Spouse Boot Camp Often Self-Taught
By Jacey Eckhart
Spring 2006
The Navy doesn't just slap uniforms on their recruits, send them to a ship and expect them to be sailors. Recruits sweat out a couple of months at boot camp. They take on weeks or months of specialized training. Then, and only then, do the new sailors hit the fleet - where they get more training.
But spouses? Man, they rip the veil off your head, ship you off to a city where you may know not a soul and expect you to be able to handle a deployment, say, a week later.
Spouse boot camp often is self-taught. We manage. More importantly, we adapt.
One of the things I've been adapting lately is a fascinating study about preventing depression in military recruits. The findings apply to military members, but they easily can be adapted to help military spouses, especially during deployment.
While on reservist training at Great Lakes, Dr. Reg Williams, professor of nursing and psychiatry at the University of Michigan, found that nearly 25 percent of all recruits were identified as "at risk" for depression.
Williams found that some individuals needed to be sent home. Others were able to perform quite well when given strategies to prevent depression and to help cope with stress.
But boot camp doesn't offer any extra time for touchy-feely, Dr. Phil-inspired psychiatric moments. Everything has to be simple, direct and effective. So the researchers taught recruits three basic strategies to cope with depression.
1. Go greet a new recruit every day. In or out of uniform, people need a sense of belonging.
"This is a very powerful psychological piece that makes a huge difference in people's lives," said Dr. Williams in a recent interview. "You need to feel valued and that you fit in."
So one of the skills the recruits learned was to go up to someone they didn't know, shake hands and tell who they were. Then they had to listen to the other guy talk. It was a simple enough way to get to know everybody and always have a buddy at lunch.
But the researchers also stressed a more important skill: Don't criticize. When we get stressed or depressed, we turn negative and criticize others. Then we don't understand why no one likes us. Making ourselves unwilling to criticize other people means that we are more attractive and more connected to the group.
2. Ask for help. This is a tough one for military spouses. I personally would rather dive into an entire Chantilly layer cake than admit that I can't pick up kids from baseball practice and the orthodontist at the same time. But I might be able to ask someone for a little advice. Or for a breath mint.
The recruits learned to ask for help studying for a test or advice about how to handle a situation.
"When they shared ideas with each other, they added armament to their strategies," said Williams. "They learned to problem solve."
By asking for help, the recruits learned to narrow their problem down to a reasonable level, seek options and decide on a solution.
3. Picture the one you love. For the recruits, the event that stressed them most was "Battlestations." As part of their training, the recruits must endure a series of scenarios developed from past disasters in the Navy.
For example, the recruits work together as a team to fight a fire similar to the one on the carrier Forrestal that killed 164 men in 1967. Then they run a mile and half to the next tragedy. The event is designed to be extremely stressful, physically and mentally.
The researchers found that what worked for the recruits was to use mental imagery. They would create a picture in their minds of a person they loved best in the world standing at the end of the run cheering them on.
We spouses can use the same strategy when we are smiling through another birthday party without our spouse or trying to get three kids under four years old into their jammies without drawing blood. We can picture our spouses, parents or grandmas cheering, "You can do this! Ten more minutes! I believe in you!" Works every time.
Recruits who followed these practices were significantly better at problem solving. They were happier than recruits who had not received the intervention, and they were more likely to stay in the Navy.
"It's the simple stuff that works, that helps me manage when I'm under stress," said Williams.
Me, too. If I could only learn to ask for help, I'd rule the world. I'm willing to start small. Anybody got a breath mint?
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Jacey Eckhart is a columnist for the Virginian-Pilot. She may be contacted at jacey1@earthlink.net.
