Have you ever felt that gripping feeling deep in your chest? It catches your breath and slows time down as you imagine everything that could possibly go wrong in a moment.
That feeling isn’t unique to military families, but I would argue that military families stand alongside first responders with a familiarity that takes a toll. You get so used to that feeling, you start to rehearse the worst possible moments over and over again in your mind so that gripping feeling doesn’t stop you in your tracks.
Also Read: Reports show a military spouse commits suicide every 8 days
You mentally prepare for the worst while you’re doing the dishes, while you’re driving your kids to school, while you’re smiling to show everyone around you the resilient badass they expect you to be. In the meantime, your mind is rehearsing every possible tragic outcome, every possible minor emergency, every possible problem you might have to solve when the military inevitably throws you a curveball you haven’t seen before.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve looked out my kitchen window and mentally rehearsed what I would say to my kids if a fatality notification team pulled up to our house. Or looked around at a messy living room and thought I’d better clean it up in case someone knocks on my door in the middle of the night.
My husband is deployed to a war zone, after all, and we’ve trained for the possibility for decades.
The fear of loss and traumatic outcome is enough to strain anyone’s mental health, but when I spoke to hundreds of military spouses during Mental Health Awareness Month 2026, not one listed those fears as their biggest stressor.
In fact, they shared so many impactful stories and experiences that they believed were critical to sharing the mental health experience of military spouses, I struggled with where to start.
The level of chaos that finds its way into a military family’s life is hard to describe without living it. As I was trying to find words that would do that chaos justice, I found myself cleaning my kitchen wearing noise canceling headphones to drown out the sound of my kids’ latest conflict so I wouldn’t add my own shouting to the mix.
If anyone questions my parenting choices, this particular strategy was recommended by a licensed therapist to encourage them to resolve their own nuclear blowouts. Only time will tell if it was a stroke of genius or negligent parenting.
Did I mention my spouse is deployed indefinitely to a war zone and every time I tell my kids I have something to tell them they ask if dad died? Or that we were supposed to move two weeks ago until things turned sideways and everything we thought we knew went up in a puff of smoking uncertainty?
The uncertainty is taking its toll on the two kids who are now exploding my kitchen with their own version of Master Chef Jr. And it’s taking its toll on yours truly, who is soothing her nervous system with headphones and comfort snacks across the room.
I am a military spouse. Technically, I have been a military spouse for nearly 22 years. But for 20 of those years I laced up my own steel-toed boots alongside my spouse. As “joint spouse” service members, our experience was fundamentally different in ways I couldn’t comprehend. Every time we made the jarring transition to another assignment, I had a job and team waiting for me. Kids added complexity to the mix, but we got priority for on-base child care, and only spent seven of my 20 years as parents.
Until the day I made the jarring transition from active duty service member to the plus one of a service member, I experienced only a small fraction of the life of a typical military spouse.*
*It should be noted that military spouses are far from typical; they are an extraordinarily diverse community of superhumans with every skillset and background imaginable.
So when I was asked to write an article for Mighty MilSpouse about Mental Health Awareness Month, I had a flash of guilt. Yes, I am a military spouse who has been deeply entrenched in mental health advocacy across the force for years. But my experience only tells a tiny fraction of the story when it comes to the challenges a military family faces. So in service of those incredible spouses who stand in the family arena (many for decades), I phoned a friend.
Technically, I phoned hundreds of friends from all branches of service and walks of life, from junior enlisted to general officer spouses, to gain insight on their perspective. The response was overwhelming, and I am forever grateful to those spouses who chose to share their stories with me so I can shine a light into the shadows of the military family experience.
Across their experiences, a few themes kept coming up.
The Invisibility Cloak
If you walk into a room of military spouses, you’ll undoubtedly be surrounded by highly accomplished professionals, multi-degree educators, veterans, and individuals with unique and interesting experiences. As the years pass, a life of military service wears away those aspects of their identity that are hard to maintain alongside their servicemember. It’s often just too hard to continue a civilian career alongside a career of service.
Certifications don’t transfer, application cycles are too long to fit into assignment timelines, and for parents, unpredictable deployments and solo parenting in locations without built-in support systems lead people to make the difficult choice to set their own hopes and dreams aside in service of their family.
One of the greatest factors to thriving mental health is a sense of purpose, and many spouses report that it was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain their own. And those that tried to maintain their own careers or pursuits reported so many barriers and friction points that they found themselves facing burnout and marital struggle well beyond that of their civilian counterparts.
One spouse described their experience as being “dehumanized,” as the label of military spouse overcame their own identity. The word “invisible” came up again and again, not to imply that they weren’t surrounded by an incredibly supportive community, but to try to put words to the loss of personal identity they experience as a spouse of a servicemember.
The Unbearable Weight of Expectation
What you will do, who you will be, how you will act, dress, live your life. Where you will live, how you will spend your time, how many hours will you volunteer to work for free. The expectation that you will sacrifice your own dreams for the sake of your spouse’s military service. The weight of expectation looks different for everyone.
As spouses step away from their own identities, they often find themselves facing expectations that carry a weight and responsibility they never expected. Military spouses are often expected to lead, manage, and support other spouses in a capacity that matches the responsibility of a full-time job, with no pay or compensation.
