ways the trauma has shaped your beliefs about safety, trust, power, control, and your own worth.
Using practical tools and exercises to catch stuck points and self-blaming in real time, as they come up in your life.
Building the skills to question and shift those thoughts so they no longer drive your choices or dictate your mood.

What CPT is not

CPT does not require you to relive your trauma in graphic detail. CPT focuses on what you believe about what happened and what it means, not on walking through every moment of the event itself.
CPT is also not limited to single-incident trauma or military experience. While it was originally developed in those contexts, decades of research have expanded its application across a wide range of trauma histories and backgrounds.
PTSD is not something you simply manage and endure for the rest of your life. Evidence-based therapies like CPT have been proven effective in helping people genuinely heal from trauma, not just cope with it.

Why is CPT effective?

Because after a traumatic event, you might not just be struggling with fear or the recurring memory. You might also be carrying beliefs like "I am broken," "I deserved it," or "the world is entirely unsafe."

CPT works because it targets those exact beliefs directly. You learn to identify the stuck points, examine whether they're actually true, and develop a more balanced perspective on what happened and what it says about you.