In the Line of Love: Surviving the Battlefield at Home

Behind the uniform, beyond the homecoming ceremonies, military families face a battlefield few civilians ever witness. The invisible wounds of moral injury and PTSD transform homes into pressure cookers of tension, where walking on eggshells becomes a survival skill and children absorb trauma they don't understand.

Drawing from twenty revealing interviews with military spouses, Dr. Daniel Roberts exposes the harsh realities these families endure. Service members struggle with intrusive thoughts, memory problems, emotional detachment, and hypervigilance – often undiagnosed and untreated due to stigma or career concerns. When flashbacks strike or nightmares turn violent, the entire household pays the price. Meanwhile, spouses become everything at once: caregiver, breadwinner, parent, and emotional punching bag, all while receiving minimal support themselves.

The challenges multiply when service members separate from the military. Suddenly, families face financial instability alongside escalating mental health needs. Children grow up in environments filled with unpredictability, potentially setting them up for their own emotional struggles later in life. These families don't need platitudes about God never giving more than they can handle – they need practical resources, respite care, and genuine understanding.

This episode doesn't just highlight problems; it offers concrete solutions. From setting effective boundaries to joining peer support groups, military families can find paths forward. Churches, community organizations, and healthcare providers can learn to build the trusting relationships necessary for meaningful intervention. Most importantly, everyone can take action – whether by donating to support organizations or simply becoming more aware of the silent struggles happening in military households across the nation.

Looking for ways to help? Contact Moral Injury Support Network at droberts@misns.org or call 910-690-5964. Your support can help military families not just survive, but thrive beyond the invisible battlefield at home.

Chapters

• 1:08 Introduction to Military Family Trauma
• 5:40 Understanding PTSD in Service Members
• 9:43 Impact on Spouses and Caregivers
• 13:28 How Children Experience the Trauma
• 13:48 Signs and Symptoms of PTSD
• 20:56 Supporting Your Service Member
• 27:08 Resources for Military Families
• 31:46 Building Relationships and Setting Boundaries
• 36:55 Call to Action and Conclusion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:34

Good day. Welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast. I'm Dr Daniel Roberts, president and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women, incorporated. Today's podcast is entitled In the Line of Love Surviving the Battlefield at Home and we're going to talk about some of the trauma and difficulties of military families when there is moral injury and PTSD involved. So the importance of this is really helping not just military families understand, but also helping caregivers understand what is really going on inside the home of many military families. Now what's happening is not usually known. I mean, it's invisible, it's kept hidden because families that are struggling with PTSD and moral injury and it's affecting the service member, the spouse and the children. These are things they keep quiet. I mean, these are things that they have a lot of guilt and shame about and you know it's difficult to when, as a family, we want to present a forward view to the world of everything is okay, we're doing well, bright, shining faces, et cetera, when really at home a lot of things are going on that are really really difficult and for many of these families, survival is a daily battle. You know it's a daily battle to keep oneself mentally in a good place and emotionally in a good place. There's a lot of worry about the children and how it's affecting them, and so it's very difficult, it's very traumatic for these families, and you know, we've interviewed 20 military spouses that have service members that are struggling in PTSD, and we found that the difficulties they're facing at home, the stressors that they're living with, are almost unbearable, and for myself, I would really have a very difficult time even, you know, surviving it myself, and so, as interviewing these people, I'm really proud of what they're able to do and just to keep going. But they need help in a lot of different ways, and so this podcast is about educating military families on some things they can do to make things better at home, but also for care providers that they can understand what's really going on, and a call to action for everyone who's listening to this to be able to take action and try to help. And there's a few ways you can take action. One, moral Injury Support Network. We are dedicated to helping women, veterans and military families, and we do that by helping them find resources providing counseling. Find resources providing counseling and just being there for them and continuing to work to find more resources for them and educate them about how they can work through this Other ways. Care providers need more training on what's happening to military families and how they can help, and also churches, synagogues, places of worship, chaplains, pastors, priests need to understand that these kind of difficulties require a lot of help, and many of the families have said, many of the spouses have said, that ministers need better training, need more information about what's really going on inside of families and how they can help. So we'll talk about all that today. Talk about all that today.

