Read Time: 6 minutes
There is a particular kind of credibility that can't be taught in a classroom. It comes from having worn the uniform, or from spending a decade building the program that veterans walk into when they finally decide to talk. The Treating Military Trauma Practitioner Program was built by two clinicians who have that credibility, and this post is about them: who they are, what they've written for clinicians, and how that work became the eight modules of the course.
It's also a reading list. Between them, Gerard Ilaria and Dr. Arielle N. Jordan have written four guest posts for the TTI blog. If you work with military-connected clients, or expect to, they're worth your time before the course and after it. Each one is linked below. If you haven't read what the newest veteran data means for community clinicians, start there; it explains why this population needs specialty training in the first place.
Dr. Jordan is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Maryland and Virginia, a national and international EMDR consultant, and an Army veteran. Through Mission REDEFINE, she runs EMDR-based group programs and retreats for veterans, first responders, and purpose-driven professionals. Her proximity to military culture is not academic. She has lived inside it, and she has sat across from civilian clinicians who meant well and missed the point.
That experience runs through everything she has written for TTI.
The most-read of her posts, and the one the course's first module grew out of. It names the cultural blind spots: the language civilian clinicians don't know, the assumptions they make about rank and deployment, the way a veteran reads a therapist in the first five minutes and decides whether to bother.
Read it here →Moral injury is the wound of having done, witnessed, or failed to prevent something that violates one's own moral code. It is not fear-based, so trauma protocols built for fear don't reach it, and a clinician who misreads it can deepen the shame. This post lays out the signs and the treatment shift, and it's the foundation for the course's module on suicide and moral injury.
Read it here →Service members of color carry a second layer of injury that most military mental health training never mentions. Dr. Jordan writes about what it looks like, why it's invisible to many clinicians, and how to make room for it in the work.
Read it here →Gerard Ilaria, LCSW-R, EMDR-C, is the founder of Bilateral Health and a trauma therapist of more than three decades. He served as Clinical Director of the Center for Trauma and Addiction at Weill Cornell Medicine, where he established and ran a national program of roughly 250 EMDR therapists serving more than 2,000 veterans. He has trained hundreds of EMDR clinicians, specializes in combat trauma and moral injury, and has spent his career with the populations most likely to be misread inside conventional care: people living with HIV and AIDS, combat veterans, the LGBTQIA+ community, and people struggling with addiction.
This is the post clinicians tell us they wish they'd read before their first military client. It's about the moment a veteran decides whether you can handle what they're carrying, and what you do in the first session to earn a second one. Much of the course's clinical engagement module comes directly from the lessons in this piece.
Read it here →Gerard also teaches TTI's Trauma-Informed Addiction Treatment Training, which is why it's offered alongside the Practitioner Program at enrollment: substance use is one of the most common co-occurring presentations in veterans with PTSD, and the two trainings were built to work together.
Gerard and Dr. Jordan built the Practitioner Program together, and it shows. Her modules carry the lived cultural knowledge of someone who served. His carry the systems-level view of someone who ran the program thousands of veterans walked into. The eight modules move from culture to neurobiology to engagement to risk to treatment:
It's on-demand with lifetime access, carries 8 CEs through NBCC, ACE, and APA, requires no EMDR training, and costs $297 or two payments of $148.50. And because both trainers have sat in rooms where clinicians were afraid to admit what they didn't know, it is deliberately not a dry, stuffy course. It's a shame-free space for learning, built by people who have been where you're trying to go.
Veterans Day is a good day to say thank you. It's a better day to decide that the next veteran who sits across from you will be met by a clinician who was actually trained for it.
Enroll in the Practitioner Program →Not ready for the full program? The Military Trauma Training pathway page lays out all three options, including the free summit.
This post draws on the trainers' published bios and their four guest posts for the TTI blog, all linked above. Clinical data referenced in passing is sourced in 17.7 a Day: What the Newest Veteran Data Means for Community Clinicians.