I have recently written three blog entries about marriage after healing from child abuse:
- Dealing with Marital Issues after Child Abuse
- Marital Issues after Healing from Child Abuse
- Update on Marital Stuff
Those three blog entries have generated a lot of comments, and many of those comments are very strong ones. Marriage after child abuse appears to be a hot topic that sparks a lot of emotion, and I am curious as to why. I have written about numerous difficult issues on this blog over the years, but few have gotten such a rise out of readers.
I wonder if the explanations are that marriage is about today (if you are married) versus childhood and that many child abuse survivors have really struggled in this area. What are your thoughts on this?
One reason I am so surprised by the comments is that I never asked for anyone’s opinion about what to do. I never said that I am planning on leaving hub or planning on staying. My goal was to explore another area of healing from child abuse as I was going through conflict in that area of my life.
I shared the process that I am going through, which included talking through the issue with my therapist. My therapist asked me to write a list of minimum requirements for feeling loved and supported in my marriage. I have not done anything with that list since my therapy session, but it helped me get an idea of what my needs were. (I am not good at identifying what my needs are, only that what I am doing now is not working.) Without hub even knowing about the list, he has been making an effort on his end doing things on that list. By having the list, I am more aware of the efforts he is making, which shows me what a good guy he is. Without the list, I might not notice some of the positive things he is already doing.
I also never said that I am a perfect wife and he is a terrible husband. I am painfully aware of my shortcomings as a wife, most of which stem from having been abused as a child. Nobody modeled for me what to look for in a spouse. I grew up in so much chaos that I chose a man who is very stable and predictable. The same characteristic that drew me to him at age 20 (doing the same thing the same way every single time) is the same characteristic that drives a wedge now. I have changed too much for things to stay the way they were when I was 20.
Perhaps readers are reading more into what I wrote than what I intended. My goal was to explore the challenges in marriage after healing from child abuse because there are many. Hub and I have been married for almost 20 years, so we have already beaten many of the odds. Enough has worked for almost 20 years to keep us going. I have yet to meet a couple that feels 100% great about the marriage every single day. It is normal to go through periods of distance and periods of closeness in marriage. That’s where the commitment comes in.
If you consider that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce and that most books on healing from child abuse include a mention of the author divorcing after healing from child abuse, I think marriage after child abuse is a very important topic to discuss. I tried to find statistics online for how many couples divorce after one goes through the healing process but was unable to find this information. Based upon the numerous mentions of divorce in books on healing from child abuse, my guess is that the number is sadly far greater than the national average.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
I think married people get very nervous when others talk about potential deal breakers that could stifle or end a marriage. And because they are married, it means it could happen to them. Being that I was not only abused but my parents remarried and divorced multiple times only creating more chaos in my life as their child. Stories like this are all too common, like you said 50% of all marriages end in divorce and I recently found out that 90% of bipolar marriages fail. I am very protective of my marriage because my hubby and kids are all I have. They are my world and I couldn’t make it without them my stringer to reality. I know it isn’t like that for everybody, especially unhealthy relationships. But as all your emails and comments pointed out, there is a great divide. You are certainly onto something here
Thanks, Sandy.
I suspected as much, but it’s good to hear someone else’s view on this topic. :0)
I think it is very important to talk through ALL issues affecting our lives after child abuse, which is (sadly) just about all of them. I also think it is important for people to be validated the some marriages **can** survive the healing process as well as that it is the healthiest choice for **some** marriages to end during or after the healing process. Most importantly, I think it is important for child abuse survivors to know that they get a say in whether the marriage survives or fails — that it’s not out of your hands.
- Faith
My comments were based on my perception of what was expressed on this blog about your husband and knew that was not at all a complete pitcher which is one reason I contemplated so long.
My marriage was a success and it is successfully ended.
I think the most influential factor in the US divorce rate is the institution of alimony and child support., Not saying good or bad. I would like to say it is that women are more financially independent alimony and child support is financial dependence.
