How Nonmilitary Stressors Become Mental Health Problems for Military Spouses…and Get Missed
Why do I care so much about the mental health of military spouses?
I’ve been the military spouse struggling with this lifestyle, not knowing I could ask for help and not knowing where/how to find said help.
I’ve been the military spouse afraid to speak up and say I was struggling.
I’ve been the military spouse who minimized my own problems. If I admitted to myself that it was a problem, then I would have to admit that there is something wrong with me that I was struggling.
I am supposed to be resilient, right?
My internal drill sergeant told me to “Suck it up, Buttercup”.
Sadly, for me, that was also the voice of some older, more experienced military spouses when I dared to dip my toe into the waters of vulnerability and ask for support.
I’ve been the military spouse who had no choice but to ask for help when I imploded from stuffing down my stressors and pretending to be resilient.
I am the military spouse who changed her life in so many fantastic, authentic, satisfying ways.
I am the military spouse who finally learned resilience!
I am the military spouse who went back to school later in life to be a counselor.
I have a passion for coming alongside other military spouses and helping them identify those boxes they are afraid to unpack.
Those boxes they move from duty station to duty station but keep them sealed, stored away in an attic or a garage.
Those boxes they are ashamed of.
They are scary; once we open them we are afraid we can’t control what is in them.
When I researched things that impact the mental health of military spouses, a particular article really jumped out at me. The authors described a military spouse as a keystone to the mental health of the whole family (1). They found that the stressors a family deals with and the resources they have as a family greatly influence the spouse’s mental health and the spouse’s mental health has a significant impact on the rest of the family’s mental health. So, it kind of becomes a cycle.
The military spouse has great power to make positive changes if she can step outside the cycle.
Research has shown that spouses of deployed service members had a higher incidence of mental health issues that included anxiety and depressive disorders, sleep issues, and stress-related disorders (2). However, other researchers have found that most female military spouses are handling stressors well (3). Their study showed that spouses who had multiple nonmilitary stressors such as lack of education, unemployment, childhood trauma, violence, illness, injury, marriage problems, or work/life balance in the family, tended to struggle more when it came to the military-related stressors.
What I see, as a counselor, is that nonmilitary related stressors can easily go untreated because we don’t recognize them as mental health issues.
In addition, military spouses face specific barriers to getting mental health help. I am going to tackle those barriers next week, and last week I wrote about why we do not take the time to address these issues that we put on the back burner.
Today I want to focus on how these nonmilitary-related stressors become mental health problems and get missed.
This post can apply to any woman because I am talking about those nonmilitary stressors. The specific application to military spouses is that when we leave these things unchecked, they make the military stressors harder to deal with.
We all experience stress, but when we suffer under stress for too long, or when it hits us in a traumatic way, it is very easy to get stuck in a struggle with mental health.
It has been my experience that trauma tends to underlie many (not all) mental health issues. People do not always recognize trauma, because it can have a broader definition than what we tend to think of. There is a fine line between trauma and stress, and both show up in our bodies in predictable ways.
We can experience some effects of trauma without having a PTSD diagnosis.
Trauma is highly subjective. Just because someone went through something traumatic, they may not develop PTSD. We have different life experiences, genetics, culture, and relationships that influence how we handle things. There really is no *should* and once we set ourselves free from that expectation we can get down to the business of healing and figuring out our personal considerations to remember when handling our own unique stressors.
Trauma can rattle our worldview and change our belief system. We might internalize beliefs.
We attach meaning about ourselves to these traumatic events. We don’t really do this consciously. Maybe you are aware of a negative internal self-critic who treats you terribly and puts words to these beliefs for you, but this stuff can also get stored in places in our brain that do not connect to language.
Our body can know it before we do.
Those meanings become beliefs that take root and drive patterns of behavior, which can develop into mental health problems. These beliefs initiate problems and also maintain them. They are often unnoticed by us, because they just feel normal.
Trauma beliefs often started as coping or natural responses to something hard that happened to us.
