What role does military culture play in affecting intimate relationships?
Military training plays a significant role. When veterans go into a war zone, they need to be constantly vigilant to any kind of threat in their environment. They’ll see threats that others don’t, and they need to do that to stay alive and keep their buddies alive, to do their job. They don’t really know who the enemy is, and they have to respond quickly. So they are constantly ready to respond to potentially threatening situations with aggression. When they come home, they can’t just turn that off. They still see threatening situations where others don’t. They might misread facial clues or assume people are going to try and hurt them, and they might respond in an aggressive way. And seeing the kinds of horrific things they might see in a war zone can also change the way they think about the world. They may have difficulty trusting other people. They may feel the world is an unsafe place. These kinds of changes can carry over into their intimate relationships. What symptoms of PTSD pla
