Beyond Thank You: Understanding and Supporting Our Veterans
By Jen Bennethum
The Hidden Weight of Coming Home
The parade has ended, the flags are folded, and somewhere there might be a veteran who is sitting in their car in the grocery store or Walmart parking lot, working up the nerve to go inside. November can bring its own kind of deployment for those who've served—navigating well-meaning thank-yous while their nervous system stays locked in a threat-detection mode, with their eyes on the door as they sit to eat, that made perfect sense in Kandahar but feels exhausting in Kansas, or Pennsylvania (anywhere).
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight." Tim O’Brien
Who We Honor: The Complex Reality of Service
Veterans Day arrives each year wrapped in patriotic certainty about who we're honoring and why. We celebrate the courage of those who signed their names on a line that could have been their last act. We honor the sacrifice of leaving family, comfort, and safety to serve something larger. But between the ceremonies and social media posts, we often miss the textured reality of what military service means—both during and after. We celebrate the warrior but struggle to see the human being who still startles at unexpected sounds, who misses the dark humor that only their unit would understand, who feels simultaneously proud of their service and alienated by civilian translations of it.
Understanding Trauma Responses: When the War Comes Home
For many veterans, this day triggers what therapists call "complex trauma responses"—not just from combat, but from the entire experience of military life. There's moral injury from impossible decisions made in impossible situations. There's grief for battles buddies who didn't make it home, and survivor's guilt for those who did. There's the particular disorientation of "transition stress," when everything that structured your life—from when you wake up to how you fold your shirts—suddenly becomes optional. Your identity, so clear in uniform, blurs in civilian clothes.
Every Story Matters: The Diversity of Military Experience
The veterans we honor aren't a single type of person.. They're the nineteen-year-old who joined for college money and ended up in a firefight. They're the career soldier who found purpose in service and now feels adrift in retirement. They're the woman who faced military sexual trauma and still served with distinction. They're the mechanic who never saw combat but kept birds in the air, the medic who held too many hands as they went cold, the intelligence analyst who carries secrets that wake them at night. They're also the peacetime veterans who sometimes feel their service "doesn't count" when civilians equate military service exclusively with combat.
The Body Remembers: Living with Hypervigilance
When we truly listen to veterans, patterns emerge. Many describe hypervigilance that won't turn off—scanning restaurants for exits, sitting with backs to walls, jumping at car backfires. This isn't paranoia; it's a nervous system still running software that kept them alive. Post-traumatic stress (many veterans prefer this to "disorder") reflects an adaptive response to extreme situations. The body holds what the mind tries to forget. That's why "bottom-up" therapeutic approaches—working with the body first rather than just talking—often help where traditional therapy stalls. Somatic experiencing, EMDR, and even yoga designed for trauma can help the nervous system learn it's finally safe to stand down.
The Isolation of Return: Losing Your Tribe
The isolation many veterans feel runs deeper than missing military friends. It's the loss of a shared language, of being understood without explaining, of mattering in ways that are immediate and measurable. Civilian work can feel meaningless after missions where lives hung in the balance. "Thank you for your service" rings hollow when you're fighting the VA for benefits, when your marriage is crumbling under the weight of unprocessed trauma, when you're self-medicating with alcohol because it's the only thing that quiets the noise.
Beyond Gratitude: Creating Real Support Systems
Supporting veterans requires moving beyond gratitude to genuine understanding. It means creating space for the full spectrum of military experience—pride and pain, honor and horror, service and sacrifice. It means understanding that traumatic brain injuries from blast exposure can look like personality changes, that chronic pain from carrying heavy gear for years isn't just physical, that the suicide rate among veterans reflects not weakness but the unbearable weight of carrying trauma alone.
What Community Support Actually Looks Like
Real support looks like employers who understand why sudden noises cause reactions, families who learn their own secondary trauma responses, communities that create belonging beyond shared service. It's peer support groups where dark humor is medicine and no one needs explanations. It's therapists trained in military culture who know that "resilience" in uniform can look like emotional numbness in civilian life. It's friends who check in without needing explanations, who sit with discomfort rather than rushing to silver linings.
This Veterans Day, consider that true honor means witnessing the whole story. It means funding mental health services that don't require veterans to prove they're "sick enough" to deserve help. It means supporting legislation that doesn't make veterans fight for benefits they've earned. It means creating communities where military families find belonging, where the skills that kept soldiers alive translate into civilian purpose, where seeking help is seen as the courage it is.
A Message to Veterans: Your Healing Matters
For veterans reading this who recognize themselves in these words: your struggles don't diminish your service. Healing isn't betraying your unit or forgetting the fallen. It's honoring their memory by living fully. Whether you're dealing with post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, or the complex grief of survival, evidence-based treatment exists that honors both your service and your humanity. The warrior ethos that got you through deployment can get you through recovery—but you don't have to do it alone. That's not how missions work.
Moving Forward: Building a Future Worth Fighting For
The deepest respect we can offer veterans isn't found in parades or discounts or hollow thanks. It's in creating a society where those who served find genuine welcome, comprehensive care, and renewed purpose. Where the hypervigilance that saved lives can finally rest. Where the bonds forged in service create bridges to civilian connection. Where every veteran knows that coming home means more than just returning—it means truly being seen, supported, and given space to heal. Please reach out to us at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective if you would like for us to help walk through this journey to wholeness with you.
