Rethinking Resilience: How Military Families Are Affected by the Resilience Narrative with Jennifer Barnhill

Episode Summary of “Rethinking Resilience: How Military Families Are Affected by the Resilience Narrative with Jennifer Barnhill”

Have you ever felt like you had to put on your “brave face” even when everything inside was crumbling? Many of us in the military community wear our resilience like a badge of honor, but sometimes that badge can start to feel quite heavy. You might notice that while everyone else is praising your strength, you’re actually feeling more disconnected and alone than ever.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jennifer Barnhill, military family reporter and the 2025 Navy Spouse of the Year, to talk about her new book, The Military Stories You’ve Been Told and the Ones You Need to Hear. We explore how the word “resilience” has morphed from a clinical term into a cultural expectation that can sometimes leave us feeling gaslit or dismissed .

What You’ll Learn:
The Origin and Evolution of “Resilience”
The “Performance” of Strength
The Impact on the “Home Front
How the Narrative Affects Your Relationship
Moving Toward Authentic Connection
The Hidden Reality of “Presenting” Resiliently
The Role of Nonprofits and Community Systems
A New Perspective on “Dependents”
The Truth About Systemic Gaps
Why There’s “Always More to the Story”

Don’t forget to check out 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.

Guest Speaker Bio – Jennifer Barnhill

Jennifer Barnhill is a journalist, researcher, and fierce advocate for military families. She is a columnist for Military.com and the host of Military Dinner Table Conversations, a reverse town hall exploring the conversations military families are having around their dinner tables—conversations that directly impact recruitment and retention. She is the 2025 Armed Forces Insurance Navy Spouse of the Year. She is a 2023 Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program Scholar and served on the board of the League of Wives Memorial Project, which helped erect the first statue honoring the advocacy of military spouses. Her work has been featured by CNN, The War Horse, Military Times and The Independent and her research has been cited by the White House.

Jennifer walked away from a PhD scholarship after falling in love with a service member, not realizing she wasn’t just marrying a man—she was marrying the military. She unexpectedly fell in love with the military community too, but was soon shocked to discover that while military families took care of each other, the institution did not. It often made life harder. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Jennifer pursued a Master of Public Administration from UNC Chapel Hill while volunteering within the community to better understand the broken systems she was writing about. The experience gave her a front-row seat to how policies are made—and how they fall short.

Armed with this deeper understanding, she returned to journalism to spotlight some of the overlooked issues impacting the community: families facing food insecurity, surviving spouses fighting for earned death benefits and would-be recruits turned away due to outdated medical policies.

These and countless other experiences culminated in her debut book, The Military Stories You’ve Been Told: And the Ones You Need to Hear—an urgent examination of who gets to tell the military’s story, and why that must change. Through it, Jennifer invites readers to reconsider what they think they know about military service—by listening to the hidden all-volunteer force, military families.

Connect with Jennifer Barnhill: Website – Substack – Facebook – Instagram –  LinkedIn – Twitter
Order the book here: The Military Stories You’ve Been Told

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Episode Transcript for “Rethinking Resilience: How Military Families Are Affected by the Resilience Narrative with Jennifer Barnhill”

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.

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.

You’re listening to episode 72, Rethinking Resilience: How Military Families Are Affected by the Resilience Narrative with Jennifer Barnhill.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Jennifer, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I know that you just recently wrote a book, and so I’m very excited to hear all about it, and I know you’re a military spouse too.

Maybe we can just start off with having you share a little bit about yourself and the book.

Jennifer Barnhill: I’m Jen Barnhill. I’m a military family reporter. I am the 2025 Armed Forces Insureds Navy Spouse of the Year. and I recently wrote a book, I actually have it with me, the military stories you’ve been told. And the ones you need to hear. And it chronicles some of the research that I have done over the years as a military family reporter.

Hearing from folks whose stories have been told, but they’re kind of peripheral to the military stories that we think about when we look at the news. Sometimes we think of, the welcome home signs, and then that sometimes, the folded flags and those are the only things that the American people know about us.

And so, my book hopes to kind of paint a better picture of what some of these ideas that we think about the military, what else is to the story? Cause there’s always more to the story, right? So that’s what this book seeks.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. That’s so cool that you’re doing that because as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about the times that I’m just interacting with people, and they find out that my husband’s in the military and they have movies in their mind about what life is like, or they’ll make comments and it’ll be like, well that doesn’t really fit my experience.

