Reading: Wanted - Worthy Marriages with a Healed Wound Base part 1 (Slides)

WANTED: WORTHY MARRIAGES WITH A HEALED WOUND BASE

Part One

By Kristine Koetje-Balder

WANTED: WORTHY MARRIAGES WITH A HEALED WOUND BASE

You are about to be married and are looking forward to a married life of satisfaction, happiness, and eternal love.

You have been married for years and continue to encounter the same conflicts and hurts. Therefore, comfort and safety rarely exist in the relationship.

There could be a very significant barrier that could stand in the way for the wholeness of the marriage. It is the unresolved issues from the past that are still affecting and influencing the marriage.

WANTED: WORTHY MARRIAGES WITH A HEALED WOUND BASE

HONESTY: 

It is crucial that you are honest with yourself about who you are and why you are that way.  This kind of honesty - this agreeing with God about our faults, which the Bible calls "confession” - means understanding where we are in light of His standard. Once we understand where we are broken and where we fall short, we can work with God to reclaim those lost parts of His image and experience healing where we have been wounded. 

RESISTANCE: 

If we cannot successfully connect with others, then our struggles to cope with trauma becomes less effective. Our main resources, our love relationships often begin to sink under the weight of the trauma. This is because when life gets dangerous and unpredictable, we know how much we need the help of others in meeting the challenge fate has delivered. 

RESISTANCE:

After the fight, when we are sore or injured, and any façade of rugged self-sufficiency that we have managed to hold on to has crumbled, our need for others who care moves front and center.  The quality of our central relationships affect how we face and heal from trauma, and as everything moves in a circle, trauma has an impact on our relationships with the people that we love.  (Johnson) 

SECONDARY VICTIMS:

Men or women can be secondary victims of their spouse's childhood abuse. Without restoration, there is disappointment, frustration, and dysfunction in virtually every marriage where one of the spouses has been victimized. These marriages often end in divorce, remarriage, and divorce again. The spouse will feel like a victim, and the relationship desperately needs the healing process of the Lord.

EMOTIONS: 

Emotions that often are felt when a wound base is present are intense sadness, shame, and fear.  These are the primary emotions. The emotions that often emerge from the primary emotions are called secondary emotions.  These emotions or behaviors are depression, anxiety, addictions, sexual dysfunction, self-destruction, physical complaints, and anger/rage.

DEPRESSION: 

Some of the signs and symptoms of depression are the following:

Fatigue - thought processes slow down and there is very little energy to get up and about and get done what used to be able to be accomplished.

Sleep problems - find it difficult to become relaxed enough to fall asleep or will sleep for 12 or more hours each day and still feel tired.

General irritability - could be short-tempered or irritable, and particularly common in men.

DEPRESSION: 

Inability to concentrate - This is known as psychomotor retardation, meaning that the brain is unable to process information as quickly as it used to.

Suicide thoughts - One of the most serious symptoms of depression.

Trouble making decisions - If a person suddenly has trouble making decisions, and they have never acted like this before in the past.

Poor hygiene and difficulty with daily life skills.

General stress - It becomes more difficult to go about your life, and if you are at work, you're going to find it even more stressful to do what your boss requires.

ANGER: 

Anger is a very appropriate reaction of an adult who suddenly faces the reality of abuse in childhood. If this is a source of your anger, then awareness is the first step to freedom.  You have as much right to be angry for a crime that was committed against your body and your emotions, as you would for a crime that was committed against some other innocent little child.  (Littauer) 

ADDICTIONS: 

Drinking and using drugs by the trauma victim can be used to shut off pain, fear, and rage experienced during the abuse. The abused child learns to evoke the numbing and disconnectedness necessary to endure the violations. The adult survivor, wishing to recreate this experience of escape, searches for other avenues to this state of oblivion. In a strangely paradoxical way, chemical abuse provides pleasurable sensations of excitement and at the same time induces numbness and a sense of being outside one's own mind and body.  (Miller) 

SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION: 

Sexual abuse distorts the normal and natural sexual mechanism of any boy or girl. It arouses at a totally inappropriate age natural sexual feelings that would be perfectly appropriate at a later time. Sexual feelings are normal for a pre-teen and usually start at puberty, somewhere between 10 and 12.  Sexual struggle within a marriage is almost an "expected” symptom of sexual abuse. Sometimes the struggle will not be evident because their soul is radically absent during physical acts of sexual intimacy (dissociative). The absent soul does not experience direct, overwhelming effect; therefore, the body is left like a zombie to perform, at times with high arousal and sexual feats. New problems can develop when one partner begins to explore his or her past sexual abuse. (Allender) 

SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION (CONTINUED):

