Periods of deployment and extended absences are a familiar part of life for many defence families. While distance can bring added emotional and practical challenges, it can also highlight the many meaningful ways families continue to stay connected. Maintaining wellbeing during these times often relies on intention, creativity, and the strength of community.

This month, we’re sharing wellbeing tips from our latest Wellbeing Newsletter that focus on nurturing connection during deployment and absence, the benefits of paying it forward, and the importance of remembrance and reflection.

Maintaining connection during deployment and absences

For many defence families, periods of deployment or training away from home are a familiar part of life. While these times can bring challenges, they also reveal the remarkable adaptability and creativity of families who find ways to stay connected across distance. Social connection does not always rely on being in the same place as it can grow through small, intentional gestures that remind us we are valued and remembered.

During deployment and absence, small routines can become powerful anchors. A handwritten letter, photo update, pre-recorded audio message or a care package can offer comfort for both the sender and receiver. These intentional routines become touchpoints that strengthen emotional connection and help maintain a sense of closeness during long stretches apart.

Sharing experiences in creative ways

Connection doesn’t always mean constant communication. Sometimes it’s about finding creative ways to share experiences. Some families keep a journal that travels back and forth, gradually weaving together two perspectives into one story. Others swap playlists filled with songs that capture their mood or memories. These gestures create bridges between two worlds, helping each person feel included in the other’s life.

For those at home, connection with community can be just as important as direct contact with loved ones. Defence partners, widows, and families often turn to each other for practical support, understanding, and companionship. Spending time with others who share similar experiences can ease feelings of isolation and strengthens resilience. Community groups, social clubs, and informal catchups become important anchors, offering a sense of belonging during times of transition or uncertainty.

Ultimately, maintaining connection during deployment isn’t only about staying in touch – it’s about nurturing hope, stability, and emotional closeness. Whether through a simple message, a shared ritual, or the support of community, these moments remind defence families that even when distance cannot be avoided, they are never navigating it alone. The bonds formed and strengthened during these times remain a powerful source of resilience, comfort, and wellbeing.

Paying it forward: A mindful practice inspired by Brené Brown

Mindfulness isn’t only about meditation or calm moments; it’s also about the way we choose to show up in everyday life. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and wholehearted living reminds us that mindfulness begins with awareness of our own emotions and continues in how we connect with others. One meaningful way to nurture this kind of presence is through the simple act of paying it forward.

Brené emphasises that connection is built through small moments of courage, empathy, and kindness. When we hold space for someone having a hard day, offer a helping hand without being asked, or express appreciation just because it feels right, we practice mindful compassion. These gestures may seem small, but they ripple outward, reinforcing the message that we belong to each other.

Pairing awareness with intentional kindness

For individuals and families alike, mindfulness can be as simple as pausing during a busy day to notice our thoughts, feelings, and surroundings. When we pair that awareness with action; choosing kindness, patience, or generosity, we bring Brené’s teachings to life. Paying it forward becomes a way to honour both our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around us.

Brené often highlights that meaningful change happens in ordinary moments. A friendly message, a supportive conversation, or an unexpected act of generosity can shift someone’s entire day. And when these acts are grounded in mindfulness, they remind us to be intentional, compassionate, and present.

This month, consider choosing one small way to pay it forward. Whether it’s offering time, encouragement, or kindness, your action can spark a chain reaction of positivity. In showing up for others, we also reconnect with ourselves, and together we can create a more wholehearted, mindful, and connected community.

Importance of taking time to remember and reflect

Taking time to remember and reflect can be a powerful way to gain insight and carry forward valuable lessons to share with others. Looking back on both the challenges and meaningful moments of our lives allows us to gain perspective, recognise personal growth, and preserve memories that matter. When these reflections are shared with others, they can provide reassurance, guidance, and a sense of continuity within the community.

Reflection can take many forms. It might involve sharing stories about managing deployments, relocations, or the emotional ups and downs of service life. It can also include remembering moments of connection, achievement, or resilience, times when families found strength in one another or in their wider community. By talking about these experiences, veteran families can offer newer members practical insight into navigating Defence life while normalising the emotions that come with it.

Learning from challenges and lived wisdom

Reflecting also encourages us to recognise the lessons we’ve learned. What strategies helped you cope during difficult times? Which routines, support networks, or personal habits provided structure? Sharing these reflections allows others to benefit from hard earned wisdom while also fostering a sense of belonging and shared understanding.

For those doing the reflecting, the process itself can be deeply rewarding. Looking back on life experiences can highlight personal growth, resilience, and achievements that might otherwise be overlooked. It can reaffirm the value of one’s contributions to family and community and strengthen the connections that make the veteran family network so supportive.

Remembering and reflecting isn’t just about the past, it’s about using experience to support others, strengthen bonds, and carry forward the lessons that matter most.