So, glad you’re doing this book, can you share a little bit about like what drew you to writing the book?

Jennifer Barnhill: I think there’s a lot of people who say, like, I never thought I would write a book. And I really do think that. One of my favorite things to do as a journalist is to write sentences in as compact a manner as possible. It’s like a challenge that I have with myself. So I never really wanted to write a book.

But as I was collecting so many stories in my reporting, there just wasn’t space to tell it all, and it just didn’t feel complete. You get edited to only a thousand words or something like that in an article. It doesn’t give the nuance and complexity that is available to you in a book where you can kind of go into the research a little bit more instead of just linking to the research.

But as far as like writing the book or getting started in the space in general, it always usually starts with one story, right? It’s a story that sparks your interest, that makes you wanna understand a problem or understand where someone’s coming from.

And so those stories show up in this book, those stories that kind of made me go, huh? What else is to this topic here. And so then I dug a little deeper and put it in the book so that people would not just have it in my head. I wanna be able to share what I’ve learned with others to help paint a better picture of the military.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. And I’m thinking it might be nice to hear those stories, whether you were a military spouse or somebody totally not connected to the military.

Jennifer Barnhill: As a military spouse, I think I’m kind of in the story too, right? So, I know we’re here to talk about resilience, so I’ll tell you a story that kind of sparked my curiosity about resilience and I think holds a value to both our community in the military and outside as well.

I met someone named Caitlin, and discovered that two, both of her sons actually had different cancer diagnoses. And she was, yeah, I mean it’s obviously that’s a lot on its own, right?

How do you deal with that as a parent? How do you navigate in military healthcare system? How do you navigate care? How do you do all that while moving? All of those complications.

The thing that really stood out about her story is when I met her, she has the lipstick. I like to put makeup on, but I’m not good at it. Like she’s put together in the way that you know she’s good at that, right?

And she shows up with smiles and you’re like, how are you just not totally crumbling apart right now given what you’re going through? And she shared with me that she went to the military medical facility, where she was getting care for her children and she was asking for a case manager.

She needed help dealing with the paperwork and dealing with the bureaucracy. And when she got to talking with that person, unfortunately they were like, I am so sorry. But they were honest with her because I had compassion for her. They were like, we can’t give you a case worker.

She was devastated. She’s like, why could that possibly be? I have two kids with cancer. Who is more in need of this. And she asked, if I had come in here with my pajamas on, with no makeup, no hair done, just looking disheveled with coffee stains all over me, would you be giving me this same answer?

And she said no, because she did not present as someone who was falling apart or in need of help. She was presenting outwardly a resilient military spouse, and therefore not at the top of the list of need, despite having tremendous need.

And so that story really made me wanna understand how resilience shows up in our community, how we use the word, how the military uses the word, and maybe how it has morphed from its original intent and actual definition into something different within our community.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, so can you maybe talk a little bit about how resilience is defined, and how you think it was originally meant to be used and talked about. And maybe how that’s changed over time.

Jennifer Barnhill: Clinically, there’s not a standard definition. In fact, there’s a lot of confusion around the word. There’s this idea of a trait versus a state, which means that, for example, the state, like right now I’m very sad, but I am not depressed, right?

So the idea of someone defining themselves as resilient or I am responding with resiliency, I’m responding to that scenario. So resiliency in its most zoomed out form is the idea of bouncing back, so you’re tested in some capacity and you bounce back to your original shape. The term was originally generated to describe materials, so like a metal or a rubber, and its ability to spring back to its original shape.

It’s not necessarily originally used to describe people, whereas there’s other definitions in this space that are maybe a little bit more human centered. Grit is one of those, coined by Angela Duckworth at her research. So in the military community, there is a variety of definitions in the book actually goes into some of them that are listed on military one source.

But reality is it’s someone’s ability to present in a specific way that they come back to the original shape in not just internally, it’s external as well where you’re being observed to being resilient because what I will say is. How it’s originally supposed to be used is in that coming back to your original spot.

