From Triggered to Solid: How Unpacking Your Childhood Trauma Helps Your Spouse Heal

The journey back from infidelity is long and difficult. It does not come easily. Having been both the betrayer and the betrayed, I know firsthand the depth of pain that both partners experience.

If you are the unfaithful partner, there are many tools you need to acquire and many skills you need to learn. Some are more difficult than others, and the hardest ones differ for everyone. For me, the single hardest skill was learning not to be defensive when my wife was flooding—and learning not to yell back, escalating the situation exponentially.

There is a reason I found that skill so hard to learn: it was deeply connected to the baggage both my wife and I carry from our childhoods.

My wife never knew her father. Her mother had a series of violent, alcoholic boyfriends—more than one of whom repeatedly assaulted that sweet little girl from the age of five until she ran away from home at fourteen. One had even threatened her life and her little brother’s life.

I also grew up with an absent father. At age five, I gained a stepfather who was in the early stages of schizophrenia—and who was extremely volatile and violent. He beat my little brother and me with uncontrolled rage. When I was fourteen, he choked me almost to death; I barely managed to break free just as I was losing consciousness.

Through our years together, I came to realize that my wife’s volatile temper was a defense mechanism—one that kicked into overdrive after D-Day. When she feels unsafe or threatened, she is filled with fear, but throughout her life, she has only felt safe and empowered when expressing that fear through anger. She becomes like a frightened animal cornered in the dark: small, generally not dangerous, but puffing itself up to look and sound as aggressive as possible to scare off perceived attackers. In truth, I believe most betrayed spouses experience something similar.

Here is what would happen: My wife would be triggered by something that touched off her deep fear of the pain I had caused her—and could potentially cause her again. Without even realizing it, she expressed that fear as protective rage.

For me, being raged at unleashed all of my own childhood fears, when rage was almost always followed by physical violence. The frightened little boy inside me would lash out at his remembered attackers, responding directly to my wife’s frightened little girl doing the exact same thing. Time after time, I kept making the same mistake. As soon as the angry shouts left my lips, a voice inside me would think, “Oh man, I wasn’t going to do that this time, and now I’m already doing it.”

I was helped along by advice from Rick, who talked about sidetracking our primal fight-or-flight response by engaging higher brain functions the moment we feel ourselves spiraling. As a history teacher, I tried naming every U.S. vice president in reverse order, or listing Super Bowl and World Series winners and losers until I felt calmer.

That helped enormously, but it was still a huge challenge. More often than not, I forgot to use those tools until I had already started yelling.

One day, it occurred to me how ironic it was that I was so quick to jump to self-defensive anger with my wife when I am so patient with children—both our own and my students. Would I yell back at a hurt, terrified child that way? Of course not. And yet, it was the poor, frightened child inside my wife that I was responding to. I wondered what it would have been like if we had known each other when we were five or six years old. Maybe we would have hidden together, huddled in a closet. Maybe we would have comforted each other.

I resolved to do everything I could to remember, in the heat of the moment, that the escalated flooding feeding between us was just the voices of our wounded, frightened inner children. I needed to approach her with empathy, compassion, and tenderness.

My wife and I are both artists—it is one of the things that drew us together in the first place. I found a photo of myself at age seven and one of her at the same age. Using those photos as reference, I drew a pen-and-ink portrait of the two of us together as children. (You don’t need to be an artist to do this; you can easily combine two digital photos for the same effect.)

I framed the picture and set it on our living room mantel.

From then on, whenever my wife started flooding and I felt that familiar urge to defend myself and yell louder, I would cast my eyes across the room to that image. I would envision those two little children holding and comforting each other. My own fear and anger would melt away, allowing me to become a safe place for my wife’s feelings to be poured out.

I often think of the opening credits of the old TV show Dark Shadows: waves crashing relentlessly against a rocky shore. We have to be that rock—standing firm as our partner’s flooding emotions pound against us. If we remain solid until the energy of the wave subsides, the tide will roll back out, and calm will return. When they see that we are safe, it becomes one small step toward them feeling safe with us again.

Visualizing that pounding surf alongside the image of us as children allowed me to regain control of my emotions in critical moments. I was amazed at the difference it made.

You can be your partner’s solid rock and, simultaneously, their gentle comfort. You just have to step outside your own self, see the vulnerable child in them—and protect it.