HEALTH & WELLBEING
SEPARATION Anxiety
by Allyson Arnold D
eployments are never easy. It is painful to surrender your loved one to a detachment of four or six
months, to places like Afghanistan. Emotions run high for both parties as they think about the impending deployment. Then the day inevitably comes when you say your tearful farewells. As the front door closes to the sound of the MT car whisking your partner away to Brize Norton, the countdown begins. And that’s when my cleaning starts.
We were stationed in Germany when my husband was first sent to Afghanistan with a bus load of other Service personnel. I drove home, my vision blurred with tears, went into the house, sobbed for ten minutes, then picked up the mop.
I proceeded to scrub and dust and hoover the whole house, cleaning the sheets, sorting out the laundry and practically fumigating the
kitchen. Thinking this was merely my own bizarre coping ritual, I met another ‘wife of’ at the NAAFI on my way to pick up more cleaning supplies and we exchanged our own scenes of sending our husbands off – only to discover that she also was in the process of replenishing her Cillit Bang.
It turns out that I am not alone in this bizarre post goodbye ritual. A friend once quipped that it was like scrubbing away DNA and it is true that deployments can invoke feelings of temporary mournfulness – it is like a part of you has died and the only way you can cope is to erase those daily reminders.
An interesting phenomenon takes place when my husband goes away – I feel sad and lonely and sometimes think ‘why me?’ I begin a short journey into self-pity, forgetting that thousands of other wives have experienced this and may well be experiencing it at the same time as me.
Some people may inadvertently adopt slight
passive aggressive personality traits; rather than accepting that their husband will be away for a certain period of time and getting on with taking control of their lives. They create chaotic situations and put a negative spin on things happening in their lives, blaming their husband’s deployment. Sure, it is okay to sit at night in front of tearjerker films in the company of Ben and Jerry every now and then and feel sorry for one’s situation, but I feel it important to recognise there are more positive ways of dealing with the situation.
So, how does one begin to cope with this temporary but still lengthy and difficult separation? Here are a few of my thoughts:
Raise your endorphins Once the cleaning has ceased and I have
26
Envoy Summer 2012
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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