But if you think about it, when you go through something hard, often you don’t go back to the way you were before. So the very beginning definitions, it’s almost an impossibility for us to be resilient, to come back to our original shape through hardship. But currently how I see it play out in the community is more of a gold star to wear on your shirt or your jacket. You’ve earned a badge of I’m a resilient person.

I can call myself resilient. But there isn’t a standard measure, like how quickly should Caitlin have responded and bounced back from a devastating cancer diagnosis times two. I don’t know what that measure looks like.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, and I really appreciate you saying like you don’t bounce back. Because I’m thinking about often what I’m doing with clients in a counseling setting, whether it’s individual or couples is like how do we grow through this? Not that we’re meant to be the same and somehow stay the same through our whole life experience.

We’re meant to grow just like we grow from infancy to toddlers, to teens to adults. And so I’m really glad to hear you talking about that because it’s interesting to that it has been kind of used in this way to be like, oh, you’re not resilient enough, maybe.

Like, if I think about kind of the culture, my own lived experience in the military world of like, you’re struggling because you’re not resilient enough.

Not because what you’re going through is hard. I don’t know if this is fitting. Yeah.

Jennifer Barnhill: And so, the history of how this came to be is documented in the book and it looks at the cultural things that were happening in the military community when resilience became part of the community structure and how they used it to train military service members in the battlefield in an acute moment.

Resilience is lifesaving, right? It’s the ability to see something traumatic and continue on and serve and be safe. Like you keep yourself safe this way. It’s measured in a very acute way where you respond to one instance, it’s not studied widely over a longer period of time, over repeated acts of rising to the occasion or springing back.

So the military started to train people in resiliency through programs like Battle Mind and others, and would offer training. And one of the things that they did by design was remove it and move it away from the clinician’s offices and they did a train the trainer model where they would remove the stigma of seeking mental health care by allowing others to be trained by their peers.

And while that had a positive effect, there was no evidence that they were actually, it wasn’t successful according to Ireland study that I found. And so it’s this idea that when it entered the culture and people started to train their peers, however well-meaning it was, and even if many of them did a great job, it ended up being something that became cultural more than it was clinical.

And therefore it lost some of its original meaning and intent along the way. Not by malicious design, just by accident almost. And now when we use the term resilience, I see it as it’s not so much about your inner self as much as how you present in the military community.

I think of an example, a friend who I was with in Japan suffered a miscarriage. And the response of many peers who had children was, “Oh, happened to me too. It’s gonna be okay.” And her husband was deployed at that time, she was just devastated.

So devastated. And those words were intended to comfort her, but that’s not the effect that they had. It was the, let’s present as outwardly bouncing back quickly. Not necessarily for the wellbeing of my friend, but for the wellbeing of the community.

We can’t solve the fact that he’s gone right now for you, so you should just respond with resilience because we can’t fix the underlying issue of what’s going on and which they can’t, right?

But when you have this idea of resiliency and bouncing back. You don’t always have to fix the underlying problems, or you don’t have to look at those. You look at the person responding to the problem more than you look at the problem itself. So that’s just one of the ways that I’ve seen it play out and I document in the book.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. I guess I just am feeling like a sense of sadness myself, and almost like some frustration as you say that because it just feels so dismissive. As you share that story about the miscarriage, it just feels so dismissive of her experience. And I know that I’ve talked to other military spouses.

I’ve seen it in all sorts of military spouse Facebook groups, kind of like a resentment maybe around like, I’m supposed to be resilient. I’m supposed to be just fine with all of the things. I’m just going with my own experience here, and obviously you have the research with the book, but yeah a sense of resentment that I’m getting pushed to the back. My needs come last. I’m supposed to just be fine. There’s no room for me to have any struggles.

Is this pretty similar to what you’ve been finding?

Jennifer Barnhill: Yeah, it absolutely is and it makes sense, right? Like none of this is malicious, none of this is bad. If you think about it from a couple’s perspective, like you and your partner. Or me and my partner, if my husband is having a hard time, it’s hard for me also to be having a hard time and then be able to support our children at home, right?

We often will rely upon each other and lean on each other in those up and down times. In the military, family, community, it’s very challenging if someone or many people all lose it at the same time, right? We are essential to readiness because if our service members are deployed we are falling apart at home, it’s this idea that we’re putting them at risk.

