The Trauma of Waiting: Veteran Family Support Groups

Trauma is not just about what happens in a single moment. It stretches over time, filling every day, every thought, everyexpectation. Trauma is not only about explosions, losses, and injuries—it is also about waiting. Waiting for a call, waitingfor a message, waiting for a return. It is living between the lines of the news, between short responses like "I'm fine,"between the fear that the phone may never ring again. 

Waiting is a unique form of pain because it has no clear ending. There is no point where one can say: "Now it’s over."Even when a soldier returns home, the trauma does not simply disappear. It remains in those who waited, in those whospent sleepless nights, in those who were too afraid to look out the window, fearing the sight of uniformed officersbringing news that no one wants to hear. 

The trauma of waiting is especially insidious because it is silent. People rarely talk about it because there is always someone who has "gone through worse." Does a mother who fears for her son every day have the right to cry if another mother has already lost hers? Does a wife, who does not know if her husband will return, have the right to her pain if there are those who have already received “the call”? Do children have the right to be upset that their father is always away when some children’s fathers will never return? 

But pain cannot be measured or compared. It has no scale, and it does not become less just because someone else’s is greater. That is why it needs a space where it can be shared and experienced together. 

Overcoming Pain Together 

Our support group for relatives of service members is a place where this pain can be spoken about. Where waiting ceases to be a silent isolation and becomes a shared experience. Where people can find others who understand withoutwords, who know what it is like to live in constant tension, who also postpone important conversations "for later" becausethey fear that "later" may never come. 

Group support is not just about talking. It is a space where trauma no longer remains locked inside a single person. Itfinds a voice, an echo, becoming something that can be carried together. And in this shared experience, a way forwardemerges. 

Waiting means constantly being between life and its absence, between the future and the unknown. But even in this in-between space, it is possible to find support. Not in loneliness, but in the presence of others. Not in silence, but indialogue. Not in isolation, but in unity. The trauma of waiting does not simply vanish, but it can be lived through in a waythat does not destroy, but instead gives strength. And this is only possible together.