Stressful Military Experiences

There are an infinite number of things civilian clinicians should understand before working with service members or veterans. It is important for clinicians to be familiar with specific military experiences such as experiences in combat, military sexual trauma, and separations from family well as health and psychological problems outcomes after having experienced such traumatic events to better understand how service members and veterans cope with such issues. Scholarly articles such as Women at war: Understanding how women veterans cope with combat and military sexual trauma (2011), and Military sexual trauma: Violence and sexual abuse (2007), both provide information that can be used by clinicians to improve their work when working with clients that have experienced military sexual trauma. The Women at war article attempts to provide a better understanding of women veteran’s varying abilities to manage stressors and post deployment reintegration by looking at stressful military experiences, military sexual assault and separation from family. The article explains stressful military experiences by conducting …show more content…
An example of this is when Carol, one of the research participants describes the separation from her family as the hardest when she came back and realized how disrupted the relationship with her family was when she took her child to school and her child did not eat the lunch she had packed for him. This made Carol realize how much had changed since she had been away as she did not know what her child even liked anymore (Mattocks et al., 2011). Similarly, Valente and Weight’s article provides the reader with concrete examples of treatment strategies as well as how they are to be executed with clients