An Introduction to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Military Relationships

Episode Summary of “An Introduction to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Military Relationships”

Welcome to the first episode of the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Military Relationships, hosted by Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky. This podcast is your trusted guide to understanding and improving relationships within the unique and challenging world of military life. Designed specifically for military members, veterans, and their families, the Communicate and Connect Podcast dives deep into the strategies and insights needed to build strong, connected, and resilient relationships.

In this debut episode, Dr. Polinsky—an experienced military marriage counselor, a military spouse, and a dedicated PhD student at the time of this episode recording in marriage and family therapy—shares her personal and professional journey. As someone who grew up in a military family and has faced the challenges of frequent moves, deployments, and long-distance relationships, Dr. Polinsky knows firsthand the struggles military families face. Through the Communicate and Connect Podcast, she offers actionable tools and science-backed strategies to help couples improve communication, rebuild trust, and thrive in the face of military-related stressors.

Whether you’re coping with the emotional toll of PCS moves, navigating the complexities of deployment separations, or striving to create a deeper connection with your partner, this episode introduces the themes and support the Communicate and Connect Podcast is known for. Dr. Polinsky also shares her passion for using the science of relationships to empower military couples and families to create meaningful and lasting connections.

Tune in to the Communicate and Connect Podcast to discover how small changes in communication can lead to big transformations in your relationships. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode filled with tips, strategies, and stories designed to support you on your journey to stronger, healthier relationships. Let’s dive in!

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Episode Transcript for “An Introduction to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Military Relationships”

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:01]:
This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual couples and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Military Relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinsky, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes. We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast. And if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too, because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:08]:
Hi there. So my name is Liz. It’s Elizabeth Polinsky. And if you’re listening to this podcast, then I figured we should probably just get to know each other during this first episode and you can learn a little bit about me and why it is I do what I do.

So I’ll start off by telling you just a little bit of background information about me. So I’m from a military family. Both my parents are Navy veterans and I’m also a military spouse. My spouse is also Navy. I’m a therapist, so I do mental health counseling.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:41]:
I’ve been doing mental health therapy for about five years. Most of my work has been at a Veterans affairs clinic, working with individuals who had experienced military sexual trauma and who had ptsd. And now I do predominantly couples counseling and marriage therapy, and I’ve been doing that for a while now. And I’m also a PhD student in marriage and family therapy. I’m about halfway through my PhD program at the time of this recording anyway.

And you know, overall I’m just trying to live my best life and I’m trying not to fail at relationships because I often felt like in the past I had failed pretty epically in relationships, which we will get to at some point. So I already talked a little bit about what I do. I am a therapist.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:02:35]:
I do mental health counseling as well as marriage and couples counseling. I’m a PhD student and I mostly work with military members, veterans and their families. You may be wondering, why do I do so much work with military members? I think that’s probably because I come from a military family and because I’m a military spouse. There are so many unique challenges. Like being in a. Being in a relationship is hard enough. There are so many challenges with communication just in relationships. If you are in a relationship, then you probably know what I mean.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:03:11]:
If you’ve ever been in one before, then you also probably know what I mean. But then you add on military life, and there are just these unique challenges, careers changing. Whether you’re a military member and you’re moving every couple of years and you have new jobs, some of those jobs are related to your actual career path, and some of them might not be.

If you’re a military spouse, then you’re moving around as well, picking up and starting over both with your career and your family. It’s just rough. So the frequent moves, the long distance especially, I know a lot of, even me and my spouse, we were long distance for a while, just so that way I could still focus on some of my career goals while he was gone with the military. And so, you know, deployment is rough when your spouse is away at deployment. And it’s also hard if you are both in the United States, but you live far away.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:04:05]:
The other reasons why I really like to work with military members, veterans and their families is just because probably due to all those, like, extra life stressors from military life. But there are higher rates of domestic violence among military families. There’s a really high rate of military sexual trauma that happens, really high rates of alcohol and substance use in military populations. So the military maybe just especially stressful for both individuals and families.

And the more people that can assist families in navigating all of those stressors and having the best life that they can, I think the better. And which brings me to why do I also focus on relationships? And I guess this is where it would say, like, it’s probably because I failed so much at relationships. I. In the past, I lost two different fiances just because I, you know, felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:13]:
I would read lots of books and I would try to fix the problems that I saw in our relationships. And it was really, really hard to change the patterns that I was seeing in my relationships. And I think outside of, you know, having struggled with relationships myself, it’s also really, really meaningful when I get to help other coup families have a better relationship, when they can feel close and connected and they feel like they can communicate, it’s so meaningful. Individual therapy is very, very meaningful.

