Hey guys, welcome to a special bonus episode of the milspouse mastermind show. I’m popping in your ears this week because I had this idea on my heart. And to be honest, it’s been on my heart for a few weeks, but I just kind of let it sit there. And then I started thinking about you and what you’re going through right now and what you need. And I decided we need to talk about this one thing.

[00:00:23] This is the number one thing that you need to know about PCSing that no one is talking about. So let’s talk about what that is and how you can start implementing it in your life today,

[00:01:31] This episode is going to be so helpful if you are new to the military, you have not done a whole lot of PCSes, or it’s been a long time since you did a PCS. But honestly, this information is so valuable for everybody. I’m going to talk about my struggles with my last PCS.

As somebody who moves every couple of years, you would think I would know what I’m doing by now, and stop making some of these mistakes. But the truth is that we all continue to learn

[00:01:54]. Every PCS is different. It has different challenges. And I think this is something that I learned last year. And I’ve kind of alluded to a few times on this show, but I really felt like it was important to share my story and my experience and really help bring about the conversation of why we don’t talk enough about the mental health part of what PCS does to us as people. And what we can do to help set ourselves up for success. Not just for success for our stuff, making it from point A to point B, but for us to get there as whole and healthy people.

So before we dive in to this topic of what you need to know about PCSing and taking care of yourself along the way, I want to remind you that you have just a few days left to get entered in the drawing to win Chrissie Kenaston’s book, What If I Name Her Grace? It’s all about the journey of trading guilt for God’s grace as a military spouse.

[00:02:56]. SAll you have to do is join our free Facebook community. Milspousemastermind.com/community. Head over and leave us a review on iTunes. You’ll get five bonus entries to win. I would love for you to share what you have experienced in this community, what you have learned through the podcast, and what topics you want us to continue to talk about. Because I know that when you leave reviews, that helps me know what to talk about it.

[00:03:34] And it helps other people to find the show. And it just makes an impact on the military spouse community as a whole. So thank you for those of you who have left reviews. If you are planning to do so, please do so before Monday night. That is when this contest ends. And you will be entered to win a copy of Chrissie’s new book.

[00:03:53] Okay. Here’s the deal. It’s summer. which means it’s PCS season for so many military families. To be honest, this is the first summer that I have not either had a PCS or a baby at home. It’s really the first time in many years that I’m getting a true summer. So it’s a little weird to be talking about PCSing when I’m not actually doing it.

[00:04:18] But I know that having that perspective of not being in the middle of it gives me a greater look at what is going on as a whole for military families. And how can I speak truth and life into that. This year is a crazy year for PCSCing, partly because of the housing market and the rental prices. And partly because of the issues with moving companies, having enough workers, finding drivers, getting all your stuff from point A to point B.

[00:04:50] It’s just super complicated this summer. And so many families are struggling. But when I look around at people that are going through a PCS, at people who are talking about how to prepare for a PCS, how to get through your PCS, and what you need to do. Here’s the thing. Most people are focused on how you get your stuff from point A to point B.

[00:05:12] There are so many great resources out there for military families. There are so many other military spouses who are providing quality content related to checklists that you can follow. Labels that you can use. Signs you can use. Lists of what you need to do. PCS binders. And it’s all good stuff.

[00:05:35] But it can be overwhelming. If you went in and followed everybody’s guidance on everything you need to do to prepare for and execute the PCS, it’s a lot. You can spend hours upon hours upon hours trying to prepare for all the things that could possibly go wrong. And spoiler alert, something is probably going to go wrong.

[00:06:02] Now I’ve only had five official PCSes, I think, but I’ve been through enough PCSes at this point to know something is probably going to go wrong. Something might get scratched, might get broken, might not go according to your timeline, your orders might get changed. There’s so many things that could happen.

[00:06:23] You might be without your stuff for a lot longer than you think you will be. I mean, there’s just a lot that could happen. And we can do our best to prepare, but at some point we have to stop worrying about everything that could go wrong with our stuff, and focus on making sure that our selves are being taken care of.

[00:06:47] Because that’s the thing that nobody really talks about when it comes to preparing for a PCS. We talk about how to care for our stuff. And we talk about how to prepare our kids to move. We talk about how to make friends for them, how to get them enrolled in schools, how to do all the things to set up a home. But we forget that major piece. And that’s taking care of ourselves, and our family. Of our mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

[00:07:16] So that’s what I want to focus on today. How you can prepare yourself and make sure that you are taking care of yourself in the middle of your PCS. So you don’t end up like me, having now had the worst PCS ever. I thought I’d been through a lot of different PCSes, but what I learned last summer was that I didn’t prepare to take care of myself. And I paid for it.

[00:07:44] So let me talk about what not to do. And then I’ll give you some tips for how you can take care of yourself and your well-being through your PCS season.

My cautionary tale begins roughly around January of last year, 2020. I started prepping for the PCS that I knew was supposed to come down the pipeline. We hadn’t gotten orders or any kind of confirmation yet, but we knew it was probably coming.

