Thank you.
One of the things the research indicates about children is that in military families children are stressed more so than in any other kind of family. That's because of the postings and the deployments. They deal with the parent coming and going at a rate different from most other professions. So that already puts a stress on the family. Although there are things, like the military family resource centre now...but you have to live close to one in order to access the supports.
What the people I interviewed about their children talked about was, again, the loss of the father who was. Because I interviewed the female partners, I'm only talking about dads: “Daddy can no longer go out to dinner with us because he can't be in a restaurant.” Family events had to be planned. A graduation has to be planned. They take two cars so that if dad has to leave, he can leave. The seating has to be planned. You can no longer go to a movie because dad can't sit in a theatre.
In terms of the one who was talking about the graduation, they went the day before to plan out exactly where they were going to sit. They had a contingency plan so that if he couldn't stay for the whole graduation, at least the mother would be able to stay. There would have been somebody who could make sure the dad would be able to get out and get to a place where he was going to feel safe.
So everything becomes complicated. All of life becomes complicated for these kids. They're no longer able to be free. They also become hyper-vigilant about, “Did I do something wrong? Am I watching something on TV that's going to cause Daddy to have a flashback?” The whole family becomes infected.
The author, Sandra Bloom, speaks about trauma being like a virus. It's insidious and it spreads through the family. So these kids, themselves, become predisposed to things like depression or traumatic injuries. They learn to be hyper-vigilant. They learn to be hyper-vigilant in taking care of the parent, by creating that environment, by trying to control the environment so that the parent is not going to have a reaction, not going to have an outburst, so that he is going to feel safe. So the role gets reversed. They become the parent and the parent becomes the child. So when they do become adults now they are predisposed themselves to suffering a lifetime of mental illness because of that hyper-vigilance and its range, and the brain chemistry and all of the neuroscience that goes around that....
It's not just. It's not fair to these children to be put through this. They have no control. They had no choice to be brought into this situation. And the support they need is to be able to be children and to be free and understand that they didn't do anything wrong and that there's nothing they can do to fix their parent, which is what they all want to do. They all want to make their parent better. They want things to go back to the way they were before, which is not going to happen.