Reclaiming Your Life After Trauma
A worksheet for identifying the activities, relationships and roles that trauma has taken away, and planning small weekly steps to get them back. Combines the 'reclaiming your life' strand of cognitive therapy for PTSD with behavioural activation.
About this resource
People with post-traumatic stress often find that their life has narrowed. Activities are dropped because they are reminders, because the person feels unsafe, or because low mood and exhaustion make them seem pointless. Relationships thin out. Roles that once provided identity, such as parent, colleague, sportsperson or friend, shrink or disappear. Ehlers and Clark's cognitive therapy for PTSD includes 'reclaiming your life' as an explicit strand from the first session, on the grounds that a life organised around the trauma keeps the sense of current threat and permanent change alive, and that re-engagement with valued activity provides direct evidence against beliefs such as 'I am a different person now' or 'nothing will ever be good again'.
Behavioural activation offers a compatible method: identify what has been lost, select activities that matter to the person, schedule them in small, achievable steps, and treat avoidance as a pattern to notice and reverse rather than a sign of incapacity. This worksheet combines the two. It asks what life looked like before and what it looks like now, what the person would most like to have back, and then plans concrete weekly steps with attention to the avoidance that will show up along the way.
The professional version notes that this work can begin before memory processing and often makes it easier, that activities linked to trauma reminders double as exposure and should be planned with that in mind, and that the client's own values rather than a return to an exact former life should guide the choices.
How to use it
- Introduce in the first or second session, alongside psychoeducation, as one of the two main strands of treatment. Explain that getting life back is treatment in its own right, not a reward for finishing memory work.
- Complete the 'before and now' fields together. Many clients have not articulated how much has changed, and the exercise can be emotional; allow time.
- Help the client choose two or three things to reclaim first. Favour activities that are meaningful, achievable within a week or two, and not primarily trauma reminders. Save reminder-linked activities for planned exposure later.
- Break each into a first step small enough to be almost certain to happen. Schedule it for a specific day and time and record it on the worksheet.
- Review weekly. Note what got in the way, distinguish practical obstacles from avoidance, and adjust the next step. Use successes as evidence against beliefs about permanent change.
References
- Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(4), 319-345.
- Ehlers, A., Clark, D. M., Hackmann, A., McManus, F., & Fennell, M. (2005). Cognitive therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder: Development and evaluation. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43(4), 413-431.
- Martell, C. R., Dimidjian, S., & Herman-Dunn, R. (2010). Behavioral Activation for Depression: A Clinician's Guide. Guilford Press.
