Control can make us feel safe, especially for those who identify with being a Type A go getting woman. But have you started noticing how your need for control has been affecting your marriage?

In this week's episode of The Marriage & Motherhood Podcast, I share:

• How to grow awareness of where control shows up for you
• Ways to stop micromanaging and be a resource for your partner instead
• How you can get on the same page with your vision for how you want life to be like

Listen here and remember to subscribe, leave a review, and share it if you loved this episode! 

For more resources on how to have a happy and successful marriage, head on over to www.michellepurta.com and subscribe!

This blog post was inspired by a post that I made inside of my Facebook group, if you're not in there already go in there. It's called Marriage & Motherhood. In that post, I asked the ladies, what are you craving most in your marriage right now? About 80% of them said quality time. I want to dive into that a little bit about why that tends to be the most common answer other than better communication when it comes to your marriage after having kids. 

When we have kids, not only do we birth a child, we as women go through a huge transformation.

We become mothers the second that we're pregnant, we care about the baby, and their well-being and do all the things that we need to do to make sure that they’re healthy. After they’re born, you now have tunnel vision, all you can do is focus on how to support this baby developmentally, physically, feeding them, changing their diapers, and mentally stimulating them. In the process, we put our marriage on the back...

How present you are has a large impact on your life and your marriage

Before I started working on myself, it was really hard to be present. Now, I’m able to be in the moment and soak up everything that is there to experience. Even for something as simple as going on a walk and noticing how green the leaves are, noticing how the sun feels on your skin, how the wind feels, the flowers that you walk past, and just being there. Not just focusing on your destination and just walking.

When you’re not present with your partner, you're on your phone or maybe you're checked out and you're not really with them at that moment. Same with your kids, you may be sitting with them and they're playing, but you’re somewhere else. Your body is there, but your mind and your energy are not there. That's how I know when I'm not present. When I feel like I'm in a hurry all the time. I'm irritable, focusing on productivity. What's on my to-do list?

What I noticed is that when...

Conflict is actually good for your marriage.

I think a lot of you will probably agree with me on this, in that Disney movies, and all those fairy tales really ruined us in terms of how we define a happy marriage. Growing up, all the way up until probably the last five, or six years. My idea of a happy marriage did not involve conflict. It didn't involve arguments. I thought that if you argued that meant that your relationship was not healthy. Lo and behold, in my experience of conflict in my marriage earlier on and in my past relationships, there were a lot of conflicts. Anytime I got upset or annoyed or something didn't meet my needs, or I felt disappointed in some sense. There was conflict. That led to a lot of different beliefs from me, in my head, my lovely mind. It created a lot of drama for me. Beliefs, like, “Oh, I'll never find someone who fully gets me.” It was just a lot of back and forth a lot of conflicting beliefs around a conflict in...

Who is responsible for your happiness?

I don't know about you, but I thought whoever I was dating was responsible for my happiness. In fact, I used to pride myself in being this super chill, low-maintenance kind of girlfriend or partner, and when anniversaries roll around, or any kind of thing to celebrate, Valentine's day anniversary, birthdays, you name it, I would get upset. I would get upset for not having my expectations met. Expectations that I never shared, by the way, because I wanted to be this other version of a person. That was not true to who I was and what I wanted. I, for some reason, would judge people who needed this. Something that shows that that person was a big deal. I thought that if I wasn't like that, I was better, but I wasn't being honest with myself. 

I would get upset because they wouldn't do anything. Or they would just, get me a card, and then we go out to dinner. I would have this inner conflict inside, where I'm like, “Well, I'm...

How is your marriage impacted by how you deal with emotions. 

How you deal with your emotions has such a huge impact, and for something that affects so much of your life, how you deal with your family, how you deal with your friends, work stuff, community, strangers, you interact with your marriage, and your kids. It's really surprising why we're not taught this in schools, why is that not a requirement? For students? Why are we not taught emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, and effective communication? Can you imagine if, if we grew up learning that not just from experience, but actually learning it? Can you imagine how much drama we could have avoided or prevented in our lives? From recess, and quarrels, to relationship challenges, that would fix a lot of drama in our lives. On the marriage front, imagine all the times you would have spent connecting instead of feeling disconnected and distraught. If I could go back in time, I wish that I would have...

We're gonna be talking about how self-care really impacts your marriage. 

Every single relationship if I'm being honest. If you don't know, I help unhappy moms who feel lost in their marriage to be happy again, and a lot of times, we get to that place of feeling lost, because we're no longer getting our needs met anymore. If you have that go-to coping mechanism of stepping into a victim mentality, you might ask yourself, why aren't they giving me what I need anymore? Why did they stop? What happened here? And what we really should be asking? On top of that question is, what have I done? To get us here? Not from a place of blame, but from a place of awareness? What part did I play? To get us to where we are right now? Because it takes both of you to get there. 

We tend to feel lost in our marriage. 

Because our partner stopped doing something, and why did they stop doing that thing, because we stopped being the person that they married. Right? We are all...

When you think of ways to work on your marriage, society has pretty much defined the go-to route as couples counseling.

Counseling is great, however, what if your husband doesn't want to go or what if it doesn't work? Does this mean that your relationship is doomed?

If neither of those work, don’t give up, there are other options out there for you!

To name some... there’s marriage coaching, marriage retreats, marriage workshops, and marriage classes!

If you're in a situation where you feel lost in your marriage, you're unhappy and you don't know what to do next and counseling is not an option, your marriage can still survive and thrive! Your fate is not doomed for divorce or indefinite misery because the most widely known option (counseling) isn’t available.

If you are thinking, “well, my partner didn’t want to go to couples counseling so how would any other method work?” Let’s dig deeper into that question.

We Only Have...

How To Know If Your Marriage Needs Work

 Marriage is not always sunshine and rainbows. If you walked into marriage feeling that was the bar that you had to meet, let’s abolish that thought. Marriage, just like everything in life, goes through seasons. It’s the same in motherhood, where there are times it feels like everything is smooth sailing and then something happens and you're thinking, “I don't know what the hell I'm doing.”

Marriage goes through seasons as well. There is so much pressure put on a marriage. We expect our partners to be a certain way and to meet our expectations and make us happy. We're not always doing this intentionally though. Sometimes it's very much unintentional. Even being a marriage coach, I go through this as well. I was subconsciously expecting my spouse to do things I never shared I wanted or I had this unrealistic expectation that I was holding over him.

Where Are You in Your Marriage?

We have so much...

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Why is marriage so hard when you have kids? 

Relationships are hard in general. We're all walking around with all these different ideas of what it takes to be in a relationship, what we think is normal, and what we think is healthy. Sometimes we think both are the same. We grew up with our parent's marriage being the prime example of what we think it means to be in a relationship. How do they love each other? How do they show that? How affectionate were they with each other? How do they communicate with each other? How do they handle conflict? How do they prioritize each other? How did they communicate with you? How did they handle conflict with you? How did they react to you when you were expressing your emotions? Like when you were crying a lot, when you were angry, or when you were frustrated? What about when you were happy? Were you even allowed to express your emotions outside of happiness? Personally, my parents were not comfortable with emotions....