“The past is in the past. So, how can it affect my marriage today?” How lessons from our youth affects our marriages today is insightful and worth you taking a few minutes to learn more!
The fact is what we learn from your childhood days stick with you for life. Your sense of identity, values, fears, expectations, habits, and responses to different situations develop in your formative years. The ones you spend under your parent’s watch. The way you are disciplined, loved, taught, appreciated, and affirmed gives way to behavior that becomes a lasting part of you!
How Lessons from our Youth Affects our Marriages Today
Research suggests that children who come from happy families that use functional, practical, and humane techniques to resolve issues usually end up marrying well. That’s primarily because they create healthy boundaries, so their relationship doesn’t suffer from any inadvertent causes afterward.
Sadly, not everyone has a healthy childhood; some of us grow up in dysfunctional homes that lack healthy communication, healthy love, or healthy conflicts. Traces of these traumatic factors may remain within a person even when they get into a committed intimate relationships. This does not excuse irrational or inadequate behavior such as abuse, name-calling, or deliberately avoiding addressing issues. However, it may provide insight and explain why your or your spouse’s actions and reactions when going through a rough patch in your relationship becomes challenging.
To establish a healthy marital relationship, couples need to recognize each other’s consistent behaviors and patterns from the past and see how they affect the marriage, unintentionally or otherwise.
How Lessons from our Youth Affects our Marriages Today
What We Learn Growing Up In the ‘Wrong’ Environment
You may have been raised in a home where you have been taught how to be caring and considerate by your parents or guardians. However, some families don’t have a good parental figure; emulating them would doom their children’s marital relationships like their own.
In this section, we will be sharing the types of homes where a child is typically raised on unfair terms, believing in home-wrecking practices. Moreover, we will discuss how it affects that child’s marriage in his or her adult life afterward.
1- The Non-Emotional Home
Surprisingly, there are several homes where children are not allowed to wear their hearts on their sleeves. You may have rarely or never seen your parents having an emotional response when, in reality, they are feeling sad, lonely, or even angry. The reason behind this action is that they consider expressing emotions a sign of weakness. As a result, they never let anyone crack their emotional shield and bottle their feelings inside.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
When raised in an environment where expressing one’s emotions is discouraged, people tend to carry that belief into their adult life and hide their true feelings. While it may work outside the home, the inside story is a lot more destructive.
When you become emotionally unavailable to your partner, several issues arise and remain unresolved. When the pile of unresolved marital problems rises, so does the lack of understanding between both parties. One-sided outbursts and continuous stress soon follows, ultimately breaking your marriage apart.
2- The Angry Home
When push comes to shove in such homes, full-blown arguments take place. There is no concept of having a calm, rational talk among parents that doesn’t involve yelling, blaming, throwing things, or name-calling. While the grown-ups fight, the child feels as if they are walking on eggshells.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
A person who grows up in a home where everything is expressed in anger doesn’t know any other way of communicating. Such upbringing could be impacting your current marital relationship. You could be fighting with your partner over issues that can be resolved by talking things out calmly.
If things get out of control, you may lose the relationship you otherwise cherish. By exhibiting anger in your relationship at home, you may have passed on the same traumatic experience to your child, therefore continuing the cycle.
3- The Perfectionist Home
If your parents wanted you to be the extremely well-behaved, can’t-do-anything-wrong kind of child who always excels at everything in life, then you belong from the perfectionist home. Looking less than perfect and failing at something is unacceptable to such parents, which teaches their kids that having an extreme level of control over your life is vital for being happy.
There is no such thing as perfection, as every relationship has to encounter its ups and downs. However, these parents can make it seem like living a perfect life where nothing goes wrong is possible, as they hide their flaws under the carpet.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
People raised in a perfectionist home become plagued by worries of judgment and criticism when they do not excel at things their parents did well. However, once they realize that these problems are there to stay for a long time, they choose to hide it, even from their partners, ultimately hurting their marriage.
Once you start craving for perfectionism, it causes damage to everything that comes in its way. You can’t always be lucky enough to find a partner who shares the same thoughts as you regarding perfectionism. Leading a life of lies is not what one usually asks for when joining someone in marriage based on love, truth, and honor.
Furthermore, your own child can become caught in the same mindset as you until you stop believing in perfectionism and start trusting in realness and honesty.
4- The Divorced Home
People who grow up in a divorced home are forced to mature way before they reach adulthood. The reason for the parents’ divorce can play an essential part in a person’s life as it significantly contributes to their belief system.
