The Aftershock: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Service, Silence, and the Physiology of Homecoming

Author Bio

Sue Oatley is a trained Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) teacher, Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) facilitator, addictions specialist, and founder of The Aftershock Project. She studied Social Anthropology and works at the intersection of lived experience, relational practice, and trauma-informed education, drawing on mindfulness, ACT, the Prosocial Matrix, and social anthropology. Sue writes as the daughter of a decorated British Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) veteran, Mentioned in Despatches, a thread that runs quietly through all her work.

Abstract

This autoethnography explores how the legacy of military service lives on in the body, across generations, through silence, vigilance, and love. Written as the daughter of a British Army EOD veteran and a practitioner of mindfulness and ACT-based interventions, it weaves story and theory to explore how physiology, culture, and relationship intertwine in families shaped by service. Drawing on social anthropology, polyvagal theory, and relational practice, it asks how love can harden into protection, and how awareness and community can soften it again. The Aftershock suggests that coming home isn’t only psychological, but also physiological and cultural, a process that unfolds through connection, not control; co-regulation, not composure; belonging, not endurance. Through story, reflection, and theory, The Aftershock illuminates how trauma and love coexist, and how awareness, compassion, and community can transform inherited patterns into pathways of healing.

Keywords:

autoethnography; intergenerational trauma; military family; polyvagal theory; anthropology; mindfulness; relational practice; homecoming; nervous system; belonging

Positionality & Ethics

My father is a decorated British Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) bomb disposal expert, Mentioned in Despatches (MiD), and I a practitioner and facilitator of mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) based interventions. I write this from both sides of the blast radius — as a daughter shaped by a soldier’s silence and as a practitioner who’s spent years helping others listen to their own nervous systems. My account is situated, partial, and embodied. Memory is selective; loved ones’ privacy is protected through omission and composite detail. I use autoethnography not to generalise, but to offer a resonant lens on how physiology and culture braid across generations and how relational practice can support a gentler homecoming.

Methodology Autoethnographic Approach

This inquiry adopts an autoethnographic method, using lived experience as both data and lens. The writing process itself functioned as analysis: cycles of memory, reflection, and theoretical engagement allowed personal experience to be examined through multiple frames, physiological, cultural, and relational. I drew on journals, embodied recall, conversations with family, and professional facilitation notes gathered over several years. The iterative act of writing, reading, and re-writing served as both data generation and sense-making, guided by the principles of mindfulness and relational awareness. In keeping with autoethnographic practice, the aim was not objectivity but resonance, to illuminate the personal as a pathway to collective understanding while maintaining ethical sensitivity and respect for those whose lives intersect with my own.

1. Introduction The Personal is Physiological

I didn’t understand it then, but my dad’s silence wasn’t distance, it was containment. He’d carried more than he could ever say, and that weight lived not just in his body, but in ours too.

I grew up in the shadow of service. My father, a bomb disposal expert in Northern Ireland, brought home a quiet that was thick with things unspoken, the kind of quiet that settles into walls, into gestures, into the body itself. As a child, I learned to read that silence like a language. To stay small. To smooth things over. To become calm, so others could be too.

He served with 321 EOD Squadron at the height of the Troubles, a period when bomb disposal units were called to multiple live incidents a day. He was Mentioned in Despatches for gallant service. That formal recognition, though a source of deep pride, also marked the moment when something in him shifted. The physiological toll of defusing explosives under extreme threat is not easily left behind. The composure required for that work, breath steady, hands still, body calm in such pressured conditions, demanded the level of containment that rewires the nervous system. It’s a mastery born of necessity, but it leaves traces. He carried that calm home, and it shaped the emotional landscape of our family, composed, the stoicism, the silence, the vigilance, the unspoken discipline of survival. 

It’s taken me most of my adult life to understand that this is what we now call trauma and is not just an event in the past, but a pattern that lives in the nervous system, one that shapes how we love, connect, and protect. What I’ve come to call the aftershock isn’t just the lingering impact of what happened, but how the body learns to survive what it cannot yet understand. This paper asks how embodied vigilance and silence are transmitted across generations of service families, and how awareness and relational practice might transform these patterns.

This paper is both personal and conceptual. It explores how the embodied legacy of military service, the vigilance, the silence, the strength, the love, reverberates through generations. It’s about what happens when service comes home, and how those conditions shape identity, belonging, and connection long after the uniform is tucked away.

To understand this inheritance more deeply, I turned to the frameworks that helped me give language to what I’d lived. Using an autoethnographic approach, I weave together three threads that have guided my personal understanding over many years: 

• Social anthropology, which explores how cultures create belonging, identity, and ritual; 

• Polyvagal theory, which maps how our nervous systems move between safety, mobilisation, and shutdown; 

• Relational practice, which reveals how healing happens in the spaces between us, not in isolation, but in connection.

