Are you suffering in silence?

How long have you spent struggling in your relationship? How many nights have you spent crying alone in the dark, while your partner sleeps next to you, wondering when or how things will ever get better? How many times have you had the same argument and gotten the same results - retreating to your corner, alone, hurt, broken, and feeling helpless? 

My guess is way too many. 

But why do we suffer alone, in silence? 

I’ve heard a lot of interesting opinions about why people choose not to share what’s going on in their marriage. Things like, “we agreed we’d never talk to our family about our marital problems because we didn’t want anyone to have a negative opinion about our partner.” 

I’ve also heard, “It’s not always bad so I’m afraid it will sound like I’m just trashing my partner.” 

Along with other things like: 

“People will judge me.”

“People would be shocked if they knew how bad things are.” 

Our Western society teaches us in so many ways that we should suffer in silence. If you’ve ever been told as a child to go to your room because you were having big emotions, then it’s really easy to internalize the belief that your emotions are too much and that you should not burden others with them. 

Most parents of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s weren’t equipped with the skills of conscious parenting and were likely so uncomfortable with their own emotions that they couldn’t deal with ours. They weren’t privy to the research we have now that shows that stuffing and suppressing emotions actually leads to higher levels of anxiety and depression.

But one thing that I’ve learned in doing this work, and in my own healing is that suffering alone can only get you so far. And it isn’t very far.

It's difficult to undo those patterns that you’ve learned in your childhood, or push past the myths of talking about problems in your marriage. It’s not easy to reach out and tell someone that you don’t have things under control. It’s humbling, and it’s hard. 

It can feel like no one will ever understand the nuances of your relationship. It's scary to open up and talk about what’s going on because you might be afraid that talking to a therapist might force you to leave or make other life-altering decisions. 

Unless you’re in physical danger, a good therapist will not tell you that you should end your relationship. That’s not our job. 

If you come to couples therapy saying that you want to fix the relationship then a good couples therapist will be focused on helping you do that. 

Talking about the pain you’re feeling in your relationship can make things feel more real, and I know how scary that can be. But once you put it all out there, it can feel so relieving, and when you see a great couples therapist, you will truly understand that you are not alone. 

One of my favorite parts of the therapy process are the first few sessions. I know that couples are uncomfortable sharing what’s really going on behind closed doors. But one of my greatest gifts is instilling hope and letting couples know that they aren’t alone.We’ve seen some really difficult issues in my practice. But my staff and I have helped so many couples weather those difficult storms and create amazing, healthy, connected relationships that surpass what people even think is possible when they first sit down on the couch.

We also have a formula for success that is backed by tons and tons of research! The Gottman Method is one of the most effective tools for helping couples improve their marriages. So you dont just come in and see how things go. 

Our staff take the time to truly understand your relationship and each of you as individuals. We start with a couples session to get a sense of the issues you’re struggling with and also conduct a relationship history - we ask about the significant events that have happened in the relationship. 

After that, we do an individual session with each partner to get a sense of your personal histories and backgrounds. These play an important role in the way you communicate with one another. 

We also send out the Relationship Checkup - an extensive background questionnaire that will measure various aspects of your relationship and communication patterns.

All of these components give us a really good picture of where your strengths are as a couple as well as the areas that can use improvement. 

Once we collect all of the important background information we sit down with each couple and show them all of the components the research tells us are required for a happy, healthy relationship. We show each couple where their strengths are, along with their weaknesses and areas that we will be focusing on going forward. 

Every couple that works with us knows exactly what their sessions will be focused on because they get a print-out of all of their strengths and weaknesses. There’s no guess-work. Our therapists get to work and help couples reach their goals. They focus on the issues and help couples create amazing, joyful, intimate, connected marriages. 

You don’t have to suffer alone. Once you put voice to what's happening the spinning in your head will stop. You can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

If any of this sounds like you, I want to help. Imagine what it will feel like moving into Fall feeling like you REALLY want to cozy up to your partner.  Imagine starting 2024 with a clear vision for the future of your relationship AND a supportive therapist behind you as you take those scary steps forward. 

Picture how connected you'll be this time next year after pushing past your fears - of failure, of not knowing where to start, of anyone knowing what’s really going on in your marriage - and seeing all of the progress you've made together. 

