Victoria Bruner

Victoria Bruner has been in practice as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker since 1976. She received her RN degree in 1967 focusing on children and family’s behavioral health. She was a pioneer in founding services for the care of infants and young children in conjunction with the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. She completed a Bachelors of Education degree in 1972 in Early Childhood Education from Washburn University. In 1976, she graduated with honors from the University of Iowa’s Clinical Social Work program with an emphasis on child and family therapy. She is a graduate of the 3 year Menninger Foundation Marital and Family Training Program. Later she established a marital and family training program. She continued in child therapy education and became known for her numerous workshops on child therapies for at-risk children and families establishing one of the first child abuse and neglect community boards in the nation.

She has taught child, family and behavioral health courses in universities and medical schools. In 1995, she became a Board Certified Expert in Traumatic Stress (BCETS) and member of the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. She has completed numerous programs in crisis and community response serving as a consultant for example to the International Chiefs of Police in the area of child/adolescent violence prevention.

On September 11, 2001 she responded to the attack on the Pentagon within 10 minutes of the plane hitting the building. That led to being selected for a team of 12 providers in Washington DC who providing traumatic stress care and consultation for the Department of Defense. In the last fourteen years, she devoted her career to leading initiatives in the Department of Defense with the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and TBI. Victoria is grateful that she could serve her country in a time of great need. She attained a role as a subject matter expert in combat trauma, research and programming for our service members and their families. Victoria currently serves on several national non-profit boards and recently received a grant from the Walter Reed Society, Washington DC to provide an innovative integrative healing retreat model to veterans and their families.

Victoria’s professional career has been dedicated to innovations and creative solutions to human suffering. In all of her career assignments she has applied the art and science of improving the quality of life for high risk populations such as service members and their families returning from war, complex cases of traumatic stress, training future providers, innovating new approaches to care, collaborating with others to develop systems of intervention and expanding the knowledge of clinical care.