Are Childhood Family Patterns Affecting Your Marriage?

If you are like many people, you may not like the idea that you are “becoming your mother” or father. The truth is that the childhood family patterns you learned in your parents’ home could be affecting the way you see life today, and even your marriage. Here’s what couples can do to recognize these unconscious family dynamics and move toward a healthier future together.

Why You Can’t Seem to Escape Your Childhood Family Pattern

Have you ever heard the saying that you marry your father or mother? Maybe you feel like you are taking on your parents’ traits as you age. It may feel like you can’t escape your family of origin, whether you want to or not. Your parents and home environment taught you patterns of responding to the world that you carry forward into adulthood. For example, if you were raised in a positive family climate, you are more likely to have healthy romantic relationships as an adult. 

Childhood family patterns can take on all different forms, including:

• Communication styles (Are you blunt and direct or do you prefer subtlety?)
• Independence vs support (How often and how easily do you turn to others for help?)
• Conflict resolution styles (Do you start fights, try to avoid them, or focus on cooperation?)
• Socialization expectations (Do you prefer a busy social calendar or time alone?)
• Approaches to budgeting and spending (Do you make purchases quickly, enjoy spending time shopping, or do your research first?)
• Household expectations (How do you expect chores and household tasks to be divided?
• Relationship boundaries (How close are you to extended family, your parents, or friends?)

These childhood family patterns may be healthy, unhealthy, or some combination of the two. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can drastically affect your relationship patterns in traumatic and unhealthy ways. But even if you had a positive childhood overall, the family dynamics you grew up in will affect you long after you have left your childhood home.

Understanding How Childhood Family Patterns Affect Your Marriage

The behaviors and tendencies you learned as a child affect every relationship you have in life, especially your romantic partnerships. Because a marriage is built on intimacy, your spouse will be affected by all the childhood family patterns you carry with you, from the way you communicate and deal with conflict, to your habits around spending, eating, and family time. 

When your childhood family patterns and your spouse’s are mismatched, it can create friction in your marriage resulting in recurring arguments, resentment, and marital dysfunction. When children are added into the mix, these mismatches can escalate as the couple wrestles with which parts of their own traditions, histories, and behavior patterns to pass on to their kids. 

That is not to say that either spouse is doing anything “wrong.” Differences can both be adaptive even if they are in conflict. Rather focusing on what your spouse is doing wrong, recognize that their lived experiences and expectations may be affecting your existing family dynamic. That way you can address those differences and resolve any conflict before you can move on to a more healthy relationship dynamic. 

5 Steps for Building a Better Family Dynamic

If you want to break away from unhealthy childhood family patterns, you may need the help of an experienced couples counselor and psychotherapist. Working with a licensed professional, you can build a better family dynamic for your household by:

Prioritizing Your Marriage

Often, couples drift apart simply because each of them are focused on other stressors in their lives like their jobs, health, children, or individual mental health. Prioritizing your marriage means setting aside time, energy, and attention specifically for your spouse and your relationship. It could include attending regular couples’ counseling sessions with a therapist who can guide you toward building a better family dynamic.

Identify Your Attachment Style

Each spouse should reflect on your own lived experiences and how you experience the world around you. When it comes to relationships, this may include identifying your primary attachment style:

• Anxious-Preoccupied attachment may look like “clingy” behavior or a desire to be as close as possible to your spouse at all times, sometimes based on a fear of abandonment.

• Dismissive-Avoidant attachment may seem detached or cold, coming from an assumption that you are independent and don’t need extensive human interactions, sometimes based on desire to avoid vulnerability.

• Ambivalent or Disorganized attachment may mix high anxiety around close relationships and avoidance of a partner’s behaviors or responses. It could be displayed as either ambivalence or a constant need for reassurance.

• Secure attachment comes from a place of confidence and often includes healthy boundary setting and expectations, as well as an optimistic outlook on the relationships.

Your attachment style is often formed based on the way your parents or caregivers treated you in your childhood. But identifying your attachment style isn’t about blaming your parents for things they did wrong, or about beating yourself up over unhealthy behaviors. Instead, knowing the deep, often unconscious, emotional cause of your behaviors can help you respond to your anxiety, fear, or defensiveness in a more healthy way.

Be Mindful and Transparent About Childhood Family Patterns

Once you know your attachment style and how it shows up in your behavior, it will be up to you to be aware when those childhood family patterns are in play. If you are having a strong emotional reaction to something your spouse is doing, ask yourself why. Consider if you are acting out of anxiety or fear about your partner or the relationship. If the answer is yes, that’s okay, but be open with your spouse about what you are feeling. Transparent communication when childhood family patterns arise can help your spouse understand, respond to, and quiet your fears. 

Set Healthy Boundaries with Others

Often, it can be challenging to break unhealthy childhood family patterns when parents and other extended family members perpetuate them. If you and your spouse are committed to making changes in the way you interact in your relationships, you may need to set and maintain boundaries with others to make space to learn and practice new behaviors. Working together on this means you may sometimes need to defend your spouse against their own family, or yours, when they behave differently than loved ones expect.

Develop New Communication and Conflict Resolution Skills

Your childhood family dynamics may always influence the way you see the world, but they don’t have to control it. By working with a couples counselor, you and your spouse can learn new communication techniques and conflict resolution skills that will improve your relationship. Breaking childhood habits doesn’t happen quickly, but over time, you can establish a new, secure family dynamic built on love and trust. 

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience. He helps individuals and couples learn strategies for minimizing conflict in their relationships. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.