PCS: The Most Stressed-Out Military Acronym Around
Acronyms are funny things. On the surface, they are just letters. Letters could mean anything depending on the weight and attention we give to it. Could be a medical condition. Could be you won something. Could have to do with cute, furry, loveable animals. It could even have an, eek, dating implication.
OR it could mean moving your whole life, leaving communities you love, saying “see you later” to relationships you have grown to smile just thinking about…and starting new. The latter sentence is what PCS means. It is a “permanent change of station” in the vast array and depth of military acronyms that deserve their own ever-changing, magical Harry Potter-type book.
PCS season is when most military service members and their families, generally around the summer, pack up their life and start over somewhere new. At first glance, this seems exciting.
Somewhere new. A new coffee shop, new people to meet, new places to explore, a fresh start.
But PCS, indeed one of the most stressed-out acronyms around, is also a source of doubt.
Will I find a job?
Will employers be willing to hire someone connected to the military?
Will my children make friends?
Will I make friends?
Will my child be allowed to try out for teams that already had tryouts?
Will I be lonely, starting over yet again?
So many “wills” and this is a topic that gets significant attention from those associated with the military. It’s written about a fair amount within the world my four walls generally sit in.
The U.S. Army, large and tank-like-roll-through-your life, as it may seem on the outside (or inside), invested energy, research, and money into helping people deal with the stress of the unknown like this. It’s an effort that caught my attention roughly 9 years ago.
The Army partnered with the University of Pennsylvania to create master resiliency training sessions — and they are full of positive psychology practices that can induce real change. When I selfishly became a resiliency trainer, I think the motivation started more for pulling me out of a “realistically negative” mindset to a “realistically positive” one. Honestly, the concepts work.
But the word PCS is like Darth Vader. It’s strong, creeps up on you, and has theme music you can hear coming. I’ll go ahead and say it — the force is strong with that one. It sets into motion so many life-altering “what can go wrong” scenarios. And trust me, lots can go wrong.
I listened to two TED talks this week, and it reminded me that Darth Vader doesn’t have to win. One such discussion was from Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist, on our relationship with stress, and the second was from a psychologist named Susan David on owning our emotions.
David recently conducted a survey with more than 70,000 people and found that 1/3 of them either judge themselves for having “bad emotions,” such as sadness, anger, or grief — and/or actively push them aside. Additionally, we push this on others, perhaps inadvertently shaming them (especially children) for emotions we see as “negative” by jumping to a solution (and you know the military is all about solutions, folks).
What happens in that attempt to see the sunny side of the street is that we don’t allow ourselves to see that normal emotions are neither bad nor good.
David says, “…when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not how it should be.” To not want to experience these things or want them to go away is what she refers to as “dead people’s goals.” David said something I think we all, PCS or not, need a reminder of:
“Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don’t get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life.”
Darth, you met your match with Dr. David. She is right.
McGonigal says if you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to it. The Army and the University of Pennsylvania have an acronym for this, too — ATC — Activating Thoughts and Consequences.
What we tell ourselves influences our emotions and our emotions generate a physiological response.
McGonigal cited a study in her TED talk that tracked 30,000 adults in the U.S. for 8 years. The study asked people:
1) How much stress did you experience in the last year?
2) Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?
And then, they used public health records to find out who died.
The bad news here is that people who reported experiencing significant stress the previous year had a 43% increase in the chance of dying.
Yep, Tot. Muerto. Morto.
But…that was only true for the people who believed stress harms your health. People who experienced stress but didn’t view it as harmful had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including those who reported relatively little stress.
How we think and act about stress can transform our experience with it. When we view our response to stress as helpful, we create what McGonigal calls the biology of courage. When we connect with others when under stress, we create resilience.
If discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life, then how we view it and react to it is crucial. If an Army leader was reading this, he/she’d say, “That is the BLUF. Why didn’t you say that at the beginning?”
BLUF, because acronyms run deep, is Bottom Line Up Front. It’s different than the BLUF because we don’t experience life with 20/20 vision.
We must move a few times.
Lose a few things.
Gain a few things.
Feel discomfort and grow from it.
Be lonely and realize we weren’t defined by it.
We need chances to grow.
We need a chance to choose how to manage uncertainty.
So, Darth Vader, this is what I say to you and the impending beat of your PCS theme music. I will tell my children and myself to own all those incredible, normal emotions.
- Feel sad. Feel happy.
- Feel anxious. Feel curious.
- Feel it all but pack your mess up.
Embrace the biology of courage because you are so courageous.
I can’t control if my household goods arrive damaged or not at all. All I can control is organizing it and praying that all ends well. If it doesn’t, well, Momma is going shopping.
And if you live in a community where people come in on that PCS bus, open your heart. Be willing to meet a new friend, even if that means they may have to leave. In this world, it often means they can come back too.
Be willing to feel discomfort reaching out to someone new. Be willing to hire that talented and qualified spouse who can’t capture his or her many, many, many attributes into a one-page resume.
Be willing to take the new kid on your hockey, soccer, gymnastics, or fill-in-the-blank team — even after tryouts have already happened. Be willing.
The moment we replace all the “wills?” with “willings,” imagine what could bloom.
Darth Vader, you don’t scare me anymore like you used to. I’ve got your number, and dance to your music now.
Let’s all be willing to dance, even when we don’t know how the music will end.