I think the biggest current threat to life long marriage as an institution is the reduction of the institution of pensions with survivors benefits.
I often am told I am negative about marriage because of my own experiences, I then ask am I incorrect in my intellectual evaluation about the institution of marriage?
As a single male I had to adjust to dealing with people that are married. Those sad ones of the 50% still married, the good relationships I did not have to adjust to, they are far and few between.
I tell many women. “You need to be talking about this with your husband and besides I do not want to hear it.” It is not uncommon for the ring to disappear when I am alone with women. I have to avoid being the next one in line when a woman is going to get a divorce. Last week a married woman who goes to the Caribbean in the winter ask me to meet her there. I would consider it if her husband was aware that was what she was doing.
So how do I tell when a marriage is not going to effect my relationship with a woman? If the way the woman behaves differently when the husband is around that indicates to me it is not a good relationship. Of course there are more obvious signs.
Married males are easier to deal with for me as there is not the sexual thing going on. Dealing with couples is often impossible as being a single male I am seen as a threat to some marriages. I am not a threat. it is really pretty easy. Why would I want to be involved with a married woman who is so screwed up she sees cheating as an answer?
I would like to know the % of marriages that end without either spouse having a partner in waiting?
I don’t see being married or being married a long time as a success in itself, It is an accomplishment. For me I evaluate what seems to be experienced rather than what is accomplished.
Some people that know me envy my being single. No one that knows me for very long feels sad that I am not married.
i often get asked “Would you get married again?” I would have to fall in love first. Reality is I do not know if I will get married again. Doing the work of therapy does not leave me emotionally available to hold up my end of a relationship. One reason I need a therapeutic relationship.
Hi, Michael.
I am on the same page as you re: people leaving marriages with someone else waiting in the wings. I have always believed that we must have integrity in our marriages. Whether or not a marriage is working needs to be the issue, not whether another particular person might be “better.”
I think it is really easy for another person to seem “better” when you are not responsible for scrubbing his/her toilets. There are realities in marriage that are not present when you are not married, so it is impossible to compare apples to apples when comparing a spouse to a lover.
I, personally, could never trust someone to be faithful to me if he cheated on my husband with me. I have seen other friends go through this, and the kind of guy who would sleep with another man’s wife was the same kind of guy who would do the same thing to the woman once she became his girlfriend or wife. Marriage is complicated enough without bringing a third party into it.
Another thing I have observed from friends who have cheated on their spouses — Don’t fall for the “I understand you better than your husband does” routine. It’s a line, and the more smoothly it is delivered, the more often the guy has probably used it. I have seen friends get burned by that.
Back to the question about how many marriages end without someone waiting in the wings — I actually do have a few friends who did leave marriages with no lovers involved. They typically involved abuse or addiction.
- Faith
I should have mentioned at it is important to how I intellectually view marriage that I did not ever think in terms of when I get married. As a teenager I was OK with I did not need to be married my mind worked that way. Perhaps if I started with the understanding I needed to be married my views would be different.
Used to drive people crazy that when I would say I may never marry. Where I was dumfounded that people assumed they had to be. Still am.
Michael,
You are such a thinker, always going deep. I enjoy reading your perspective on things. There is a lot of wisdom in what you wrote above. I especially appreciated this:
“I don’t see being married or being married a long time as a success in itself, It is an accomplishment. For me I evaluate what seems to be experienced rather than what is accomplished.”
Faith,
As always, I find a range of comments here. Some seem really extreme to me and others very understandable to me. (Even my own!) I try not to judge them too harshly, but sometimes I do depending on my mood.
I think the reason for this in my mind is because if someone is reading this blog and commenting it’s because they’ve been traumatized and robbed in their childhood. We can never imagine the horrors that people go through, even having gone through horrors ourselves… Some how ours go back and forth between being “the worst EVER”. and “not all that bad”, depending on where we are in that moment.
