Parenting with a Service Background: Breaking Cycles, Building Connection

You promised yourself you’d be different. That whatever happened before, whether in your own childhood, your military career, or both… would stop with you. You wouldn’t raise your kids in an environment of fear or distance. You’d be emotionally available, open, supportive. You’d be the dad or mum who listened, stayed calm, showed up.

But somewhere along the way, it got harder.

Harder to stay patient when they’re emotionally reactive.

Harder to stay present when your nervous system is screaming to shut down.

Harder to be the parent you wanted to be, because parts of you are still shaped by the one you had to be.

Service life trains you to suppress emotion, maintain ‘composure’, and push on. Those are useful, sometimes life-saving skills in the right context. But they don’t translate well to family life. Parenting isn’t a mission you complete. It’s a relationship you build in real time, with all the mess and unpredictability that comes with it.

And often, it’s not just the military training that gets in the way. For many veterans, there’s also earlier trauma. Maybe no one ever taught you how to sit with a child’s distress, because no one ever sat with yours. Maybe you were told to “man up,” “crack on,” or “stop crying, or “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Maybe that became your template for love, safety, and discipline.

So when your child cries, you freeze.

When they defy you, something in you flares.

You love them fiercely, but connection feels… hard.

You find yourself either getting sharper than you meant to or retreating into silence. You’re physically there but emotionally miles away. You catch yourself thinking, They’re just tired, or I don’t have time for this, or It’s not that big a deal.  And later, when they’re asleep or gone, you’re flooded with guilt, wondering why it’s so difficult to do what feels so obvious.

But this isn’t a failure. It’s a nervous system doing what it was ‘trained’ to do. Survive. Protect. Hold the line.

The problem is, relationships don’t respond well to emotional armour. They need softness, presence, and repair.

And none of that is intuitive when all you’ve ever known is discipline, structure, and the reward of getting things “right.”

Therapy can help you name what’s going on beneath the surface. The shutdowns. The reactivity. The shame. It can help you slow down enough to notice what’s being repeated, and what you want to do differently.

Attachment theory, trauma-informed practice, and neurobiology all support this, that children don’t need perfection. They need someone who tries. Someone who comes back. Someone who can tolerate their emotions and help them make sense of what’s going on.

But to do that, you need to be able to tolerate your own emotions first.

That’s the work. That’s the practice.

You’re not weak because this is hard. You’re not failing because your instinct is to pull away. You’re someone who was trained to survive extreme environments, now learning how to live and love in ordinary ones.

And that, perhaps more than anything, is what strength really looks like.

Being a strong parent isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. Therapy offers the space to explore the patterns that get in the way, and the tools to build something new.