136. The Weight of the Past- Unpacking Emotional Baggage for a Healthier Marriage

This week on the Evolved Marriage Podcast, join Kate and Eric as they delve into the profound journey of healing past traumas and building a stronger, more intimate connection in marriage.

Topics:
➡️ Embracing Past Traumas: Learn the transformative power of acknowledging and discussing past hurts to improve your marriage.

➡️ Vulnerability in Healing: Discover how opening up about deep-seated pains can lead to significant healing and deeper intimacy.

➡️ Facilitating Healing Conversations: Understand the importance of creating a safe space for your partner to express their trauma and pain.

➡️ Dealing with the Weight of the Past: Insights into how past experiences like infidelity or absence affect long-term relationships and strategies for healing.

➡️ Three Steps to Relationship Healing: A discussion on the critical steps for healing in a relationship: creating conversation space, understanding past needs, and addressing current triggers.

➡️ Supporting Your Partner: Learn the importance of validation and empathy in supporting your partner through their healing journey.

Tune in for a compelling episode that offers valuable insights into emotional healing and intimacy in marriage.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Eric MacDougall
Today, you know, the reason that this topic came up for us was because we often see in relationship, where one partner is still bringing up a lot of the pain that they experience in the past. So we're gonna be talking, especially in relationship, this happens, right? So in long term marriages, examples of us is, you know, my alcoholism and how it impacted us in our relationship, some of the choices I made, etc. But it can be whatever, in whatever relationship right, maybe it's an infidelity that has happened in the past, maybe it's, you know, that one partner was just a way on work constantly. I spoke to man recently that, you know, because he was in the military, and he was away on work, he wasn't there for the birth of his daughter, and how hard that was for him, but also how hard it was for his wife to kind of go through that alone. And so these are just pains, right, that we're experienced, that are based on, you know, kind of losing that secure attachment, and then they get embedded in us, and they kind of stay there. So we're gonna be talking about the ones within relationship, but understand that this can go also way back in your past, right,

Kate MacDougall
even childhood things, you know, the way the way your parents treated you and the way your as a woman, you know, maybe the way your father treated you and how you're, you know, bringing that to your current relationship. So, yeah, definitely, this can go way back, you know, baggage from way past or maybe just close past.

Eric MacDougall
Yeah. And today, we're going to kind of, you know, essentially, in a very quick way, talk about how we can use these, you know, healthy, courageous conversations in order to help our partner heal through some of this. So, you know, I teach a very extensive model in this in our masterminds, I teach men how to do this in the mastermind very extensively, and It's very powerful in terms of helping your partner overcome a lot of these past challenges they have and heal. So they can essentially unburden themselves, right, this idea of kind of cutting the cord, letting go that weight that is no longer serving them, but that in some way, they're still holding on to because they're still feeling it real time. Because feelings don't know time. And so the first thing that's really important understand is that this has to be talked about, right? Oftentimes, the big challenge that we see in relationships is one partner brings it up, right brings up the pain brings up the past. And in response, the other partner essentially tries to bury to get

Kate MacDougall
or defend themselves as the spouse Well, I'm not like that. Yeah,

Eric MacDougall
like, oh, we do that. Yeah. Or yeah, if it's a past relationship, or things like that, right? Well, I'm not that type of person, or why you bring that baggage in, that's not me, etc. Or even, you know, within the change of a relationship, right, that happened 12 years ago, why do you keep bringing it up? Can we just leave that alone? Let's move forward, let's think ahead, etc. And so I totally understand why a partner would respond in that way, right? When you're seeing your partner suffer and just kind of living in the past and talking about this, not only does it feel kind of crappy for you, because it feels like you're stuck in time. But it's also hard to see your partner suffer, which is really, really hard. And so just understanding this idea that, you know, when your partner is bringing up the topic, instead of trying to get them to bury it, let go of it, get rid of it, what we want to do is actually bring it out and