So, in short most regular commenters I believe are survivors and as such had their worlds ruled by the outside forces in their lives from early on, and have to struggle to live life according to their own terms, coming from within rather than looking out for approval. Being that everyone is in a different place in their healing journeys, means that the comments will range in their extremity and their emotional charge. (I think you as much pointed this out in your post today) And yes, this is a HOT topic, as all relationships are to a survivor, because we have had no real basis in reality of how to create and maintain them during the time period in childhood when we should have. So we have to figure all this out as adults having had our perceptions severely skewed and damaged.
As to THE LIST: I don’t know if what I’m about to say will be taken as encouragement or not, but it is how I mean it to be. My hub and I made our lists a few years ago. One of the things on his list was that he felt he was being taken for granted and unappreciated because I did not tell him enough…. I never even knew he felt this way! And when I would get an inkling that he was feeling like this, it seemed more like self pity to me, which drove me further away from what he wanted from me. I grew up in a house where you obviously you do your chores! You don’t get praise for something you’re supposed to do! Just what you do over and above that… maybe. The point is that now I DO know and have been working to acknowledge his efforts more, and it has helped immeasurably. There are quite a few examples of things like that which have improved from making “the list”, but you get the picture. My experience has been that if, as a couple you do not treat it like an ultimatum, the list can be quite the helpful tool. It helped to save our marriage. This is the last I will say about it.
The bottom line is: Whatever works for you, whatever resonates is your best option, and only you can know what that is. If you just keep swinging, you’re bound to hit on something. (Or something like that… an old baseball saying).
Good luck, and great post… as always.
Peace,
mia
Correction: In paragraph 3 I used the word “abuser” and I meant to use “survivor”… yikes!
Hi, Mia.
I changed “abuser” to “survivor” for you. :0)
Thanks for your comment!
- Faith
Thanks Faith.
I have also read a lot about marriages ending after therapy – and another book I’m reading, which is about the approach of menopause, also speaks of “the change” pushing women to “better things”. So, I don’t know that it is only child abuse that causes the problems in marriage, but we certainly do shift as we grow out of the past. As we change – in any way – we change how we view our relationsips. We can get a clearer picture of what we want and need. While we may have been fine living in an emotional vaccuum in the past, when we really did not know how to deal with feelings and intimacy, we can get to a point of knowing what we’re missing and wanting more. Unfortunately,because we were not emotionally available ourselves, we likely chose mates who were not capable of this kind of intimacy without growth of their own.
I am currently in this situation in my own marriage, so the issue is something to which I’ve been giving a lot of thought, recently. I find my eye and mind wandering, more and more, noticing other men, noticing what I have and what I don’t have. So far it is only my mind wandering, but if I can’t get this relationship on track it is likely going to be more than that. I’ve been suggesting going to counseling with my husband for the last two years, but he refuses…
This has been such a strong issue for me, that I’ve hardly been able to blog. I don’t want to write about things that are not important to me at the moment, or those which feel out of line with my integrity. I have only two confidants, right now, who I feel I can trust with this kind of problem One is my therapist and the other is a woman who has had an affair, herself, which did not go well. The feeling of being alone with this is greater than it has been with some (but not all) other things I’ve worked through with my therapist in the last four years. It was good to see this information here, which helps bring it out in the open.
When people comment about something that really hits home for them, their personal experiences and feelings are going to come into play. If someone has had a bad marital experience they may get defensive when they read something that you wrote because maybe they’re feeling like your words apply to them or that they could.
It’s actually nobody’s business to tell you what to do or to chastise you for your thoughts or actions in your own marriage. You’re trying to work with it and that’s commendable because so many people just quit without trying.
I don’t know if it helps or not but I’m bipolar and I have DID and my husband and I have been married a long time. We didn’t know that I was bipolar until AFTER we had been married several years, and I just started working on the sexual abuse over a year ago. The bipolar stuff was actually harder to get through than the sexual abuse so far but we did it and a lot of that has to do with me finally being able to tell him how his actions or wrods affected me and what I needed and him being able to develop empathy and tell me what he needed as well. Then we both worked on it.
