Clinical Practices When Working With MST Survivors
Working with MST survivors is a unique and meaningful area within trauma‑focused therapy and military and veteran care. Below, you’ll find some of the common challenges providers encounter, along with resources to support trauma‑informed approaches that can strengthen your work with MST survivors.
Engaging with clients on the 1st session can be challenging, especially for those with a history of trauma. Military Sexual Trauma creates an additional level of anxiety and mistrust in institutions or providers who may be perceived to hold power over our clients. Below is a list of challenges you may encounter on the 1st or 2nd session with a MST client, and strategies to overcome.
A Mental Health Provider describes the importance of considering physical space during the initial session with a MST client
Clinical Practice
Trauma‑focused psychotherapies help survivors process traumatic memories, challenge unhelpful beliefs (such as guilt or shame), and gradually re-engage with avoided situations, which are all essential components of effective recovery. Click on the boxes below for additional resources to support your clinical work with MST survivors.
Holistic Care: Trauma Informed Yoga and Integrative Practices
Group Therapy: Courage Group and Warrior Renew overview
Working with MST survivors in therapy can be challenging due to concerns when the client is Active Duty, Reserve, or National Guard. Clients worry about confidentiality, if their chain of command has the right to access records, and the impact that attending mental health treatment may have on their military career. Below are some examples of ethical dilemmas you may face:
"In terms of private practice, one isn't caught as much in the institutional things like having to report to somebody's officer who's in charge or arguing about a diagnosis that happened recently. Where the officer who was in charge was insisting this was not PTSD. Those are the kinds of things that are a lot easier if you don't have to argue about them."
MST Provider on ethical dilemmas
"When people come in, I ask what their goals are, and I always tell them my goals. My first goal is to keep you safe, which means you're going to be uncomfortable, but you're going to be safe. My second goal is to witness what you have to tell me, and I use that word “witness” on purpose. It is to witness and to hold what you have to tell me, and my third goal is to strengthen the skills that you already have, that you didn't know you had.
Because that's what therapy is."
MST Provider on their approach on the 1st session