Kate MacDougall
face it, yeah, by giving your partner space to open up about it by becoming curious about it, by becoming interested in it, you're going to learn things about your partner that you might have never understood before. So for example, if your partner was unfaithful, what sorry, not was unfaithful, we had been in a relationship where somebody was unfaithful to them. And they might have trust issues. Now, in your current relationship. Even though you've done all the actions to show that I'm not an unfaithful person, you can trust me, I am faithful, I don't go out ever alone with women, other women, I don't do this. And I don't do that. Your partner's still living with this trauma. They're still living with this past and this baggage. And so by you, allowing them to open up about it by you asking questions like how did that make you feel? Tell me more about it, becoming very curious about it, it's allowing your partner to get it off of their heart and into the world. Because when you're carrying something on your heart, when it's heavy on your heart, it's very hard to heal, you can only start healing when you start talking about it. And you start expressing how that's making you feel. And maybe your partner is not ready to talk to you about it yet. Maybe they haven't done that inner work, or they don't even understand how it's making them feel and the impact it's having on your current relationship. You could do something like encourage them to write about it, maybe journal about it, start just putting out their feelings in a journal. Like, I'm angry, even if it's a word bubble. I remember I've done that before. You know, past, angry, frustrated, sad, like I just wrote words. And that was my start to heal. And to understand how, you know, for us, it was the past in our relationship that really did some damage. And we brought that baggage to our relationship. Still now like five it was like, you know, years later, and we were still carrying that baggage from the beginning of a relationship. And I wasn't ready. If you had come up to me at that point and said, Talk to me about it. Talk to me about how that made you feel. And I think you might have in a few like we'd had done an interview session therapy sessions, and you had done it, just the two of us. And I wasn't ready to talk about it yet. Because I hadn't taken the time to fully understand it myself.

Eric MacDougall
Also, it was too painful, right? Yeah, sometimes that is a big thing that's preventing us from bringing these things up. Yeah, really sitting with

Kate MacDougall
it. We think that if we continue to bury it, and continue to not talk about it, that eventually it will go away. Yeah. Or

Eric MacDougall
if we, you know, when it does come up, instead of sitting in it talking about how you fell talking about your experience and really kind of going through it. You think it will feel better just to blame your partner again, kind of, you know, say, oh, it's your fault, or, you know, maybe you hadn't Yeah, make them the bad guy. And, you know, you think that's working. But long term, it's not, you're just perpetuating the cycle of feeling powerless. And these feelings are essentially controlling you because they're working into your unconscious, right? And so what we want to do, and this is the hardest part, I think, for a lot of us because two things are happening here that are really important to understand. The first thing is, if you're a partner who's bringing up these pasts, and you've experienced the pain, it's incredibly painful to relive some of these memories, right? You could be all kinds of stuff you can think about maybe a partner who have went through emails and found that at about an affair by reading some very detailed emails, it's incredibly painful to go back and relive that right to sit out and talk about how I felt in that moment. And

Kate MacDougall
surface again, the crying and the betrayal and the Yeah,

Eric MacDougall
yeah, maybe when you were yelling, you know, maybe you were in an abusive relationship, or maybe one of your parents neglected you, right? There's all kinds of ways that we have these traumas, right, little T traumas, if you will, or big T, trauma T traumas. But we have to work through these. And a big part of the reason we don't do this is because it's painful to relive this. And so what we typically do is we try to bury it. And if we bury it, they essentially run our life in the background, right? So we want to do is bring them out and heal them. So that's the first part that's so hard for us is, if you're the partner who experienced the pain, it's hard to relive it. The other thing is, if you're the partner who was a cause of the pain, right, so I think about this in terms of my alcoholism, my emotional abuse years ago, the way I treated you, etc. When you bring up the pain, not only is it hard for me to see you suffer in that way again, but it actually kind of creates something in me that's based in shame and guilt. It reminds me how horrible I was reminds me how much a monster I was all these things, these really negative beliefs that then are hard for me to hold, and pray to say, Oh, I have to essentially, you know, experience this shame, but help my partner heal.