Through this lens, The Aftershock becomes both a story and a study. It asks: How do the embodied impact of service shape not just the veteran, but the family, the child, the next generation? And how might understanding these patterns, not as pathology, but as a form of protection, help us come home, physiologically and relationally, to ourselves and to each other?

2. Theoretical Framework, Between Cultures and Nervous Systems

These frameworks, anthropological, neurological, and relational, offer maps of belonging and repair. Yet theory can only take us so far. To understand how these patterns live and breathe, I turn to my own experience. What follows is the view from within, a personal account of what it means to grow up inside that aftershock.

Social anthropology and neuroscience might seem like strange companions, but together they describe the two worlds every human moves through, the external and the internal, the cultural and the physiological. Both are concerned with how we find our way home after disruption, home in the body, where the nervous system can rest, and home in our relationships, where belonging can begin again.

Anthropology: The Spaces Between Worlds. 

Anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep (1909) and Victor Turner (1969) showed that every culture has ways of marking change, rites of passage that help people move between worlds. Birth, marriage, death, initiation, homecoming: each one involves a moment of liminality, that in‑between space where the old identity dissolves but the new one hasn’t yet formed. In that threshold, community matters most. The rituals of transition are not just symbolic; they are social technologies for holding uncertainty and reintegrating people back into belonging.

For many who serve in the Armed Forces, the entry into service is full of ritual, uniforms issued, identities stripped and remade, belonging forged through shared hardship. Yet the return is almost always solitary. The modern world has lost its rituals of homecoming. Without collective recognition, many remain stuck in the liminal, no longer soldiers, not yet civilians, hovering between two worlds that don’t quite fit.

Polyvagal Theory: The Physiology of Belonging. 

Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011) offers a parallel lens, describing how our nervous system itself holds a kind of rite of passage. At any moment, it moves between three evolutionary states: mobilisation (fight or flight), immobilisation (freeze or shutdown), and social engagement (safety, curiosity, connection). Porges calls the body’s ability to detect safety or threat neuroception, a kind of unconscious scanning that never switches off. When we live in prolonged danger or emotional strain, like my father, our neuroception can become biased toward threat, even in moments of calm. The body keeps bracing, long after the war is over. Physiologically, we can become stuck in states of defence, just as socially we can become stuck in the liminal.

In this way, polyvagal theory maps the internal terrain that anthropology maps externally. Both describe how we cross thresholds, how we return, or fail to, from states of intensity to states of safety. One speaks in rituals and community; the other in nerves and breath. But both point to the same truth: coming home is not only a social act. It’s a physiological one.

Where These Worlds Meet. 

What anthropology locates in culture, polyvagal theory locates in the body. Both describe what happens when transitions are left unacknowledged when there are no communal rituals to help the body and psyche recalibrate.

Rituals and relationships, through witnessing, rhythm, breath, and shared experience provide the very conditions the nervous system needs for re-entry. They are acts of co-regulation disguised as culture.

Together, these perspectives suggest that reintegration, whether from war, trauma, or any profound life change, requires both ritual and regulation, both community and nervous system safety.

Understanding this intersection gives us a map for what I call re-becoming: the slow process of dismantling old survival structures and learning how to live and connect again.

3. Growing Up in the Aftershock

I grew up inside the metaphorical blast radius, not the explosion itself, but the aftershock that followed it home. From the outside, we looked like a small, ordinary family. My dad, my brother, and me a tight little unit held together by duty, love, and unspoken grief. But beneath that, the air was often tense, but no one named. My dad had learned in the Army how to stay composed under pressure, how to move calmly toward danger. At home, that calm became something else, a kind of emotional containment. His silence wasn’t coldness; it was armour. As a child, I didn’t know that. I just knew that when the air changed, I had to hold my breath too.

Children in service families often absorb the unspoken codes of the institution long before they understand them. We inherit the rhythm of life in the armed forces, the discipline, the duty, the unrelenting composure. In anthropological terms, we become cultural carriers: we internalise the values and behaviours of the system that shaped our parents, even when that system no longer fits the world we live in.

The Domestic Disposal Unit. 

When I lived with my dad, the air in the house was always thick with potential detonation. Yet even with the shouting and slammed doors, there was containment. Everyone knew the rules: keep calm, don’t escalate, play the game, defuse the tension before it blows. It was a household run like a unit. Structure meant safety.

Looking back, I can see how discipline and order offered a strange kind of comfort. The routines, the unspoken code of behaviour, even the silence after conflict, all of it created the illusion of control. Inside that containment, my body learned to stay alert, to monitor the emotional temperature, to anticipate the next explosion before it happened. I became, without knowing it, the bomb disposal expert in the domestic space, trained in diffusing emotional devices before they went off.