Think about the fact that we all know not to touch a hot stove.
Either we did it and learned it the hard way, or our parents told us over and over again that we would get burned if we touched something hot. Our brain learned to be aware of the dangers of hot stoves, so it can go on autopilot to protect us. We don’t have to think about not touching that stove, because our brain has got us covered.
Trauma beliefs do protect us, but when we do not process our traumas they can overgeneralize and keep us excessively hypervigilant.
You may have heard of the stress responses of fight, flight, and freeze.
I don’t want to get into the weeds with brain science but these responses show up predictably in our bodies (4) when we experience stress. These same responses can show up later if our brain stored that stress response as trauma. Our bodies hold those trauma memories, and we can find ourselves in one of these states without knowing how we got there.
It is adaptive for our bodies to go in and out of these stress responses, especially the “fight or flight” response.
Our body mobilizes for action, either to deal with the stressor or get away from the danger.
This is where we see symptoms of anxiety.
We may have irritable outbursts, restlessness, fatigue, worry, racing thoughts, muscle tension, trouble sleeping. We are on high alert to the stressor while we are in that state of dealing with it.
I have written before about high functioning anxiety.
Anxiety is normal and necessary, and we need it to deal with life and be successful. However, our bodies are designed to drop back down into a state of rest and safety.
We are not designed to stay anxious, and this is a way mental health problems develop. It makes sense to be anxious in order to deal with stressors. When our lives of full of stress, we do not learn what to do with that anxiety, how to find a way to give our bodies that state of rest. We hang onto it and it becomes our “normal.”
When we think of things as normal we don’t think to try to change them.
In fact we don’t even notice normal things after a while. It can even feel unsafe to not be anxious because we have used anxiety to cope for so long.
When we stay in that fight or flight state for too long, it takes a toll on our body. It also takes a toll on our thoughts and emotions, and we start feeling helpless and overwhelmed. This is when we can slip into that state of freeze. We shut down, withdraw, isolate, and separate ourselves from the pain of life.
This is where depression shows up, and maladaptive coping that keeps us checked out of our real life (substance use, mindless scrolling, bingeing TV and movies, workaholism, etc.)
Ignoring our emotions, keeping them stuffed in boxes that we move around with us, is a way of staying in a fight/flight/freeze state.
It takes a great amount of effort to have to deal with that box everytime you move. Even when you are not in the middle of a relocation, those emotional boxes sit around and clutter up your mental space. They take up room in your brain that could be used for something more satisfying. They keep you from resting and from fully engaging in your life and in your relationships in meaningful ways.
It is possible to open the boxes and deal with the stuff.
As an EMDR therapist, I have special training in strategies to help you deal with all of that stuff in a way that does not overwhelm you.
As a military spouse who has done this work myself, I know what kind of life satisfaction waits on the other side of that work. I know the freedom that comes from not being bogged down by my trauma-that-others-might-not-call-trauma boxes.
Let me know if you are ready to deal with your own boxes. You can reach out on the secure contact form on my website, or give me a call at 717-219-4339.
References
(1) Green, S., Nurius, P. S., & Lester, P. (2013). Spouse psychological well-being: A keystone to military family health. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 23(6), 753-768. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2013.795068
(2) Mansfield, A. J., Kaufman, J. S., Marshall, S. W., Gaynes, B. N., Morrisey, J. P., & Engel, C. C. (2010). Deployment and the use of mental health services among U.S. Army wives. The New England Journal of Medicine, 362(2), 101-109. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa0900177
(3) Sullivan, K. S., Park, Y., & Riviere, L. A. (2022). Military and nonmilitary stressors associated with mental health outcomes among female military spouses. Family Relations, 71( 1), 371– 388. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12589
(4) Walker, R. J. (2023) Polyvagal Theory. Retrieved from https://www.swtraumatraining.com/_files/ugd/0b3865_0c80e1ea2b664e929808b3823d596a65.pdf
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.
