By Rebecca G. Townsend, SrLPE, LPC, NCC
Photo by Army Sgt. Daniel Nelson
I am blessed and honored to live and work in a military community, and to have the opportunity to care for our nation’s Warriors and their loved ones as a professional mental health provider.
While most of my clients are affiliated with the military, I have some who are not…or perhaps, think they are not. However, when you live in a community with 30,000 active duty Soldiers, and the city with the second largest population of Veterans in the United States, everyone is impacted by war and deployments, and will be for generations. That community can play a big role in helping the families of Warriors.
A few years ago, I had a client who was a professional in her late 50’s with depression symptoms. Through multiple sessions, we unpacked her emotional baggage. We found she had a lot of hurt anger for her father – emotions she had successfully tucked away for decades.
During a tough session, she shared a painful memory. Her mother had gone to church and her father, who she said was emotionally distant, was left to care for the 8 children. On this particular day, her father had all the children line up, arm’s length apart, facing the wall to stand in silence for hours until it was bedtime. He did not speak to them again until he ordered them to bed.
I mentioned that her description reminded me of something from a book I’d recently read about a WWII Soldier who was a prisoner of war in the Pacific. The guards at POW camps would contain and control large numbers of prisoners with those types of tactics.
My client’s eyes became large and filled with tears. “My dad was a WWII veteran and was a guard at a holding camp for enemy prisoners…he never spoke of the war and I never thought of it.”
She was living the residual effects of WWII in 2011. Clearly, the impacts of war are generational.
The children of war Veterans will live with wounds initially endured by their parents. Injuries may have frozen the emotional livelihood of their mother and/or father, preventing them from being as engaged as children need their caregivers to be.
Therefore, children, just as adults, seek to fulfill the emotional emptiness which originated from a call to duty, a call to serve our nation and to protect her freedoms.
That emotional emptiness may be quickly congested with drugs or alcohol. Teenagers may seek to satisfy their innate need for attention with promiscuity, cutting behaviors, or anger. Younger children may withdraw and develop fears and anxiety, crippling their ability to socialize and enjoy age-appropriate activities.
How do we stop this ripple effect?
- We must encourage stories to be told…giving safe places for Warriors and their loved ones to be heard, to be encouraged to speak their truths, helps unburden them.
- Children and teens need a space to draw their stories, play out their emotions, and share music that exposes their soul’s wounds.
- The space provided may not be in a counselor’s office, it could be at a kitchen table, in a support group, or around a camp fire.
- The key to loosening the shackles binding us to our pain is pure, uninterrupted attention and focus from another being.
While there is a need, at times even an urgency, for professional help, there is an obligation that we, as a community, have to our Warriors and their loved ones. That obligation is our time, our companionship, our gratitude.
This is the ripple effect of healing.
Rebecca Townsend is a Senior Licensed Psychological Examiner and a Licensed Professional Counselor. Rebecca is a listed TN Supreme Court Rule 31 Family Mediator. She has been working in the field of mental health for over 15 years. Her professional and personal experiences with children, families and couples has led her to complete professional trainings in working with stepfamily development, couples communication, and parenting. Rebecca also has extensive training and experience in working with military service members and their families. She was in the first class of graduates to receive a Post-Masters Certificate in Military and Veteran Behavioral Health through the Department of Defense’s Center for Deployment Psychology.
She recently founded Stand in Their Boots.