Speaker 1: 5:06

So a little bit of background on PTSD or what we found with PTSD for the service members. Many of them, their PTSD didn't come from one, didn't always come from one specific incident that happened in wartime. Often it was a culmination of things like a piling on of constant stress, the deployments and all the stress and difficulties that happen in deployments, such as combat If you look at the Afghanistan issue where he pulled out of Afghanistan and all those service members having to see those civilians who didn't get taken care of, seeing other kind of abuse and other kind of just a sheer level of poverty and violence that's often happening in these deployment environments. And so there's the constant deployments and then there's the coming back many times after a deployment, coming right back and then moving again to go to a school a military school or the next assignment, a school, a military school, or the next assignment. And so the constant moving, the deployments, the worry and fear associated with that, and then the constant stress at home with the deployments and movements, and so a lot of the PTSD that came about was a culmination of things, not just one incident or one traumatic event, and so of course it had a ripple effect on the whole family.

Speaker 1: 6:57

When you have a service member who's suffering with violent outbreaks often can be verbally abusive and suicidal ideations, the constant tension in the home, not knowing when the service member might fly off the handle at the next moment, how they often can act in public, and then many service members just isolate themselves from the rest of the civilian world, and so what that causes is for the spouse to then be very, very you know many of them talk about that they're walking on eggshells all the time, just nervous about what might happen next or what the service member might do next. There's a definite feeling of betrayal that the military services are not providing enough care for service members and that, rather than you know, you come back from a deployment and there's no break in the action. Come back from the deployment and you're right back to the next duty, assignment, the next school, the next challenging job, you know, going from maybe a staff officer to now a commander. So you have all the stress of being a commander, trying to take care of all these soldiers and families while you yourself are really struggling. And so the spouse sees that stress, sees that anguish, and then, once service members leave the service, many because their PTSD, they lose their careers.

Speaker 1: 9:05

Now the spouse becomes everything the caregiver for the service member, the sole provider. Maybe the service member's getting some disability, but that's never enough in and of itself to take care of the home. So now the spouse is working full time outside the home, trying to get the children to school, take care of household things, pay the bills and also take care of the service member who is not getting enough mental health care from the VA and other sources. And so the spouse ends up, you know, like absorbing all the stress and absorbing all this, all these duties, and then there's not enough mental health care for spouses. So while they're going through all this, when are they supposed to have time to get mental health care? When are they supposed to be able to get a break from the children? There are some nonprofits that do some of this work but, as we've done some research, there's definitely a lack of resources when it comes to child care for military families, child care that recognizes the PTSD issues and recognizes the stress. So spouses need things like respite. They need things like child care, maybe often away from the normal times of child care, maybe they need child care in the evening so the spouse can work at night or on weekends. A lot of child care oriented around military families is oriented around when service members normally have their duties. So when service members have their normal holidays or weekends off, that's also when child care takes some time off. And then there's just the cost of child care and it can be very disheartening both for the spouse, the children and the service member.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Let's talk about children real quick. Children feel the facts of this stress. You know, if you're a child growing up in a home where there's a lot of instability, there's a lot of stress. Mom and dad are fighting, dad maybe is, or the service member which is not always a man maybe punching the walls or abusing alcohol, having suicidal ideation, disappearing, uh, at times and just nowhere to be found, or is just completely isolating themselves in the garage or in the basement or whatever you know. That all creates a tremendously difficult situation for children and that affects them and their emotional well-being. It burdens them with things that they may carry for the rest of their life and it certainly makes it very difficult to pay attention at school and to do school things and again, there's often much shame here so that they have difficulty finding, making and keeping friends. They certainly are. Many of them are hiding things from their friends. They certainly are. Many of them are hiding things from their friends and it has a real effect on their mental and emotional well-being, their self-image, their self-confidence. All these things are deeply affected when there is moral injury and PTSD involved in the household.

Speaker 1: 13:02

So let's talk about some specific signs and symptoms of PTSD. So, first of all, intrusive thoughts. People suffering from PTSD often experience recurrent involuntary memories of the traumatic event or traumatic events. This can create distressing dreams or nightmares related to the trauma and flashbacks reliving events, and these flashbacks can happen at any moment. They can happen driving a car, they can happen being out in public. Many of the spouses have talked about the nightmares in the middle of the night, and at times these nightmares became violent so that the service member was flailing away and hitting the spouse at night and then waking up the next morning not remembering any of it at all.