The key phrase associated with many sexual problems is a lack of interest or disgust. A man or woman may have little or no desire for sexual pleasure, even though there is an ability to experience arousal during sexual contact that leads to orgasm. This can be directed toward the sexual act or the sexual partner. Sexual addictions or compulsions could be a way to work to find relief or work out revenge. Revenge is the working out of deep-soul hatred toward others (other-centered contempt) or toward oneself (self-contempt). Revenge exacts payment against both the perpetrator of the past harm and the victim for his/her supposed cooperation and ambivalent pleasure. At times, the symptom pattern can be self-contempt or could be predatory with sexual promiscuity or seduction. The relief is often short-lived because on the other side is shame, self-hatred, and penance. (Allender) 

SELF DESTRUCTION

The psychiatrists Bessel Van Der Kolk, Christopher Perry, and Judith Herman found a high correlation between severe childhood abuse or neglect and adult self-destructive behavior. They could link the adult patterns to a lack of secure attachments in childhood and to the tendency of the severely traumatized individual to dissociate. A number of studies (reviewed in Landecker, l992) view self-injurious behavior as an attempt to escape feelings of emptiness, depersonalization, and unreality; to ease tension; to express emotional pain; and to punish the body as a way of expressing responsibility for the abuse.

MORE INFORMATION ON SELF-DESTRUCTION 

These same clinical experts see the self-destructive behavior that is characteristic of many trauma survivors as attempts to alleviate inner rage when feelings cannot be expressed verbally, to provide a sense of control over the body, and to express shame and provide biochemical relief.  (Miller) 

SELF DESTRUCTION/EATING DISORDER: 

Anorexia- Refusing to eat and playing with the food given - causes the person to lose weight rapidly. Initially, the victim may be praised for dieting successfully and this much-needed affirmation encourages her to continue until she is extremely thin and it is dangerous. Telling the anorexic to eat more usually turns her away from food as the person pleading with her becomes a potential controller; anorexics resist any kind of outside power. Anorexia can often improve if the initial cause is unearthed and brought clearly to the surface. (Littauer) 

BULIMIA:

Fits the dynamic of relief and revenge model of compulsive behavior.  The relief is found both in maintaining a certain body weight consistent with the woman's vision of beauty and in the experience of instant gratification through bingeing. There is a feeling of being physically satiated through the bingeing. Then comes the purge - and even this word implies removing something that is noxious and undesirable. Many bulimics state that hidden away in their fantasies is the hope that something vile and shameful will be discarded (other than food) when they vomit. More often than not, the "it” is the unknown. The relief, however, is present in the moment "it” has been removed.  (Allender)

PHYSICAL COMPLAINTS: 

It has long been that the division between the body and psyche is an artificial distinction. There are differences between the two, but there is a clear bridge between our inner health and our physical well-being.  Physical symptoms are often a sign of deep inner struggle. Please know that I am not saying that all physical symptoms have an emotional base. If there are abuse issues, the physical armor that protects against possible abuse memories (our body) produces a rigid and exhausted frame. The body was never meant to be at war with the psyche, and when it is, physical symptoms occur.  So-called stress related disorder include ulcers, intestinal problems, lower backaches, stiff neck, tight jaw, and chronic headache.  (Allender)

DENIAL OR ABSENCE OF MEMORY: 

What if the spouse has no idea they have a wound or trauma?  Or what if that spouse is in denial?  I am a therapist that believes that children internalize and respond to trauma differently than adults. Childhood trauma can result in problems of memory storage and retrieval. Dissociation is a likely explanation for a memory that was forgotten and later recalled. Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a Harvard attachment researcher, was particularly interested in the phenomenon of dissociation, which is manifested in feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world, and in seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down. 

TYPE ONE AND TYPE TWO TRAUMA: 

Dr. Lenore Terr, M.D. was the first to make a distinction between Type one (single event - this would be a car accident, single beating, fire, etc.) and Type two (repeated events), and the clear difference in children. Type two trauma is common to have the following symptoms: denial, self-hypnosis, and intense anger. Denial is necessary for a spouse who has experienced repeated trauma (e.g., physical abuse, witnessing violence repeatedly, or sexual abuse). The denial becomes evident because it is very difficult to let go of the image of a "good parent.” It is much easier to employ the mechanism of denial because at least the mind can hold tight to the belief of a "good parent.” Imagine the confusion of a child that is looking to the abusive parent for security; denial can still produce that security.  This is a primal wound and seems to be an "innate knowing” that a parent is supposed to protect and take care of us. Also, the denial could be a defense mechanism because there is the occasional activity of normality and joy such as "getting ice cream.” 

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA:

If a child cannot tolerate what they know or what they feel, the only option is denial or dissociation.  Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress, but also their emerging selves - their interests, preferences, and goals. The person who has memory gaps has built a wall around the painful, hurtful experiences of childhood. They have suppressed those hurts deeply into their subconscious. They have covered them up in the garbage can of their early life and put the lid on so tightly so as to never be confronted. If your caregivers ignore your needs or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother's hostility or neglect and act as if it does not matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. (Van Der Kolk)