Military trauma is not civilian trauma in uniform. The culture, the specific experiences, the moral weight, and the institutional context all shape how it is carried and how it must be treated. Dr. Flores has spent her career learning this — and building an approach that actually works for it.
About Dr. Flores’ Military Expertise
Dr. Flores completed her doctoral internship at the VA Medical Center in Salisbury, North Carolina — giving her clinical training in veteran and military trauma that most civilian psychologists do not receive. She has worked with veterans and active military throughout her career, including combat veterans of Vietnam, Gulf War, OIF, OEF, and other operational deployments. She understands the culture from the inside: what it means to have served, what the identity of service requires, why help-seeking feels incompatible with that identity, and what actually works clinically to move through the specific imagery and moral weight of combat trauma.
The Landscape of Military Trauma
Military trauma encompasses several distinct but overlapping presentations, each of which requires clinical understanding of its specific features:
Combat PTSD
Combat exposure is one of the most reliable predictors of PTSD. The VA estimates that 11–20% of veterans who served in OIF/OEF operations have PTSD at any given time, with rates as high as 30% among Vietnam-era veterans. Combat PTSD often presents with prominent hypervigilance, explosive anger, intrusive imagery of specific combat events, and sleep severely disrupted by combat-related nightmares. ImTT addresses combat imagery directly — without requiring the verbal narration that many veterans find intolerable.
Moral Injury
Moral injury is distinct from PTSD and is increasingly recognized as a central feature of the suffering that combat veterans carry. It emerges from having done, witnessed, or failed to prevent something that violated a deeply held moral code — killing civilians, following orders that resulted in outcomes that cannot be reconciled with personal ethics, witnessing atrocities without the ability to intervene. Where PTSD is driven primarily by fear, moral injury is driven by guilt, shame, and the rupture of meaning.
Military Sexual Trauma (MST)
MST is recognized by the VA as a significant contributor to veteran mental health conditions. It carries the features of sexual trauma amplified by the institutional context of military service — betrayal by fellow service members, the requirement to continue serving alongside the perpetrator, and the well-documented barriers to reporting within military justice systems.
Transition Trauma
The transition out of military service is itself a source of profound loss for many veterans: loss of mission, structure, unit cohesion, purpose, and identity. This transition is not simply adjustment — it is grief, and it is frequently complicated by untreated combat trauma that becomes more visible when the structure of military life is removed.
Treatment Approach
Dr. Flores uses ImTT as the primary modality for combat PTSD and military trauma, supported by CPT for moral injury and cognitive dimensions, somatic approaches for the physiological burden of chronic hyperarousal, and group therapy for the isolation and identity disruption of the transition. Intensive programs are available for veterans who cannot commit to ongoing weekly outpatient therapy. All services are available via PSYPACT telehealth across 44 jurisdictions — including every major military installation state.