The REBOOT Combat Recovery Program: Health and Socioemotional Benefits

Abstract

Spiritual care for combat trauma seeks to help military personnel heal by finding meaning and purpose in their warzone experiences. Although prior work suggests that spiritual care for combat trauma is potentially beneficial, questions remain about whether health and socioemotional benefits hinge on intrinsic religiosity. We evaluated these questions in conjunction with the REBOOT Combat Recovery program, which offers Christian-based spiritual care for combat trauma via a 12-week manualized course. We collected self-report data from 111 U.S. service members and veterans during Week 3 and Week 12 of the program. Findings showed gains in pain interference and intensity (|d| = .30 to .37), sleep health (|d| = .44 to .52), mental health (|d| = .68 to .75), and social health (|d| = .54). Socioemotional improvements in anger (|d| = .76), meaning and purpose in life (|d| = .58), social connectedness (|d| = .50), and forgiveness (|d| = .44) also were apparent. Gains were largely unmoderated by intrinsic religiosity, demographic characteristics, and military characteristics. A key direction for future research is to employ a pretest/post-test control group design to further evaluate whether REBOOT Recovery is broadly useful as a spiritual care program for combat trauma.

Keywords:

• Combat trauma
• health
• intrinsic religiosity
• military
• REBOOT Recovery
• socioemotional
• spiritual care
• spirituality
• veterans
• wellness

Notes

1 All procedures received Institutional Review Board approval from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2 Another potential moderator is whether participants attended the program with a family member, friend, or loved one (49%) or attended the program on their own (51%). We conducted subsidiary multilevel modeling analyses to examine the possibility, but no main effects or interaction effects were apparent for any aspect of well-being.

3 Time of assessment also interacted with biological sex to predict pain intensity (B = 0.94, p = .049) and anxiety symptoms (B = 1.65, p = .038), but probing the interactions revealed benefits for both groups. More specifically, both women (pain intensity B = –1.30, p = .069; anxiety symptoms B = –3.29, p = .003) and men (pain intensity B = –0.40, p = .008; anxiety symptoms B = –1.34, p < .001) reported gains from Week 3 to Week 12.

4 Results were very similar when intrinsic religiosity, the three personal characteristics, and the four military characteristics were included together as predictors in the multilevel models. We opted to report the personal characteristics and the military characteristics separately for ease of interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Jenny Owens is employed by REBOOT Recovery, a nonprofit organization that may be affected by the research reported in this paper. The research was supported in part by a Military Service Knowledge Collaborative Seed Grant Award from the Chez Veterans Center at the University of Illinois. The authors are grateful to John Dale, Matthew Dodson, Jeni Hunniecutt, Leonard Matheson, and Evan Owens.