General officer spouses are expected to chair working groups, travel to visit bases, and run conferences to bring attention to military family issues. Spouses that find themselves in those rooms often feel briefly re-energized with a sense of purpose and agency to make a difference.
But even in those rooms, I personally witnessed incredibly competent and qualified spouses of very senior leaders dismissed and treated like their voices didn’t matter. I applaud them for staying in those rooms and fighting for meaningful changes, no matter how hard it was.
But They’re SOOOOOOO Resilient! (Military Spouse Eyeroll Goes Here)
A phrase that masquerades as a badge of honor showed its true colors in the testimonies of hundreds of military spouses.
“Resilience is not an infinite resource.”
“Resilience is drained with the strain of the lifestyle.”
“Continually calling spouses and children ‘resilient’ perpetuates the stigma that they must be strong and unbreakable, so if they falter in their strength they are weak and failing.”
“The stigma that you have to be OK because you’re ‘strong enough’ to get through it, and the adversity only makes you stronger, keeps you from leaning on others fully or admitting how hard it is.”
“Being called ‘resilient‘ makes you feel guilty for struggling.”
Military spouses are resilient. They wouldn’t survive a day if they weren’t. But it’s time to acknowledge the cost: constantly draining that resilience is often the slow degradation of mental health that impacts the strongest and most resilient of them all.
Managing the Chaos
You haven’t felt overwhelm until you’ve borne the burden of a military spouse’s to-do list during a PCS move.* Some ranks or career fields go through the chaos of a military move every one to two years. Your entire life is uprooted and planted somewhere that was chosen for you. You start over again and again, with deployments sprinkled throughout the “stable” periods, trying to build a sense of normalcy for yourself and any family you bring along for the ride.
*PCS stands for “Permanent Change of Station,” which, I now realize, is an ironic (or twisted) naming, as nothing in a military career is permanent.
That lack of stability is amplified by the fact that a military spouse manages life without a consistent partner, and often without a stable support system they can lean on when times get tough. Even when surrounded by the most supportive communities, military spouses often struggle to find social support they trust on their toughest days.
Constantly moving and trying to integrate into new communities takes its toll on relationships and often leaves spouses feeling isolated, misunderstood, and like they have to shoulder their burdens alone.
“When your support system is other spouses experiencing the same burdens, it is even harder to reach out for support, as you know they are experiencing the same load.”
Just Go Get Help!
Easier said than done.
Many spouses brought up the fear of stigma, not for themselves, but the risk to their service member’s career if their spouse sought mental health support. Others talked about the burden of supporting the service member’s mental health, many facing complex traumas inherent to their job. That burden led them to neglect their own mental health as they tried to fill the gap for a service member facing stigmas of their own.
Those that sought help faced another layer of challenges. It can take weeks, sometimes months, to find a provider covered by insurance, and then months more to build the rapport and courage to share your experience. Before you know it, you’re moving again, and struggling to find the strength to start over somewhere new.
Continuity of care is nearly nonexistent due to lack of providers and licensure barriers. As one spouse shared, “rigid prescription laws refuse to recognize the transient reality of military life.” In many cases, spouses face lapses in critical prescription medications and therapies that hit them at the most stressful inflection points in their lives.
The Mighty Military Spouse
If not infinitely resilient, what is a military spouse?
A military spouse is a force to be reckoned with, who faces insurmountable obstacles and keeps moving forward. A military spouse carries the weight of the world on their shoulders and keeps finding ways to carry more, like that neighbor who needs to grab that last grocery bag with their pinkie and open the door with their foot. A military spouse is a heroic person who may need to be reminded that even heroes need to rest, and that even the most powerful heroes team up with each other eventually.
Every one of these heroes is human, and deserves to have the kind of support system that lifts them up, notices when they need to take a step back, and recognizes them for the incredible individual they are. A military spouse is also stubborn, and may resist your attempts to help shoulder their burden, just like the dear friend who had to physically grab me by the shoulders today to tell me she was doing me a favor when she saw my face contort at the thought of letting someone do something slightly inconvenient for me.
If you are a military spouse, I see you. I took your struggle for granted until the day I stepped into your shoes. I’ll never forget the first call I made to a dear friend after my first event without the armor of my own uniform:
“Remember all those times you told me you felt invisible and I didn’t get it? I see you now.”
To my fellow military spouses, don’t be afraid to take down the armor and care for yourself as intentionally as you care for everyone else around you. When others reach out and offer a hand, don’t be afraid to grab on tight. It won’t make you weak, it will rebuild your strength so you can step back into the arena stronger and more badass than ever.
Join us as we Continue the Conversation
If you are a military spouse, active, guard, reserve, or retired/veteran, you are invited to join us in a workshop that will give you space to discuss mental health as military spouses, provide tools and resources to help build a foundation to prioritize your mental health, and join an impact session to identify the top 10 changes you want to see.
Those findings will be published and shared with change agents in military and veteran communities.
WHO & WHAT: Continue the Conversation: Mental Health and the Military Spouse Workshop (virtual) facilitated by Angelina “Strike” Stephens
WHEN: 23 June 2026 12 pm – 1:30 pm EST
WHERE: Mental Health and the Military Spouse REGISTRATION LINK
HOSTED BY: We AreThe Mighty’s MightyMilSpouse & MilSpouseFest
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