But when you work with a couple or a family, you just get to have this huge impact helping people feel whole in their relationships, helping them feel fulfilled. And it’s very fulfilling work that I do when I get to see couples come together with stronger relationships. The other part of that is that maybe, like, Some science is that when you help a marriage be stronger or a couple relationship be stronger, it promotes growth. Like even if I never work with any of the kids, if I just help the couple in a family, it can trickle down into improving kids lives.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:06:26]:
And then in that way you’re actually helping generations learn what it is to to have a healthy family dynamic, to have healthy romantic relationships, what good boundaries look like, how to communicate. And so it’s just a very comprehensive way to help help someone in their life. It’s just something I’m so passionate about. Really, really enjoy it. Like I said, I lost two fiances and it was really, really hard to become aware of my own relationship patterns and go about figuring out how to change it.

And I am so grateful for my previous therapists that I had and then the ones that motivated me to become a therapist myself and the other therapists in my life who mentored me along the way to really help me one, be able to help other couples in other relationships, but also be able to learn how to have a healthy relationship for myself. Part of why this is so important is because we all need relationships in order to thrive in life. And when people don’t have meaningful, close, connected relationships with others, they end up having a lot of problems.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:41]:
Loneliness. I often say that loneliness is the silent killer because when we feel lonely, we have more health problems, our life expectancy is lower. And what is even more painful is if we’re in a relationship and if I’m in a relationship with someone else and I’m still feeling lonely in the relationship, then that can be excruciating like nothing else can. I guess I’m just trying to say relationships are so important and we need them to thrive.

And I have been there and I have felt that pain of my relationships falling apart in front of me and having no idea what to do to make them work, to help them grow, to help them heal. And it was excruciating for me when I lost those relationships. I think the other part was, at least in my case, and what I think is probably common across the board, is there’s sort of a lack of training in relationships. In my high school and in my middle school, I didn’t learn, you know, anything about how to have healthy relationships.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:08:47]:
And my own family upbringing did not have very many great role models. In fact, it wasn’t until I was 16 that I actually saw a relationship where I was like, wow, that is the type of relationship that I want. I didn’t even know that could exist.

And so I Think, you know, there are a lot of us out there who haven’t had great relationship role models, who never got the education or the training or any sort of, like, relationship skills to really know what to do to have the best relationships possible. Going off of that note, well, I guess I kind of already said that. So, like, my parents divorced. I said I didn’t really have good role models until I was 16. My parents were in the Navy.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:32]:
And that had some unique challenges related to that. It was very, very, very hard not having my dad around because he was gone with the military so often. One of the things about what we learn in families and why improving relationships and being really intentional about learning how to improve relationships, why that’s so important is because when I haven’t had role models and I haven’t had sort of like, education or training on how to have good relationships, we can often be sort of doomed maybe to repeat the same patterns as our parents.

And repeat or not even. It’s not even always our parents. It’s just the environment that we grew up in. If you didn’t grow up with your parents or even if you did grow up with your parents, but there were a lot of other people around. The types of relationships that you see around you are often the templates for what you learned relationships were supposed to look like.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:30]:
And a lot of people come to me when they start working with me and they tell me, you know, I never wanted to be like my parents in this way. Or I vowed I wasn’t going to do that, and now I find myself doing it. And that’s because that’s the template that we’ve all learned is, well, it’s whatever was around you growing up is the template that you learn and the script that you have for your relationships.

The other part is that people will often repeat their same patterns in relationships. And I know this is definitely the truth for me is that as I was going through my various relationships that I had before I was married, I was often repeating the exact same problems in each relationship. Even though I was reading a lot of books and I was trying to change things, I was working really hard to change things, and the same patterns kept on happening.

I really want to help people not get stuck in patterns like that. They don’t have to be destined to just recreate the patterns from their family or fall into the same types of patterns that they see their friends or other people fall into, or even the same patterns that they’ve been in in terms of relationships over and over and over.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:11:44]:
There is science out there to help the science of relationships and the science of romantic love that I want to sort of be able to disseminate to people and help people understand it and apply it to their lives so that way they really can have the best relationships possible.

I think something that I believe at a very deep core level is that everyone deserves to be loved and that loving is one of the greatest gifts. It’s a gift that I can give myself. To love someone else is a gift for myself and it’s also a gift to that other person. And being loved is one of the greatest gifts that someone else can give me or give you. Oftentimes we just have to get out of our own way in order to have the fulfilling relationships we want.

And so that’s what this podcast is all about is how to get out of our own way using the science of love relationships in order to communicate better with our significant others in our life and have really fulfilling connections.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky [00:12:55]:
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for our free 10 week relationship email course.

This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it. While I am a therapist, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not considered therapy and it should also not be a replacement for therapy. If you think you need a professional of any kind, you should definitely go find one. Until next time.