You'll be so proud of your relationship and you would have spent the last year learning, healing, connecting, and creating an unstoppable, deep, intimate bond and gained communication tools that you will have for the rest of your lives together. 

The things we teach couples take time and practice to implement, but once our couples understand what is under their behaviors, they begin to experience lasting change. They create more intimacy and their love continues to grow even after they graduate from therapy.  

How Trauma Impacts Marriage

“If it’s hysterical, then it’s historical.” Have you ever heard this saying? Maybe it's just psychology geeks like me who gravitate towards these types of sayings. This is one that has really stuck with me from grad school through the years in my practice. You might be wondering what the heck that even means - well, when someone has a really big reaction to something that doesn’t necessarily warrant that type of reaction it’s usually related to something from the person’s past. Many times it's an indication of something that has also been unresolved. 

As a couples therapist I hear fights about so many different things - things that might seem pretty benign on paper: You didn’t do the dishes! You never text me back quickly enough! You didn’t tell me you were stopping at the store on your way home! 

If you can imagine grown adults having what looks like a tantrum in my office for these above examples, it might seem so ridiculous to you. However, the reason that these things cause such big reactions for people has less to do with the subject matter, and more to do with old wounds and historical traumatic experiences. 

Going to war isn’t the only thing that causes a trauma response although it is one of the quintessential experiences that people tend to imagine and sometimes the only thing people imagine can cause PTSD - but that assumption is outdated and incorrect.

Trauma can be defined as “a deeply distressing or disturbing event,” and emotional trauma is experienced when there is a violation of a person’s familiar ideas about the world and about their human rights. 

Trauma can be difficult to define because it’s really about the way the event is experienced. In Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, What Happened to you? They discuss an excellent example of a fire in an elementary school.

For the firefighter on the scene, this was business as usual, and the incident felt controllable and even predictable. For the first grader in that classroom this event caused him to experience minutes of terror, intense fear, confusion, and helplessness. Both are very different experiences, and this is considered a trauma for the child due to his response.  

A recent study by the National Survey of Children’s Health found that almost 50 percent of children in the US have had at least one significant traumatic experience. And the CDC recently reported that 60 percent of American adults report having had at least one adverse childhood experience, or ACE. (You can find out more about the ACEs here)

Events like an infidelity or sudden threat of divorce in relationships can be very emotionally traumatic and people describe experiencing them in terms like, “my world shattered,” or “I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me.” In these examples the relationship that the person believed was stable and secure is turned upside down and unrecognizable.

That sense of security being ripped out and the sense of reality being shattered causes emotional trauma. There are developmental traumas (that happen during childhood), and emotional traumas that can happen at any age. Either type of trauma can impact the relationships closest to us, including our marital relationship. 

When there is an unresolved trauma that comes from childhood, it can rear its ugly head right in the middle of an argument with a partner and cause havoc. That response that’s so big, and seemingly unnecessary, can then touch on your partner’s unresolved trauma causing a tidal wave of emotions to come spewing back. This is typically the reason couples have such difficulty hearing one another and reaching resolutions. 

The conflict often becomes so big that both partners eventually retreat and only come back together when they absolutely need to deal with something together, like parenting their child, or they have to play nice in front of family or friends.   

The argument that is started because your partner had expectations about spending time alone together after a long day can really be about him/her being upset that you haven’t made them a priority. And that need to be high on your priority list may not even be coming from your relationship at all, but from their unresolved need to be prioritized as a child since their mother was often away using drugs and alcohol, and they were left to fend for themselves. 

When both partners have unresolved traumas they can continue to bump heads with each other. One partner may have a deep-seated need to be a priority due to parental abandonment, while the other has a deep need to be independent because they were constantly smothered by an overbearing parent. These two marry one another, and dig their heels in, fight tooth and nail, and continue to go around and around about this seemingly unresolvable issue in the marriage. 

The negativity from something like this can bleed out into other areas of the relationship and erode it over time. 

Couples therapy is a great place to identify how past traumas are showing up in your relationship and can be worked on in that setting, or your therapist might recommend individual therapy in addition to or in place of couples therapy. Either way working to resolve past traumas can be incredibly beneficial to your marriage.