In the wake of America’s 2021 military withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of war, licensed counselor and active duty Army spouse Corie Weathers noticed two things.
The first: many service members’ struggles with mental health seemed to escalate overnight. The second: she saw a “wave of unspoken anger in the military spouse community.”
“The more I listened, the more I knew this was the sound of grief, exhaustion, and burnout,” Weathers recalled. “Like a shaken-up soda bottle, the community was ripe for three possible reactions — implosion, explosion, or both.”
She noticed. And she sprang into action.
Weathers wrote “Military Culture Shift: The Impact of War, Money, and Generational Perspective on Morale, Retention, and Leadership.” Published in 2023, it offers a textbook-style cultural analysis of challenges facing this generation of military leaders. Weathers hoped, through her work, to proactively address the problems she observed at higher levels in the military community.
Today, she travels throughout military installations as a “first responder to relational chaos,” applying her experiences as both a licensed clinician and 15-year military spouse to equip others. She has facilitated training events for 3rd Special Forces Group spouses, 1st Special Forces Command, The Army War College Foundation and more.
One element of Weathers’ recent training and work around “Military Culture Shift” seemed to provide language for something in my own experience I couldn’t quite articulate — and apparently, that of many others:
Do service members and spouses become more passive over time?
This is the central question Weathers asks in her training on assertiveness. According to Weathers, the evidence answers in the affirmative. Recognizing the factors that encourage passivity over time can help both spouses and service members reclaim a sense of agency in military life.
There are many multi-layered factors which contribute to this pattern, which Weathers lays out in great detail. But one factor in particular will likely feel — for many — very close to home.
“It’s always been a part of the culture that the mission comes first. Your life, your decisions revolve around what the needs of the Army or the needs of the force [are],” Weathers told me. “Spouses really begin to feel that the mission must come first, this is really hard, and I must come second. And that does create this passivity over time.”
If a service member is deployed suddenly, for example, a spouse’s desire to work full-time may immediately become less plausible, as the weight of the household rests solely on them. The military depends on spouses in this way. There are a myriad of ways in which a “mission above all else” mentality manifests for individuals and families.
On the service member-side, Weathers says the institutional culture of hierarchy lends itself to some becoming passive up the chain of command and potentially more aggressive down.
“Traditionally, if somebody outranks you … you know you submit to that order and that is the way our institution runs. That’s how we’ve successfully accomplished missions. So that can be in some ways overused even just in the culture, where it is difficult for service members to go to their superior and be assertive or even ask for things that are healthy or set healthy boundaries,” Weathers said, adding that her research has shown that Gen Z is increasingly disrupting this pattern by asking more questions about workplace conduct.
In her training sessions on assertiveness, Weathers focuses on several key questions:
- What is assertiveness?
- What is healthy?
- What is healthy communication and what is unhealthy?
She remarks that most of us are not taught assertiveness skills in childhood, thus making it difficult to assert ourselves later on. And if spouses and service members are not able to assert themselves on a regular basis within their military lifestyle, that energy must go somewhere, Weathers says. Weathers believes this helps to explain increased rates of toxic leadership reports and sexual harassment reports in the military.
However, with awareness comes opportunity for change.
“Anytime you try to change a pattern to a healthier pattern, chaos is going to happen,” she said, adding that in the face of relational chaos, most people will fall back on what they’ve always done or abandon the relationship. Spouses are often afraid that the Department of Defense will abandon them, and inversely, the DoD is afraid of families abandoning the mission. This results in a default back to the norm, Weathers said.
Weathers encourages anyone set on helping change aspects of the military culture to remain steadfast amid chaos.
“If you can get used to the chaos — chaos has to happen in order to get to the new pattern because chaos is so scary,” she said. “But I think the younger generation is saying we are willing to outlast the chaos if anybody is willing to try it with us.”
The cultural challenges are beyond what any one person can fix. But Weathers has recommendations for what military-affiliated individuals can do to increase agency in their own day-to-day experience:
- Get help from organizations like Five & Thrive and community-based organizations connecting military families to quality-of-life resources.
- Educate yourself on not only the problem, but why the problem exists. This will help you have a seat at the table to better advocate for yourself.
- Learn about military budgeting processes and how funding decisions are made at the unit level. You may end up knowing more than anyone else at the table.
- Go through the chain of command. Address quality of life challenges through proper channels.
And finally, she says, make decisions that are healthy for you — and always with respect and kindness at the forefront.
Military families and individuals are strong in the face of adversity; it’s who we are. It’s what we do. What could happen if we apply that strength to advocate for sustainable, healthy change?
And lastly: what barriers have you encountered lately? What do you want to do about them?