Dangerous Assumptions and Superman Thinking

Miscommunication is not a new thing when it comes to marriage, especially a new one. Add several months of long-distance contact and a hefty load of stress and you are now looking at big problems. This is what happened to my husband and me.

There are different levels of stress, frustration and feelings of loneliness. We assumed that we would always be able to deal with them. We failed to see that as strong as we both are, we also have moments of weakness. We are human after all. It is easy for him to remember this of me, and sometimes he forgets how strong I really am. On the other hand, it is not as easy for us to remember that he is not Superman. Sometimes I say this jokingly, but now that I reflect on last year, we subconsciously (and stupidly) assumed that he was.

When we got married, we made a commitment to each other to share our burdens as much as our happiness. Now, due to his profession, this comes with a disclaimer confidential information remains confidential, so this adds a layer of difficulty when trying to communicate our emotions. We are still great when it comes to fixing external (non-relationship) problems and sharing our happiness. However, due to the above assumptions and superman-thinking, he slowly, but surely started keeping his emotional burdens from me. I was too distracted with myself, the house and other things, and I didn’t want to stress him out even more by asking him to work harder on sharing his emotions.

So how did this turn out for us?
I started feeling as if all he wanted from me was to take care of our dogs, house and other belongings while he was gone. Although this is highly important, my role as his wife and best friend were close to non-existent. I knew that my feelings were wrong and so I powered through it because I knew how difficult the training that he was going through was. I bet a lot of people know this is, but a good percentage of the training that SEALs go through have little to do with physical challenges (except for sleep deprivation), but mostly mental.

As months went by, my husband began to separate himself from his true self – in his mind he had no family, friends or anything else but the training that he was going through. This is too robotic for even someone like him, and thus he started drinking alcohol… way more than what he is used to. When it came to our conversations, he would say that he was fine, or that he couldn’t talk because he needed to get some sleep. When he felt like sharing his feelings with me, he was usually exhausted. That made it very difficult for him to think of ways to communicate effectively while removing confidential information, and so he would decide to keep his emotions to himself. Long story short, he successfully completed all of the various training events throughout the year, as that was our first priority, but it left our marriage in a bad state.

What I’ve learned so far is that although Navy SEALs get tons of training to do their job amazingly well, they didn’t use to get a lot of training for how to deal with their challenges at home. When my husband joined the teams more than a decade ago, these types of services and training opportunities were very few and some thought of as being underdeveloped. Nowadays, based on what I’ve seen, there are several programs, services, workshops, and more especially designed to help our community through family and personal development.

When my husband and I realized that our marriage was in trouble and that we needed to improve our communication, emotional regulation and coping skills, he moved into action (he beat me to it!). Just like anything else, he faced it with all the focus and determination that he would place for a work-related mission. Before I knew it, we were enrolled to use a service called FOCUS. Here is some information regarding this service:

FOCUS is Family Resiliency Training™ for Military Families, which includes those without children. FOCUS has helped us learn to improve the following skills:
- Emotional regulation
- Communication
- Problem-solving
- Goal setting
- Managing deployments (or long intensive training trips)
http://www.focusproject.org/

As I know, this service is then developed to work with the specific needs of the community – Navy SEALs and the Marines, for example, have plenty of differences. Again, it is not couples therapy and their goal is not to help us save our marriage; these are skills that we can apply to our relationship with ourselves, each other and others.
So are we now Superman and Superwoman? Not really. If things work out between us, we know we'll never be and we like it that way. Hey, even Superman has his kryptonite. Nevertheless, we are better equipped to deal with multiple deployments, we now understand each other better thanks to the new skills we’ve learned, and we will now also be able to do a better assessment of our marriage.

When 5 months feel like 2 years

My title is putting it lightly, but I guess I should start by setting the scenario. Rewind back to the beginning of last year: Husband went on a 4 month training trip that I wrote about in an earlier post. Soon after he came back, he had to go to a 2 month training that took him to 3 or 4 states and no visits allowed. He was then home for 1 month and then gone for one more (I bet you are confused by now). In one year, not counting the one week trainings, he was gone for a total of 7 or 8 months - longer than his recent deployment overseas. See, the only, although very important difference, is that they are not in real harms way (well, mostly and as far as I know). Even if he is not in true danger, this does not remove the fact that he is still away from home and from me.

I was naive to believe that we were both equally strong (What does this even mean?), that we are dealing with similar level of stress, and that all that time spent separated would not be a big challenge for us. I kept thinking that he could deal with his stress on his own and with the little help I could provide via emails, text messages and phone calls (nothing tragic happened, in case you think I'm going there). The truth is that he was not able to do it without resorting to self-destructive behavior: drinking, emotionally shutting down and pretending to be someone else. Sad to say, unbeknown us, we were becoming a very typical military marriage story. Another statistic of a failed marriage in the Navy SEALs community.

Since there is plenty for me to write, more than enough to fill in the space between August and now, let me tell you where we are right now: together, attending a program called FOCUS, and trying to make our marriage work. The following posts won't be a chronicle of sob stories, but a mix of good and bad moments, reflections, information for other new Navy SEAL spouses and random musings.