What’s Really Hurting Marriages Today?

What is the most overlooked issue plaguing marriages today? I believe that almost all issues plaguing marriages are symptoms, meaning to say outward secondary expressions of something else. And that one of the big underlying issues that people are too afraid to acknowledge, it's too painful to acknowledge is the effect of child abuse on specifically the woman. It affects men and women, but specifically the effect that child abuse has on women. I've said on other occasions that the male female paradigms are giver and recipient. The man is the initiator or the provider. The woman receives that, cultivates it, and gives back something that's upgraded. That the obvious example of that is reproduction. The man gives this tiny genetic material to the woman. She develops it for 9 months and gives back a child. But that's not just in biological reproduction. that's in everything in emotional energy. And the man gives to the woman his full attention, his full time and care, and he fills her with his undivided attention. She takes that, she's literally impregnated by that, and then she gives birth to enough positive energy to fill a home. That's the way it works. So the whole male female paradigm operates on this dynamic of provider recipient. Now, when a woman has been violated in the most intimate of ways, that affects her ability to receive, a wall goes up, a protective wall for survival purposes, and she is not able to let her guard down and to receive for obvious reasons. When that's not acknowledged, when that boogeyman remains in the closet and ignored, then everybody's confused. What's going on? Why are they not connecting? And they'll blame all types of things. Oh, we don't communicate well. Oh, we're not compatible. Oh, our values are different. And the real reason is she's been hurt usually by another man, usually by a man who was supposed to be her protector when she was a child. And now she cannot open herself up to her husband. I think people would be shocked and horrified to realize how many problems in families today is because of something that a man did to a woman years before she became a wife. And the path forward toward healing is to acknowledge this. Most survivors of abuse do not admit it until middle age. to be honest about it and to begin to build a new and healthy paradigm of femininity and receptivity where she can let her husband into her most sacred private space.