The above post is full of misleading information. Prolonged Exposure (PE) is the most researched treatment for trauma related disorders around. It is also a "gold standard" treatment- meaning it's efficacy is top of the line. Again, the above post is extremely misleading because no other trauma treatments have received gold standard status for its treatment outcomes, so the following statement is patently false. "Therapy using modalities such as EFT tapping and EMDR are more gentle, more effective and take less time than simple exposure therapy." Drop out rates for trauma treatments are statistically the same for all approaches. Part of the symptomatology of PTSD is avoidance. That is basis for the prolonged exposure, to have the client face what they are avoiding, especially the more disturbing aspects of the traumatic event(s) as measured by subjective units of distress (SUDs).
PE involves having the client relive the trauma over and over again until SUDs begin to go down. Your homework would include listening to recordings of your sessions outside the treatment room. You may also be assigned to expose yourself to anxiety provoking stimuli outside of sessions based on a hierarchy of fears and anxieties working on the most anxiety-provoking antecedent first. As previously stated, the goal of therapy is to reduce your SUDs level to a manageable point. Even though SUDs were developed by a behavior therapist (the "B" in CBT which is the general classification of PE), the late psychiatrist, Josepf Wolpe, SUDs are also used in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). PE is considered a short term therapy, not a longer therapy as the above, misleading post has indicated.
I'm trained in several types of CBT for trauma, hypnosis, EMDR, EFT, psychodynamic, humanistic-existential, postmodern and several somatic approaches for trauma. The research indicates there is no statistically significant in any of the approaches with the exception of EFT, which doesn't have a significant research base, though the relatively fewer studies indicate EFT yields promising results. I use software from the VA that asks clients questions and attempts to match their answers with the best fir for the client. I also discuss the treatment strengths and weaknesses of each treatment per professional ethics of informed consent.
If you would like more information on PE, you might want to get a hold of a copy of Edna Foa's, the creator of PE workbook, that is written for PE clients titled Reclaiming Your Life From a Traumatic Experience (2007).