7 Lessons Learned from Life as a Military Spouse
My husband officially retired from 30 years of service in the Air Force last month.
We have been adjusting to the new routine of having him home (with a beard!) while he has been on terminal leave, so I have had some time to gradually get used to this idea.
As I journaled through this time of transition, I found myself waxing a little nostalgic about our time in the military.
It has been a wild ride, and one I am thankful for. Even the hard parts.
The hard parts are what really grew me and helped me develop the resilience I needed to function in this lifestyle. Resilience is one of those qualities that transfers to other areas of our lives, and for that, I am so very grateful.
Resilience is not the only lesson I’ve learned.
7 Lessons Learned from Life as a Military Spouse
Don't play the "who has it worse" game.
I absolutely hate it when people do this. In any context.
Someone shares their struggle, and someone else dismisses them because they (or someone they know) had it worse. You know, like the stories of walking miles to get home from school in the snow, uphill both ways.
I’d be lying if I pretended I haven’t told these stories. If you listen real close, you can hear the sound of my kids’ eyes rolling as I regaled them with tales of dial-up internet, or life without a microwave.
The underlying message of these stories is “Suck it up, buttercup.”
Sometimes we do need to suck it up. Often there is nothing else to do but suck it up.
It has been my experience that people can deal with their hardships a little better when they can do it with compassion from others, instead of judgment for struggling with something that “isn’t that bad.”
Sometimes we tell those stories because we are trying to be compassionate. Something about the struggling person’s hardship strikes a chord with how we felt in a different situation. We want them to know our heart is with them. But, it can very easily morph into something that is about us, instead of actually showing support for the person who voiced a struggle.
It is important to give the person struggling a chance to feel heard in their struggle. It helps them keep from bottling things up in an unhealthy way. Sometimes people process things just by saying it out loud. When you give them the chance to tell the story, they may be able to put it away, or define an action step that might make this season of their life easier to live through.
Most of all, people don’t feel alone in their struggles when you let them share.
Not that there is never a time to share your struggles, too.
It’s just important to keep from bulldozing the hardships of others with our own stories, or dismissing their concerns because “someone had it worse”.
2. Everyone has their struggles.
We all go through things that other people know nothing about. And we go through them differently than other people. We have different needs, different perspectives, different past hurts that can make current pain feel like salt in a wound.
We need to be compassionate in response to the words and actions of others because we have no idea what they are going through.
3. It's ok to admit you don't have it all together.
Piggybacking off of #2… we don’t recognize that other people are struggling because they don’t tell us. Our social media feeds are full of the things we are proud of. We can look like we are doing all the things flawlessly when we are really hurting inside, or hiding the things we don’t do well.
When we look at how others are (seemingly) breezing through their lives, we can assume that we must be “doing it wrong.” This keeps us stuck in shame, and we don’t speak up about what feels hard.
I remember the first women’s retreat I went to as an adult, we had a time of prayer after an extended time of sharing prayer requests. I was flabbergasted to find that my perception of how perfect other women’s lives were was just a small part of what they were actually dealing with. I felt sad that so many were suffering with really hard situations, but also encouraged that I was not alone.
When we remember that others probably have parts of their lives that they don’t talk about much, if at all, we can find the courage to risk a blow to how people perceive us and ask for help.
In doing so, you might be that beacon of relief that another woman needs to see, so she knows she is not the only one who is not perfect.
4. It's ok to say no to people who think they are being helpful.
When we go through hard things, we have our own ways of handling it.
When we let others into our struggles, they will have other ideas on how to get through it.
Sometimes these are fantastic ideas that are just what we needed to hear. Sometimes they are… not.
It can be good to give their idea a try anyway. I am thinking here, of a person struggling with anxiety who doesn’t realize how helpful the practice of abdominal breathing can be over time. JUST TRY IT!!
Or the person with depression who doesn’t want to go for a walk in the sunshine. Sometimes forcing yourself to do that stuff hacks your mind into being a better mood.
But sometimes you know yourself and your situation enough that you know something is not going to help.
