What would you say to individuals and couples who suffer with childhood trauma and therefore struggle with all areas of marriage? We may look normal but our problems run deep. Trauma is often multigenerational — parents who can’t show love will raise kids who can’t feel their feelings who will then raise kids who can’t connect to others and so on. How can we heal and build healthy relationships?

Marriage is an institution so challenging, even people who haven’t suffered trauma will struggle within its confines. Certainly, individuals and couples coming from traumatizing developmental environments — those who haven’t been blessed with the gifts of solid self-esteem, emotional stability and safety, or healthy strategies for communication and boundary setting — are bound to flounder even more.

It’s precisely this latter group that is most likely to achieve the most personal and relational growth through marriage. This is because the intensity of their struggle and subsequent pain and suffering almost always puts them on a path to healing. Those with less dramatic difficulties may continue in their ways far longer, leading husbands and wives to endure repetitively destructive interpersonal patterns and/or painful stagnation.

Although growth is a wonderful outcome, no one wants to experience the path of pain that may promote it. But it’s possible to act preventatively. A person conscious of her trauma-induced emotional and behavioral deficits can undertake therapy before embarking on the great journey of marriage. This will give her a toolkit that can help reduce conflict and relationship wounding. Therapy normally restores the healthy sense of self that reduces sensitivity to rejection, as well as the need for excessive attention, stimulation, or control that can harm marital relationships.

Similarly, those who notice their difficulties in the early months of marriage can be quick to undertake couples’ counseling and/or personal therapy as well. Again, preventing years or decades of pain is obviously the most desirable course of action.