Spontaneous spouse of war

Self sacrifice of oneself or one's interest for others or for a cause or ideal

Sacrifice a : destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else
2 : to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end
http://reference.aol.com/dictionary?dword=sacrifice

When you read the meaning of the word sacrifice you can see how it applies to a spouse of member of the military or of a veteran. There has been very little reported about the sacrifices the troops families make between long, often extended deployments and redeployments or of the sacrifices the families of National Guardsmen and Reservists. We can excuse what they have to go through as a choice they made to marry someone in the service, but too often there are even more spouses who had no choice at all other than to fall in love with someone who supposedly left the military behind them.

When wives fell in love with their Vietnam veteran husbands, they never thought twice about what came with them. They saw them for who they were right then and there, never thinking about the changes that could happen without warning. When they have mild cases of PTSD, it never dawns on anyone that the symptoms can get worse. Then there are the veterans with dormant PTSD, sleeping inside of them without showing many clues the war came back with them.

Mild PTSD and dormant PTSD awaken with another stressor. This secondary stressor hits them hard without warning. It is not a slow process. It happens within hours. While PTSD develops eating away pieces of a life, secondary stressor PTSD takes out a huge chunk in one bite. This can come from the loss of a loved one, car accident, family tragedy, a crime, a fire, on the job or because of the job, natural disasters and even new wars that have nothing to do with them.

The spouse is often left in shock wondering what happened. How can a person change overnight? How did their lives fall apart in a blink of an eye? They look at the veteran thinking they are still the same person but angry all the time, looking for a fight, acting like they don't care, all in all like a stranger they no longer know. Most of the time they blame themselves for what has happened never making the connection between what happened to them while they served in war and that time in their lives.

Choices are made without knowledge of what they are dealing with. A lot of wives and husbands of veterans, simply do what other people do in marriages that are not what they thought they would be and they leave. It has not occurred to them that their spouse is ill. All they can think about is what they know and deal with it accordingly.

Yet when they know what it is, what is behind it, there is a choice they also have to make. Do they leave and begin a new life putting the veteran out of their life entirely or do they regret what they were unable to do the rest of their lives? Some are too selfish to be able to stay. Nothing against them because there are different kinds of people in all walks of life. Some are too weak to stay because they cannot take any of the turmoil any longer. Again, nothing against them because of their nature. Yet then there are the spouses stronger enough to be willing to stay. They become the spontaneous spouse of war. The rest of their lives will be a struggle against the war their spouse lived through. Every aspect of their marriage from that point on will have something to do with what their spouse did before far apart from them.

For the spouse who is able to stay, they need all the support they can get because they are doing the hardest thing anyone could ever do. They face sacrificing everything other humans seek. Their entire marriage changes. They no longer have a co-parent and feel as if they are a single parent making all the decisions and holding all the responsibility for brining up their kids. They spend countless hours alone when before they had their spouse with them, going shopping, to the movies, out for dinner, to family functions and parties with friends. They make excuses for why their spouse no longer attends with them and they feel as if they have no marriage left as they remember the good times, hope for them to return and cling to every resource they can find to cope with it all. They wonder how they got into what they are in and sooner or later they wonder how to get out of it. Some will look for hope that their spouse will get better. Some will wonder when the last straw will come and they have to leave. They come to a point when they think they just can't take it any longer and then again they must decide.

Some spouses look back and wonder how they did it as long as they did, while others wonder what else they could have done. None of us are the same and each one is capable of what they were built with but even the strongest marriage cannot survive without the tools to do it.

Family support groups are vital in keeping these marriages going on instead of ending. Having someone to lean on in the worst of times gets them to where things begin to get better as they build a new life with a marriage that is working for them. They can find their own kind of "normal" in a life that is anything but normal. Just hearing that someone else went through the same thing helps a great deal. Knowing they are not alone builds them up and supports them as they go through making the changes in their own thoughts, wishes and futures.

We need to restore the support groups in the Veterans Centers and VA hospitals to support the spouse in all of this. It was not what they ever planned on going through and none of us can dismiss it with saying they knew what they were getting into when they got married to a veteran. No one plans on PTSD showing up years later, but it does. Just ask the wife of a Vietnam vet and you'll get a better idea of just how shocking it is to wake up with a stranger.




Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington