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Emotional poison can ruin a marriage

By Bill Mitcham | Mooresville Tribune

Published: May 29, 2008

All of us know family members or friends who have divorced.
When we are in a healthy marriage and see others divorce, we are quick to pass judgment on those persons, sometimes questioning their morality, and deeming them with flaws of commitment, personality, relational skills or other deficits.

Let me suggest something which will make all of us more understanding and less judging of persons who divorce. It's something I term emotional poison and in many cases, it could be a major factor.

Unresolved differences or unaddressed conflicts in a marriage cause the build-up of emotional poison in a couple's relationship. Resentment is a symptom of emotional poisoning. If a chronic conflict is not resolved or if one partner is dominating and controlling a spouse, emotional poisoning permeates the interactions of the spouses.

This emotional poison affects the children in the home. An analogy is the secondhand smoke of two parents who are heavy smokers. The physical health of children is put at great risk by parents who smoke in the family home. Parents who allow unresolved issues fester actually put their children's emotional health in jeopardy. The natural flow of affection, genuine care and nurturing is interrupted when parents are full of hate, disgust and anger. Children are not blind and void of emotional awareness. They swim in the same emotional water their parents swim in. It is not unusual for children to pick up this emotional poison. They can become as bitter and uncooperative as their parents.

Too much emotional poison can lead to an emotional divorce between two married people who live in the same house. To the outside world, even extended family and friends, emotionally divorced spouses can appear to be relatively happy and normal. They may go to social functions together, attend church or synagogue as a family, or show up at the same ball game to watch their kids play. However, at home there is no affection, no intimacy (many times they sleep in separate rooms) and no conversation, unless it is about a parenting issue with the children.

An emotional divorce could be as damaging as a legal divorce. Some social scientists say it is worse. Sometimes in a legal divorce, the parents go to therapy and learn go deal with the emotional poison, even finding ways to get beyond it. In an emotional divorce, the poison continues to grow in secret, like a cancer.

Children who grow up with a mom and dad who are legally married, but emotional divorced, tend to take much of this poison into their own marriages.

Some marriage and family therapists believe all of us set out to create in our marriage the same emotional temperature of our family of origin. In other words, if our growing up family was warm, nurturing and accepting, we try to replicate this in our marriage. If it was a hostile, explosive and cold home environment, unconsciously we are in danger of making our family of intention (marriage) the same.

Each generation that transports emotional poison forward to the next generation experiences the snowball effect. Each generation that doesn't find a way to dissipate the poison from the system adds to the size of the emotional snowball. After the poison reaches a certain point, it gets too big to hide and too big to manage. The crisis gets too big to resolve and a divorce is imminent.

Sometimes a divorce in this generation has its roots in a previous generation. No one knows about the emotional divorce that was in the family system generations back. The secret of the emotional divorce is carried forward in the accumulation of emotional poison. All the blame and judgment attributed to persons who divorce could be misplaced blame and judgment. The blame rests in the previous generation that failed to address conflicts and resolve issues. The failure belongs to the generation that used denial and avoidance as their main mode of operation rather than conflict resolution and shared power.

All of us need to be less judgmental and more empathetic to our family and friends whose dream of a lifelong marriage comes falling down around them. We may not know all the facts.