How to Respond When Trauma Influences Expressions of Love and Other Wisdom from Dr. Gary Chapman, Author of “The 5 Love Languages”
On February 28, 2024, Dr. Gary Chapman spoke at Mt. Bethel Church on the topic of “Building Better Relationships: Understanding the 5 Love Languages.” You can read a summary of his talk here.
At the end of the event, attendees were encouraged to submit questions through a survey. Dr. Chapman graciously agreed to a follow-up interview with our team where he answered many of the questions submitted. Below are some of the questions submitted and Dr. Chapman’s answers.
Q: What if I’m convinced that I don’t have a love language? What if I’ve taken the quiz and it shows all 5 being of equal percentage?
Dr. Chapman: Then you’re extremely lucky! To people who tell me this, I say don’t worry about it. Enjoy it because it means you’ve been loved well and often by people around you, so you hear and speak all five languages fluently.
Q: Is that the only reason someone might not be able to figure out their love language from the quiz?
Dr. Chapman: Most of the time if the quiz doesn’t work for someone, it’s because they’ve been loved well. But there is another type of person that would probably get inconclusive results on the quiz and that’s somebody who has never felt loved–maybe they were abused as a child—and they don’t have an emotional concept of love.
I think if you have a relationship with this type of person, where you start is similar to how you love a child before they’ve developed a primary language. Say to them, “I understand that because of the trauma you’ve been through, you don’t know which expression of love would be most meaningful to you. So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to focus on one of the languages one week and the next week I’m going to focus on another one.” And so you kind of work through all five of the languages over a few weeks, and you keep the conversation open with this person about how each act of love makes them feel, and what you’ll probably find eventually–or what they’ll find–is that they appreciate one more than the others.
Q: Can a person’s primary love language change?
Dr. Chapman: Not usually, but you can learn to speak and hear other languages more fluently. In fact, if you’re being intentional about the ways you express love in all of your relationships–not just your romantic or familial relationships–then chances are you’ll pick up other languages rather quickly.
Q: Do you believe trauma can influence relationships and/or people’s ability to express love?
Dr. Chapman: Certainly. Whenever there’s traumatic things that happen in life, obviously it affects the normal flow of expressing love to each other. Let’s say you have a healthy marriage: things are going well; you’re both speaking each other’s language. But then one of you comes down with cancer, goes through chemotherapy, and loses their hair, etc. You might still be able to speak the love language in certain ways, you know, but you’re also empathetic with each other. If you’ve had a good marriage, you’re going to be empathetic with each other during that time, and you’re not going to expect each other to be as intentional as each of you were when both of you were healthy.
And of course, there are some conditions that can alter your ability to express love. And that’s when I think you need to lean into the Lord for help and reach out to friends to help you work with that person with those disabilities. I wrote a book on that called “Keeping Love Alive as Memories Fade: The 5 Love Languages and the Alzheimer’s Journey.” I wrote it with a medical doctor whose wife had Alzheimer’s.
Click here to view last week’s installment of this series. Stay tuned for future posts in this series for more answers from Dr. Gary Chapman!