Marriage While Emotionally Wounded

Written by Dr. Sidney Langston   

Current statistics indicate that one out of every two marriages ends in divorce and that 60% of second marriages, 80% of third marriages and 90% of fourth marriages end in divorce. Why is it so difficult to develop a meaningful, lasting, intimate relationship?

A significant factor is that people enter into the marital relationship with little knowledge of how their individual pasts will affect their relationships with their spouses. Most couples believe that their difficulties with communication, finances, parenting, conflict resolution and intimacy are current concerns that have little to do with their past.

Marital research has demonstrated that individual childhood backgrounds have a great deal to do with how couples relate to each other. A startling factor is that victims tend to marry victims. Because they bring the wounded parts of themselves into the marital relationship, they tend to repeat the dysfunctional patterns they learned in their families of origin. Look at the characteristics of your families of origin, not for the purpose of blaming, but so you can see where the pain in your present relationships may have originated. Thus you can better determine what needs to be done to bring about change.

A few childhood events that might result in emotional woundedness are:

1. Loss of a parent by either divorce or death;
2. Either parent physically or emotionally absent from the home  a great deal;
3. One or both parents overly critical or perfectionistic;
4. Either parent looking to a child to be his or her confidant;
5. Strong ties and allegiance to one parent to the exclusion of  the other; and
6. Parents who rarely acknowledged or validated feelings and opinions.

When you realize that your marriage is suffering from emotional wounds inflicted in childhood, you have three options.  You can spend a lifetime blaming a bad marriage on your past but doing nothing about it.  You can ignore your past and its influence on your present. Or you can choose to go through the process of healing your past wounds. This will set you free in the present so that your marriage can become happier and more fulfilling.

There is no magical formula for recovery, but taking the steps listed below can guide you toward resolution of the hurts in your lives.

• Face the problem. Take a rigorously honest look at yourself and admit the pain and problem areas in your life. As the areas of pain become obvious, try to think back and discover the roots of your thought and behavior patterns. Anger and other intense emotions that become exaggerated in particular circumstances can serve as clues.
• Reconstruct painful childhood memories that come to mind. Tell someone you trust about the memory. This will provide emotional release and allow you to survey your losses.
• Experience the feelings of those losses. Focus on the feelings attached to a particular event. In the grieving process you release emotions that have occupied valuable inner space. It is important to learn how to appropriately express those feelings. Remember that while grief is a process that takes time, it leads to inner healing.
• Establish responsibility, not for the purpose of blaming your partner or families of origin, but to bring understanding which leads to recovery.
• Trace behavioral difficulties and replace troublesome behaviors with healthy ones.
• Learn healthy patterns from other people by getting into a support group in a healthy environment. If you find yourself floundering, seek outside help. One author advises, "You went through the pain alone the first time. Don't go through it alone again."
• Confront the offender if indicated, but keep in mind that confrontation is not always appropriate. In his book, Pain and Pretending, Rich Buhler says confrontation needs to come from our healing, not from our hurt. Confrontation does, however, create the opportunity for forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation to take place.
• Forgive those who hurt you. This is a process which begins in our minds and, over time, becomes a reality in our hearts.
• Rebuild your self esteem and wounded or broken relationships.
• Learn how to empathize with others in their pain.

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Buhler, Richard. (1988). Pain and Pretending.  Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Frank, Dan & Jan. (1990). When Victims Marry.  San Bernadino, CA: Here's Life Publishers.

Copyright 1993, El Rophe Center, Inc.