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If you’re a servicemember who has returned to your community after combat duty, what gestures of support were most helpful to you or your family? If you’re a family member, friend, coworker or neighbor, what are your best ideas for helping servicemembers’ re-entry to their home communities be as smooth as possible?
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Resources for mental health professionals
Resources for servicemembers and their families
- A Survivor’s Guide to Benefits: Taking Care of Our Own
- Anticipatory Grief
- Bereavement Counseling
- Deployment Health and Family Readiness Library
- Listen to a discussion of the mental health needs of returning servicemembers
- Military and Veterans: Substance Use and Co-occuring Disorders Among Military and Veterans
- Military One Source
- National Military Family Association
- National Veterans Foundation
- Recovery and the Military: Treating Veterans and Their Families
- Returning from the War Zone: a Guide for Families of Military Members
- Returning from the War Zone: A Guide for Military Personnel
- Seamless Transition
- What Military Families Should Know About Depression
About
October 15th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Here might be a key about working with military couples and deployments.
Here is a starting point that emerged from my dissertation. My main topic was a comparison of satisfaction in military versus civilian couples at a specific age of life.
As a sidebar, I was curious about the effect of deployment on the couple. I especially focused on the initial separation; mid-deployment meetings; and the return.
Basically: 100% of the men (deployed) and women (stay at home) answered the same way:
What was the worst part of the separation:
Men – when I left
Women – When he returned
When thinking about your spouse, what was the worst part of the separation for him or her.
Men about his spouse – when I left
Women about her spouse – when he returned
Both thought their partner was having exactly the same reaction to the separation and yet they were totally out of synch. And as they sought to work it through, the communication was ineffective due to a fundamental assumption that my partner sees it the same way I do, but will not address it.
It seems to me that that huge gaps in understanding and assumptions creates a considerable gap. That gap needs to be addressed and an understanding of the partner’s experience and point of view before any headway can be made.
I regards to approaches, tools and models: our next step will to develop and make those available here and affiliated with joiningforcesamerica.
If you have ideas, bring them on!
Tx,
Will