TPC-Journal-V4-Issue2

The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 2 123 ing and after their husbands’ out-of-country deployment (Basham, 2008; Riggs & Riggs, 2011). The first phase, protest, occurs when a child is separated from his or her mother, with sadness and anxiety presenting as the most common initial emotional reactions. The protest phase is linked to pre-deployment and deployment time periods, as wives often feel numb, angry and abandoned due to an upcoming or current separation from their husbands (Pincus, House, Christenson, & Adler, 2001). Furthermore, wives also may experience sadness, loneli- ness and anxiety during this phase (SteelFisher, Zaslavsky, & Blendon, 2008). The second phase of separation anxiety is despair, characterized by feelings of extreme sadness (Riggs & Riggs, 2011; Robertson & Bowlby, 1952). A wife may often go through similar stages of grief and mourning when her husband is deployed (Pincus et al., 2001). Initially a wife may be in denial that her husband is gone, believing that she will be fine and that he is only away for a few days’ training (Pincus et al., 2001). As time passes, she may experience depression and withdrawal as she realizes that her husband will not return for a long time, if at all (Vormbrock, 1993). The nature of the military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are characterized by continual life-threat- ening experiences, coupled with the absence of any “safe” place (Demers, 2008). Constant media coverage spotlights the dangers of deployment to active combat zones and undoubtedly impacts a wife’s ability to trust that her husband will safely return (Demers, 2008). Wives have reported being in constant fear for their soldiers’ safety, which may result in feeling helpless throughout the deployment (Demers, 2008; Spera, 2009). Eventu- ally, a wife may begin to accept that her husband is gone, and transfer her love to someone else, such as a child or different partner (Morse, 2006). The final phase of separation anxiety, denial or detachment, can occur during both the deployment period and the post-deployment period (Morse, 2006). Robertson and Bowlby (1952) postulated that this last phase serves as a defense mechanism, which wives utilize when their husbands abruptly rejoin their families (Pincus et al., 2001; Riggs & Riggs, 2011). Anxiety combined with excitement has been found to impact the restabilization of the couple (Morse, 2006; Pincus et al., 2001). Attempting to regain a physical and emotional connection with one another after a long, seemingly permanent separation has been found to be extremely stressful, resulting in struggles with communication, coparenting, returning to pre-deployment routines, and marital intimacy (Orth- ner & Rose, 2005). Additional challenges during the post-deployment period may entail negotiating new roles and boundaries within the family system, household management, financial status, parental rejection and new social supports (Drummet, Coleman, & Cable, 2003). If the husband returns and attempts to resume roles that existed prior to his deployment, it may diminish the stay-behind wife’s feelings of worth and accomplishment, since she suc- cessfully managed the various facets of daily life in her husband’s absence (Drummet et al., 2003), further straining the attachment between the couple. Although each endured the deployment simultaneously, the experi- ences were likely uniquely and vastly different from one another (Pincus et al., 2001). Purpose This quantitative study examined how stay-behind wives experience separation anxiety, through examin- ing the relationship between duration of deployment and psychological distress during post-deployment. The theoretical framework for this study focused on attachment between a husband and wife and how a couple cope with separation. Surveys of wives were conducted during the post-deployment period in an effort to capture data from the time that couples were reattaching. For the purposes of this study, post-deployment is defined as the 12-month period after the husband has returned from deployment.