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Deployment Distress

Guideposts blogger and military mom Edie Melson experienced an emotional case of vertigo after her Marine Corps son was deployed. She sought anything to steady her. That turned out to be her faith and the Psalms.

A son's deployment triggers a military mom's emotional vertigo.
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The room began to shift, but I still sat straight on the couch. As it tilted, the spinning began, followed by nausea. If you’ve ever experienced an attack of vertigo, you know the feeling well. Sometimes it passes within a few hours, other times it can linger for days. People who struggle with it learn how to manage their days in spite of the off-balance feeling, keeping a steadying hand on anything nearby.

When I awoke that first morning after our son left on deployment I found myself experiencing an emotional attack of vertigo. My world had shifted and spun out of control. Everything I thought could never happen, had now shifted into the column of “could happen.”

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All I wanted was to crawl into bed, hide my head beneath my pillow and sleep until the insanity retreated. But just like my physical attack of vertigo, this emotional struggle didn’t exempt me from continuing on, despite my disability.

As the days went by, the dizziness decreased, but always lingered just below the surface. It reappeared as my mind wondered to the what-ifs of my son’s situation.

I learned to walk through my days, keeping a steadying hand on my faith. I kept the connection with Him through prayer and reading my Bible. I practically memorized the book of Psalms because those writers connected with the emotional upheaval in my own life. God was my anchor. He never abandoned me, and He’ll be with you, even through an attack of emotional vertigo.

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