Military Family Counseling
Military family counseling helps service men and women and their families understand the demands of being in the military and helps them accept and deal with the true sacrifices they make. Challenges that a military family faces include infidelity, sacrifice, separation anxiety, and transitioning.
Military service is a huge sacrifice and an adjustment for couples and family members. The families of military service men and women make their sacrifices and must adjust, too; sometimes at a moments notice. The two main scenarios for their sacrifices are uprooting a family with multiple moves over the course of a military career or leaving behind a spouse or becoming a one-parent household.
Dealing with Transition
When the family lives in continuous transition where they move from base to base and start over, repeatedly, they are forced out of their comfort zones and their safety boundaries are destroyed.
Every family member is vulnerable because of continuous change, but the impact on children can be especially hard. Children of military families struggle with a sense of instability in their childhood lives and are challenged with developing healthy connections with others. It is difficult for the child to make friends and adjust to new schools. They are uncomfortable and often feel insecure and isolated.
The spouse also struggles with these same things.
The one reality military families tend to struggle most is learning to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Dealing with Deployment
For families that stay home when the military spouse/parent deploys, a single parent takes responsibility for raising the family and running the household full-time. The family feels left behind and abandoned sometimes especially during challenging times, holidays, anniversaries and birthdays.
A non-military spouse deals with unique emotional stress. Separation anxiety leads to feelings of isolation. Extended periods alone leave a spouse wondering if they are even needed or wanted. The non-military spouse is tempted by infidelity and might abandon the marriage, resulting in the military spouse coming home to nothing.
When children are involved, they are left with a single parent raising them. But unlike divorced parents who still have visitation, children have minimal contact with a military parent who is deployed. Technology has improved this, but it does not remove the increased feelings of abandonment.
The love and unity a family should share with one another is a risk of being broken by distance, if it is not addressed and dealt with.
Dealing with Returning Home After Deployment
A military spouse/parent faces their own set of unique challenges when they return home after being deployed. Their struggle with adapting back to civilian life leads them to a sense of not belonging, not being understood, and being unneeded. Not only do they face communication problems, but they must also adjust to the vastly different daily activities of non-combat/combat comparedness to the civilian life.
In other words, they must find a way to fit in with the family, friends, and the community again. They must transition to a new schedule, new responsibilities, work schedules or school schedules.
A misconception by others is that the military person can just pick up or fit in where they left off, but this is not possible with the experiences they have endured and the time they have spent away.
Being Resilient with Military Family Counseling
When a military family goes through the challenges of continuous transitioning or staying behind while the family member in the military deploys, their ability to overcome the challenges makes them stronger and resilient.
Military family counseling helps prepare the military family for the challenges they will face. With the support, guidance and tools from Heavenly Counsel, the military family learns to understand and adapt to the changes during all stages of the military spouse’s/parent’s career in a healthy way that is rooted in mutual empathy.
Whether your military family is struggling with being uprooted or left behind or wants to support a military spouse/parent returning home from deployment, book your military family counseling session today.