[00:08:15] And so I started getting the house ready to put on the market. I had this whole plan for all the things I was going to do over the next six months to sell the house – put it on the market, get it sold. Get our stuff out the door and ready to go for our PCS. Well, I stressed myself out trying to get the house ready to put on the market.

[00:08:40] And the week that I put it on the market, is when COVID really came to light in the US. They shut everything down and then our house sat on the market for months, while people decided whether they went in to go look at houses or not. And you know, the kids were home from preschool 24-7, and trying to keep the house clean and having strangers walk through at home and not knowing what was going on with the virus and trying to work from home and all the things.

[00:09:09] And so, while I was used to stressful PCSes, this was so much more stress over a sustained period of time. And what I didn’t realize was what it was doing to my health. I’ve said for several years that stress effects our bodies, because all the systems of our bodies are connected. But I really took it for granted that my body would just be able to deal with all the added stress.

[00:09:39] A lot of my normal stress outlets were unavailable to me because of COVID. I stopped going and getting a pedicure. I stopped going to the chiropractor. I stopped getting massages. I stopped going out and having time without my kids. All the things I was used to doing to help myself manage my stress level, I stopped doing. And I had all this extra stress for a sustained period of time..

[00:10:00] PCSing is stressful in and of itself. And so what eventually happened is the week before the movers were scheduled to show up, I had all this stuff that needed to get done because we had an overseas PCS, our first overseas PCS, which is way more complicated, in the middle of COVID.

[00:10:22] And we got last minute orders. We have three different shipments to three different locations that were all happening in a span of three days. And we had to be out of our house that day because we were closing on our house. The new owners were coming in and starting to move in that same day that we had shipments being picked up. It was insane.

[00:10:40] And the week before that, I ended up so sick and fatigued in bed. I literally could not get out of bed. I was like, what is going on with me, with my body? My body is literally falling apart. My anxiety is through the roof. I thought there was something wrong. I had pneumonia or something and I was like, my chest hurts.

[00:10:58] I did a chest X-ray to figure out what in the world is going on. I can’t get out of bed. I have a low grade fever. I have all this chest pain. It will not go away. And to make a long story short, all of that was because of my stress level. There was nothing wrong with my chest other than, because I was so stressed. Feeling physically fatigued.

[00:11:18] The only thing that was wrong with me was that I had super low vitamin D levels. My body was literally reacting to all of the stress and anxiety that I had let myself get to that negative point. And so that’s why I say I do not want that for anyone else. And I’m sharing my story with the hope that it will help you remember that you can’t sacrifice your self care.

[00:11:42] You cannot forget to take care of yourself because you’re so worried about taking care of stuff. Stuff is just stuff. It will either make it to point B or it will not. You can replace stuff. You only get one of you. It is so important to take care of yourself.

[00:12:07] And so, as I was trying to prepare for this PCS, I’m stuck in bed. I go to the doctor and I’m like, what in the world is wrong with me? And the nurse says, well, you’re just not taking care of your stress level. You need a better way to manage it. Well, that’s a great thought, except that I don’t know how to do that in this season.

[00:12:25] . And so that’s why I say it’s so important to have strategy to release your stress if you have additional stress coming in. Because we are all are going to have stress coming in during a PCS. There’s no way to avoid all of that extra stress, that anxiety, that worry that can easily creep in about all the things going wrong.

[00:12:46] You’re away from your bed for multiple nights, sometimes multiple weeks. You’re not sleeping as well. You’re not eating as well, because you’re on the road. Your kids aren’t on their schedule. All of these things are negatively affecting ourselves and our bodies.

So what can we do? Number one, make sure you have strategies to release your stress. It it comes down to do I work on, you know, making sure all my boxes are properly labeled, or do I just go for a walk around the block? Always choose the walk around the block. Make sure you are doing something to release that stress.

[00:13:22] Sometimes it’s just a matter of taking 10 minutes to do a meditation, to pray, to do whatever it is that just helps you take a step back, not think about what needs to happen and just do something that feeds your soul, that fills you with life. So what is it for you that will help you release your stress?

[00:13:49] It can be super simple. It’s just a matter of like moving your body or fueling it with the right foods. Something that you can do to help your body release stress.

Number two, just remember that self-care is not selfish. You need to make caring for yourself, for your health, your mental, emotional, physical health a priority in your life.

[00:14:10] Even in the middle of PCS season, we talked…I’ll look up the episode and link it in the show notes. But a couple of months ago, I talked about how you can stay the course during PCS season and not let a PCS knock you off your game. To your goals and whether those be health and fitness goals, or whether they just be personal goals or business goals or whatever. You can stay on track for your goals, but even more than that, is just caring for yourself, for your body, for who you are as a person, way more important than stuff. It’s not selfish. It’s what you need to be able to navigate this season and help your family navigate this season and set yourself up for the long run.

