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The Unseen Guest: How Past Wounds Shape Your Marriage Conflicts · Doing Marriage Well

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  Doing Marriage Well for March 25, 2026 The Unseen Guest How Past Wounds Shape
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  Your Marriage Conflicts Today, more on a compromise.
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  Often, we find ourselves at odds because one or both of us suffers from emotional wounds.
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  The issue of extrovertism and introvertism I have been discussing is not about
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  brokenness, but it may be exaggerated due to past injury.
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  With other things, our desire for something, or our desire to avoid it,
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  maybe mostly or entirely about ways we were hurt long before we met our spouse.
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  It's humbling to admit to ourselves
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  that what we want, we want because of something that needs healing.
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  It's especially difficult when we admit that what we want costs our spouse.
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  You needing something, or needing to avoid it, because a past injury is not bad or wrong.
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  It's also not selfish, and you should be honest about your feelings instead
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  of just doing what your spouse wants.
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  Admitting why you feel as you do to your spouse is a brave and beneficial thing.
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  It may feel embarrassing. It may feel like it puts you at a disadvantage.
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  But if your spouse won't use it against you to get what they want,
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  it can make the situation easier.
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  We can deal with childhood injuries, work through the pain, and find transformation.
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  Telling your spouse that your past is why you want what you want is promising
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  to deal with your injury.
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  There is no guarantee that your desire will do a 180, but if you get healing,
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  it will make it easier for you to do or not do whatever.
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  Actually getting healing can be a difficult task. It means being brutally honest
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  with yourself about your past.
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  That may mean admitting someone was not as nice or caring as you have told yourself.
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  It could also shine a light on something selfish, harmful, or destructive that you did.
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  Issues like this often come from repeated events that happened over many years.
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  Certain patterns can play out in our young lives, beating us down and creating
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  in us defensiveness, desires, or weaknesses that are not an inherent part of who God made us.
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  But when we get hit the same way over and over, we start to accept that what
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  has created in us is a fundamental part of who we are.
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  Once we get there, we lose the ability to recognize the behavior or thinking as alien.
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  Talking with your spouse may help you expose some of this, but many folks will
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  need a trained third party for that.
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  Story work is a great tool for this, and I recommend the folks at Aldrich Ministries
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  for that. There's a link in the show notes.
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  This is Paul, and dealing with your past makes it far easier to do marriage well.