During this phase the therapist focuses on developing rapport with the client and providing psychoeducation. Once this has been completed, the therapist asks the client to write an impact statement to establish a current baseline of the client’s understanding of why the event occurred, as well as the impact it had on their beliefs about themselves, others and the world.

This phase focuses on identifying thoughts and increasing awareness of the relationship between a person’s thoughts and feelings. A specific focus involves teaching the client to identify maladaptive beliefs, also known as stuck points, that interfere with recovery.

The primary goal is to allow the client to complete therapy with the ability to utilize adaptive coping strategies in the future. This phase focuses on 5 conceptual areas that traumatic experiences most frequently cause damage to: safety, trust, power/control, esteem and intimacy. Clients practice recognizing how their traumatic experiences resulted in over-generalized beliefs, as well as the impact of these beliefs on current functioning and quality of life.

The therapist asks the client to write a detailed account of their worst traumatic experience, which the client reads to the therapist. This helps to break the pattern of avoidance and enable emotional processing to take place with the goal of having the client clarify and correct their cognitive distortions. The therapist will also utilize socratic questioning (i.e., asking open-ended questions to encourage examination) to help the client arrive at new cognitions about their trauma, as opposed to simply utilizing the therapist’s interpretation.

For clients who find it too distressing to write about the incident, an alternative method is used which relies almost entirely on socratic dialogue between the therapist and client.