Sharing our latest wellbeing tips for war widows, defence and veteran families
As the year draws to a close and the Christmas season approaches, it’s the perfect time to reflect, reconnect, and restore balance. In this month’s Wellbeing Newsletter, we’re sharing 3 practical tips to help you thrive, exploring the power of sharing wisdom, understanding resentment, and embracing the outdoors. These tips are designed to support your wellbeing and strengthen the bonds within your family and community during this meaningful season.
The power of the outdoors on wellbeing
Spending time in nature offers a gentle way to support wellbeing and build connection. The natural world provides a calming environment that helps us feel grounded and present. For families of veterans, outdoor experiences create opportunities to slow down, breathe, and engage with people in safe, relaxed, and enjoyable ways.
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.
Understanding resentment for wellbeing
Resentment isn’t “bad.” It’s a signal, a message that says, I’m giving more than I can. I said yes when I meant no. I’m exhausted from being brave. It often points to crossed boundaries, unmet needs, or parts of ourselves we’ve quieted for too long. Brené Brown reframes resentment as a strong response to unmet needs, compromised boundaries, or being prevented from living your truth. She describes resentment as a buildup of pain, fatigue, and loss of agency that accumulates when we keep giving beyond our capacity.
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
- Name the source.
- Notice resentment without judgment.
- Reclaim agency.
- Rewrite your narrative.
- Connect through hope, not only grief.
- Practice embodied boundaries.
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.
A veteran partner or widow can offer guidance and encouragement to someone newer to the lifestyle, providing practical tips and emotional support, such as:
- Sharing lived experience: insight into Defence life, relocations, deployments, emotional ups and downs.
- Providing social connection: introductions to local support networks, community groups, Defence family events.
- Offering emotional support: listening without judgement, reassuring that loneliness or uncertainty are normal, sharing coping strategies.
- Practical guidance: tips for navigating Defence systems, housing, family support programs, childcare.
- Encouraging self-care and independence: identify personal goals, hobbies, employment or study to maintain identity outside Defence.
- Building resilience: share stories of adaptation and perseverance to normalise challenges and foster confidence for future changes.
Mentoring: purpose and fresh perspectives
Mentoring can be deeply rewarding for the mentor, offering purpose and connection, opportunities to reflect on experiences, and fresh perspectives from newer or younger family members. Offering support fosters a renewed sense of identity and contribution. Sharing hard-earned knowledge and helping others navigate Defence life validates the mentor’s experiences and highlights personal growth and resilience.
Subscribe to our Wellbeing Newsletter for monthly updates on all activities available in your area, what’s been happening in our Wellbeing Program and also for more tips like this.
