Targeted Search

Changes don’t happen 0-60 mph, rather they occur incrementally. Providers know that barriers can impede improvement to healing, but by setting a series of step-by-step goals—whether treatments for better sleep, pain relief, or relationship strategies— service members and veterans can see improvements to their physical, behavioral, and emotional issues and build on them from there.

The Road Home Program has had great success treating both female and male survivors of military sexual trauma. Through cognitive processing therapy and other therapies like mindfulness and therapeutic arts—working with providers and alongside peers who have had similar experiences—survivors of military sexual trauma can transform their feelings of powerlessness into a stronger sense of self.

Telling your loved one with PTSD that you cherish them, you care about them, and that you will help them if they will let you is a powerful first step toward getting that person needed treatment. You can’t take on someone else’s suffering—unproductive, anyway—but you can steer them toward the resources and providers who can help them.

Often feelings of lost connection with family members—whether with a spouse, children, parents, or siblings—is what finally catalyzes a veteran or service member to seek treatment for TBI and/or PTSD. For example, a Special Ops veteran who had deployed 10 times during a 35-year military career finally sought treatment through the Home Base program because his child told his wife that he was afraid of him. He did not want the effects of TBI and/or PTSD to create irreparable damage to his whole, multigenerational family.

Once upon a time, researchers and doctors treated all traumatic brain injuries the same, but they now know that the mechanism of injury plays a key role in diagnosis and treatment. There are many parallels for civilians and service members who sustain a traumatic brain injury, but the people are very different. Athletes who sustain a TBI most likely will not have the overlapping emotional challenges that service members may who sustained their injury in combat or in a more threatening setting. Helping service members and veterans often includes treating them for both TBI and PTSD simultaneously.

Treating PTSD in post-9/11 and other veterans is best undertaken with experts in prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy. Experts in these therapies can be found in person or via telehealth through the Warrior Care Networks. WCN providers also share their treatment models with primary care doctors and buddy system programs to expand their reach.

Experiencing PTSD and chronic pain simultaneously can sometimes lead to suicidal thoughts. But with guidance from family and friends to find the right resources and professionals, people can access highly effective combined treatments that help them return to a full life—physically and emotionally.

PTSD develops from a traumatic “stuck memory” and all the consequences of that memory not getting processed, resolved, or grieved. But it can be effectively treated, not simply managed.