Being outdoors with others allows relationships to develop naturally. Walking side by side, sharing a view, or tending to a garden together can open space for conversation and companionship. These shared experiences help build trust, understanding, and emotional closeness. Nature’s steady rhythm offers a calming backdrop that supports connection.

Healing in the outdoors with activities

Outdoor activities can be adapted to different preferences and abilities. Whether it is a gentle walk in a local park, sitting by the water, exploring a community garden, or joining a guided nature walk, there is something for everyone. These activities strengthen family bonds, encourage shared memories, and provide purpose and joy. For families who have faced relocation or significant change, outdoor activities can help meet new people and build supportive networks.

Engaging with nature does not have to be complex or time consuming. Even small, regular moments outdoors can bring feelings of connection, belonging, and calm. If you are interested in joining one of our wellbeing walks for social connection, check out our wellbeing activities here.

For war widows and families of veterans, resentment can feel protective. It can keep the bond with your loved one alive and hold space for pain. Listening to resentment with kindness can reveal what it’s trying to teach you. This resentment may be directed at systems that glorified sacrifice but failed to offer support, at a partner who is gone, at themselves for not “moving on,” or at cultural expectations of strength that silence grief. These pressures create dissonance, isolation, and a shared identity around unspoken hurt.

Noticing and engaging with resentment matters. When explored with curiosity, it can become a pathway to establishing safety, boundaries, self-compassion, and post-traumatic growth.

How do we work through resentment: from pain to self-reclamation

Sharing wisdom through mentoring

Sharing wisdom through mentoring can be deeply beneficial and mutually enriching, especially in the veteran family community. When a veteran family member with years of lived experience shares insights, practical advice and encouragement with someone newer to the community, it helps newer families make connections, build confidence, resilience and a stronger sense of belonging.

Connecting through shared physical activity

Participating in physical activity is an excellent way to foster connections with other people. Something that is essential for our wellbeing. Participation in shared activities builds relationships, reduces loneliness, fosters trust, communication and cooperation which develops our resilience and boosts our social wellbeing.

Activities can be undertaken one-on-one or in a group. There are endless possibilities to suit preferences and abilities including gentle activities like walking or more adventurous nature-based activities like canoeing or hiking. There is an activity to suit almost everyone!

Participation in shared physical activities has many benefits for social connection for you and the whole family. Undertaking physical activities one-on-one or in a family group provides shared experiences which help to open communication channels and make precious memories, helping to reconnect and build relationships, strengthen family bonds and identity. Activities can be as simple as kicking a ball in the backyard or taking a walk on the beach or in the bush; it is not the activity that matters, it is the time spent together, and the experience shared.  

Veteran families have a unique understanding of the challenges of making new social connections, and participation in shared physical activities is an amazing way for everyone in the family to foster new friendships after relocating. Connecting with people who enjoy the same physical activities as you, helps to break down barriers, provides avenues for conversation and create bonds. Participation in activities and new experiences with other people helps to reduce isolation, build support networks and strengthen community connectedness, belonging and collective identity, which has a wonderful impact on our overall wellbeing.

Reframing anger as a foundation for healing

In Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, she speaks about anger as being an emotion that we feel when something prevents us from reaching a desired outcome or when we feel that there has been a violation of perceived justice. Anger can then be understood as a response emotion. Brene describes this as an action or full-contact emotion. This means that anger is a powerful emotion which can activate our nervous system impacting our physical body and mind through our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Studies have shown how this disruption to our nervous systems delicate balance suddenly or compacting over time can lead to dysregulation and illness or injury.  

Understanding anger with Brene Brown

This research highlights the importance of working with and healing anger to support the rebalancing of our nervous system thereby preventing ill health and maintaining a sense of wellbeing. In order to acknowledge and work through anger it is important to explore the role of anger as an emotion. Brene challenges the notion that anger is a primary emotion, instead pointing out that anger can often act as an umbrella covering other more complex emotions such as grief and shame below.

Brene says that anger often acts as a warning sign asking us to stop and reflect upon what might be going on for us or someone else below the surface and behind presenting behaviours. For example, Brene argues that anger in its purest form is a compassionate response to experiencing or witnessing perceived injustice. Therefore, if we remain in a curious conversation with anger, we can more mindfully connect and hear our own and others deeper lying needs for healing.  

It is important to look at what lies behind the presenting emotions and behaviours of the people we walk alongside. Through our Writing Through Grief online wellbeing activity, we focus on exploring grief, an emotion which can often be hidden by anger through creative writing frameworks. This structured form of exploration gives each participant permission to name, own, bear witness to, and heal from their anger and hidden pain.

Brene shares that when we deny our anger, we deny our pain. This means that it is important to our health and wellbeing to be able to safely externalise and mindfully explore our anger to better understand ourselves and those around us acknowledging validating, and harnessing anger as an access point to forgiveness, growth, insight, and healing.