The central difference between me and Matt though, was that I was scared of everything. Our first night as a married couple, Matt went to go into the elevator to go to the 12th floor of the hotel where we were staying, and I refused to get into the elevator because I was deathly afraid of them. By contrast, Matt had no fear. After college, he moved to a country where he didn’t know the language or the crime rate. He just moved. And he lived.
In a real sense, we were foolish but on opposite ends of the spectrum: I was afraid of everything, and Matt was afraid of nothing.
I know the Bible talks about not having a spirit of fear, but it doesn’t instruct us to be afraid of nothing. That’s foolish. Matt was afraid of very little. He had no fear. His perspective on life also meant that he took a long time to understand how I saw the world. Since he grew up in a context that told him that he was going to be a leader and in charge and a protector, in many ways his upbringing did not allow him to know and understand someone who was as afraid of everything, like I was.
Obviously, everyone who is married encounters someone who sees the world in different ways. It’s the fact of being married. However, in our marriage, where I’d experienced trauma way before I even met Matt, well, that just set us up for all kinds of problems.
So, speaking of trauma, what do we mean when we say that word?
In our current culture, everything from war to a bad grade in algebra is called ‘traumatic.’ The word & the concept has entered our lives, almost across our culture. So, we think it’s important to be clear on what we mean.
the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.
Of course, a one-line definition can seem shallow or overly simplistic. We’re only using it as a guide as we tell our story, so we don’t necessarily expect this definition to answer every question as fully as possible.
Ok, so living as a couple where at least one person in the marriage has experienced trauma introduces a complexity in the relationship that love & attraction cannot solve. Basic communication can seem almost impossible.
Recent research shows that people in our situation could expect to have a problematic conflict resolution, to put it in really, really nerdy terms. In other words, we didn’t know how to communicate, and we’d fight about it, and if someone on the outside of our marriage saw us trying to communicate, they’d know we were pretty jacked up. Trauma in marriage can do that to you.[i]
So, on the one hand, we knew that our marriage wasn’t working. It was like our conversations always had a backstory that each of us carried, but neither of us could recognize. On top of that, we desperately wanted to stay married, to be in love, to stay in love. And, of course, we thought we were the only ones. Like, we’d invented something here that could destroy our relationship—so we didn’t really know how to talk about this trauma, even if we wanted to.
We.
Were.
Stuck.
Pamela C. Alexander. (2014) “Introduction to the Special Section on Dual-Trauma Couples.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Vol. 6 No. 3. 199-200.
