Common Ways Military Spouses Keep Their Mental Health on the Back Burner
You are in a hotel room or, if you are lucky, a TLF, with all of your stuff packed up on a moving truck somewhere.
Maybe you’ve been visiting family or long distance friends on your trek from one duty station to another.
It can feel unsettling to be a temporary nomad.
To have no actual address.
This status also comes with a freedom. You left the responsibilities of your last home, job, volunteer positions and haven’t yet started up with new ones. The schedule is wide open!
You may find yourself wanting to plug in somewhere, find your footing, your people, as soon as possible. You don’t know how long you will be at this duty station so you want to fast track your progress to your new normal.
Everyone finds their own way to navigate this situation. After you’ve done it a couple of times, you settle into a system of sorts. You find what works for you to get plugged in.
I am not here to give you 10 easy tips to finding your new normal. Most of the articles I have read on that topic leave me thinking, “Well, duh! Of course we do that. Military spouses know this stuff already because we have lived it. We have had to come up with our own tips out of necessity.”
Instead, I want to encourage you to get the jump on prioritizing your mental health.
This is probably one of the biggest flags I wave as a counselor and military spouse.
Research(1) has suggested that the mental health of the military spouse impacts the mental health of the rest of the family. But often, our solution to helping our family members stay mentally healthy is to pretend we don’t have any issues with our own mental health.
We let our mental health issues simmer on the back burner because we feel like there is no time to focus on our mental health.
We may also feel some shame around the fact that we might need some help.
Let’s consider some common experiences in the military lifestyle that impact our willingness to seek mental health help:
Command/Leadership
When your service member spouse is in a leadership or command position, it can be an all-consuming task. It is a critically important job, and the family tends to bend and flex to make space for the service member spouse to do what is necessary for the unit and the mission. You don’t want to bother your spouse with your own problems because the problems the unit is working to solve seem much more important. You convince yourself you can handle it.
At the same time, it can feel like the whole family lives in a glass house. You may be afraid that your struggles or the struggles of your children can reflect poorly on the service member spouse. This is a difficult context for a military spouse to admit that she needs help and get it. It can feel much easier to put your feelings on the back burner until the season of command has passed.
Pre-Deployment
Leading up to a deployment, we want to be supportive of our spouse. If we think deployment is hard, how much harder do they think it is? What must they be going through? There are so many preparations: getting legal documents in order, sometimes a move, sometimes time the service member has to travel for a training. The service member may feel a burden of responsibility to spend as much time with your children as possible, and of course, you want to support that effort.
Sometimes deployments come out of nowhere in response to a world event and there is no time for those preparations. It feels rushed and scary, uncertain.
But there is no time to focus on how you are doing. So you dump your emotions into that back-burner stew.
During Deployment
Once you say the good-byes and turn to face the actual time period of deployment, you hunker down and figure out how to handle it. This is also (often) a very survival-mode type of situation, despite the messaging you get from well-meaning people who tell you to thrive instead of survive! (I don’t know about you, but that phrase made me want to barf every time someone said it). You are figuring out your logistical supports, how you are going to fill the time your spouse used to fill, and establishing what works for you as a solo-parent.
In this type of survival mode, you might be afraid that if you open up that mental health can of worms you might not be able to close it. You feel an expectation to be strong for the kids, or maybe even for extended family who is worried about the deployment.
You have learned over the years that you need to be resilient so your service member spouse does not worry about things back at home, because there are enough life-threatening worries in the deployment location.
Add some more emotions and challenges to that back burner stew, and give it a stir.
Post-Deployment
Once the service member spouse returns, you may be so glad the deployment is over that you definitely don’t want to take time to deal with mental health issues! Some couples feel like they are in a bit of a honeymoon phase.
Sometimes you think it should feel like a honeymoon, but it doesn’t. And you jump to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with you that you are anything less than ecstatic to have your service member husband home. You feel guilty. You are afraid of voicing this to your husband, and wouldn’t dream of talking to someone else, like a friend or a counselor, because you are afraid of the judgment. Plus, maybe you just got orders for a new duty station, so it’s time to get ready for that.
You guessed it… that back burner stew is simmering, better add some more water (and emotional seasoning to it).
PCS (Permanent Change of Station)
Again, the circumstances around an assignment to a new duty station can be very different; some people get months of notice, others find out last minute. Some know it’s coming and hold their breath waiting. Some even pack up and start heading to their new duty station to find out en route that their assignment has changed and they are in fact, headed to the other side of the country!
When you have months of notice, or you are waiting for that announcement to come, you don’t want to start anything new. Especially counseling. You feel like you would just get started giving all of your history and getting some of the work done and well, time’s up at this duty station. The way the rules are with counseling, many counselors cannot see clients in other states (unless they are licensed in the new state).
You think it is just not worth it.
This is exactly why I am writing this post now, at a time when a lot of military spouses are just getting settled at their new duty stations.
Get started now!
It can be overwhelming to unpack and figure out your new normal, get the whole family settled into your new life. You are completing some of those same survival tasks that you work on during deployments; setting up logistical support and structures. Finding your people.
Before you know it, it will be time to start looking ahead to the next duty station, or deployment and you won’t want to start something new at that time.
If you continue to ignore that back burner, the liquid in it may reduce and you will have a burnt mess crusted onto the pot.
Your whole house will smell, the smoke alarm could go off, and the house could even catch fire.
This kind of crisis doesn’t tend to happen at convenient times. (Like there ever is a convenient time for a crisis.)
This is near and dear to my heart because I have been there.
I was the military spouse who didn’t even realize I brought my own pot of stew into my military marriage. It was already simmering when I got married, and I added new stuff to it when I didn’t know how to manage life’s challenges. By the time my husband was sent on a remote assignment, my back burner stew caught fire. Due to the timing of our overseas move, I ended up trying to spray it with a fire extinguisher myself, for months, until I could find a new normal and settle into some counseling.
Counseling changed my life.
I realized that those benign ingredients in my stew pot were not harmless when the heat intensified, and I wondered how many other military spouses have something simmering that they don’t even know about? I learned that there were other things I could do with those emotional ingredients, things that would help me live my life in a much more satisfying way, even when the challenges come. Especially when the challenges come.
I have had the chance to test this out, too. To say “challenges have come” since my time in counseling would be an understatement! Because of that work I did during my husband’s remote assignment, I have the tools to manage myself effectively. I can experience authenticity and satisfaction in my relationships in the midst of those difficulties.
If you just moved to a new duty station, now is the time to start looking for a counselor.
Especially if you want to use insurance, you’ll want to make some phone calls now. Many therapists have waiting lists. Many are full and won’t call you back. It could be a month or longer before you can even get in, but if you put it off, you may not have enough of a chunk of time to work on whatever is in your back burner pot before it’s time for that next PCS.
I’ll be writing more about issues relevant to the mental health of military spouses in the weeks to come, but for now, my encouragement is to consider the importance of taking action sooner rather than later.
You don’t want to wait for a crisis to deal with that back burner.
If you are interested in getting started with me, please reach out via the secure contact form on my website, or give me a call (717-219-4339). I see clients in person in Carlisle, PA or via online therapy. I’d love to help.
Reference
(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
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.