It’s this idea that we are not ready on the home front. And so there is good in not everyone falling apart all at once. But the problem with that is then how do you choose who gets to fall apart? Right? We don’t wanna be the one to tear everyone down. So we want to rise to the occasion.

We do it to ourselves. It’s not so much that others are always doing it to us, like we want to rise to the occasion. We want to make sure we are supportive of our service member while they’re gone. We’re holding up the home front. We’re doing this too. It comes at a cost though, right?

It comes at a cost if we don’t eventually have a breather, we don’t get that downtime. So I think that it there are solutions to some of these self-policing moments where we make it safe for people to have their feelings and say, you know, no, that’s not gonna hurt you.

In the present there are things called human factors boards in certain military communities, and one of those human factors could be financial readiness. The other is your household. If your household is destabilized, that is a risk for you. And they talk about this in a military setting.

So it isn’t in our minds, it’s real. It’s not a gaslighting situation. There is a documented connection between our ability to rise to the occasion and military readiness. So instead of being like let’s be resilient, we need to train for it properly. We need to equip people through supporting them directly, not just putting on a happy face.

And that’s enough to be resilient ’cause someone could be outwardly frustrated, but inwardly very much resilient. It’s not about just the happy face.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, that makes so much sense. Because I’m thinking about the connection between mental health and resilience, and I’m thinking about the connection between my mental health and there is research that indicates that my mental health impacts my spouse’s mental health and vice versa.

And so I’m just thinking about what would it look like to actually train people in resilience? And maybe you have thoughts on this that you cover in the book but my sort of initial thought is that how do we provide more mental health support for military spouses?

Jennifer Barnhill: You can’t really train for resilience, equipping them by giving them a better version of that, by giving them mental health skills. In the book, I kind of go into this idea that there is this concept of germ theory, and it’s a little bit nerdy, but originally they discovered like how important it was to wash your hands because of a study that an individual who observed an obstetricians clinic or basically a labor and delivery ward.

And they noticed that the doctors and the medical students were going into the morgue and not washing their hands in between. And the outcomes for those pregnant women and the newly delivered women were far worse than the outcomes for the midwives who did not go into the morgue.

And so this idea of handwashing as a solution. But you think about it like the doctors are the cure, right? They’re the things that are going to help you through your delivery. The reality was, is the cure was part of the toxin, right? They didn’t know that they weren’t washing their hands properly. And so resilience has become part of the toxins.

If I take that analogy a step further, it’s kind of like COVID, right? When we learned how to wash your hands properly. That’s running your hands under the water. You’re not getting the benefit of true, thorough hand washing.

You’re not using the soap, you’re not singing your ABCs while you’re taking 20 seconds to wash your hands. We need to remove the barriers to teach the proper hand washing, right? It takes time, it takes effort, it takes money.

And it’s not just a running your hands under the water. Right now resilience just is like, well, we want you to be resilient, but we’re not gonna show you how.

We’re not gonna teach you how to wash your hands. And so that analogy is, it is one that I use in this book because it’s not that resilience is bad. Doctors are great, but they need all the data, all the information to be able to know. Is this cure now something that is being used against families as almost a toxic positivity and it’s not really helping them inwardly.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Toxic positivity. I think that feels like the perfect word when I am thinking about my own conversations that I’ve had with other military spouses around the idea of resilience. And I’m so glad you said that because you said it and it like, hit me and I was like, yes. That’s how it feels.

And I guess I’m finding myself wondering in all the stories that you collected were military spouses talking about what really helped instead of just telling me to be resilient, was there a mention of like, this is what I would actually need, this is what I would actually help.

Jennifer Barnhill: Yes, so the main, and this isn’t from the spouses, this is just from data. So the thing that is hard about emotions that people have reported is not so much your ability to let go your emotions or the forced holding in of emotions. It’s your ability to choose which of those pathways is healthy for you.

So like repressed decision making, if I can’t show my emotions when I personally need to show my emotions, that does harm to me. Naturally, maybe it doesn’t do harm to me because I’m a person who processes quietly. I don’t need to let it out. I don’t need to show anything outwardly.

But that freedom of expression is underlying a lot of what’s going wrong with resilience per se, not so much that there are resources available to people there. They do exist, but stigmas are still there.

