How Do I Heal My Marriage When Trauma from My Past Is Hurting Us?

Yes, healing your marriage while carrying trauma from your past is possible when you feel safe and secure with your partner. It begins with awareness of your common triggers and communicating this in your love map, to your partner. 

Trauma can affect how you communicate, trust, and react emotionally, often without you or your partner realising it. Couples therapy that integrates trauma-informed care and inner child healing helps both partners understand emotional triggers, rebuild safety, and develop healthier connection patterns. You don’t have to heal alone—doing the work together can deepen intimacy and create lasting change.

Gottman Couple Therapy

Book Now

Communicating Your Love Map When You Feel Alone

Help your spouse become a pillar of support and a safe harbour and you won't feel alone in your marriage and life struggles.

You love your partner—but sometimes your reactions feel bigger than the moment. Maybe you withdraw or shut down entirely when things get hard, or lash out when you feel misunderstood. You’ve wondered: Is this about now—or is this about something from before?

You’re not alone. Many couples find that past trauma silently shapes their present relationship.

Nobody formally taught us how to be married, live together and navigate life's challenges together. We learned it through observing our family of origin, our peers and through the lens of our set of values, beliefs, culture. These may not be ideal, but it is familiar and often in our unconscious.

How To Tell if My Trauma Affects Our Marriage?

Here are some signs that our nervous system is more vigilant and will react to protect and keep us safe in conflicts and quarrels, leading to over-functioning or under-functioning behaviours. Some signs your sympathetic nervous system is kicking into overdrive include:

• You feel unsafe during conflict, even if it’s minor

• You shut down emotionally or become hyper-reactive when perceived to be threatened

• You expect abandonment, rejection, or betrayal—even when your partner means well

• You seek control or reassurance to feel secure

Gentle Reminder:

👉 These patterns aren’t flaws—they’re survival strategies your nervous system learned early. You survived, you adapted. in some ways, you have been successful because of your adaptability and resilience through the lived experience.

Why Awareness Of The Nervous System Response Is the First Step

The salutogenic approach to couples therapy and inner child healing begins with helping clients regulate. Awareness is key. It is important that we focus on being aware of the nervous system response and need not dwell into why we feel or react as it risks exposure and re-traumatising.

Trauma doesn't always come from “big events.” Sometimes, it’s emotional neglect, lack of validation, or unsafe childhood environments. These experiences affect attachment, emotional regulation, and communication.

Inner Child Healing helps uncover these early patterns and bring compassion to the parts of you still holding pain.

The Gottman Sound Relationship House states Building Love Maps and updating it regularly as the first foundation for a sound relationship. It is absolutely necessary to express the needs for safety and common situational patterns and triggers.

Build & Share Your Love Maps

Start building and sharing your love map with your partner. Click the picture to access!

We help clients in therapy on various strategies to heal their wounds, navigate conflicts by turning to each other for support and cooperation. These can also be done in small steps on your own, especially if your spouse is willing and on board.

A love map is an expression of your needs, values, activities, dreams, goals, fears, preferences and day-to-day experiences.

It is helpful to express the need to feel safe, loved, understood, supported, etc. and the common situations where you feel these needs are unmet, without assigning blame to anyone. Focus on the common behavioural responses when your internal threat detection system is triggered. Observe how your body is when this happens, or the common activities you would engage in when you feel unsafe.

This is helpful as it provides cues to your spouse that you are not feeling safe and secure, and when detected early (before your spouse gets triggered by you being triggered), can promote co-regulation.

Co-Regulation A Couple That Breathes Together Lives Together

Part of the love map building and sharing activity includes building a safe space for the needs of both parties to be expressed. In particular, the need to feel safe - be loved rather than judged, be supported (acknowledged) instead of being told what to do, be seen to be vulnerable and held with loving care and patience.

The common pattern however tends to drive couples away rather than towards each other, driving a wedge between the couple.

To start building up each other, it often begins with knowing what we are doing wrong.

How Couples Therapy Can Help

At My Inner Child Clinic, our therapists are trained in:

• Trauma-informed care

• Inner child work

• Gottman Method Couples Therapy

  
  

This approach supports both partners to:

• Recognise and respond to emotional triggers

• Communicate without blame or shutdown

• Rebuild trust and safety through co-regulation

Trauma-Informed Couples Therapy

Unhealed experiences from the past—whether childhood wounds or past relationship pain—can affect how we relate, communicate, and trust in the present.

You Don’t Have to Be Fully Healed to Love Well

Healing is a journey—and it’s okay to begin that journey while still hurting. The key is to heal in relationship, not in isolation.

Ready to begin?Book a session with a trauma-informed couples therapist at My Inner Child Clinic. Together, we’ll help you rebuild trust, safety, and intimacy—one conversation at a time.

Couples Therapy Singapore