Chapter Nine:
Impact on Family and Friends
As service members protect our country, their family and friends are also affected by their call to duty. The injuries of the service member create additional stress and hardships for the family members and friends. This chapter provides advice and recommendations for family members and friends on how to communicate and interact with disabled veterans and what they can be done to care for and protect themselves during difficult times.
For every member of the military, the service member's family and friends back home are also deeply affected and must endure their own form of separation, deprivation, and emotional costs. The nature of this current conflict can make it even more difficult for families and friends of service members, since the military is now more diverse (and has more women and older members with established families back home) and more Guard and Reserve members serving and all members called upon to serve longer terms overseas
With better medical care, service members are also surviving more extensive injuries. But each of these injuries can create additional stress and hardships for their family members and friends. While the rest of this book is directed at the veterans, this chapter is written for the family members and friends of injured veterans to describe what is happening to the veteran, how they can communicate with him, and how they can best help her on to full recovery and reintegration.
Authors:
Shirley M. Glynn, Ph.D., a clinical research psychologist at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, provides training and consultation to improve family services nationally throughout the VA. She is also a research psychologist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los
Angeles. She has been conducting clinical research in family interventions for persons with serious psychiatric illnesses and combat-related PTSD for over twenty years.
Colleen Saffron, an Army spouse for the past eighteen years from Harker Heights,Texas, provides the perspective of a caregiver. Since her husband’s injury in Iraq in 2004 she has managed to care for him and their three children while also returning to school to graduate with honors. She is one of the founders and creators of the group Operation Life Transformed which works to fill the gaps in veteran care related to the family’s economic recovery by providing training and job placement opportunities to family member caregivers
