Learning to breathe: My healing as a military child

The Month of the Military Child marks my two-year work anniversary at Atlas, and I often wonder if I’ve done more to heal myself in this time than I have the community.

When I first joined the team, I had a conversation with our Lived Expertise team about hypervigilance and how it affects Family members. They asked what hypervigilance means to me. I wasn’t expecting such a simple question to impact me like it did. I’ve never thought about this. I’ve only recently come to see the effects of hypervigilance on my dad, a 20-year Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and how this impacted him as a parent. It felt selfish to think it could have impacted me.

I grew up learning to be hypervigilant and not understanding why. Learning to be anxious, mimicking my dad, but also sitting with my back against the wall in the “safety” of my home so I could watch him. As the focus of a lot of his anger, it was how I protected myself. I never had a safe place where I could let my guard down. I was always holding my breath.

When I started working at Atlas, I learned more about hypervigilance and the effects of PTSD on Veterans, and I began to realize how similar this was for me. I show up early to events to suss the place out, I watch people more than I watch a movie when I’m at the theatre and I’m not great at “living in the moment.” I’m constantly performing risk analyses in every single situation I am in.

For my husband, who is a currently serving member of the CAF for the last 22 years, this can be irritating. He doesn’t see how I’ve experienced trauma the way a soldier has – the way he has. But I’m learning that from a very young age I took on the feelings of my dad’s trauma… and he later became my trauma. I learned to act in ways that protected me from him and his PTSD.

It only took seven weeks at Atlas to come face-to-face with these realizations and memories I locked up and threw away the key to many years ago. Thankfully, my work has given me the opportunity and a safe space to listen, learn and grow from other adult military children who have vulnerably and bravely shared their own stories with me – I’ve also learned that I’m not alone. As I learn and grow, so does my dad. Empathy and understanding have paved the way for both of us to heal and I’m incredibly grateful for that.

In my job, I have the unique opportunity to reflect on these lived experiences daily. I write campaigns that I care deeply about, including Month of the Military Child, Mental Health Week and I’m honoured to be part of the core working team for our annual Veteran Family Summit. I often find myself writing to and for the people I know and love, including my own children who have experienced multiple service-related separations from their dad, or to my own father. I believe it is important to give back to the people who give up so much in service to their country, and I wonder what life would have been like for us if we had these resources back when I was a kid.

Month of the Military Child reminds me that the impact of service doesn’t end with the uniform – it lives quietly in homes, in relationships and in the children who learn to adapt long before they understand why. Working at Atlas has given me the language I was looking for, for the experiences I once carried without question and a space to acknowledge them without guilt or comparison.

Being able to give back to this community – to my father, my husband, my children and to other military kids who are still learning how to breathe – has been deeply meaningful. If one simple question could open the door to healing for me, I can only hope the work we do helps others to feel seen sooner than I did. Because when we can name these experiences and make room for them, we don’t just grow, we heal.

— Meg McLean