There’s a Story Deeper Still

*The credit for the title of this post goes to ReStory Counseling. This is their phrase and it resonates so deeply with me and inspired me to write this post.

I used to write a lot about our marriage in this space. If you look back over the last 14 years, you’ll find posts – usually written immediately following a conflict, or sometimes even in the midst of one. I often wrote from a place of pain. I wrote in vulnerability and, looking back, a lot of naïveté. I wrote about personal stuff on my blog because it was a place where I felt like I could be honest and transparent about hard things in a way that is much more difficult in person. The buffer of my computer screen provided enough distance to be real without having to watch how people reacted.

Life went on, and we continued to spiral, reached the razor’s edge of divorce, and our world shrunk down in order to save our marriage. We got laser focused on the work of not falling apart, and I just stopped writing. But over the past few months, I’ve felt strongly compelled to write about my marriage here again because in the telling of our story, a big piece of the story is missing. Maybe even the most important piece. It’s not that I intentionally left it out. I just didn’t yet understand what was actually going on.

(Currently multiple people in our close circles have marriages in crisis or ending, and my heart is aching to help somehow. I don’t know if sharing our journey will help anyone, but if it helps even one person, it will be worth it.)

Chris and I were older when we got married. He was 39 and I was 31. We entered our marriage from two vastly different worlds, with no illusions that it would be easy. We weren’t young. We had lived some life and experienced some things. But even so, we still were so naive.

We started marriage and within four months were pregnant. The townhome we were living in with our three dogs would be too crowded with a baby so we bought a house. I stopped working. We had a baby and a month later, we were shocked by the unexpected news that my dad had cancer. Within three months, he was gone.

Marriage. New house. Job change. Baby. Death. All within a year. Talk about adjustment. Chris fell into depression. I became highly anxious. He poured himself into marathon training and I reluctantly tried to adjust to the life of being a stay at home mom with by then two babies. Those years were simultaneously incredibly sweet and the toughest years of my life.

But those are the just the facts. What was actually happening beneath the surface was much more harmful. We developed communication habits and behaviors that were unhealthy. In our ignorance, we fell into patterns of interaction which were becoming more and more volatile and destructive. We were spiraling. He had undefined, uncontrolled anger. Which he expressed. A lot. I had zero ability to respect boundaries and had no self control when I got anxious. Which I did. A lot. Which created a super emotionally unsafe marital environment. Chris and I both tried to find ways to cope and get what we needed. He took retreats. I filled my schedule. He withdrew. I blogged. He slept. I binged TV. He exercised. I ate and drank. We tried several rounds of marriage counseling. But none of it made an ounce of difference to the destructive cycles we were stuck in.

But those are still just the facts. Because what we didn’t realize at the time was underneath those unhealthy patterns was something deeper. Something much younger and more vulnerable. We were essentially two young children, reacting out of basic survival instincts. But we had no idea.

By our 11th anniversary things were coming to a head. Despite our issues, we planned 5 nights away in Buena Vista. During that trip our interactions got more and more volatile and we spent the actual day of our anniversary apart. We saw that we were on the fast track to what inevitably will end in divorce, and we had no idea how to get off. It’s not what either of us wanted, but we don’t have any idea how to change it. We felt helpless and very lost.

The following summer, we find out that there is a spot that opened up in a family camp we were on the waiting list for, and we spontaneously say yes. Because it certainly couldn’t hurt, right? When we get there that we learn that 2 of the 9 couples who are there are marriage and family therapists. And we were all about to spend the week together. Not only that, but they are trauma-informed and trained in the story-based approach to therapy. It was the first we had ever heard of things like attachment styles. Or attunement. Or triggers. Or trauma. We left that week at camp with a marriage holding on by a very thin string but a sliver of hope that there might be a way to save our marriage. We knew the road would be long, but we didn’t have another option.

We separated again. (For the third time.)

And we dove headfirst into the deep end of inner work. We found trauma informed counselors who could help us sort through and understand our individual stories. And we worked so hard. Since then it’s been 2.5 years (and counting) of individual counseling along with marriage counseling. We’ve binged podcasts. We’ve read books. We’ve done trauma intensives.

Through all this, here’s what I have finally come to understand. Until we understood the individual childhood trauma that was stored in each of our bodies and how it was showing up in our adult lives, there was no hope for change. No matter how much marriage counseling we did.

And that’s what I want you to make sure I shared. The piece that was missing for us. What led to 13 years of escalating dysfunction and destructive cycles, despite our desperation and doing literally everything we knew to change. The reality that what was actually causing our conflicts was not a dysfunctional marriage, but our own individual childhood trauma, stored deep within in our bodies, and coming out now as emotional dysregulation. It wasn’t until we started addressing those younger wounded parts of ourselves that we started experiencing true and lasting change in our marriage.

If I could go back to the beginning of my marriage and give myself one piece of advice it would be “Be extravagantly kind to yourself. There is a young Becky inside of you who is doing the very best she can. She is scared and she needs you. She needs your compassion and gentleness and care. Take care of her. Get to know her and love her well.”

To be continued…

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Here are are a few of the resources we’ve found to be especially helpful to us on our journey.

Adam Young – The Place We Find Ourselves (podcast)
Dan Allender – Redeeming Hearthache (book)
Aundi Kolber – Try Softer and Strong Like Water (books)
Mel Robbins (with Dr. Russell Kennedy) – The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety (podcast)
Chris and Beth Bruno and Tracy Johnson – ReStory Counseling