Kate MacDougall
Yeah. And that's bringing up something for me, I remember at the beginning, avoiding talking to you about, I could talk about in therapy by myself, I could talk about it with some some friends, not all friends, but some friends that I felt I could trust. I could talk about it, but I couldn't talk to you about it, I couldn't talk to you about my hurt, because I had seen all of the work you did to change that. The fact that you had quit drinking and that was must have been so hard for you, you know what to do. And it was a journey in itself. And, and I could see that you are no longer this person. So by me bringing up this past, almost made me feel like well, if I bring it up, I'm like, just sweeping everything he's done under the rug. And I'm just ignoring that, and telling him like, well, thanks for quitting drinking and being the amazing person you are now but I still remember the past person. So thank you, but no, thank you kind of it. So it was kind of like there was this like sense of, Well, if I bring it up, I'm gonna make him feel bad about himself again. And I don't want to because I'm proud of the person and the work he's done. And I'm proud of the person he is today. And I don't want him to have to relive that. Because I can't imagine how hard it was for you to go through the process of healing yourself and quitting drinking and you know, doing the work and you did the work and you put like, 120% into it. So for me to be like, Well, yeah, but I'm still heard about it. It almost made me feel like it was invalidating everything you had done. So I didn't want to bring it up, because I was like, just get over it, Kate, like just get over

Eric MacDougall
it for you. It was like this or that. It's like you're I heal. So it's kind of win lose, right? Yeah, it's either I heal my pain, and it sucks for Eric, because you know, it's going to invalidate him. Or I let Eric kind of win. And I have to hold on to this payment.

Kate MacDougall
And I'll hold on to it. And I'll try to heal it on my own. But not realizing that until and that was the huge catalyst for change. And I think that we've talked about this in past episodes. But until we had that sit down conversation where I opened up to you, and I was like, I am still hurt about this. And this is what it made me feel like, and I was open and vulnerable. And for the first time, I think it took me about five years to talk to you about it. But until I did that, there was no healing. You know, and as much as I went through personal therapy and tried to work on it on my own, and whatever the big healing happened when I opened up to you about it. And when we talked and I was able to let you know how it made me feel, and the impact that it was still having on me. And all you did in that conversation was sit there and get curious and continue digging. And then how did that make you feel? Tell me more about how that triggers you today. Tell me more about that. Keep going Keep going and you sat there and I remember you looking at me and me thinking oh my god, like I'm just I'm just like vomiting all this past trauma on him and letting him know that he's a monster like trying to almost reminding you that you were a monster and and that was very, very hard for me to do. But I understood at that point. It took me five years to understand but until I do this, he will not understand the impact that he had on you and how it's still impacting you Today, yeah,

Eric MacDougall
and I want to say, you know, thinking back in the moments, I remember that moment very vividly as well. And, number one, it was really important for your healing. So it wasn't necessarily just about, he needs to understand the pain I went through. But also, I think you got to a place understand like, I need to release this. Yeah, I need to kind of have to stop holding on to this. Yeah. And you know, in the group, we talk a lot about sitting in the fire, right, this idea in the mastermind, but for me, I remember that, like it was like an infertile, right, like, in a sense, and I could see you in the moment battling in terms of how much do I let out because at some point, it almost came out as kind of rage. And then you were like holding it in. And so there was times when we were sitting there talking. And it was just me saying, Tell me more about that. And then there was like, a minute of silence. And you were just sitting there and you were like in tears. And I could tell you were kind of battling like, do I tell him this? Do I let him do I? How angry do I want to get? Right? Right, exactly. And do I allow myself to lose control whatever. And I just sat in the silence with you. And then you know, you would get to a point where like, you just don't understand. And I was like, No, I don't like and I never will.

Kate MacDougall
Yeah, so that validation during that conversation was most definitely probably the most important thing that made me feel like, okay, it's safe for me to keep going, and then letting it out. And there was some probably some points in that conversation that were maybe a little unhealthy, I might have said some hurtful things that weren't necessary to be said. But I think you were able to hold space for me and understand and be empathetic. She's very angry about this. She's obviously very hurt about this. And so when you're opening up, whether it's something that your partner did, or something that an ex partner did, or something that a parent or somebody in your past did, when you're opening up, it's extremely important to give your spouse the time. And this might happen in a one sitting conversation. This might happen in many sittings. But the point is to just give them that space to open up and to talk about their hurt, and to talk about how it makes them feel how it's impacting them. Now, what are the current triggers today, in 2023, that are still impacting

Eric MacDougall
to kind of bring them back to that moment? Yeah, wake up that part of them.

