Faith and Honor in Trauma Treatment for Military Personnel and their Families

War is a life-changing experience for all participants; for some, it is also life-threatening and challenges their religion and spirituality (R/S) at its foundations. R/S is a key factor in promoting resilience in the midst of the adversities faced by active duty service members, veterans, and their families. When faced with combat experiences involving personal injury or the deaths of fellow soldiers and civilians, warriors may experience spiritual struggles about their combat traumas, even while turning to God or a higher power for support. For many warriors, their R/S is an important resource for making meaning of their own war experiences, as well as honoring fallen friends who made the ultimate personal sacrifice. However, for some warriors, their R/S will become a casualty of their war experiences when morally injurious events are encountered in combat and spiritual “red flags” arise. Moral injury refers to the psychosocial–spiritual consequence of involvement in events that violate deeply held moral beliefs. In this chapter, we consider ways in which the relatively new concept of moral injury is useful in improving understanding of the negative spiritual consequences of combat and in tailoring spiritually based interventions to address them. We identify key R/S issues, both positive and negative, that are frequently found among military personnel who have made combat deployments. We briefly review published spiritually based interventions for combat-related trauma and its consequences before describing our own spirituality and trauma group therapy module in more detail. A case study follows that illustrates our approach to addressing combat-related changes in R/S. We next consider key characteristics of the set of published approaches that feature R/S-based interventions to address combat-related psychological dysfunction and/or attempt to alleviate R/S-related distress after combat. Finally, we propose future directions in the development of R/S-based interventions for combat-related psychological and/or spiritual problems.