This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
When trauma shatters our world, it doesn't just break our sense of safety or our trust in others. It fractures something far more fundamental: our ability to make sense of our own story. Like a mirror dropped on concrete, the coherent narrative we once had about ourselves, our world, and our future splinters into countless fragments, each reflecting a distorted version of reality that no longer feels recognizable or true.
Sarah sits in my office, her hands wrapped tightly around a cup of coffee that has long since grown cold. She's telling me about the car accident that happened eight months ago, but her words come in fragments, jumping between the smell of burning rubber, the sound of her daughter crying in the backseat, and the overwhelming guilt that maybe, somehow, she could have prevented it all. Her story doesn't flow like a river; it erupts like a geyser, unpredictable and overwhelming.
This is what trauma does to our narrative self. It takes the continuous thread of our life story and tangles it into knots so complex that we lose the ability to follow the thread from beginning to end. We become strangers to our own experience, unable to integrate what happened into a coherent understanding of who we are and how the world works.
Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT, emerges from this fundamental understanding: that healing from trauma isn't just about managing symptoms or learning coping skills, though those things matter. It's about reclaiming authorship of our own story. It's about taking those scattered fragments of the mirror and carefully, deliberately, piece by piece, creating something whole again. Not the same mirror that existed before—that one is gone forever—but a new one that can reflect truth clearly and completely.
