How Does Trauma Relate to Marriage Therapy?

Sometimes I get asked how my expertise in Trauma Therapy illuminates my work with couples. Here is my answer.

Couples are simply two individuals who chose to join their lives with the goal of creating a life together. Each brings their own baggage into the relationship and this in turn often keeps them stuck acting out repetitive destructive patterns from their childhood.  Harmful difficult experiences from the past result in an individual quite naturally seeking to protect him or herself behind barriers carefully erected over time to protect one’s emotional wounds. Unfortunately in the course of protecting ourselves we push others away and this can inhibit our ability to form the kind of close relationship necessary to form a healthy couple.

Each of us is programmed to repeat familiar patterns regardless how painful and uncomfortable they might have been.  We therefore tend to unconsciously be attracted to people with whom we can re-enact the unresolved conflicts in our family of origin, in the hopes that we can finally “get it right” and find a happy ending for our struggle.  Unfortunately our adult relationships cannot change painful childhood experiences, but learning how to establish a healthy intimate relationship does provide the opportunity to heal the old hurts.

Establishing a healthy relationship is very difficult and most of us have no idea how to do it.  We end up simply repeating what we saw our parents do even if we recognize it didn’t work for them and probably won’t work for us.  We all have expectations of our partner’s behavior based on what we experienced with our parent of the same gender.  We truly do marry our mothers and fathers at least once, in an attempt to fix the old dysfunction.

The “chemistry” we feel in the early stages of a relationship may be that we recognize in the other person qualities that we experienced in our parents.  We tend to pick someone who will help us recreate the old familiar patterns.  This provides us with an opportunity help us face and heal unresolved issues from our childhood, or merely a platform upon which to re-enact old destructive patterns only to keep re-experiencing the same painful feelings.

As a trauma therapist I have the skills to help couples identify past hurts or traumas which give rise to destructive repetitive patterns in their relationship.  I then coach the couple to discover new options in their relationship and to replace the old dysfunctional scripts with new more positive and effective ones.  The goal is to help both individuals develop the skills necessary to be able to get close to each other, to trust and depend on the other.  To be able to make a long term commitment to a relationship in which they are mutually interdependent, where differences are tolerated and they respond to each other with compassion and a genuine desire to meet each others needs.