The Impact Of Your Parents’ Childhood Trauma On Your Marriage
Your grandparents' treatment of your parents might reveal things about your own marriage struggles.
Volodymyr Melnyk, Hector Pertuz, Halamka | Canva Many people find it difficult to imagine their parents as children, particularly if their parents don’t tell a lot of stories about their past, or if there's not a lot of emotional disclosure in the home overall. It can be an epiphany for many people in couples counseling to zoom out and look at their parents’ childhood and its impact on them. Here are some ways that your parents’ childhood trauma history impacts your relationship functioning today.
Did your parents have parents who struggled with addiction, depression, trauma, poverty? Were they raised by immigrants who suffered a great deal in the countries they escaped from, or who experienced war? Were they abandoned by a parent or did they experience the death or illness of a parent? Did a parent have to be hospitalized? Did they grow up with enough to eat? Did they suffer the loss of a sibling?
You may have viewed your grandparents as loving and kind, but did your parent ever make comments that they didn’t act this way when your parent was young? Many abusive parents were under tremendous stress as younger people, and then mellow with age and changed circumstances, which is why I say that even bad parents can usually be OK grandparents (and sometimes wonderful grandparents).
For example, your dad’s dad may have been an alcoholic tyrant when he was young, but has now quit drinking and is a loving grandparent to you. This doesn’t mean that your father doesn’t suffer from growing up in a dysfunctional home, but this may have been the first moment you deeply thought about the difference between his home and the one he created for you.
When you are abused or neglected, this impacts your self-esteem dramatically. If your parents were raised in dysfunctional homes, they likely have no idea what “normal” is and have very low self-esteem. They feel like observers instead of participants in life and have always been trying to be a loving parent to you in the absence of any role models, which is more difficult than you likely realized as a child, or even now.
Parents who have very low self-esteem have low expectations for their kids’ behavior. This means that if your own parents had difficult childhoods, they may not have thought they were worthy of you. They may have placed you on a pedestal, as a perfect child that they were going to protect from everything bad. They may have been very permissive and let you get away with murder, taking your self-absorption as evidence of healthy self-esteem.
Parents without self-esteem want their kids to feel confident, but they often overshoot the mark and end up giving the child no standards, rules, or boundaries for fear of “crushing their spirit.” Unfortunately, this often makes children quite unempathetic. They were always taught to “self-advocate” in a way that the parent never could in their childhood. However, since the parent has no idea what a healthy balance of self-advocacy and empathy looks like, this means that the child is taught to always look out for number one, becoming quite selfish in the process.
If you feel that you didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional home and that your parents are super nice, loving, wonderful people, but somehow partners often consider you self-absorbed and difficult, think deeply about the impact of their childhood issues on how they raised you. With the best of intentions, your parents may have focused on your comfort, self-image, and happiness at the expense of teaching you to empathize.
If your parents had narcissistic parents, remember that their most comfortable way of interacting is to put those parents’ needs (emotional and physical) above their own. When you were a child, they likely acted the same way with you, because their only way of engaging in the world is to kowtow and people please. This may manifest in a people-pleasing mom or a workhorse dad, both of whom were focused only on you and your siblings knowing no pain or discomfort, and never having to do anything you didn’t want to do… even when those were the right things to do to be kind or a good member of a team/family/society.
For example, you may have been allowed to skip school or turn in assignments late (with a parent writing you a note), not share your toys with a sibling, or be rude or not speak when you weren’t in the mood to engage, or skip out on family events, or not be expected to write cards or make/buy gifts for parents’ or siblings’ birthdays, and the list goes on.
When you began dating, you were likely drawn to a partner that let you be “the difficult one,” and this was fine for a while, as they acted like your parent did, and bent over backward for you. However, if their self-esteem improves over time, or there is a huge change to the relationship like having kids, then their expectations for you may increase. This often leads to conflict, as this is the first time that a loved one has said that you are not performing up to expectations… or had any expectations in the first place.
Think deeply about this post if it makes sense to you, or if it describes your partner. Therapy can help you recognize that your childhood doesn’t have to have been abusive or neglectful for it to hurt your ability to engage with others. Understanding your parents’ backgrounds in a new way often leads to epiphanies in clients, in both individual therapy and couples work.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.