Tammy, far far from that. There is no one way to achieve things. What there are though is better ways than others. For you dream interpretation worked as you where not ready to face your trauma, however; you ended up doing exactly that once you worked out a little bit of a longer way that you had to do that in order to stop the nightmares once interpreted. Valid, just more lengthy.

Again though, there are lots of ways to do things, and with all the people and experience on this forum I aspire that we find and highlight the shorter ways for those who are healing, who have the chance to learn from our experience and not do things the hard way, however; it is still noted that other methods exists when the head on approach fails. In that event Tammy, your way would be recommended without a doubt, it just means that person is not ready to face their trauma, though they are ready to discover what their nightmares are about. In learning that you learnt you must attack your trauma to help you, which means others who may not directly want too, also find out the truth, just a different way and a bit more time taken. The shorter the healing process, I believe the better for the sufferer.

I would say most of us here are lucky in that we suffered for shorter times, though plenty here who suffered a decade, two or more already. Society is more open to mental healthy nowadays, and people know and/or are learning faster to seek immediate help and information to guide them faster, not just crawl under a rock, or live with it, or get over it, as most of us would have been told. The more educated society becomes, the faster many can speed up the process of healing instead of suffering for decades.