The third thing you could do is acknowledge the hard; look for the learning points. Let’s be honest. Sometimes life sucks. There are seasons. There are events that we go through that are just hard. It doesn’t do any good to ignore our negative emotions or pretend like they don’t exist.

What we have to do is acknowledge what it is that we are feeling, but then separate the feelings from an action or response. There’s a thought that happens between what we feel and what we do with what we feel, and what determines our action is that thought about the feeling.

[00:15:37] I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s like a light switch in the middle. You know, the trigger is the event. And based on the event, you’re going to have a feeling, but the feeling doesn’t necessarily dictate your response. Your thought about the event does. And so you can say, Hey, I feel really frustrated right now. I feel angry. I feel whatever that feeling is, but how am I going to choose to respond to this situation?

[00:16:04] So we have to choose. Step two is to choose what to do with that feeling. Do we just acknowledge the fact that we feel that way and let it go? Is it something that we need to work on changing our feeling about the situation? Or is it an indicator that something deeper is wrong that we’re struggling in a deeper way.

[00:16:33] And then the third part of that is just looking for what we can learn from a given situation. Hey, you know, this happened, I felt this way. But I can choose a more productive response and reflect on that experience. What can I learn from the situation?

Personal growth is not always easy or quick, but guys, as military spouses, we have so many situations that allow us to grow as individuals, much quicker and much faster than a lot of other people, because we are put in these situations that force us out of our comfort zone. That force us into difficult situations.

[00:17:13] We can either suffer for, or we can grow through. And so the choice is ours. Of what we want that situation to bring to us. What do we want to do with this situation that we feel like is causing us suffering? Do we choose to learn and grow and find meaning from that? Or do we treat it as a victim?

[00:17:37] This thing happened to me, my lifestyle. It’s a choice. That choice is ours to take agency of our life and to choose to learn and grow through our circumstances. Take things one day at a time, focus on what you can control, what you can get done on that day, and then let the rest go.

[00:18:00] Because in the end, what happens is what happens, and what matters most is that you cared for the things that really matter – who you are, your family, your relationships; not your stuff. So do what you can, don’t worry about the rest.

And then I guess the last thing that I would say, and this is not so much a tip as it just is an acknowledgement of reality. Give yourself grace. If you get to that place where you allow yourself to get too stressed, if you get to that place that is just overwhelming to you and where you are. Where you start to physically suffer. I understand. I’ve let myself get to that place and it is possible to get out of it. It is not always a great place to be, and it can take weeks.

[00:18:50] And sometimes even years to rebuild our health and get us back to that place of health and vitality and meaning and purpose and where we want to be. So if you have stepped into that place where it is affecting your mental and emotional, physical health, do what you need to do to get help, to get you back to that place.

[00:19:13] So, if you are feeling frustrated that you didn’t take care of yourself, that you’re not feeling, you’re not where you need to be, and you’re struggling with your health…be it mentally, physically, emotionally, whatever it is. I understand. I’ve been there. We were doing an OCONUS PCS. I got really sick, right?

[00:19:34] When we, our stuff got picked up and then three months later, when our stuff got delivered, I got super stressed again. I guess I didn’t realize that I was stressed, but I developed a horrible case of shingles, which is super, super painful. It can be brought on by stress. So apparently my body was still not processing things correctly.

[00:19:55] I was still dealing with stress, even though I had taken steps to try to mitigate my stress, to try to help myself move towards that place of health. It’s a long process once your body is out of whack. It’s a daily process of just continuing to show up, do what you can, and then give yourself grace and let each day just happen, and do the best that you can for that day.

[00:20:18] That means reaching out to somebody that can give you more intensive support, whether that is through a counselor or through your chaplain through the free counseling offered, through MFLC. I’m not sure what that’s called in all the different branches, but there are free counseling, short term options on base.

[00:20:43] You can go to a company online, like betterhelp.com. Sometimes it might be even seeing a mental health professional. Get the help and support that you need and just give yourself grace. Let the process happen. It happens. We let ourselves get to this place, but if you are not already there, the number one thing I can tell you about your PCS is to make sure that you are properly caring for yourself.

[00:21:09] I hope this was meaningful and helps you in some way. If you are going through a PCS, pop into our Facebook group. Let us know if you’ve already moved, where you’re moving, what has been the most stressful part of your move, and what you have done to help mitigate your stress in this season. let’s share ideas, support each other, encourage one another.

[00:21:31] And just to remind ourselves that we are not alone, there are so many other people who are going through difficult situations, just like us. We can be there for each other. Don’t forget. You can enter to win a free copy of Chrissie Kenaston’s book, What If I Name Her Grace? simply by joining the milspouse mastermind free Facebook community.

[00:21:53] Milspousemastermind.com/community or do a search in Facebook for Milspouse mastermind. You can also get five bonus entries simply by leaving us a review on iTunes and the fastest way to get there is milspousemastermind.com/show. I can’t wait to read what you write. Until next week, may you live filled, fueled, and full of joy.