Relationship Education for Military Couples: Recommendations for Best Practice

• Author: Benjamin Loew,Howard J. Markman,Annabel C.L. McGuire,W. Kim Halford,Melissa G. Bakhurst
• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12211
• Published date: 01 June 2017

Relationship Education for Military Couples:

Recommendations for Best Practice

MELISSA G. BAKHURST*

BENJAMIN LOEW

†

ANNABEL C.L. MCGUIRE

‡

W. KIM HALFORD

*

HOWARD J. MARKMAN

†

Military couples have a number of distinctive strengths and challenges that are like ly to

influence their relationship adjustment. Military couples’ strengths include stable employ-

ment, financial security, and subsidized health and counseling services. At the same time,

military couples often experience long periods of separation and associated difficulties with

emotional disconnect, trauma symptoms, and reintegrating the family. This paper

describes best practice recommendations for working with military couples, including:

addressing the distinctive challenges of the military lifestyle, ensuring program delivery is

seen as relevant by military couples, and providing relationship education in formats that

enhance the accessibility of programs.

Keywords: Relationship Education; Prevention; Military; Couples; Relationship

Satisfaction

Fam Proc 56:302–316, 2017

Military couples are relocated frequently and spouses are often separated because of

deployment and training. Service members are often repeatedly exposed to combat.

This paper focuses on the experiences of military couples from the United States and Aus-

tralia. The United States deployed the largest number of personnel into recent conflicts in

the Middle East, with long-term ally Australia a numerically smaller yet important con-

tributor to the war effort. Relationship education (RE) has the potential to help military

couples manage challenges, and in this paper we describe guidelines for how RE can be

offered to enhance its positive benefits for military couples.

Rates of help-seeking for mental health difficulties are low among U.S. military person-

nel (Hoge et al., 2004). Personnel often do not utilize psychological services due to fears

about career implications; personnel who are found to suffer from mental health concer ns

can be removed from active duty (Zinzow et al., 2013). In this paper we argue that univer-

sally offered RE has the potential to enhance reach of mental health promotion services to

military personnel.

*School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

†

Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO.

‡

The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Melissa Bakhurst, School of Psychology,

The University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD, Australia. E-mail: m.bakhurst@uq.edu.au.

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Family Process, Vol. 56, No. 2, 2017 ©2016 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12211