Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

How IPT works.
 Each week for 14 weeks, your therapist will meet 
with you for about 50 minutes. It’s important to try to meet regularly 
to maintain momentum in the treatment. If there are unavoidable va-
cations or other breaks during the treatment, your therapist will work 
with you to try to reschedule sessions.
 1.  Your therapist will be interested in
 • 
how you’re feeling
 (anxious? down? angry?), and
 • 
how your feelings may be linked to things that have happened 
during the week
 between sessions.
For example: encounters you’ve had with other people, pleasant and 
unpleasant events, and how they affected you emotionally. Again, the 
connection between feelings and your life situations is crucial. 
Feelings 
are useful signals about your situation.
 If someone does something up-
setting, you may feel hurt or angry. There is no such thing as a “bad” 
feeling.
We understand that, because of PTSD, you may have trouble feeling 
your feelings. IPT is designed to help you get back in touch with them.
 2.  After a few sessions, you and your therapist will choose one key 
area in your life to focus on: either 
grief
, a 
role dispute
, or a 
role 
transition
. Each of these categories describes life situations that 
might have contributed to your developing PTSD, or else may 
have resulted from PTSD.
 • 
Grief
 means that PTSD started when someone close to you 
died, and you have had trouble dealing with that terrible loss.
 •  A 
role dispute
 is an interpersonal struggle you may be having 
with someone close to you.
 •  A 
role transition
 is a major change in life, including having 
suffered a disturbing trauma, moving to a new place, starting 
or ending a relationship, starting or ending a job, or developing 
a serious illness.
 3.  You and your therapist can explore how your PTSD affects your 
daily life situations, the emotions that arise in those situations, 
and what you can do to handle them more comfortably and 
effectively. The time that you’re in therapy is 
a good time to take 
“safe risks”
: to try out new ways of handling situations with other 
people and then discuss the results in therapy.

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 4.  Your therapist will also be interested in people around you who 
may be able to provide you with 
social support
, which helps 
protect against PTSD symptoms and aids in recovery from PTSD.
 5.  If you should feel uncomfortable during a session, don’t hesitate 
to tell your therapist what’s bothering you, including anything 
the therapist is doing that you don’t like. Your therapist will be 
sympathetic and won’t be offended.
 F.