My sincerest good luck to you both Faith.
“I am painfully aware of my shortcomings as a wife, most of which stem from having been abused as a child.”
I think if you had written the original blogs focused on your perceived shortcomings/ marriage difficulties because you are a survivor, you might have got very different responses.
Perhaps that the tone of your blogs was really very critical of your husband as a person possibly antagonized some of your regular readers, just because they are used to reading about your work on your self and your issues rather than your working (it seemed, less so now) on someone else, and one who hasn’t even got a voice here…
Everyone’s opinion is important when exploring issues.
Hi, A x.
Good point. I started writing on the topic when I was angry with hub (immediately after a fight), so I can see your point there. :0)
- Faith
This is an example of what I personally found particularly critical:
“Hub does not want to deal with his own stuff. He wants to stay in denial with me playing the role I played for so many years… hub cannot handle the “messiness” of life without me shielding him from it.”
Would you say that about any survivor on here who is having difficulties changing from past models? To say “You don’t want to deal with your own stuff…you want to stay in denial… you just can’t handle the messiness of life…”
It may be the truth but it does come across as harsh criticism indeed of another human being – you seemed to be blaming him for the dysfunction in your marriage – and I think perhaps that’s where some of the discomfort of readers arose.
Hi, A x.
That is the truth as I see it, and hub would probably agree with the overall truth in those comments, although he would not word it quite that way. Hub does not like change and is bothered even by neutral changes, such as Wendy’s changing its recipe for French fries. He has been clear that my changing so much has been a very big challenge for him.
Any relationship between two people is a “dance” with each person having a role. When one person changes the dance, the other must change as well or the dance will no longer work. My point was not to say that hub is a bad person — he’s not. My point was that I am tired of doing the dance I have been doing for two decades. I don’t want to play that role any longer. If that makes me judgmental, critical, or whatever anyone wants to call it, so be it, but that’s me being honest and authentic.
You touched upon equating my feelings about hub with what someone might say to a child abuse survivor. (Hub is not a child abuse survivor.) I wonder if that is part of what is going on … if people are equating my feelings toward my situation with hub toward how people might feel toward them while they are going through the healing process?? Since hub is not a child abuse survivor and the stuff that is upsetting him is world’s apart from healing from child abuse, I don’t connect the two, but perhaps that’s the connection that some readers are having??
Back to hub … He has been making a real effort to plug into the family (with my son and me) since that blowup two weeks ago. I thanked him for his efforts tonight in fact. :0)
Thanks for enlightening me on where some readers might be coming from. I was truly baffled by some of the responses.
- Faith
I’ve read very few of the comments on this series of posts, but I did want to say that I really appreciate your discussing the topic. I think that your honesty is very helpful: sometimes viewing your husband’s shortcoming in a harsh bright light, sometimes viewing your own that way, sometimes accounting for all the good things that have built two decades together. It strikes a chord with me as I navigate the evolution of my own nearly-twenty-year relationship.
Hi, mcr.
Thanks for the feedback. :0)
One shortcoming of putting something in writing is that sometimes people view what you have written as being permanent since the writing is permanent. Feelings change. In one moment, I might rue the day that I ever decided to marry. In another moment, I might feel incredibly blessed to be married to the person I am. Both feelings are normal in marriage. The commitment is the part that keeps you going.
Also, I think people feel the need to take sides when a couple goes through marital struggles. They think they have to be Team Hub or Team Faith and that one must be right and the other must be wrong. Our issue is more about what works and what doesn’t work.
I have changed an enormous amount since 2003 and even more so if you look back over the two plus decades that hub and I have been together. I am no longer the wounded, people-pleasing girl who made no demands as long as she would be protected and loved. Changes in me = changes in all of my relationships, marriage included. Meanwhile, hub prides himself in still being the same person he was 20 years ago, down to ordering the same meal at Wendy’s that he did at age 22.
