Your marriage is falling apart. Is it trauma or the relationship?

By Orit Krug  |  February 16th, 2020

You won’t be certain about this answer until you heal your past trauma.

Whether you experienced trauma in a past relationship or together in your current relationship (i.e., loss of a child), it will distort how you view your current relationship until the old trauma has been resolved.

Even if you talked about your trauma for years in therapy or couples counseling, you probably haven’t resolved it fully (most trauma gets stored non-verbally in the body – there’s no amount of words that can release it). 

Any old trauma stored in your body and nervous system makes you hardwired to overprotect yourself from getting hurt and create huge problems out of little things that could’ve been easily settled.

Trauma makes you wired to look for danger signs even when there are none.

This is NOT your fault.

Unresolved trauma keeps your nervous system in survival mode, which makes you hyper-vigilant to the “danger signs” in your relationship. These are automatic body responses that many people try to unsuccessfully talk themselves into changing.

This is how animals survive on instinct! Our primal bodies are no different and we CANNOT convince our nervous systems to stop keeping us alive.

While you suspect or believe that the relationship is the reason your marriage is falling apart, you might be relieved to know that it’s often trauma’s fault (once you heal it, your entire relationship can blossom like never before!).

So many people block their partner’s love or sabotage their relationship because of old unresolved trauma, and now their partners have pulled away.

This wall and distance between you makes it feel like your marriage is falling apart, but I encourage you to reconsider what might really be happening.

Blaming the relationship is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re still holding onto old trauma.

Many couples go through a divorce that costs them so much emotional and financial heartbreak, only to realize later that it could’ve been prevented if they had healed their trauma first.

After healing her trauma, my client Lisa confessed that she wished she didn’t divorce her loving husband 20 years ago. Once her vision cleared from her trauma-tinted eyes, she realized that her marriage was actually great. 

But her unresolved trauma often triggered his insecurities and neither of them were strong enough to move out of conflict and repair the relationship.

If she had healed her trauma, her nervous system would’ve been strong enough to allow both of them to tolerate conflict much more harmoniously and they could’ve kept their family in one piece.

She didn’t blame herself – she just felt she could’ve prevented it all if she healed her trauma while she was still married.

The problems in your marriage tend to dissolve as you release your trauma.

My client Anna found me when she was considering leaving her husband because she felt her marriage was falling apart. She felt very disconnected from her relationship and didn’t know if he was capable of truly seeing her. 

She wasn’t able to truthfully speak up about her needs. She froze up every time she tried. He got frustrated because she stood there like a deer in the headlights every time he wanted to have a productive discussion with her.

Of course she felt unseen! She hid herself instead of expressing her needs whenever there was conflict.

She had held onto the trauma of witnessing her parents’ abusive relationship. When her mom spoke up to her dad, he became emotionally or physically abusive.

Anna had no real reason to believe this would happen in her own marriage (because it never did), but she couldn’t let go of her outdated fear, no matter how much she told herself it wasn’t real.

As we gently accessed and released her past trauma, we rewired her nervous system out of her habitual freeze response.

We then taught her physical body the skills she needed to be more assertive and stay in her power during conflict. She finally started speaking up without fear.  He finally started seeing her.

Now their marriage is SO much easier and they are closer than ever before. She no longer felt her marriage was falling apart. They were happy again.

Her partner didn’t get external support to change anything about himself, yet their entire relationship improved. He supported her through her transformation and was delighted to have more connected discussions. Even about the serious things.

If you KNEW that healing your trauma could transform your relationship and marriage, would you do it?

If you healed your trauma and your relationship STILL didn’t improve, you’d at least know you tried everything you possibly could to save your marriage. Plus, you’d have cleared your past trauma, which feels amazing and freeing.

You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in without fear.

The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.

This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.

If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.

Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.

But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.

That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.

(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.