Kate MacDougall
Exactly. What is that? What are the triggers? What? What is it that I do that reminds you of that moment? What is it that I do that might remind you of the way you were treated as a child or the way you were treated in your past relationships? And so asking those questions, seeking to understand will help you see your spouse in a whole different light. And by embracing your spouse, I'm talking about the the person opening up by embracing your past by understanding, yes, this did happen. Yes, I did go through this. And yes, I am hurt and still hurt by it. That is a huge, huge healing moment, for the both of you, it's very healing, to stop hiding behind your feelings and to stop hiding behind, you know, let's just pretend this didn't happen, let's sweep it under the rug, let's just, you know, this isn't the guy he is anymore, or this isn't the partner I'm with now, it's, let's just let it go. Let it go, let it go by not talking about it, you're just reliving that every single time you get triggered. And that trigger could be anything from like, a doorbell ring to a sound, you know, triggering sound to an action or, you know, seeing a specific person, like triggers can be anything. So by talking about it, you start becoming aware of those triggers. And you know, and if you're not aware of it, get some help, go see a therapist journal about it, start talking about it with different people, if you don't feel safe to do it with your spouse yet, but this has to come out. And eventually having that conversation with your spouse, having that constant, very vulnerable conversation, very difficult conversation with your spouse, will allow them to see you in a light that they've never seen you before. It will allow them to understand you and understand your circumstances in a way that they never probably would have otherwise.

Eric MacDougall
Yeah. And I think, you know, as you're talking about that, there's really these three big points right to this healing. And the first one is to really create space for conversation for your partner to be vulnerable and really reconnect to that experience, right, creating awareness about what was happening, allowing that to come out of them. excetera is extremely important. So literally, you know, we talked about, like, tell me about, like, what the worst part was about being with a husband who was constantly drunk. Like, tell me about moments where you just felt complete powerlessness. Right? And then Kate would just say, I remember this time where this happened, and she's kind of reliving it, like, very specific. This is how I felt this was going on for me and I was so angry and this and that I felt and she's kind of worked walking through it. And now what's happening is I am now creating that space for her to walk through it. And so that's the first part, right creating space for a party to walk through that. The second part is understanding what they needed, then. Right? And so, tell me, you know, now that you've experienced, it talks about your experience, what is it that you needed most? In that moment? Well, I, you know, I needed this, I needed you to come home safely. I needed you to stop drinking and to come to bed at night, I needed you to stop raising your voice at me when you were drunk. Like you're, you're talking about all these things, right? And so what you're doing is in back then in the moment, what is it that you needed from me that I did not give to you? And maybe it's in a relationship and External Relations? The parent, is it that you need a parent, your dad was you needed from these men that you know, were unfaithful to you, whatever. And so you want to be very specific about what you needed? In that specific moment. If I could have made it all great, what would have happened? And now you want to bring it to the present? And say, what do you need most from me now, and this is when these triggers come up. When you're feeling this way, when you know, your body is invaded by this emotional state, and you're activated and you don't know what to do? What is it you need most from me, your partner who wants to create security who loves you deeply. And it could literally be, I need you to hold me, I need you to be with me while I cry. I need you to listen to me while I talk about how horrible My experience was. Like it could be anything. Yeah, your partner knows what they need if they're able to connect to that, right. And again, like Kate said earlier, if you're the partner who's kind of, you know, figuring this out, start by writing it out, then talk to a person that you feel really comfortable and safe with to talk it out. Eventually talk to the person who, if they're still around, created this pain, right? We were lucky we were still in relationship. If not talk to somebody you love and a safe person. And then work through that healing by letting it out by releasing it and putting it out into the world.