Speaker 1: 14:06

A second symptom is avoidance Avoiding thoughts, feelings or conversations about the trauma, steering clear of places, activities or people that trigger memories of the trauma. And so this is where we often see service members with PTSD avoiding social interactions at all, refusing to go to the store or be out in public, even be with extended family members, because they are often triggered by things, and what might be normal stress for a person without PTSD can become an incredibly triggering event that causes someone with PTSD to spin out of control. And, of course, if you're in public with the spouse, if you're or with the service member so if you're a spouse riding in a car with the service member who's driving and they get triggered, that becomes an incredibly scary situation. It becomes a dangerous one as the service member begins to drive in a way like they're used to driving in the combat environment, with very aggressive driving, completely losing their cool and their calm. So those kind of things can happen. To understand the signs and symptoms of PTSD because most service members who have PTSD haven't been diagnosed with it. Many service members are afraid to get diagnosed because they don't want to have it. They don't want to admit that they're struggling with PTSD. Admit that they're struggling with PTSD. And if they're still serving in the military, ptsd will certainly cause you to lose your career and they're worried about that and they're worried about the financial implications of that rightly so.

Speaker 1: 16:12

The third symptom is negative changes in mood and cognition, and this can include persistent negative thoughts about oneself or others, feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, emotional numbness or detachment from loved ones, difficulty experiencing positive emotions and memory problems. In our interviews we've had all that Participants talking about how they have difficulty feeling anything, some of them and then others. They can feel lots of negative emotions, but the positive or good feelings just seem to be walled off from them, like they can't even get to them, like they want to be walled off from them, like they can't even get to them. Like they want to be happy. They want to experience good emotions but they just can't seem to do it. One of the first spouses we interviewed talked about her husband's memory problems due to his PTSD Like he has had Huge memory problems where just whole days are completely blank for him and can't remember even the most basic, simple things that we, we all, in our daily life, don't even consider about remembering because it's just, it's just automatic for us. Well, this person couldn't remember anything. Well, this person couldn't remember anything, and you know. So they had to carry around a notebook and just write things down, even really basic things, so that he could look at them and remember oh, here's where my keys are, here's where my whatever is. So PTSD can really do a number on the mind and can make it very difficult to just function in routine things in life.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Fourth symptom increased arousal symptoms, irritability or aggressive behavior, difficulty sleeping, difficulty concentrating. Hypervigil device, a sniper what have you friends to die? Then it puts you in this hypervigilant mode. And even things that you know, driving by seeing trash on the side of the road, could trigger a service member, and so if you're getting triggered all the time, what are you going to do? Obviously, you're going to try to avoid situations where you could become triggered. So, now that we've looked at the signs and symptoms of PTSD, if you're a family member and you're seeing these things in your spouse, then there's a good chance, even if they haven't been diagnosed with PTSD, that they do have it.

Speaker 1: 19:43

So we want to try to encourage spouses to encourage their service member to get checked out, looked at for PTSD. And this can be a very hard conversation and many of our spouses have talked about how difficult of a conversation it is and how some service members are not even open to it at all. And so you know, as a military spouse and your service member or veteran is struggling with PTSD, you believe they have PTSD. What I would encourage you to do is continue to gently have conversations about them needing help. If they're not getting help, you can't force them to get help, but you can certainly motivate them to do it, depending on the nature of your relationship with the person. Then encouraging them to get help in a loving way, trying to show them that hey, you know. Finding those moments and opportunities to have conversations with them, not right after they've been triggered, not while they're triggered, but maybe find those times where they're calmer, when they're in a good place, a good mood, and saying you know, a few days ago you got really triggered when you were driving. That scared me and the kids. I'd really love for you to try to get some help and I'm here for you. I'm here to support you. But you know we don't want to have to keep going through this and I know you know it's not your fault. What has happened to you, because of you serving your country, serving loyally and honorably, these things have happened to you. So it's not your fault. I'm not blaming you, but really really need you to get some help.

