Coming Back Together: A Guide to Successful Reintegration After Your Partner Returns from Military Deployment

With more than two decades of experience working with families and veterans, Sayers, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is well qualified to give advice to spouses and partners of military service members and to veterans on how to avoid the many relationship pitfalls that typically occur after someone comes home from a war zone or any other risky overseas assignment. In this self-help book, he provides clear and useful advice filled with examples of couples who coped and others who didn’t. Much of the advice follows common sense: join “friends or relatives in activities that are enjoyable”; “help your partner and your children increase the amount and quality of enjoyable time that they spend together”; and “when you feel yourself driven to interrupt in a discussion with your partner, stop yourself and keep listening.” All of the advice is well-thought-out and tailored for the unique and complex issues that arise when a loved one returns home from war to peace. (July)