Emotional Labour is different from physical labour but no less taxing, in fact, it can be more so. Emotional labour can be thought of as how we manage our emotions and expressions within both our professional and private life. We are good at managing our emotions in the military but a key finding in our research was that the cultural and social dynamics veterans face when experiencing transition comes with a significant level of emotional labour that can often be unnoticed. For some veterans, the experience of transitioning from the military to civilian life lasts many years if not decades, and they have difficulty in juggling their military identity and civilian identity, struggling to navigate the complexities of the civilian world.
Ray a Royal Marine, spoke at length on finding purpose after leaving the military. While he has now been in the civilian world for decades, far longer than he spent in the military, Ray still notes that he is dealing with the same things that he felt on initially leaving the military. He talked of how his identity is linked to a strong sense of ‘standards’, which inform his behaviour and expectations of others:
Ray: It’s still the same today. Still learning all the time. I’m still dealing with the same things I was in 1990 today. That will never go away because of the difference in attitude, the difference in the way I do things compared to the way other people do things and what I expect people to do. That hasn’t changed at all.
Chris a reservist who served in Afghanistan is an example of a veteran who, like many, did not initially anticipate the impact that leaving the military would have on him, nor how long experiencing transition would last.
Chris: The welfare officer […] said to me, seriously, this will affect your life and I just looked at him and burst out laughing and I went, I don’t know what you’re on about and I genuinely didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I’ve had a good war, I enjoyed it and he said, no, no, this will come back and haunt you at some point and I never got it then. I do now.
Willis, another former Royal Marine, talked about how upon leaving the military, he had to ‘become’ a different person.
Will: I had to be a different Will. So I had to explore my own masculinity, I had to explore, and I did a lot of therapy around that and I used to quite enjoy therapy like this because you can talk, just talk, can’t you, talk about yourself, it’s quite nice.
These snapshots of our research show how veterans do not experience transition in the same way, nor is it a linear process. The emotional labour that veterans undertake over years if not decades of transitioning into civilian society occurs through continuously negotiating different cultures for a long time. In this way, Transitional Experiences can last across a lifetime. Please feel free to share some of your experiences.