Speaker 1: 21:55

Other spouses have used the tact of if you don't get help, I'm going to leave, and many of the spouses have talked about the struggles and difficulties of staying in the marriage Because, on the one hand, they feel that it's not the service member's fault that they have PTSD. The service member needs help and if they leave, who's going to be there for them? Who's going to be there to help them? And, on the other hand, just going through what's often the daily trauma and violence and abuse verbal or physical or both abuse becomes too much for the spouse and the child. So if those are situations where it's very abusive, and especially if people are in not just physical danger but emotional danger, then you know it may really be time to look at leaving and that's only a decision you can make for yourself, but it's a difficult decision. It's not one that you can just hey, you need to leave and get your kids to safety. There's a whole lot going on and get your kids to safety. There's a whole lot going on.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Like, a lot of the spouses have religious beliefs about the importance of love and sacrificial love and being committed in a marriage and so on and so forth, and many of them have found a way to remain in that marriage through all the difficulty and have seen themselves as a representative for God to be there to love and care for and nurture the spouse and try to see that they get help. And many of them said, hey, I'm in this for life, I'm in this for the long term and I've learned some things that can help and I trust in God to help us. So that's one thing, like encouraging the service member to get help. The second thing is trying to get help for yourself, and that's one of the things that Moral Injury Support Network can do is help spouses find services. Oftentimes what they've experienced is the VA tries. It doesn't always have enough mental health resources to support them, but there are other organizations that do provide help and support, and Moral Injury Support Network is here to help military spouses find help and support. They need to get some mental health care and therapy and support and education. There are some organizations that are doing that kind of support, like Give an Hour is one. That's an organization we have a partnership. The Elizabeth Dole Foundation has been doing tremendous work. There are other organizations we're available to hear, we're available to help find those resources, and those resources include child care and you know, like I talked about before, it's very difficult to get mental help when you're so busy trying to make a living, care for the kids and everything else. But some spouses have found a way to be able to do it and so there are some information networks out there that can help. Moral Injury Support Network provides counseling also, and it's always free of charge. So you can reach out to us and we're happy to help, and all this will be in the podcast. You know our information is on in the podcast show notes and you can find us on at HTTPS. Anyway, misnsorg is the website MISNSorg, or you can reach out to me personally at 910-690-5964, or you can email droberts at MISNSorg. So if you need help finding resources, please reach out to us Now.

Speaker 1: 26:25

Talking about those outside of the military family, what about those ministries, those churches, those that you know want to be there for military families? They have a lot of military families in there where we live, not far from Fort Bragg, north Carolina. A lot of churches have a lot of veterans and military people in their churches and they need you know. How do you identify, how do you find out if this moral injury and PTSD is happening within those families, because they're not just going to come out and say it and you know you may have programs. A lot of churches have programs around Memorial Day, veteran Day, honoring military families. Those programs are great. I think you should keep doing those.

Speaker 1: 27:19

But to me, I think the number one best way to be able to reach out and do ministry to military families and find out what's happening within those families is go through the long, slow and important process of building relationships with the people in those families. Some of the spouses have talked about how they were not able to receive really good ministry or support from chaplains, priests, pastors and so on, because those pastors didn't have, weren't able to provide the best. You know, they weren't able to say the right things when needed, because they may have said things like you know, god will never put anything on you more than you can handle. You know everything happens for a reason, so on and so forth. But to a military family struggling with all this, it certainly feels like God has given them more than they can handle. And the truth is, from my standpoint, that God often does allow things to happen that are more than you can handle, and that's because he wants us to rely on him. But when you're going through this stress and trauma, there's a way to be able to have faith and rely on God, and part of that God helping and being there is other people coming along beside and providing the kind of care they need, love and support they need. So building those relationships like really being intentional about creating friendships with those military families, not just seeing them at church, them at church, but really trying to have this long-term view of building relationships with families.

Speaker 1: 29:33

It may take months, maybe even years, to build a kind of relationship as a minister with a military family where they begin to open up about what's happening inside the family and then, once that happens, then looking and helping them with resources, whether it's child care. If it's being able to take the children and provide child care for a period of time so that the spouse can have a respite from all the stress, that can get away for a weekend, having a spouse retreat maybe, and as part of that retreat, providing child care. You know, finding helping them get mental health resources, pay for those resources, pay for those resources, taking up offerings and collections to be able to provide financial assistance to them if needed, food support, all these kind of things with the family so that they can begin to open up about their needs and what's happening inside the family. And until that happens, you're probably never going to know what's really going on. And they might be coming to church, but maybe they're not really doing well. But maybe they're not really doing well. It's unlikely that they're going to. Just you know you can look for these signs and symptoms within the house. Look for signs and symptoms of stress, look for distancing from other people, staying maybe coming to church but staying away from people, not being part of church activities and so on. Those are ways to identify that maybe something is happening, going on within the family and this is being very gently and intentional about being there for them and being a source of support for them.

