Our tenth anniversary kicked off a season of unprecedented strife, most of which was circumstantial. My husband and I were homeschooling our three young sons, navigating multiple part-time jobs and trying to manage my health crisis. Both of us lacked sleep, energy, and patience. Prior to this season, conflicts had not been an issue for us. We had them, we processed them, we forgave each other, and moved on. But a decade in, something shifted.
And it wasn’t for the better. In retrospect, we regressed to deeply embedded patterns from our families of origin. My northern European clan silently withdrew from one another and stoically pretended nothing was wrong. His Italian American household vocalized anger in operatic fashion. Tempers flared, voices cracked—and then someone made a joke and...