Customer Reviews

Counseling Military Families: What Mental Health Professionals Need to Know

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This is a book written by a therapist for therapists. It gives a great explanation about military life, to include customs and courtesies, rank structure, mission focus, and the role of families and combat buddies. I would recommend this to former military members and civilian counselors to help fill in some of the questions about the different services and definitely for a good understanding of how we can be helpful to our military service members, whether they have seen combat, have been deployed repeatedly, or belong to the active or inactive services. There is so much to learn and understand, beyond what most people learn in graduate school. This book makes for a great introduction. :)

Lynn has done a great job in pulling together all of the interviews/information she gathered from counselors and therapists who treat active duty and their family members, as well as, described her own professional experience. This should be required for students in the field who have the desire to work with military personnel. I was honored to have been able to contribute to this work.

Increasing numbers of civilian psychotherapists and mental health counselors are working with military service members, their spouses, and families. More and more military families are going off base for assistance, either because they are dissatisfied with the service they receive from military docs, or simply because they don't like the wait. Also, in response to the need for services to treat the growing population of veterans with service related brain injuries and stress disabilities, the military is actively recruiting qualified civilian mental health clinicians through employee-assistance-type programs (EAPs). However, until now, there has been no published resource for guiding these non-military treatment providers.
A welcome step in this direction is provided by Counseling Military Families, which is specifically intended to be a guide to the culture and ethos of military service for nonmilitary clinicians.
Quite usefully, the first two chapters in Part I orient the civilian clinician to military service and military culture, everything from how to understand ranks in different service branches, to comprehending the structure of an all-volunteer service. Part II focuses on the military family itself, covering such topics as spouses, children, extended families, soldiers as parents, double-military families, extended families and stepfamilies, and retired veterans.
Part III is devoted to treatment. The first chapter in this section delineates some of the common stresses of military families, including deployment stress, PTSD, family violence, and alcoholism. The next chapter focuses on a single program called the Transition Journey for coping with grief and loss, while the following chapter describes military applications of some of the more widely recognized intervention modalities, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, and family systems therapy. This chapter also tackles some special issues, such as deployment stress, military stepfamilies, and productive strategies for working with military men in the context of the military culture of honor. A final chapter contains two case studies.
Counseling Military Families is an important book both for the clinical insights it provides into this area of practice, and for making a conscious effort to help civilian practitioners feel a little more comfortable in treating military service members and veterans. As the wars of the past ten years wind down, a second battle for the minds and lives of those who served is just beginning, and they're going to need all the help they can get. This book is an important tool in that effort.
- Laurence Miller, PhD, International Journal of Emergency Mental Health

I found this book to be interesting and very helpful to every mental health professionals and the military chaplains. It has everything you need to know about this life; so you can start working with this families in a concious and helpful way. Excellent!