Paying the Price for Each Other’s Trauma.
There’s a strange thing that happens when you marry someone. It’s not really talked about in the run up to the big day, because everyone is focused on the positives, the hopes, the dreams, the wishes.
Yet each partner in the marriage brings along a silent gift, an unwrapped mystery, that their significant other will spend the rest of their relationship paying for.
Their own trauma.
Because no matter how good of a person we are, we all bring our baggage into our relationships. Maybe it’s an inability to truly talk about how you feel, because you were taught as a child that you didn’t matter.
Maybe it’s a soul crushing insecurity and inability to trust, because you were once cheated on, and made to feel so insignificant. Or maybe it’s an inability to open up intimately because you were taught that it was wrong, dirty and sinful.
Whatever you bring, your partner will pay for it, with their suffering, with their pain.
None of us are exempt.
Holly and I have a fun story that I came into our marriage with 2 suitcases, while she came with a U-Haul. It’s not too far from the truth, because when I left England to emigrate to America and marry Holly I literally condensed everything I owned into 2 large suitcases that weighed in just under the maximum allowable limit. Everything else in my life was discarded, or so I thought.
In truth, I was bringing an ocean liner full of baggage with me, one that I was woefully unaware of.
And over the years of our life together, Holly has had to pay the price for the baggage I brought with me. Thankfully, none of it has been a deal breaker, partly because she has incredible patience with me, and partly because I think she could see that I have never stopped trying to learn about myself, and change the parts of me that have been detrimental to our life together.
She has never blamed me for my weaknesses, although they are many.
But there’s something incredibly painful in realizing that your partner, the person you want to do everything for and give everything to, has suffered because of your imperfections and inadequacies.
That’s part of what drives me onward in my journey to overcome the many obstacles from my past that have prevented me from becoming the person I desperately desire to be.
Emotional trauma in all its forms has one truth running through it – that healing takes awareness and it definitely takes time.
Understanding and helping someone through their trauma takes patience, kindness, a willingness to be honest and a desire to serve. It is harder when their unhealed trauma affects us, and causes us pain, but it is still possible to find within yourself a wellspring of compassion and caring to pour over the wounds that your partner has not yet healed.
Because the greatest healing occurs not in a vacuum of communication, but in a connection of hearts, healing and helping each other.
Until we are both whole, together.
Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings