What's your childhood experiences have to do with how your marriage is doing today? Depending on what those experiences were, it could be plenty.

If your parents had a good marriage and showed you lots of love, you have a better chance of having a successful marriage yourself. But if your parents had a poor marriage, or multiple marriages, and were unloving, neglectful or abusive with you, you'll have a more difficult time establishing a satisfactory marriage.

Not that you can't do it. It will just take more effort and awareness on your part to do so.

In my last article, I wrote about the work of Ayala Pines in her book, Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose (Routledge, 1999.). In it, she argued that one way childhood issues are played out in marriage is when we marry someone with traits we find unacceptable in ourselves and then criticize her for those traits because we don't want to face them directly. We make an internal problem external.

But there are other ways childhood issues can be played out in marriage. Over one hundred years ago, Freud coined the term repetition compulsion by which he meant we are compelled to repeat the unresolved problems from the past in our present lives. A woman with an alcoholic, abusive father may marry an alcoholic, abusive husband because she hopes, unconsciously, to turn her husband into the loving person her father never was.

Another explanation of why we marry someone like a parent with whom we had problems is that we carry an internalized image of that parent in our minds and respond to the match between that image and our beloved. We marry someone who is familiar, who treats us the way we were treated growing up, perhaps because we may feel we don't deserve better.

Feeling we don't deserve love may explain why we marry someone with problems. If one or both of our parents had emotional difficulties as children, we usually were aware of their problems and wanted to fix them. We may then marry someone with emotional pain similar to our parents' pain because we are accustomed to trying to be helpers.

This is the central dynamic in the so called co-dependent relations and is usually based upon the belief, fueled by low self-esteem, that a healthier person would not want us.

Another explanation, backed by fifty years of research, about how early childhood experiences affect marital interaction is based on what is called attachment theory. This theory really refers to unconscious experiences because it examines the first three years of life of which we have little or no conscious memories.

Attachment theory assumes that the bonding our primary caregivers established with us during our early years sets the tone for our later adult attachments. If we securely bonded to a loving caregiver who met most of our needs, we'll be better able to bond with someone as adults. If our primary caregivers were either cold and distant or inconsistent in their care of us, however, it will be more difficult to trust someone to be there for us in adult life.

Does this mean you have to drag up your childhood experiences in marital therapy, especially if they are painful? Not necessarily and not if you don't want to.

Often, the first, quickest approach to marital problems is to work on present behaviors to improve the marriage. But if this approach isn't effective, I invite couples to do what I call more in-depth work in which each explores the effects of childhood on their present interaction in the presence of the other. I have found that this can deepen understanding, compassion and intimacy between the spouses.

Although this exploration can hurt, it can also heal.

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