Welcome Home Veterans - Spouse and Family Transition
Celebrate Recovery Welcome Home Groups are a safe place for veterans and their family to connect. Most military families miss the camaraderie that the military culture provides. This can be achieved through Celebrate Recovery and Welcome Home Open Share Groups.
Exploring the Issue of Spouses and Family Transition
(Spouse) Do you:
- Feel a disconnect in your social interaction with one another?
- Feel as though you cannot reconnect after deployment?
- Experience outbursts of anger or physical violence when you disagree?
- Feel a loss of independence after the spouse returns to the home?
- Feel as if your role in the home is threatened?
- Feel unwilling or unable to give up the “final say” in decision making?
- Assume your spouse would jump back in when they returned?
- Miss the way things were pre-deployment?
- Feel undermined in the home?
(Veteran) Do you:
- Become nervous when someone rearranges the furniture?
- Feel afraid to comment on household decisions without backlash?
- Struggle with a lack of military culture and discipline in the home?
- Feel you no longer have a role in the home?
- Feel emotionally withdrawn or unable to relate to your spouse?
- Struggle to communicate in a way that your spouse can hear?
- Miss the sense of belonging born of unit cohesion and the military culture?
- Miss the sense that “I’m part of something important and bigger than myself”?
How We Find Recovery
Through a relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Higher Power, and by working through the 8 recovery principles and the Christ-centered 12 steps, we can find freedom from our hurts, hang ups and habits.
Characteristics of someone in recovery for spouses and family transition may include, but are not limited to:
- Working together to understand your styles of communication.
- Taking time to discuss decisions made during deployments to create an understanding of the new normal.
- Considering past immersion into military culture of command structures.
- Improving problem-solving and decision-making skills by renegotiating roles.
- Allowing each other space to process new changes.
- Seeing the transition as a challenge to overcome or a mission to complete. Setting up phases or tasks to work on.
- Carefully setting family priorities as a team.
- Re-engaging in spiritual activities together. i.e. prayer, Bible reading, church attendance.
- Celebrating small victories together.
- Connecting with Celebrate Recovery and your local church for a sense of belonging.
- Attending Large Group weekly and participating in a Welcome Home Open Share group.
- Joining a Celebrate Recovery Step Study Group.
- Reaching out to fellow veterans, inviting them to Celebrate Recovery, supporting them in their mission to overcome hurts, hang-ups, and habits.
Small Group Guidelines
- Keep your sharing focused on your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Please limit your sharing to three to five minutes.
- There is NO cross-talk please. Cross-talk is when two people engage in a dialogue during the meeting. Each person sharing is free to express feelings without interruptions.
- We are here to support one another. We will not attempt to “fix” one another.
- Anonymity and confidentiality are basic requirements. What is shared in the group stays in the group. The only exception is when someone threatens to injure themselves or others.
- Offensive language has no place in a Christ-centered recovery group.
Accountability Team Phone Numbers
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Accountability Partners
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