We Do Therapy: Then Came the Wedding

How did trauma impact our wedding and honeymoon?

This is Part II of the four-part series, We Do Therapy series (available to paid subscribers). You can access the posts that introduced the series and Part I here. Scott and I are sharing both the struggles and triumphs of two young adults who believed they had found someone who would care for them. Our intent is not to offer marriage advice. We are not licensed therapists. We are survivors who hope that what we share about our journey together will help others to be curious about how trauma might be impacting their marriage. Hopefully far sooner than we did! (Please read note at end of page.)

AI Generated Image: “What should we do with all this baggage?”

Preparing for a wedding is always a stressful time, but my bout with mono, loss of job, and subsequent loss of church community added very unnecessary layers. We are grateful for our friends who stepped in to care for us as I had to move from my apartment, live with a friend, try to gain my strength, and plan a wedding that had to relocate from the local church to my parent’s church which was eight hours away.

A month before the wedding we rented an apartment and I moved in. I did not know that I would be terrified by being alone in the apartment complex. After several days of panic calls, Scott began sleeping on the couch. We didn’t understand my fear and we tried to hide our living arrangement—heaven forbid that anyone would know! It was the beginning of hiding and what became a very effective survival-based co-dependent relationship.

The wedding day did finally arrive.

We proved that we could climb over difficult circumstances and make our dreams come true. We planned to drive down the coast for a short honeymoon before returning to our apartment. We couldn’t know that the place we chose to stop for the second night would bring the impact of trauma front and center to our brand-new marriage—something we would not understand for another thirty-five years.