Knee Deep in the Hooah!

Below is an excerpt of a post I have up at You Served. Stop by. Read. Let’s chat!

Strengths and military marriages

January 9, 2009 By Claire
Posted in Life in the Military, Spouse and Family

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
-Mark Twain: Notebook, 1894

Note: The information below has a few references hyper-linked. Most of it is stuff I have pulled out of my head where unicorns, finished laundry and obedient children reside. Therefore, please take it as opinion. I am too tired to write a paper that is worthy of publication in the APA Journal. However, the opinions below are based on a lot of experience. Take it with one grain of salt and a good shake of pepper.

Marriage is worth saving! We hear it all the time, and it’s a point worth driving home because it’s true. Marriage provides society with couples who have vowed to care for one another, and included in that is a tacit vow to care for any children they may have together. Marriage is especially important to the military. According to research, marriage and family life makes for better soldiers who have a longer retention rate (for male soldiers not female).

As many times as we hear marriage is worth saving, we also hear how marriage is failing. Often, the statement is worded as if “marriage” (the institution itself) is what failed rather than the two dynamic, thinking, living beings who actually created the marriage in the first place.

There are times when changing the structure of a sentence or substituting one word for the other is merely a game of semantics. There are times, as well, when the change in words and structure is actually a change that is dynamic. A Strengths based approach in matters such as divorce takes the focus of our energy off of one continuum and places it on affecting change on another. Let me explain it a little more…

In 1946 years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) put forth in their preamble a statement that has caused a positive change within the medical community concerning the paradigm of viewing health and disease. The medical community’s shift has also caused a shift in the thinking of theorists in the social and behavioral sciences as well.

The shift made was a simple declaration that matters of health and matters of disease are on two completely separate continua rather than coexisting on the same continuum at the polar opposite of each other. In simple English this means that the absence of disease does not equate “health.” Prior to this the assumption was that disease prevention made for healthy patients.

Essentially what was learned (and it is still not used enough in a lot of approaches for various reasons) is that we can not promote functioning in families by trying to prevent dysfunction. We can not strengthen marriages either by only knowing what causes divorce.

This is good stuff! keep reading —>