Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.
As the clock slowly scrolled from 9:01 p.m. to 9:27 p.m., I became more and more anxious with each minute. My husband, a naval aviator, wasn't deployed. He was just on the flight schedule. He had told me he would be landing at 9 p.m. Sure, flight schedules can change, but he usually texts me if there is a delay. My panic worsened with each passing minute. Then, he walked through the door as if nothing had happened. It was only then that I realized I had been holding my breath.
As a military spouse, I don't know how many hours or days or weeks of my life I spent in a perpetual state of tension. It's not surprising; nearly everyone I have met in the aviation community knows of at least one person who has been killed in a crash. I went to a Bible study with Betsy. I am friends with Landon's widow. And those are just the people I know personally. I tried not to think about them, but no matter how well I suppressed their stories, my body had internalized the fear. Even when my husband was in a crash that left his helicopter without rotor blades, I went about life as if nothing had happened. For the better part of his military career, I spent my life with my jaw clenched, shoulders near my ears, on edge, and had no idea what I was carrying until my health was impacted.
The stress the military community holds is not just related to our proximity to deployments or combat zones. It is woven into the fabric of everyday existence.
It wasn't until I sat down with a friend for coffee, years after my husband stopped flying, that I found out I wasn't alone.
"It hit me really hard about a year after he got off active duty," Samantha Daniels, Center for a New American Security Next Generation National Security Leaders Fellow and veteran Marine Corps spouse, shared as we sipped our coffee. "I wasn't expecting that."
Daniels and I first connected because I had just moved to the area and we had similar professional backgrounds and had previously worked together. After we got to talking, we realized we had both been through the same, all-consuming combination of fear and worry that subconsciously shaped years of our lives.
"Sometimes when I'm driving, I'll notice that I was gripping the steering wheel in a death grip," she said.
I, too, had similar revelations. I would often catch myself with my shoulders knotted at work. Eventually, my jaw began to hurt from remaining tensed for hours. My wake-up call happened months after my husband's final flight as a naval aviator when I, run down with stress, was told I had contracted mononucleosis or "mono," a month after our change of duty station. I had mentally hit my wall, and my body paid the price. I have since discovered that Samantha and I were not the only military spouses carrying stress.
Air Force spouse Christine Hinrichs had already been a military spouse for 10 years when COVID-19 hit as she was about to move with her family to a new duty station. She knew how to handle the movers. She knew how to research a new area. She was prepared. But it took their belongings three months to arrive and, instead of being able to turn to friends to blow off steam, she was deep in quarantine.
"The day that our goods finally arrived, I started having a lot of pain and itching," said Hinrichs. When she developed a fever, she tried to go to see the doctor on base but couldn't get an appointment for three or four days. When she finally went to the ER, she was told, "This is the worst case of shingles I have ever seen."
Shingles is a painful rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox that reawakens in the body. Studies show that increased stress can trigger the disease.
"The mind and body are so interwoven that, while you might not be consciously thinking it, your body can be actively responding to it," shared Dr. Courtney Barber, the 2024 Armed Forces Insurance Military Spouse of the Year, psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist. "In physiological terms, no, there is no difference in how our body responds. The body remembers and reacts accordingly when activated. It typically doesn't differentiate between the trigger that may ignite the fight-or-flight or stress response. It will innately respond, often with or without our conscious permission."
But the stress extends well beyond worry associated with a spouse's deployment to combat zones.
"I've met spouses whose husbands were deployed to, like Iraq and Afghanistan," said Daniella Horne, an Army veteran and Navy spouse. "Yes, they worried about war and combat and their husband making it back in one piece, but now the stressors are more like, 'Hey, we're having issues with housing and our PCS move.'"
It is hard not to notice that the stress of military life comes as a direct result of the unpredictability. But some of us are still unaware of what we are holding.
In preparation for this article, I interviewed half a dozen spouses, asking them all similar questions about what pushed them to their breaking point. However, when I asked Navy spouse Melissa Purnell, I wondered whether she was one of the countless spouses who had not yet hit the wall. "Have you ever stopped to think if you've ever processed this?" I asked.
"No, I don't think I have," she shared. "Maybe I just ignore it and that's my way of dealing with it, like just pushing it in the back of my mind."
Data shows that holding stress may be an expected and normalized part of military life. According to research conducted by Operation Child Care Project in 2024, 38% of families seeking child care assistance reported facing mental health challenges, while 28% indicated that they were experiencing increased stress levels due to the lack of care options. Another root cause of our stress is finances. According to a 2023 Military Family Advisory Network report, 46.6% of families experiencing financial stress said it had impacted their mental or physical health. MFAN findings point to several key sources of stress, including frequent moves, employment and child care struggles, and the unpredictability of military life.
Although we can't fully understand or control our circumstances, we can manage our reactions.
"Being curious with your own thoughts, you start training yourself to find your own markers and your own stressors and your own thought patterns," said Crystal Bettenhausen-Bubulka, a licensed clinical social worker, Navy spouse and founder and executive director of Strength in Service, a nonprofit focused on providing mental health services.
Instead of thinking your neck pain is because of a hard workout, maybe it is because you're walking around with your shoulders near your ears. If you regularly have an upset stomach, she says, "Maybe it's not what you're eating, maybe it's also that your cortisol levels are spiking because you're under a lot of stress.
"There's a lot of excuses and sweeping things under the rug, especially in a lot of the clientele that I see because everyone is kind of getting into this comparison: 'I don't have it that bad and then they're not acknowledging themselves,'" Bettenhausen-Bubulka said.
I made excuses until my body forced me to stop. But that is what military spouses do; we do all the things until we collapse. But who will be left to pick us up if we let ourselves fall?
