Do you ever get the sense that an unseen force is at work in your marriage? I’m not going all woo-woo on you here, but what if you could identify that force, understand it, and then use your marriage as a place of healing?

If you've been through some kind of deeply traumatic experience then it's perfectly reasonable to expect that it will have had some effect on you as a person. But trauma can also have a big impact on your marriage, often without you even knowing.

How big of a deal is trauma?

I wanted to examine this because I see it at play in a lot of marriages and I am hoping that by reading this you will be able to self-evaluate your circumstances to see if this is relevant or helpful.

Trauma has different definitions and can be caused by many different things. Experiences such as childhood illness or hospitalization, near death encounters or experiences where death is witnessed, accidents, extremes like genocide and war, rape or torture are all examples of situations where trauma may result. Basically any deeply distressing or disturbing experience can result in trauma. Often you’ll see this where a person’s ability to cope is simply overwhelmed and you end up feeling powerless.

What’s interesting about trauma is the rule of nine. If you have events on a scale where zero is not a big deal and nine is witnessing something really terrible, the rule of nine is about how there are different figures you can multiply together to get to nine. If you experience one incident at a nine level of intensity you can have trauma as a result. Or you could also get it from having three incidents at a three-level; none of the incidents on their own would be big enough, but they add up together to a traumatic experience. Or even nine events that are a one level of intensity, where you have repeated exposure to something “small” that’s not big enough by itself, but by repeated exposure, it works up a trauma response.

So trauma ends up being the emotional response you carry to a very negative event or series of events. Trauma is a normal reaction to painful or difficult experiences but it can impact your ability to cope with normal life. And it can also have a major effect on your marriage.

How Trauma Impacts Marriage

A study from 2000[i] looked at 96 couples where at least one spouse reported a history of childhood abuse. Of course, that would be a likely source of trauma. These couples exhibit some particular attributes. So we’ll look at what these are and then why they appear, and then examine how we can help heal this.

This study made a few observations. First, if one or both spouse reported a history of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood the couple was more likely to experience lower relationship satisfaction and higher individual stress symptoms than couples where neither spouse reported an abuse history. This is why we are dealing with the subject of trauma: it can impact marriages for sure!

They also noted that couples with a history of childhood abuse scored lower on cohesion than non-abuse couples. Cohesion is about the closeness of the couple- the emotional bonds they share. So there is more distance experienced in marriages where childhood abuse has been part of one or both spouse’s history.

It is common for individuals who have experienced abuse to report that they experience emotional distance and isolation. So yes, this definitely has the potential to touch marriages. If you’re reading this and it feels familiar, just stay with me though: we have good news for you later on.

Why Does Trauma Affect Marriage?

We’ve talked about attachment before — the science of love or the love bond that exists between two spouses. Trauma impacts attachment and, related to that, one’s ability to be emotionally engaged.

Let’s talk about some examples of what this looks like based on the work of Johnson and Williams-Keller[ii]. By the way, this is Sue Johnson who has really pioneered EFCT— the approach t...