Holding It Together: A Veteran’s Quiet Discipline

You’ve left the military. You’re doing everything you’re supposed to. Working. Paying bills. Making polite small talk at work. But inside? It’s not you talking. Not really.

You’re performing.

You’ve become skilled at saying the right thing, staying agreeable, holding your tongue. You keep the darker humour in check. You stay quiet when someone makes a naive comment about war. You nod through the day, act normal at the barbecue, laugh at the jokes you don’t find funny.

And it’s exhausting.

Some veterans speak about flashbacks. Others talk about nightmares. But many say nothing at all. They just get on with things… on the outside, anyway.

In civilian life, they’re often praised:

“Reliable.”

“Level-headed.”

“Cool under pressure.”

And maybe they are. But it takes work to hold that together. This isn’t about pretending to be OK. It’s about carrying on despite the undercurrent. The tension in the jaw. The tightness across the shoulders. The edge that never really goes away.

The Hidden Cost of Composure

Military culture rewards control. You learn to compartmentalise, to function under duress, to put the mission first. But what’s useful in uniform doesn’t always serve you after it. In fact, it can make things harder. You know how to stay calm. You know how to absorb stress without flinching. You also know that sharing too much, or at all, can feel risky. Indulgent. Unfamiliar.

So you don’t.

You listen. You nod.

And you carry on holding it together.

But here’s what gets missed: that holding itself is graft. And over time, it can start to shape the self—flattening experience, muting emotion, stalling relationships.

Avoidance, Dissociation, and the Quiet Disconnection

What looks like calm may actually be avoidance: a natural trauma response that helps protect you from what feels overwhelming or unspeakable. It can show up as busyness, distraction, keeping people at arm’s length, or convincing yourself that nothing really gets to you.

Dissociation can follow, often unnoticed: zoning out in conversations, forgetting parts of the day, feeling detached from your own emotions. It’s the mind’s way of shielding you from pain when it doesn’t feel safe to process it.

And then there’s emotional suppression: pushing down frustration, sadness, even joy, because somewhere along the line you learned that strong feelings aren’t welcome, or useful, or safe.

These are all adaptive strategies. They make sense in context.

But they come at a cost: your sense of connection, your ability to rest, the depth of your relationships.

In the Trauma Response Series, we explore how these patterns emerge, and more importantly, how to unpick them, gently and with care.

A Different Kind of Strength

Psychological resilience doesn’t mean never being impacted. It means adapting well, with awareness.

That includes learning to notice the pressure you put on yourself to perform well, to avoid mistakes, to never burden anyone.

It includes recognising the early signs of stress before they become exhaustion, or withdrawal, or unspoken rage.

And most importantly, it includes giving yourself permission to pause the performance, to speak plainly, to feel safely, to reconnect meaningfully.

The Next Step

You don’t need a crisis to seek support.

You don’t need to explain everything.

And you don’t need to give up your edge.

What you might need is a space that doesn’t require you to be fine.

That’s where therapy begins.