When you have one spouse who has greatly transformed and the other spouse priding himself on not changing at all, that’s going to create conflict. It doesn’t mean that we cannot ultimately work through the conflict, but conflict is going to arise, and I don’t think either he or I are “bad” people for being who we are. It’s not about good/bad or right/wrong — it’s about what works and what no longer works.
- Faith
I think the marriage thing became a ‘hot topic’ because it is an ‘outside relationship’ thing – and in society, marriage is considered one of the most important relationships a person or people can have. Given that most of us survivors were abused in “important relationships” by important people in our lives, it makes sense that we would have troubles when it came/comes to relationships – all the issues we’re familiar with, such as the shame, distrust, et cetra.
I think that perhaps the reason so many marriages change are due to the fact that the dynamics tend to change after one has gotten married – it’s a fact of life. Kids come along – kids go (maybe
– we all know about the “boomerang” effect!) – and people change. Sometimes they both change for the “better” – but in becoming different persons, they tend to grow apart – or separate. You never know. Human beings are complicated things.
We feel fortunate that our wife has stayed with us, but she’d come from a former ten year relationship (marriage) with another man (who in the end had beaten and abused her – and her kids somewhat, traumatizing the eldest two some). So we knew she was a woman of commitment – she had stuck by him through thick and thin until things had gotten too bad. Just one of the many qualities which drew us towards her and them (her children). After all; this was a woman who could change her own waterpump on her own car. Gotta admire a woman like that; Southern born and bred and quite a slim beauty besides.
Man thing; whut can I say.
Sometimes (and some of the family agree) we think that marriage is an institution which is slowly falling by the wayside – I heard somewhere that for the first time, less than 50% of couples were married anymore – something like that. Always did think it should be more by contract than to “the end of time” anyway – which it seems to be (as in “by contract”) when you consider how easy it is for a marriage to ‘go away’ anymore . . .
Lots of dynamics, lots of problems – marriage isn’t easy sometimes, and I think when coupled with a person who has been abused – the strains can sometimes be too much for two people . . . so they break apart and become one. Separate – alone (which is okay, btw!) – and open to a new life.
What will be will be, as the old song says . . . and all we can do is try to be alive – and happy sometimes (most times, always!) – and make our way through.
I think most comments (certainly mine was) were directed not so much ‘at you’ but at ourselves; it’s just you opened a page usually kept hidden from the public gaze.
So sorry if the response seemed like it was judgemental, or giving you unwanted advice- you’d been the one doing us the favour for our own venting!
Hi, theurbanworrier.
My comment was not about any one comment in particular. When I wrote about friction with a friend and ending that friendship, all comments were extremely supportive. When I wrote about friction with hub a couple of months later, that wasn’t the case — comments were all over the map. I was curious as to why.
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. I just found it interesting that everyone took me at my word re: the friend but had varying levels of reactions when it came to my marriage. I never thought it was about me. I figured that marriage must be a really touchy issue, which (of course) encourages me to write about it more. That’s the focus on my next three blog entries this week (Tuesday through Thursday). :0)
- Faith
Excellent, thanks! Having just read through masturbation as self-harm (weird it came to me today- I’ve seen it referred to so many times) and seen your capacity to open doors for people, I’m so glad you’re willing to tackle the ‘difficult issues’.
[...] Why is Marriage after Child Abuse Difficult to Discuss? (faithallen.wordpress.com) [...]
@ faith – have you written a blog on getting into relationship ( am single ) but i have never had relationship because am basically scared to get into one for many aspects.. i.e for being further abused if chosen the wrong partner – 1in 4 women abused get into another abusive relationship.. not only that.. but emotional needs that i have.. issues with intimacy etc… i have lawys struggled with this and when anyone is interested in me i run a mile out of fear.. i want to overcome this.. any resources/ links would be helpful..
in my background getting married settling down is really part of my culture.. and sometimes am under a lot of pressure.. but i feel that till i go through my healing process that will make me a better, wife and mother.. i didnt want to rush it.. but sometimes i feel i have put myself on a stranded island…
thanks