August 24, 2009 
By Jacey Eckhart
Are you trying to change the way you feel about military life? I’m not talking about turning yourself into one of those creepy women who seem to have no life outside their service member. I’m talking about hitting that point in your Bitter Little Military Wife stage that you recognize your husband is a pretty good guy, really. That the high school boyfriend who just checked in with you on Facebook is still (ack!) living with his mom. That if you let yourself get any more bitter you are going to start tasting like bok choy. Coffee grounds. Ear wax.
Yup, you have clearly reached that point at which you know it would be helpful to your own happiness if you could magically change the way you feel about the demands of the military. Poof!
But you have one problem, don’t you? Deciding that you are sick and tired of being that BLMW and changing into a happier woman are two totally different things.
How do you change? I mean, really, really change. Change is no joke.
Think of the times you’ve tried to quit smoking, get organized, lose weight, exercise. The reason those four topics keep an entire fleet of women’s magazines in business is because change doesn’t come just because you want it to come. If it did, I would have substituted bok choy for Cheetos long ago and I’d weigh about nine pounds by now.
Understanding how human beings actually change their behavior is one of the most crucial skills military families learn. That’s why I was so intrigued by Alan Deutschman’s book Change or Die. Deutschman is the executive director of Unboundary, a consulting firm that helps big business navigate change. When he researched change, he wasn’t really thinking about military spouses. Instead he looked at case studies of people who needed hardcore changes in their behavior. He studied car companies with skyrocketing costs and drug users who kept being sent back to jail. He studied heart patients who had to eat cleaner and exercise more if they wanted to live another day.
What he found was that people usually think they can inspire change with what Deutshman calls the 3Fs: fear, facts and force. For those drug users, those motivating factors would be the fear of going back to the soul-crushing misery of prison; the fact that people die from drug use; and the force of actually being locked up. For we military families trying to change how we feel about military life, the fear that you will be alone for the rest of your life whether you are married or not. The fact that divorce rose from 2.5 percent of military marriages in 2001 to 3 percent in 2005. The force of refusing to move to a new duty station because your toddler likes her current daycare provider.
Surely fear, facts and force are enough to make anyone change.Surely five minutes in a prison shower should be enough to make an OxyContin habit seem like a bad, bad idea. Surely the idea that you’d have to date guys who live with their mamas is enough to make your airman look a lot like Matthew McConaughey.
Except that they don’t. Fear, facts and force may make logical sense, but those things don’t actually motivate lasting change in our behavior. Instead, Deutschman observed that real change came with what he called the 3Rs: relate, reframe, repeat. For the drug users, this meant that they lived in a working group home with other reformed drug users who quit using, found work they could do, made it through the day with some aplomb. They reframed by learning to think of themselves as being part of a large extended family that had just immigrated to a new community. They repeated their new behaviors by acting as if they were not junkies every minute of every day for the months they took part in the program. They achieved change.
From my observations of military families, I’ve seen the bitterest of BLMWs find a relationship with another spouse who was like them only happier. Then they reframed their beliefs. They went from thinking that the military was something their soldier or sailor inflicted on the family, to gathering evidence about how this military thing was who their guy was, not just what he did for a living. Finally, they repeated this behavior constantly by acting as if they could carry on—even on the days they thought they could not.
Hating the military is something many family members do. It’s part of our culture. But at a certain point, that hate, that resentment outlives its usefulness. We want to strip it off like a wool coat in August. That’s one of the times we military family members need to take the time to think through Deutschman’s 3Rs. We need to relate. Reframe. Repeat.
Until we can’t imagine life any other way.
Jacey Eckhart is a syndicated columnist for CinCHouse.com