Two Worlds, One Family: Disability, Military Life, and the Systems That Fail Both
I am consistently struck by the way military personnel and veterans advocate fiercely for their family unit. That advocacy speaks to love, to loyalty, and to a particular kind of vigilance that service life cultivates. But I am equally aware of the tensions that sit beneath it, the friction between the demands of military life and the civilian systems that families must navigate, often alone, often mid-move, often under pressure that has no civilian equivalent.
I write this with a particular vantage point. I grew up as a child of the forces, with disability and a rare disease diagnosis. I later became a military spouse. I know, from watching my parents and my partner, that the person serving is most at ease when they know their family is supported. That is not a small thing. It shapes operational readiness, mental health, and the sustainability of a career in the forces.
And yet: disabled people, those with SEN needs, and those managing long-term conditions face barriers every day, regardless of any military connection. So what difference does the military aspect make? Are military families any further disadvantaged? And should there be explicit consideration of support for them? I believe the answer to all three is yes. Here is why.
PARENTS - SYSTEMS GENERATED TRAUMA - AMPLIFIED:
A significant recent report highlighted something that practitioners in this space recognise immediately: Systems Generated Trauma - the way disabled children and their families are traumatised not by their condition, but by dysfunctional public services when they reach out for support. This is the civilian baseline. The military family navigates all of this, and more.
My own childhood offers some illustration. Multiple moves meant that tracking of my health needs was fragmented. Notes were lost between boroughs. Referrals expired. Continuity of care was a theoretical concept. My mother managed hospital trips, surgery, and life-changing medical decisions before I was eighteen - often while my father was deployed, at a time when communication across distance meant waiting. There was no video call. There was not always a voice call. He coped in his own way, from a distance, and that distance had its own cost at the time.
Today, I hear from parents carrying a foot in two worlds simultaneously: military life with its deployments, postings, and culture, and civilian systems with their referral pathways, tribunal processes, and institutional indifference. They are navigating their child’s care whilst managing the pressure that dual-world living creates on the family as a whole. Some have quietly told me that they believe these combined pressures have contributed to marriage breakdown, which raises the further question of what that breakdown means for both the adults and the children involved.
We need to take the emotional support for the whole family seriously — not as an add-on, but as a structural commitment.
PARENTS - THE SKILLS GAP THAT NO-ONE PLANS FOR:
There is another layer that receives little attention: the practical and relational upskilling that parents sometimes need when their child’s needs are unusual or complex.
My mother did not suddenly know how to sign when she found out I was deaf. That was not negligence, it was a gap that any hearing parent faces, no-one is born with all-knowledge. I have worked with parents who have struggled with their child’s emotional dysregulation, arising from neurodiversity, language limitation and the frustration that can accompany it, overwhelm from a variety of causes, acquired brain injury including the aftermath of encephalitis or meningitis, or the disruption of significant family change such as divorce and relocation.
In this work, Non-Violent Resistance has been a meaningful framework, supporting parents to find the steadiness from which co-regulation in the home becomes possible. The goal is not compliance. It is connection, and the capacity to hold that connection under pressure.
For military families, the pressure is layered. The solo parent during deployment does not have the luxury of gradual skill-building. They need access to support that is timely, appropriately delivered, and that accounts for the context in which they are parenting.
SPOUSES - DISABLED BY THE SYSTEM:
Moving to spouses: again, we begin with the civilian baseline, and then we add.
Access to Work exists to support disabled people and those with long-term conditions to remain in employment. In principle, it is a vital lifeline. In practice, it is fraught with barriers that accumulate into something close to inaccessibility for many.
• You must already be working, and demonstrate a minimum income of approximately £6,500, before you can claim.
• New applicants are currently being told they may wait 37 weeks simply to be allocated a case worker — and that is before assessment.
• The total process, from application to decision, can span two years.
Military spouses are more likely to be self-employed, a pattern they share with disabled people, for whom employment flexibility is often a necessity rather than a preference. A disabled military spouse may find self-employment the only workable option, and then discover that the support designed for them is structured in ways that exclude that very choice.
Then there is the pace of forces life. Everyone in this community knows that things change. Postings happen. Deployments shift. The two-year timeline of an ATW application does not correspond to any rhythm that military family life recognises. For the person serving to know their spouse is at home, supported, and able to sustain their own life and work - that matters. When the system fails the spouse, it does not stay contained there.
What we are left with is a situation where a disabled military spouse who needs support to work faces a system that requires prior income they may not have, a wait that outlasts a posting cycle, and a process that assumes a stability of circumstance that military life does not provide. There is nothing to do but be disabled by the system — and that cost is borne not only by the individual, but by the whole family, and ultimately by the service member themselves.
WHAT THIS ASKS OF US:
I am not suggesting that the military community is uniquely deserving of support that others should not have. I am suggesting that the existing barriers, for disabled children, for parents navigating complex care, for spouses navigating the same, are compounded, in specific and documentable ways, by the realities of service life.
Frequent moves. Periods of solo parenting. Communication constraints during deployment. Postings that interrupt referral pathways. A culture in which asking for help carries its own weight. These are not abstract considerations. They are the texture of daily life for families across this community.
The emotional support for military families and spouses needs to be structurally embedded, not episodically available. The skills gap for parents needs to be anticipated and resourced and the skills of spouses supported, not sidelined. The systems that are supposed to support disabled spouses need to be genuinely accessible to people whose lives do not fit the assumptions those systems were built around.
That is what this work is for.
Let us know what you think in the comments!
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V.G.
About Verity Green
Based in Catterick Garrison, Richmond, Bedale, North Yorkshire and Online. Therapy and training with trauma, long term conditions and disability, adoption, care leavers, managing high conflict environments in the home, recovering from high control, and managing change from intense environments (such as sport, Armed Forces Community).
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