For me, that meant becoming small, compliant, good. I learned early that if I could stay calm, keep the peace, make others feel safe, then maybe I would be safe too. From a polyvagal perspective, I had learned to regulate for others, my neuroception wired to other people’s states. It’s what Porges might call co‑regulation inverted: instead of being soothed by safe others, I became the one doing the soothing, even as a child, absorbing the tension so others could stay calm.

When I left and lived with my mum, the container dissolved. The structure I’d relied on, the rules, the rituals, the sense of mission, fell away. My nervous system, still wired for duty, went looking for another way to keep the noise down. Food came first, then drink, then drugs, external soothing, crude replacements for containment. They worked, for a while.

Only years later did I understand how patterned this was. Polyvagal theory would describe it as my body’s attempt to regulate after the loss of structure. Anthropology might call it a change in ritual: the collapse of one system of meaning before another had formed. In a household shaped by trauma and unspoken tension, adaptation wasn’t optional, it was survival. Either way, the body doesn’t wait for the mind to catch up. It adapts.

Perhaps my father and I weren’t so different after all. He neutralised explosives; I neutralised emotion. Both of us learned that calm could keep people alive. The difference is that I had to learn, slowly, that calm can also come from connection, that regulation can be shared, not imposed.

Analytic Bridge, From Containment to Connection

This reflection reveals how service culture can become woven into the nervous system of a family long after the uniform is hung up. The military principle of “contain to control” translated seamlessly into domestic life, shaping how safety was sought and maintained. What functioned as discipline in one context became emotional suppression in another. Polyvagal theory helps name the biology of this inheritance: vigilance as a form of protection, shutdown as a form of loyalty. Anthropology situates it socially, the unspoken ritual of calm that holds communities together under pressure. Together they show how the same embodied strategies that ensure survival can, over time, limit intimacy. Understanding this has reframed my story. The work now is not to discard containment but to transform it, to shift from control to connection, from neutralising threat to cultivating safety. In that shift lies the possibility of breaking the intergenerational pattern: to keep calm not by defusing feeling, but by staying present with it.

That pattern stayed with me into adulthood. It showed up in my work, my relationships, even in how I taught. I became the calm one, the helper, the fixer. And yet, beneath that steadiness was a deep undercurrent of anxiety, the kind that comes from holding too much for too long. Looking back, I can see that my nervous system was doing exactly what it had been trained to do: keeping the unit together. What anthropology names liminality, the state of being between worlds, lived in our house. My dad was caught between soldier and civilian, between duty and vulnerability. And I was caught between daughter and emotional caretaker, trying to bridge a gap that was never mine to close. But that’s what growing up in the aftershock feels like: to love deeply, to sense danger before it arrives, and to carry the weight of what no one talks about. In time, my mind came to understand what my body had been trying to tell me all along. Years of reading, reflecting, and teaching helped me build language for what had once been instinct, but understanding alone didn’t loosen its grip. The body holds its own archive, and sooner or later, it asks to speak. 

4. The Body Remembers What the Family Forgets

For most of my life, I thought healing was something that happened in the mind, through understanding, insight, forgiveness. But the body has its own timeline, its own truth.

One day, years later, during a moment of conflict, something rose up in me, hot, ancient, and wordless. It wasn’t rage exactly, though it burned like it. It was a No, a full-bodied, trembling No that had waited decades to be said. It came not from defiance, but from somewhere deeper, the place in me that had always tried to keep the peace, finally choosing to protect itself instead.

Through the lens of polyvagal theory, I understand it as the completion of a survival response that had been trapped in freeze. The body was doing what it never got to do: fight, protect, assert life. Anthropologically, it felt like a ritual of its own, an initiation enacted not by community, but by the body itself. A ceremony of reclamation.

But the true healing didn’t happen in the midst of conflict, that was the doorway, it came later, in stillness. Sitting in meditation, I brought awareness to the No and held it with compassion. Instead of pushing it away or acting it out, I allowed it to unfold in its own time. A flush of heat, the clenching of fists, and beneath it, a softer awareness, an older self holding a younger one who had needed protection, not encouragement to comply or keep the peace, even when what she was witnessing was wrong. What had been frozen began to move; what had been held in fear began to soften.

Because trauma, especially intergenerational trauma, doesn't just live in stories. It lives in posture, in muscle, in the subtle bracing for something bad to happen, in breath. It’s transmitted not only through behaviour but through physiology through the quiet ways our bodies mirror those who raised us. Don’t react. Hold back. Don’t fight. Just stay calm in the midst of chaos just like my dad.

For years, that was the script my body followed, until one day, awareness loosened its grip, and something truer began to move.

That No was also a Yes: to myself, to life beyond vigilance, to the possibility that love and safety can coexist. It was the body remembering what the family had forgotten, that protection doesn’t always mean shutting down. Sometimes, it means opening up.

