This is a huge topic that deserves repeated reflection; how do our inherently struggling psychologies impact marriage, and how might marriage help or hinder us with our struggling psychologies? First a comment to frame this discussion… it is my understanding that interior psychological struggle is inherent in the human condition!
The insight that I have in mind here is… that one aspect of marital success or failure has to do with how well a marriage helps each in the marriage with the long standing hurts and difficulties that long predate the marriage, typically related to family-of-origin situations in each partner’s histories. Examples are a disorganized partner with a highly organized partner, or a traumatized partner with a partner from a constricted middle class history.
We always hope that our lives following marriage will be enhanced compared to our lives before – that our marriage is value-added! Often this is the case. However, it is all far too common in marriages fraught with conflict/mistrust/insecurity that each in the marriage does not feel their partner “has their back” or each feels safer and better within themselves because of the marriage. Often, the opposite is the case, each in the marriage feels less safe with their inner struggles in connection to their partner than they feel when alone. Sometimes it can be that both in the marriage live remote from each other, each in their own private hell.
In this vein, many of the couples that I have worked with over the years have felt so unsafe/insecure with vulnerable exposure to their partners, that they deeply protect their private inner lives to such a degree… they have almost no inner sense of what a secure home life with their partner is like. In many of these marriages the only picture of good marriage that the couple has access to is one with less conflict, detente from the ongoing war – with no sense of what a truly safe secure primary relationship is like.
