[What does psychotherapy accomplish in the treatment of psychosomatic disorders?]

Psychosomatic disorders are epidemiologically so frequent as often accompanied by psychic (anxiety), vegetative, and psychiatric (depression) symptoms. Efficient psychotherapy of psychosomatic disorders must therefore influence vegetative (peripheric) and central arousal as well as deficient coping strategies. The latter trigger pathologic psychosomatic reaction patterns in (mostly) specific distressfull situations. Psychotherapy of psychosomatic disorders effects: Relaxation of the overactivated and stimulation of the desactivated, a shift of the patient's exclusively somatic attribution of the disease to a psychosomatic one, more efficient coping strategies, a break-up of the pattern "conflict - emotion - vegetative irritation - physiologic reaction".