Table 2.

Illustrative quotes from family members and veterans at follow-up

	Family members	Veterans
Changes following BFI	“I would say I’m maybe a little bit more aware as I react and respond to certain things. I’m probably more aware of where it might be coming from or what it’s rooted it in.” “[S]ometimes he’ll be like ‘Well no, I just need to do this, can you give me space? Like I don’t want you near me when I’m doing this homework.’ And whereas before I would kind of be like, ‘Well what the heck, I’m just trying to help, why don’t you want me near you?’ ….not making it about me, but just feeling bad that he doesn’t want me around. And now I kind of get it…so I back off about that. But he’s also responding better to when I ask him a little bit about the homework. I’ll be like ‘So what’s it about?’ and he still won’t say exactly but he’ll say ‘Oh well, it’s just about [the trauma],’ or ‘It’s about [my deployment]’ and that’s it. But it’s not so snappy and mean.” “[The BFI] does help me to kind of like put A, B, and C together, connect them a little bit easier and to be mindful of it too. So instead of just being like ‘It’s something that he has to deal with,’ which it is, it is something he does have to deal with, and yes retroactively it affects our lives together. But it’s also something that I can help him deal with and I think this has helped, reminded me of that, and given me some more tools.”	“[W]hen she came back from her first appointment she was more open and understanding to…asking, like, how my days were going. Prior to her coming in to the [BFI] program for the first time I would come home and she would say ‘Oh, how was work?’ I don’t like bringing work home with me so I would just say, ‘Work’s fine,’ wouldn’t go into detail about it. But then I realized after she had made contact with the program and had a better understanding of everything, she started asking how I was physically and emotionally and things like that, which was a little strange at first but it was good for the most part.” “I was [telling her more about how things were going for me emotionally]. You know, what angered me. But I mean, as any vet will tell you, anger is a pretty easy one, you know? What threw me off was when she asked me, you know…how did she word it? What I was fearful of. And I mean, me personally…you ask “Well, what are you afraid of?” and I’m just gonna shut that whole topic down or attack it with aggressiveness. But it was the way that she worded it where…I found it easier to express emotional fear or what have you.” “It was nice to know I had somebody there.”
Disclosure (about treatment or trauma)	“So before [the BFI sessions]…I didn’t even know that he had homework, if that’s what you want to call it. So I asked about that [after the BFI] and he said ‘Yeah we have a few exercises’ but I mean, he doesn’t really share too much….” “He just has talked a little bit about some of the activities that he’s doing, and he will usually give me a sense after the session about whether it was difficult or whether it was sort of a relatively easy session. He talks a lot about, in those difficult sessions, how he kind of loses track of time and will just kind of get lost in what’s going on.”	“Probably [having her participate in the BFI] made it easier for me to talk about. Especially the PE stuff per se. Because she at least had a foundation to understand it. And I didn’t necessarily have to give her as much detail about the process because she kind of already had an understanding of what the process was. So I could use the word ‘imaginal’ and she already knew what imaginal meant, right?” “[We talked about the BFI sessions] a little bit. We never got into a lot of detail and she hasn’t shared a lot. But I don’t ask probing questions, and I don’t do that with my kids either. If they want to tell me something they will. Otherwise…I’ll open the question with, you know, ‘How was it or how did it go?’ and if you say nothing then that’s how it went. I’m not going to go beyond that.”
Environment of BFI	“I think that I definitely learned the question of what actually is PTSD, because…I mean, people obviously know what it is, um the meaning of it, like what PTSD stands for, but it’s also hard to actually understand how it really affects someone and like, all the reading I’ve done online, that only gets you so far. So it works a lot better when you’re talking to with someone who is from the same place that the person who has PTSD is going to as well, because they know them better….So I think it’s just a better communication process dealing with someone that’s in the same organization [where the veteran is being treated].”	“Well there’s certainly the trust factor you know, coming from a doctor….It’s the professionalism, the atmosphere, that all of this provides. Which is good.” “She was fearful [when I started treatment at the VA], not fearful of like ‘Oh my goodness, what’s going to happen, are they going to hook him up to gadgets and electrocute him?’ But she was just worried…that I was getting sub-quality care when I wasn’t. So by her coming in here and doing this, I think that that definitely relieved some of the anxiety for her.”
Interpersonal effects of PTSD	None	“I would say that if like a veteran is going to, you know, finally come in here and ask for help, right? I would say that it would be more beneficial…to push that veteran more towards this [family] program and do this as a preemptive step….You would have to explain it, like, ‘Listen, I know you’re feeling X, Y and Z, and we respect that you want to get the treatment and we’re going to give it to you, but, you know, if you were a single guy we’d get you started next week. But you’re not, you know, you’re a married man or you have a girlfriend or you’re in a relationship….’ I would try to push them to do this sort of [family] thing first because it really is a team effort and everybody’s affected by this.” “If the work is just being done by the veteran…it’s not going to work, it’s not. And you know, maybe in a perfect world there’s a single guy and all his problems are just problems with himself, but I truly don’t believe that they are, you know? I think PTSD affects everyone. We’ve even joked about it. She’s like… ‘I need something, I think I have PTSD or something from you.’ It’s a joke but, like, yeah it’s kind of true.”
Utility of a possible joint session with veteran present	“The question just sort of from a method perspective that I wonder about is whether or not a joint session might have been helpful? You know certainly not to invade his privacy in any way, but just to get a little bit more insight beyond what he tells me afterward. To get a little bit more direct insight about what’s going on and sort of how, how it’s progressing and how he’s feeling.” “Nooo. I think that, it goes back to, my husband needs to know he has a safe place to go, that he can say whatever he’s going to say and it’s never going to come back to me or anybody else. My husband needs to be able to go and vocalize that he hates my guts that day, or he, he doesn’t want to come home to his friggin’ family, and not have to worry about me emotionally having to hear that and any sort of fallout from it. I think that is a huge thing for men in general, I hate to, you know, generalize, but I think that’s a huge thing for men. That they really do need to have their safe place to be able to open up because it’s hard for them to do that. So I think that the fact that we were separate [for our sessions] was really good.”	“Yeah, that would have been interesting to do that. I don’t know, I’m 50/50….I don’t know whether it would be good or bad.” “It just gives you a chance to…maybe share some specifics. In a, you know, let’s call it a refereed setting. Where the professional is there to make sure the…certain groundwork is covered, right? If there’s 10 things that need to be talked about, that all 10 things get checked.”
Attitude towards a possible group BFI	“I don’t know. I don’t think so… I feel like it could, well, number one, [the veteran]’s very quirky and strange on his own so I feel like I don’t know if anyone would be very similar or not…and I don’t know if I would be as open to say a lot of the stuff in front of people that I didn’t know….Yeah, especially because he doesn’t like to share his business a lot, and I would almost feel like I was talking about his personal issues like behind his back almost.” “Um, preferred it? No. Would I also have participated and be interested in it, of course! I would love to meet other women that who have gone through what I’ve gone through.”	None