Traumatic Stress and Affect Management in Military Families

Experiences of Military Spouses of Veterans With Combat‐Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

“…The findings reported here highlight military spouses’ perspective of their daily life with a veteran with PTSD symptoms. Further, this study adds to earlier descriptions of the experiences of military spouses living with veterans with PTSD (Dekel et al., ; Lyons, ; Maloney, ; McLean, ; Ray & Vanstone, ; Woods, ); supports marital adjustment findings revealed in PTSD research conducted with Vietnam veterans’ partners (Evans, McHugh, Hopwood, & Watt, ; Jordan et al., ; Koenen, Stellman, Sommer, & Stellman, ; Riggs, Byrne, Weathers, & Litz, ), ex–World War II Prisoners of War (POWs; Cook, Riggs, Thompson, Coyne, & Sheikh, ), and former Israeli POWs (Dekel & Solomon, ); and provides a deeper understanding of the impact of combat‐related traumatic stress on family relationships (Canfield, ; Frederikson, Chamberlain, & Long, ; Maguen, Stalnaker, McCaslin, & Litz, ; Ray & Vanstone, ). The findings of this study support the evidence that spouses struggle to balance their day‐to‐day life due to the symptoms of PTSD (Mansfield, Schaper, Rosen, & Yanagida, ).…”