Post deployment from a Mom's perspective

I enjoyed her insight from a parents perspective.

In this post I want to address a syndrome I have found myself experiencing the last couple of months. I call it Post-Deployment Parent De-stressing or PDPD (and I guess is would be PDSD for spouses). We parents, spouses and family members are pretty resilient too, but it would be delusional to assume that we don't take on a very special kind of tension when our loved ones are deployed.

I considered myself to be pretty calm about the whole deployment for the most part. But like most of us, the tension slips out anyway -- like when I found myself surprised at the tears I experienced during the Memorial Day parade in our town last year. Hmmph! Who would have thought?

Now that my son has been back on US soil for two months, I notice some things. Unbeknownst to me, I clenched my teeth during my sleep during those twelve months. I didn't notice it then because my attention was elsewhere. But I do now. When I wake up in the morning with a stiffness in my jaw, I think, "Oh yeah, there it is." But what I notice most is that these sensations don't disappear the day our soldiers arrive home. I worked on this stress response for 12 months -- got it finely honed. So it's not going away right away. Which I think is really good noticing on my part, and as a parent. My son, like many returning military, has a year's worth of unwinding to do. He doesn't talk much about the bad parts, but occasionally little things slip out. He's not crazy about being redeployed, but if asked, he will serve. That tells me that maybe he's seen enough. But the tension is an underground stream, thinking already about the next deployment. For us too.PDPD is about giving yourself the space and the time to de-stress yourself. While it's true that our kids are more likely to die in an alcohol related car accident than in an attack in Iraq or Afghanistan, the life experiences they have are dramatically different.

New research on stress in the military from a group at University of Pennsylvania puts it better than anything I've read before: "Military service is inherently stressful. Servicemembers are expected to deal with significant and potentially traumatizing stressors, such as threats to individual safety, the necessity of inflicting harm on others, and exposure to injury, death and significant human suffering. Combat exposure has been linked to a range of negative health consequences, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, and physical health problems. Combat aside, deployment itself presents a host of additional stressors, such as difficult living conditions, boredom, and family separation. Current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq expose troops to unprecedented challenges. Multiple deployments exact a high toll, including lower morale, more mental health problems and more stress-related work problems. Moreover, counterinsurgency blurs distinctions between enemy combatants and civilians, leading to excruciating decisions about the use of lethal force based on ambiguous information. Finally, conservative rules of engagement (ROE) often place service-members in dangerous circumstances with limited options; for example, more than 60 percent of soldiers in Iraq reported experiencing a threatening situation in which the ROE prevented them from responding. "Wow, that's not another night on the town. These experiences are out of our reach, and deep down we sense that.

So parents and family members, let's go easy on ourselves. Let's spend some time noticing our own emotions, physical hot spots (tense shoulders, jaws, etc.) and meet the stress head on, hold it, and slowly let it go. And be patient. Our own resilience as family members, I strongly believe, helps bolster the resilience of our military loved ones. But being resilient doesn't mean hiding our own experiences or covering it up. The more we express where we are, what we need to increase our staying power, and learn from each other, the stronger our military families become.