Speaker 1: 31:55

Here are some other important strategies for managing the stress and the things we talked about physical and emotional abuse inside the home, and one of the things that is really important for families to be able to do is to set boundaries, and this is something that some of the families, some of the spouses, talked about. It took them quite a while to learn how to set boundaries, and this is something that a lot of people struggle with. But, you know, after two or three years of really experiencing some abuse, some spouses learn to set some boundaries and stick to those boundaries and not allow the service member to do things that they were doing that were abusive, to gain control of the finances and to learn to walk away from situations that were getting stressful, from situations that were getting stressful, learning how to not have arguments with service members that could end up turning ugly. So there's, you know, too much to cover here on this podcast, but boundary setting is an important thing to learn for military spouses and to be able to help protect themselves and their children and the service member by setting boundaries and then enforcing them, and some other things that have been really, really helpful for military spouses is peer support groups. A number of our spouses talked about how it was really cathartic for them to now that they had learned many things about how to set boundaries, how to care for themselves, how to care for the children, how to get resources for the service member. Now they wanted to be there to support other families, and there are a number of great groups doing peer support.

Speaker 1: 34:19

I mentioned the Elizabeth Dole Foundation. There are some other programs. We'd be happy to help you find those peer support programs because I think that has been one of the most powerful support strategies for this situation. And so, within a church environment or a community environment, some community organizations, your veteran organizations creating peer support programs can be really, really helpful. So that you know, even if formal mental health care services are not always available, these peer support programs certainly can be there to fill in the gap and provide additional resources like child care and so on.

Speaker 1: 35:16

In addition to peer support programs, there are self-care practices that also can be very helpful, things like meditation for people that are religious, prayer and studying your holy scriptures your holy scriptures, you know, carving some time out for that and learning to, to find moments of, of peace within. You know these other traumatic incidents, learning how to to let go of responsibilities from time to time, um, so that you can. Some mental stability, some mental equilibrium, if you will help in between times of mental health appointments or peer support group events, so on and so forth. These are the sort of things that can help someone with their mental and emotional state, because the problems don't go away. They're still there. But if you can get into a positive attitude or a more positive attitude, you can begin to have some hope and see some possibilities for resources and see some improvement in situations, then that can really help a lot.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Well, we've talked about a lot today and rather than try to you know, provide everything that you can possibly know about this and how to improve this situation, what I'd rather encourage you to do is reach out to us Moral Injury Support Network and get help finding resources, get help learning about setting boundaries. If not us, then there's a couple of organizations I mentioned. The Elizabeth Dole Foundation does a great job providing peer support to your local pastor about your needs and what's happening in the family. If you're comfortable with that, we are here to provide education and information and we have a book that's coming out here. I'm looking for it by the end of the month it's March 18th right now and I think by the end of the month or shortly into April we'll have a case study book published and within that case study book we have 20 chapters, all the interviews that we conducted with these spouses and we have the spouse's story and then some really important takeaways about resources needed, the sources of stress and moral injury, coping mechanisms that other spouses have used that have been effective or ineffective, and sometimes it's just important to know what doesn't work as it does what does work. And then we've identified in this book gaps in support so that we can begin to work with you, with other organizations, about how we can fill in these gaps.

Speaker 1: 39:22

If you're a military spouse and you're listening to this podcast and you have some great resources that can help others, please reach out to us. We want to make those resources available on our website so that people can get to them. We want to keep those resources handy so that as we talk to military families, we can point them to those resources. If you have questions or need help getting resources or support, please reach out to us Again, droberts at misnsorg or you can call me at 910-690-5964. If you're a care provider, we'd love to have some conversations with you about providing support to military families. If you're really great at it and you've learned some techniques that have really been helping spouses or military families, I should say please reach out to us Again. We want to make your information and your techniques, your modalities, your therapies whatever available for military spouses I mean military families so they can have that.

Speaker 1: 40:36

As always, we're a nonprofit organization so we live and thrive on donations. So if you have concern for military families, you recognize that you feel called and pulled to support and maybe you don't know how you can always make a donation to us. You can go to our website at misnsorg slash donations. Right there on the front page you'll see the donation button. We're happy to take any donations and all our donations go to supporting women, veterans and military families, and we want to be a resource for people. So thank you for listening so much. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have a great week and a great month and we'll see you next time. Thanks.