Happy Holidays: Military Divorce Numbers On the Rise and why

This is what Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA has to say on this. He talks about the re-deployments, which is part of it. He talks about the economy, again, part of the problem. He also puts in the National Guard and Reservists, again, correct. But he left out the biggest reason for divorces of all.

Happy Holidays: Military Divorce Numbers On the Rise
Paul RieckhoffPosted December 5, 2008 09:08 AM (EST)

The holidays are usually a joyous time to spend with family and friends, sipping eggnog, trading presents, singing carols. But this year given the gloomy economic circumstances and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm reminded of a line from the holiday classic Christmas Vacation: "It's Christmas and we're all in misery."

For some military families, the stress of war has proven to be too much:

While 1st Lt. Mike Robison was serving in Iraq in 2003-04, his wife, Candance, depicted him as a "good, brave man"... But the marriage fell apart after Robison's return home to Texas. Candance said they argued over her role managing the household and how he treated her 10-year old daughter from a previous relationship.

"It absolutely changed him," Candance said of his deployment. "I still struggle every day--that year has affected every single aspect of my life."


Heartbreaking stories like the Robisons' are increasingly common. This week, new numbers from the Department of Defense confirm that the divorce rate among active-duty troops is rising.
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What's the biggest reason people, regular people, have for getting divorced? They say their partner changed. Most of us can put up with the stress of money. After all that happens in just about every marriage. Most of us can put up with a lot if the person we married stays the way they were and we know we are loved. That is the reason we decide to marry the person we marry. We love them and they love us. We want to spend the rest of our lives with them and we expect them to stay just the way they are.

We may allow for slight changes because no one is really totally honest when we are dating. What we don't want to allow for is drastic changes. We don't know how to handle them. We don't know what to expect when the person we thought we knew changes. We end up wondering when the changes will stop happening and if we will even still like them.

This is PTSD. Unexpected drastic changes.

I was watching a video the other day addressing how a National Guardsman came home and was changed by PTSD. He was thinking about committing suicide. The wife was stunned and hurt by the fact her husband, the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, wanted to leave her and wanted to die. She knew he had PTSD but still she didn't know enough to understand where all of that was coming from and it really didn't matter what she meant to him when he was being eaten up alive. The fact is, nothing we do, no matter how much we love them, we cannot get them past PTSD without professional help.

What knowledge does is it helps us to get them to go for help. It helps us help them. With support, they are a lot more likely to seek help. One more thing knowledge does, and this is a big one, it keeps us from making PTSD worse.

How many times have you heard about a wife getting punched out for waking up her husband from a nightmare? It happens a lot more times than you will ever hear about. It happens when they are also having a flashback. In those times, they are in the grips of danger and under tremendous stress, reliving having their lives on the line. If we understand this, we are a lot less likely to make serious mistakes that can escalate into violence. The same thing happens with arguments. They think differently, process things differently, remember differently. If we know what comes with PTSD, we know when to drop a subject and walk away before things get out of hand. We know we can talk about it later when things are calmer.

I've been married for 24 years and made all the mistakes the newer wives are making even knowing what I know. Even with all the knowledge in the world, we're still human emotional people. When those times come we're able to get over without holding a grudge and forgive. There are unacceptable things done that I will not put up with but he knows what they are. If I didn't know what came with PTSD, it would be nearly impossible to not take it personally.

What really gets me is when a wife will tell me they don't want to know what PTSD is, or a husband does not want to know what happened when his wife was deployed. When they refuse to acknowledge life away from them and what the men and women deployed into combat go thru, they are paving the road to disaster. If they have children, it's even worse. The kids end up more upset and pulling away from their parent and resenting both of them.

Until we all take a serious look at what goes into destroying a marriage in the military, we're doomed to see a lot more of them collapse when they could be saved.

We can talk all we want about the usual suspects in wreaking a marriage but there is nothing usual about putting PTSD into a household without acknowledging it. My marriage would have been over and done with within the first four years if I didn't know what was doing it to both of us. Too many marriages have failed when they could have been saved. We have enough problems living with a "normal" spouse that has not been changed by PTSD and the divorce rate in the civilian population proves that. When you add in PTSD, it's the prefection of misery if they don't fully understand it.


Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
International Fellowship of Chaplains
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"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