And so the book looks at not necessarily what I would recommend to a friend or a clinical perspective, it looks at the institution, how can the institution remove the dependency on military families to have to rise to the occasion in instances where the system could be fixed?

So in the case of Kaitlyn, my friend, who I told you about earlier in this call is, well, is there enough caseworkers? Did we not have enough caseworkers to justify like a person with two children with cancer? Why are we relying on her resiliency to not fund more positions? That’s the system failure that forces families to rise to the occasion.

Like how many times have we called Tricare to be assigned a care provider who is no longer accepting Tricare? And then only to be told, oh.

And when I say Tricare, for those who are not military, that’s the military healthcare insurance provider. And so when you call back to say, Hey, that provider’s no longer taking patients, well, that that person may be taking other patients just not TRICARE patients.

And you’ll be told by TRICARE that, hey, you need to call another number to tell them they’re no longer taking patients. So the system sees the person who is informing them that there’s a broken process. They put the onus on them, and so that’s where the system creates instances where it fails people and asks them to be resilient instead of fixing the problem.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, I’m hearing it sort of as like the whole book is really advocating for maybe systems change that we could approach this differently that the military could focus on systems that would better support families versus families having to find even more ways to be even more resilient.

Jennifer Barnhill: Yeah, and that’s the chapter in resilience. There’s chapters that look at how military spouses are called dependents and really they have huge role to play in the community and adds additional data to that and stories, of course, looks at the role of nonprofits.

And how they help our community function within this space and help us honor our promises of taking care of our own, looks at recruiting themes and how military families are integral to recruiting. There’s a lot of different themes, the premise is there’s always more to the story and there’s always more to the military story.

There’s what you know on the surface, and then there’s all of these experiences of military families, of other parts of the population that maybe don’t have a lot of a voice, that if you heard those stories, it would give you a more well-rounded understanding of the military experience, which is essential.

I think, you know, even though we’re a small percent of the population, we take up a lot of news stories. We’re in the news, and it’s always important to understand what you’re hearing and have more context so that you are informed about. Not just hearing what you’re told. You know, get to know a military service member, a family member, and you have a better understanding of where all your taxpayer dollars go.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. So I’m thinking where can people find the book?

Jennifer Barnhill: They can get it at Barnes and Noble. They can get it on Amazon. Local bookstores carry it as well, through bookshop, which is if you wanna shop small, they can buy it there. Pretty much anywhere you would wanna buy a book. You probably can find my book.

There’s gonna be a digital version as well as obviously the print version for those who might prefer that.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes, we’ll make sure that the links are in the show notes. But I’m also thinking there are so many stories, and I know you’re a journalist, and so if someone wanted to share their stories with you or if someone wanted to connect with you in some other way, what would be the best way to do that?

Jennifer Barnhill: Through my socials on, I’m primarily on LinkedIn and on Instagram, and so I’m sure I can give you the handles, we serve too on Instagram and my name pretty much on LinkedIn. But those are the two places I show up professionally just ’cause I can’t keep up with all of the rest.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, I understand. As we end here, what is one message or one takeaway that you’d want our listeners to leave with?

Jennifer Barnhill: Okay. I know you said one, but I’m gonna give two, a real quick ones though, is there’s always more to the story and military family stories do not supplant our service member stories.

They accentuate, they give a better, more well-rounded experience, and therefore it’s not a competition. The more stories you hear about the military, the better. And then as far as resilience, you are not alone in feeling like that word maybe just doesn’t sit right. There’s something about it that in the way it’s been used, it isn’t sitting right because it feels like;

Am I really resilient? Am I rising to the occasion? Did I do it right?

And this book, this data hopes to validate your experience because it’s not just you. There are other people who feel like they’ve been asked to rise to the occasion one too many times. It then is reasonable and there’s, I think, a proposal of how we can get a healthier, better way forward together.

Because this is not about like pointing fingers, it’s about coming to better solutions so people don’t have to deal with this anymore. That they can feel welcomed and find a place of respite and not feel gaslit by resilience sometimes.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. Okay, great. Well, Jen, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Jennifer Barnhill: Thank you for having me. It’s been an awesome talk. Thank you.

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.

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