Conrad met the criteria for PTSD. His symptoms as well as his efforts to avoid contact with certain people are significant and severely impair his ability to function daily. Erroneous negative appraisals of responsibility for causing the death of his brother manifest in a range of negative emotions including inescapable feelings of shame and remorse. These feelings and reluctance to discuss the event further isolate the client from social situations in which his negative appraisals and faulty assumptions would be challenged. Feelings of inadequacy brought on by his interpretation of his mother’s uncaring and critical behavior have strained their relationship eliminating a former source of love and support. To better understand the perplexing set of symptoms the client is…show more content… They propose that when fear structures are pathological they employ excessive response behaviors increasing their resistance to modification (Foa & Kozak, 1986). In a cyclical fashion these structures are maintained through the avoidance because the evasion prevents them from being fully accessed or modified (Foa & Kozak, 1986). Their theory stresses the necessity of modifying these structures through activation and reappraisal. This “emotional processing” will help link the trauma with its context in time and allow for better discrimination between the past and the present. The erroneous negative appraisals will also need to be addressed in order for Conrad to arrive at more helpful conclusions about the event. Since the initial processing of the event was incomplete, disorganized, and charged with inaccurate emotional information a variety of strategies including cognitive restructuring followed by exposure with corrective information will be utilized to promote reprocessing of the