If the parents divorced because one of them cheated, the person starts to view all committed relationships as doomed and suspects that the instinct to cheat is stronger than any commitment. However, by receiving therapy and observing other loving couples in long committed relationships, a person can unlearn the negative view and be ready for future relationships, intimate or otherwise.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
When parents split up during a person’s childhood, it does not usually impact their mind. However, as an adult, this person is more likely to feel insecure about relationships, especially in married life. However, when a teenage person experiences their parents getting divorced, it’s more likely to impact them for a short duration as they are mature enough to process their split.
In general, there are usually two outcomes for a person who experiences their parent’s divorce growing up — making rational decisions and avoiding the parents’ mistakes that led to their marriage to end or remaining insecure and being suspicious of your partner for the entirety of the relationship.
5- The Abusive Home
In an abusive home, mental and physical boundaries are violated repeatedly; parents can do this to each other and their children. Growing up in such a toxic environment can have lasting effects. In such homes, children usually turn to under or overeating as a coping mechanism or self-comfort technique. Abusive homes harm a person’s mind and body.
Furthermore, repeated traumatizing events can also lead to elevated stress levels and hormones that upset or disrupt your brain and body connection.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
Growing up in an abusive home can lead to severe consequences in adult married life. When people from such families don’t seek immediate help and counseling, their mental and physical health is already intensely compromised when they start struggling through the basic understandings of the marital relationship.
People in abusive homes have to deal with the fear of the unknown and constant stress. Unless they choose a partner who understands that situation well, their struggles only continue to grow afterward.
6- The Abandonment Home
Abandonment is one of the most common issues children face nowadays, as one or both of their parents refuse to stay emotionally or physically available in their pre-adult life. While these children usually end up living in their heads, they start coming up with fantasies that are too good to be true.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
The abandonment issues can chase you through your adult life when left ignored. The insecurity consumes your married life and spreads like fire in a forest, leaving no room for your relationship to thrive.
While there are people given the opportunity and strength by their loved ones to fight against this factor, not many are lucky enough to get the same chance as them, and their relationship weakens with time.
7- Growing Up in Poverty
Although marriage doesn’t cure poverty, two incomes are usually enough to run a home. However, when that is not the case, and the child is raised in a home where there was never enough to eat or dress well due to any reason, they usually become sensitive and start keeping to themselves rather than going out and making friends.
Poverty affects a child’s mind, making them vulnerable to feelings like sadness, loneliness, and under-appreciation.
How Does It Affect Your Marriage Today?
People who grow up in poverty feel that they are not offering or providing enough money for their home, which causes problems in their married life. The issue appears even when the person is making more than sufficient income for keeping up with their partner’s and children’s wishes. That’s primarily because their mind may still feel the after-effects of what they faced in their childhood.
The marriage can be impacted with such insecurities, as it typically leads to negative thoughts, including self-judgment and fruitless frustration.
How Lessons from our Youth Affects our Marriages Today
What You Learn Growing Up In the ‘Right’ Environment – The Healthy Home
How lessons from our youth affects our marriages today – Even though there are several troubling scenarios a person can go through while growing up, there are still people out there who understand how to build a healthy home with a happy family and thriving children.
Here are a few qualities a couple should have for a loving relationship that inspires your child to have an aspiring marriage life:
1- Show Affection
A child raised in bad circumstances picks up detrimental habits. Similarly, demonstrating appropriate affection towards your partner can open them to be more affectionate in their married life. You need to appreciate your partner without any prompting at different times in front of your children so that they can understand the meaning of true, unconditional love.
2- Have Regular Date Nights
The best way to communicate with your partner is by taking them out on regular date nights. Make sure to include your children as well on some nights. Kids notice everything, so it can be an excellent opportunity to show them how a loving relationship is formed.
3- Share Responsibilities
Home chores can cause regular fights when they are not mutually distributed between partners, mostly when both parents work jobs. However, dividing the duties among all family members can be a great way to communicate with your children while reducing the workload significantly.
4- Fight Right
Your marital fights can also be an essential part of your children’s life lessons. Even in rough times, you can show them how to solve conflicts in a respectful way. That is the time to make them understand how to fight fairly and behind doors rather than dominate your partner in public settings.
You can also establish fight-free zones in your home. For example, many people refer to their kitchens and dining rooms as a fight-free region to prevent unnecessary fights.
Following these points of wisdom during your marriage can reinforce the concept of unconditional love to your children by portraying that you can still lead an ideal life even in not-so-ideal circumstances!
If you would like to speak with an experienced Marriage Coach, about any other challenges or obstacles facing your marriage we offer a variety of resources for couples or you can contact us for a FREE Consultation. Pick up a copy of our book “How Communicating Saved Our Marriage” or check out our new natural product line Inspired by US.
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