When my husband was deployed, I welcomed friends and family to come and see me for a visit, but I declined trying to travel to see them. It was enough of an interruption to our day-to-day that it just wasn’t worth it. They didn’t sleep well at other people’s homes, and we would get off our regular laundry routine, and homework wouldn’t get done, and they’d get cranky from time in the car and we’d have to recover for a couple of days to get back into our daily routine. When I was solo-parenting that year, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to do much of that, but I found myself feeling guilty, because I knew people wanted to help me by inviting us over, and I appreciated it so much.
Sometimes we have people in our lives who love us, and we love them, but they just don’t know what kind of help you actually need (because the needs we have in hard times are different from person to person).
5. Its ok to ask for specific help.
I just said that others may not know how to help. It may feel foreign to ask for specific needs, but how will they ever know if you don’t ask?
The year my husband was deployed I got really good at asking to join carpools, and letting people at my church know when I had a need (like a ride to the car repair shop).
I remember another situation when I was really overwhelmed and I asked a friend to do some laundry for me.
It was a weird ask, I know, and the circumstances around it are much more raw than I can explain here, but that act of kindness helped me immensely. It was something she would never have thought to offer.
Maybe the kind of help you need is more formal.
Many military spouses shy away from counseling because they think it is not confidential or it will hurt their husband’s career (1, 2, 3, 4). As I have written about before, it is time we changed this stigma around getting mental health help.
6. Your spouse needs you to be honest about the home front.
We tend to minimize the stuff that goes on at home, because compared to our active duty spouse’s job, the home front should be manageable. But sometimes it is not, and they need to have an accurate understanding of what we are dealing with.
I made the mistake of keeping quiet about that stuff for so long that I finally exploded. My husband had to face the fact that he thought he was married to Wonder Woman who handled everything with ease when really I was struggling.
Active duty spouses may not be in a position to help us with a lot of our struggles.
They can’t just come home from a deployment or change a PCS (wouldn’t that be nice?).
But they definitely can’t do anything to help if we don’t tell them what is going on. And you’d be surprised at what they can do, and how much they care.
7. It is important to invest in military and non-military friendships.
Those military friendship can feel easy to start up. The systems our spouses live in are naturally set up to foster community, and it can be easy to just exist in military circles where people get it.
It may feel harder to jump into nonmilitary circles because they have their friendships established already. I have one civilian friend who I met right after she went through a tough good bye with a military spouse. She vowed she wasn’t going to open her heart to another military family. Our childcare plan fell through when we went into labor with our 4th child, and needed someone to watch our other kids while we went to the hospital. She stepped up to the challenge, and we have been good friends ever since, and I couldn’t be more thankful.
It takes effort to maintain friendships over long distances, and I am sad to say, I haven’t always been good at it. For that matter, it takes effort to maintain local friendships, too, but it is so worth the investment.
It takes effort to maintain friendships over long distances, and I am sad to say, I haven’t always been good at it. For that matter, it takes effort to maintain local friendships, too, but it is so worth the investment. My favorite part of my husband’s retirement celebration was seeing all these wonderful people from different pockets of our lives together in one place.
If you need some help navigating the ups and downs of military life (or civilian life!), I am here for you!
References:
(1) Acosta, J. D., Becker, A., Cerully, J. L., Fisher, M. P., Martin, L. T., Vardavas, R., . . . Schell, T. L. (2014). Mental health stigma in the military. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR426.html
(2) Becker, S. J., Swenson, R. R., Esposito-Smythers, C., Cataldo, A. M., & Spirito, A. (2014). Barriers to seeking mental health services among adolescents in military families. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 45(6), 504-513. doi:10.1037/a0036120
(3)Cornish, M. A., Thys, A., Vogel, D. L., & Wade, N. G. (2014). Post-deployment difficulties and help seeking barriers among military veterans: Insights and intervention strategies. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 45, 405–409. doi: 10.1037/a0037986
(4) Lewy, C. S., Oliver, C. M., & McFarland, B. H. (2014). Barriers to mental health treatment for military wives. Psychiatric Services, 65(9), 1170-1173. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.201300325
Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.
