Wounds We Share: The Hidden Ties of Trauma Bonding in Veteran Life

Standard Trauma Bonding:

Trauma bonding is a psychological response to abuse where the person experiencing abuse develops sympathy for the abuser, reinforced by cycles of abuse followed by remorse. It occurs when the abused person forms a connection or relationship with the person who abuses them.

Military Trauma Bonding:

In a military context, trauma bonding takes on a different meaning. It refers to the close bonds formed between individuals who have experienced trauma together, often due to shared traumatic events such as combat or other high-stress situations.

Embrace the Suck:

"Embrace the suck" is a military expression that acknowledges unavoidable adversities and encourages individuals to accept and overcome challenges. It means consciously accepting or appreciating something that is extremely unpleasant but unavoidable.

A Veteran's Perspective on Trauma Bonding:

Trauma bonding is often an ongoing joke among military members and veterans, but there's a lot of truth to it. The "standard" definition doesn't quite fit our experiences. Sometimes, it feels like there's an anti-trauma bond with those causing the trauma, like leadership that seems to enjoy making you suffer. But this is what often leads to military trauma bonding—the collective "embracing the suck" among those enduring the hardships, while questioning those dishing it out.

This isn't always about extreme suffering like combat. Sometimes, it's simpler things like enduring a company-wide inventory inspection three times in a row, unloading and reloading the same connex six times in a week just to stay busy, performing 24-hour guard shifts together, or doing push-ups in the mud and rain together.

Of course, there are more extreme cases of combat trauma bonding, which are usually shared in silence and not laughed about later. But I want to focus on the lighter side of trauma bonding and how it weirdly helps in the civilian world transition—and sometimes, it doesn't help at all.

For any veteran who embraced the suck in the military, the civilian world's version of "embracing the suck" can be laughable. What causes your average civilian to get all bent out of shape leaves you sitting there confused, thinking, "That's it?" When you both share the same thoughts about how much something "sucks," the reactions are typically vastly different. Your average civilian might talk about going to HR or quitting. Veterans, on the other hand, avoid HR like the plague because they're often riding the line themselves of being brought to HR. As for quitting, it's not really in our vocabulary. We're used to pushing through and finding ways to avoid that outcome in the future.

Later, when you joke about the shared situation—assuming the civilian didn't quit—the veteran might laugh about it and even throw in some dark humor. Meanwhile, the civilian might still be mad about it, planning their future HR visit or threats of quitting if it happens again.

The point of this rant is just to reminisce about military life, where we get together and laugh about our past sufferings, throwing in dark humor. Because we went through tougher situations, civilian life problems seem much easier to handle and sometimes funny when others get so bent out of shape about things.