Every day of Capt. Brandon Dawalt’s 12- and 15-month deployments to Iraq, his wife, Sara, worried about whether he’d return to their home outside the giant Fort Hood military base in Texas. She thought she’d finally be able to relax when he came back from his second tour nearly two years ago and went back to work at the base. At least there she felt assured that the sounds of explosions and gunfire were only training exercises—until last week anyway.

That’s when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who counseled soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), gunned down 13 people and wounded 29 others at the base. While Brandon wasn’t hurt in the Nov. 5 shooting, Sara says she was overcome by feelings of shock and betrayal. She couldn’t comprehend how a member of the military—someone who was supposed to help returning soldiers like her husband, could hurt them instead. In one afternoon, Hasan had ruptured the safe haven the Dawalts and so many other military families thought they had found back home.

“If your soldier is gone, your home is your safety zone where you feel closest to that person. This is the one place we have to feel safe,” says Sara, 32, the author of 365 Deployment Days: A Wife’s Survival Story. “I couldn’t believe it was happening on Fort Hood and it was one of our own doing it.”

Though such violent incidents are rare, mental health experts worry that Hasan’s recent rampage may amplify the high levels of anxiety that military families already are feeling from the extended U.S. engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. While there’s little research to draw comparisons between the mental health of military spouses today compared to those who lived through past wars, many experts believe today’s spouses, the majority of whom are still women, are now suffering unique stresses from the long, multiple deployments that have characterized the current conflicts.

Jaine Darwin, Psy.D., co-director of Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists (SOFAR), a network of volunteer mental health professionals who treat military families, says the shooting has now given spouses an additional reason to worry even before a soldier is deployed. “That’s a very emotionally stressful period for the families,” says Darwin, a psychologist-psychoanalyst in Cambridge, MA. “The idea that the process of getting ready [for war could be] physically unsafe is mind-boggling. It re-brands the whole experience of going, making pre-deployment a danger.”

While the rampage is bound to have an effect on soldiers, Darwin expects military spousal anxiety, depression and sleep problems along with misbehavior among their children are likely to increase as well.