Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has the most robust evidence for efficacy for most people with PTSD (). As for acute stress disorder (ASD), this form of psychotherapy includes patient education, cognitive restructuring, and therapeutic exposure to recollections of the traumatic experience. Cognitive processing therapy is a type of CBT that involves talking through the implications of traumatic experiences and putting negative thoughts about oneself and the traumatic experiences into perspective, seeing them as different from the actual trauma.

Prolonged exposure is another effective psychotherapy that involves addressing a series of traumatic memories while managing the psychophysiologic response to them with techniques such as controlled breathing, thereby gradually desensitizing the impact of the memories.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of exposure therapy that may also be used (). For this therapy, patients are asked to follow the therapist's moving finger while they imagine being exposed to the trauma. While some experts think that the eye movements themselves help with desensitization, others attribute its efficacy mainly to the exposure rather than the eye movements.

Therapeutic style is important in the treatment of PTSD (). Warmth, reassurance, and empathy are some of the nonspecific factors that may be unusually important when working with people suffering from such core PTSD symptoms as shame, avoidance, hypervigilance, and detachment.