Unpacking Emotional Baggage: Why #MilSpouses and #MilKids Need Mental Health Care Support

Published: January 21, 2022

Unpacking Emotional Baggage: Why #MilSpouses and #MilKids Need Mental Health Care Support

Life as a military family has many benefits, but it also creates unique emotional debts that can result in mental health concerns. Most military spouses and families bravely forge ahead, which can lead to burying any trauma and pain experienced along the way. Those unresolved issues have to be dealt with—to heal and to ultimately continue serving as a strong family unit on the home front. But for most, it’s hard to raise a hand and admit help is needed.

Why? For starters, across military-connected social media pages and groups, you will probably encounter questions like: “How do you cope with deployments?” Or more generally: “How do you handle life as a military family?” 

The responses are usually the same: develop a thick skin and stay busy. While the feedback is meant to be encouraging, are we really helping a struggling military spouse or, worse yet, a struggling military kid, by telling them to toughen up and find distractions? It’s time to normalize seeking professional help. Because, while not many vocalize it, military spouses and kids are struggling and want professional support. In fact,  according to the 2020 Military Family Lifestyle Survey (MFLS), nearly half (47%) of active-duty family respondents reported they need access to mental health services to support them while they/their service member is deployed.

We sat down with a Veteran spouse who, looking back at her family’s years of service, agrees we should rethink our answer to those common questions. For the purposes of this article, she’ll go by the pseudonym of Jane. “My husband served 21 years in the Marine Corps,” Jane shared. “During that time, we went through deployments, moves, and all the things that make military life hard. Our very first deployment, my brother came to stay with us to be my extra hands, the support I’d need to manage caring for my kids and working with my husband gone. Four months into that deployment, he took his own life. My support, my link, the person who was supposed to help me get through it all, was tragically gone  without warning. But I had my kids and a deployment still to get through. So I did what so many military spouses do. I kept my head down, stayed busy, focused on the ways in which we were fortunate and the opportunities the military was providing us. Everything else, the trauma and the pain, I pushed down so I could keep moving forward. Just now, thanks in large part to my oldest daughter, I am starting to process some of what we went through. We acquired all types of emotional debts along the way with our military lifestyle. Post-retirement, we think because we are done with active service somehow, life is good and that pain goes away. But the roller coaster will continue because our emotional debt follows us no matter where we go until we deal with it.”

While beginning to process those emotional debts, Jane is also making the difficult realization that the example she set for dealing with trauma didn’t just impact her; it also impacted her two older children. “When my older children were little, I always thought growing up on base was the safest place for them to be,” Jane recalled. “That they had this incredible community and safe environment to grow up in. But I’m learning that it was actually a very unbalanced, difficult place for them. Being on base meant a constant connection to the chaos of deployments; a constant reminder of the trauma deployments create. They were also seeing the normalization of living with anxiety, isolation, and even depression. I taught them to stay busy and push through. My daughter was a social butterfly, always somewhere to go, somewhere to be, always away from home. I thought it was a good thing. I know now that she was desperately searching for a place to belong, to escape her anxiety, to avoid home where she’d have to face feeling alone, missing her Dad who was gone.” 

We talk a lot about military spouses and military children being resilient and strong. And they are. But we shouldn’t let that resilience become a wall that prevents us from seeking help when we need it. And more and more, we’re seeing that military kids need help. The National Military Family Association, a Blue Star Partner and trusted advocate for military families, specifically looked at military kids in its Military Teen Survey and found that military teens are struggling. Modeling the behavior of repressing pain in order to keep pushing forward isn’t the answer. Jane likened it to carrying around a bag of heavy rocks. Each trauma we experience, each hardship we go through, is a new rock added to the bag. Over time, if we don’t process any of that pain, the bag starts overflowing and the rocks get dropped in the path of our family members. They stumble over them or pick them up to carry the weight for us, thus creating generational trauma that continues to be passed down. 

“Many of our challenges happened around Christmas,” Jane shared. “My brother’s suicide, the hardest memories of my husband being away, things from my childhood–it was all connected in some way to the holidays. I thought I was dealing with it, but looking back, I can see that I was always angry at the holidays. Depressed even. All the pain was still there and manifesting in different ways. It was coming out in ways that impacted my kids. I see that now. My daughter is helping me see that, helping me to do better for my younger kids.” 

How is Jane’s daughter able to help? After returning home from college due to COVID-19 shutdowns, she was confronted with the traumas she had experienced as a military kid. She had the courage to reach out for support and share what she was learning through counseling with her mom. But many military families, even those who identify themselves as needing mental health care, aren’t always getting it. In response to the 2020 MFLS, one-fifth (21%) of active-duty family respondents reported they would like to receive mental health care but do not. That’s a statistic we need to change because prioritizing mental health can have many positive impacts.

“Now, with counseling and the support of my family, I can do better for my kids,” Jane said. “I can model healthy behavior and not repeat the mistakes my parents made, too. Best of all, when my daughter sees how I’m different now with her younger siblings, she tells me how proud she is of me. How proud she is that I’m allowing myself the time to understand and process my emotions and teaching them to do the same. We’re all still learning and stumble from time to time, but I will continue to make her proud of me, and I am equally so proud of her.”At Blue Star Families, it’s our mission to lessen the burden for military families. The reality is, it has been a long fight for military and Veteran families for the past 20 years, and we’re still on duty. Military-connected families are in our communities and need our support. If you or a family member is struggling, know you’re not alone. Help is available. Find a Blue Star Chapter near you to start building your network and your sense of belonging. And when you’re ready to take the next step in seeking mental health care, Cohen Veterans Network, our Blue Star Partner, has resources available to help.