5. Discussion, The Liminal Space Between Love and Trauma

What unfolded in my own body is not unique. It reflects a wider pattern the way love and protection can become entwined with vigilance across families and generations. This autoethnographic synthesis contributes to emerging scholarship on trauma and reintegration by situating the body as both archive and site of cultural transmission. It demonstrates that understanding service-related trauma requires attending not only to individual pathology but to collective physiology, to the relational and cultural forces that shape how safety and danger are held across generations.

Between love and trauma lies a quiet threshold, the space between protection and connection, duty and presence, speech and silence.

Anthropology calls it liminality; polyvagal theory maps it as the nervous system hovering between defence and safety. This is where many service families live.

We inherit aftershocks we did not live but still feel. When experiences of fear, vigilance, or suppression are not spoken about, processed, or held in community, they are absorbed into the next generation as unarticulated codes of survival. The body becomes the messenger of what the culture cannot yet acknowledge. Without understanding or relational repair, these embodied strategies, vigilance, withdrawal, emotional containment, are repeated as reflex rather than choice.

When trauma is unnamed, the nervous system becomes the storyteller.

It often takes just one person, one generation later, to begin loosening the chain, to have the grace and courage to pause, to feel, and to ask different questions. Naming what was once unspeakable opens a chink in the armour; through that small opening, compassion and understanding can begin to move.

This reflection is for those who have carried such echoes without language, for the children who are now adults still trying to articulate what they sensed but could never name. It is also for teachers who see children managing invisible burdens at home; for educators and policymakers who shape how we teach emotional and relational literacy; and for the Ministry of Defence and allied institutions who could integrate nervous-system education and anthropological insight into how soldiers are supported as they transition out of service, especially those who have served in combat roles.

If trauma can be transmitted through silence, then healing can be transmitted through understanding.

Recognising these patterns is not about blame, but about belonging, about creating a cultural frame wide enough to hold both biology and story, both science and humanity. Only when the aftershocks are acknowledged, spoken, and shared in community can the cycle begin to soften. In that recognition lies the beginning of collective repair.

6. Conclusion, Coming Home

In the end, this story circles back to my father, the man beneath the armour. His silence was not absence; it was endurance. He carried the legacy of his service in his body long after the uniform was folded away. His vigilance, restraint, and composure were acts of love, shaped by a nervous system that had learned to survive through control. The very qualities that earned him a Mention in Despatches, composure under threat, precision in chaos, hours of holding it together, became the same qualities that contained him at home.

Through this lens, the aftershock is not simply the impact of trauma, but the unspoken legacy of love trying to keep others safe. It is the physiological residue of service, passed through families in gestures, tone, and silence. Understanding this lineage transforms the narrative from one of pathology to one of protection, from damage to devotion.

Anthropology reminds us that homecoming has always required ritual and community. Polyvagal theory shows that safety is restored not in solitude but in co-regulation, through relationships that signal, you are no longer in danger. Together they reveal what reintegration really asks of us: a collective willingness to create cultures where nervous systems can exhale again.

For me, writing this has been part of that ritual. In the process of writing and re-writing, I found the story itself beginning to settle mirroring the nervous system’s own movement toward safety. In that sense, the act of writing became both inquiry and integration, a small ritual of embodied homecoming. By naming what was unspoken, I have begun to turn inherited vigilance into relational presence. But this work is larger than my own healing. The Aftershock Project carries it forward, an invitation to families, educators, health professionals, and institutions to see service and trauma not as individual events, but as shared physiological and cultural patterns that can be met with compassion, education, and community.

When one person finds the courage to understand, the chain begins to loosen for everyone.

Coming home, then, is not a single act but an ongoing practice, a movement from endurance to empathy, from silence to dialogue, from containment to connection. It is the slow remembering that protection and love were never opposites, only different ways the body tried to keep us safe.

If anthropology teaches that ritual binds community, and polyvagal theory reminds us that safety begins in connection, then our collective healing depends on both. Perhaps to come home, truly, is to learn, together, how to be a village again.

Epilogue, The Aftershock

I used to think the aftershock was the breaking of me. Now I know it as the becoming, the heart learning that trauma and love can coexist. It’s what happens when silence finds its voice, when love outlasts anger, when what was once armour begins to dissolve. The aftershock isn’t the end of the story. It’s where the healing begins.

Notes

EOD: Explosive Ordnance Disposal.

MiD: Mentioned in Despatches (UK military award).

References

Atkins, P. W. B., Wilson, D. S., & Hayes, S. C. (2019). Prosocial: Using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups. Context Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.

Van Gennep, A. (1909/1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books.

Williams, M., & Penman, D. (2011). Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world. Piatkus.