All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Patricia Reesick. She is PhD ABPP Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University.

She has received many grants, including grants from the NIH, NIJ, CDC, SAMHSA, VA, DOD, for her innovative work in developing and testing cognitive processing therapy.

She has written two books, one called Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD, and getting unstuck from PTSD. She has another text book on the way.

She has recently retired, but very busy from what I hear, giving grand rounds and writing and doing all the things that would forward and further the work that she has spent her life doing.

She has published over nine books, 250 journal articles, and she has worked with countless PTSD patients.

I thought I would start by asking her some questions about her journey into this important work, and then I really want to focus in on what cognitive processing therapy is, and what I would say, the pearls that we can glean from it.

This will not replace a training in this or supervision, but maybe we will give you a taste of what are some of the stuck points that people have when they have a traumatic event, and how using more of a cognitive therapy approach can actually help get them out of that stuck point.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Yes, part of your internship, you were part of the first cohort of rape crisis counselors in the mid 1970s.

How did this impact you at the time and your future work with trauma patients?

I was on internship in the South Carolina at the Medical University of South Carolina and the BA Hospital, and I was approached by a couple of people who were setting up one of the first, it wasn't the first, but it was one of the first rape crisis centers in the country.

I had been working with children before that, and that was my area of research and thought that was going to be my career.

And when I started working with the rape victims, I realized that I was asked to do a symposium for Southeast Psychological Association, and one of my fellow students and I did a complete review, and of course we had no computers back then.

It was looking issue by issue of psychological abstracts.

I think that's what it was called back then, I don't remember.

But anyway, it was volume by volume looking through the indexes, and there was, we could only find four articles on the topic of rape, and they were all like horrible.

We then got the word that the federal government and IMAGE was going to be funding research, $3 million, which back in 1970s money is pretty big to fund research on the effects of rape.

So I was working as a rape crisis counselor and getting called out in the middle of the night and learning a lot about kind of like how women were responding.

Mostly they were numb, not saying much, but sometimes the family members were fairly outrageous.

And the doctors took forever and were untrained at the time to do rape kits. Now they have the same program and nurses do that in most places or many places.

But we started doing research and my whole field shifted because everything we learned was new.

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