Hey Julia Woods
Join me, Julia Woods, a couples coach and wife of over 3 decades, as I share some of my client's stories and my own so that you can be encouraged, inspired, and gain new results in your marriage.
Hey Julia Woods
What I wish I had known about marriage!
💥Marriage Growth Community - https://beautifuloutcome.com/marriage-growth-community
What if you could transform your marriage by simply shifting your mindset? Join me, Julia Woods, as I unravel lessons from 33 years of marriage with my husband Jeff. What I share with you is the many things I wish I had known about marriage from the beginning. These mindset shifts would have been so valuable through the unexpected challenges of raising children, growing a business, and healing childhood trauma. I share them with you so you can learn what I wish I had known, much earlier in my marriage which would have saved us decades of heartache.
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🎁 Free Gift for you! 100 Prompts and Ideas to Connect with your Spouse!
🎁 FREE GIFT: Turn Defensiveness into Connection! https://beautifuloutcome.com/e-guide
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👉 Take the free communication quiz! What’s YOUR communication type?! https://beautifuloutcome.com/communication-quiz
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Where you can find me:
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Welcome to hey Julia Woods podcast. I'm your host, julia Woods, founder of Beautiful Outcome, a coaching company focused on helping couples learn to see and understand each other, even in the most difficult conversations. On my podcast, I will share with you the real and raw of the messiness and amazingness of marriage. I'll share with you aspects of my relationship and the couples I coach in a way that you can see yourself and find the tools that you need to build the marriage you long for. Welcome to another episode of hey Julia Woods. I am excited to share with you today's topic, which is what I wish I had known about marriage. My hope is that, in what I've learned in 33 years that I wish I had known, will be very valuable and helpful for you as you navigate your marriage. So you know, for Jeff and I, we fell in love when I was 22 and we got married when I was 23. Jeff turned 20 the week before our marriage or before our wedding day and, man, I felt so connected and seen and loved and I thought marriage was going to offer me more and more of this incredible experience that was beyond anything I had ever experienced in the realm of connection and emotional, mental, spiritual intimacy and I thought that marriage was this most beautiful place to experience love and that it was going to just keep growing and growing. And you know, this marriage, this relationship that he, jeff, and I had, was a place that you know gave me someone to laugh with and face the challenges of life with and have babies with, and I saw how much fun and joy that we were finding in dating and planning a wedding and getting to know each other and I thought this is what married life would look like and that's pretty much how it was for our life for the first two and a half years and we did hard things together. I was going through some really hard career changes and we navigated that really well. He was such a support to me and we were learning to manage money together and meeting together each week talking about where our finances were and what we wanted. And we were remodeling a repossessed mobile home and you know we were figuring out floors and cabinets and how to finance this thing that we were turning into this first home and you know we thought we were going to be able to just keep going in this direction. And then we had our first baby and we started a business together and both of those things of running a business and having our first baby.
Speaker 1:They triggered some past trauma in me and I didn't know that it was past trauma. I look back now and I can see that some things got triggered in me. I didn't know how to meet the needs of a baby and meet the needs of a husband and meet the needs of the customers. And I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be seen as someone who was valuable and lovable, and so I was trying to show up perfectly for our clients and I was trying to show up perfectly as a mom and trying to show up perfectly as a wife. And I was trying to show up perfectly as a mom and trying to show up perfectly as a wife and I was failing miserably. And, wow, I was really struggling.
Speaker 1:And having a baby began to trigger some of the unmet needs from my own childhood that I needed to heal and I was starting to feel a lot of negative emotions. Negative emotions about myself, negative emotions about my abilities to be who I thought I was supposed to be in the world. I was feeling negative emotions in conversations with Jeff and I thought that negative emotions were bad and I thought that if I felt negative emotions then I must be bad. So I didn't want to feel bad, so I just plowed through these messy emotions and thought it was normal to just, you know, ignore them and push them down and act like they didn't exist and act like you know. Hey, you should be happy you have this beautiful baby and you should be happy that your business is growing. And you know, you should be happy that your husband wants to be with you. And well, I was becoming a mess.
Speaker 1:Before we dive deeper into today's episode, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. It's a game changer really. To have the relationship you long for, you must take responsibility for yourself and who you are being, moment by moment. It's not about what your spouse needs to change. It's about you taking control of the only thing you can control, which is you. That's the truth that nobody's talking about when they talk about marriage. But I am inside the marriage growth community where I will help you take responsibility for your ability to lead conversations with your spouse, to love and connection, so you can have the marriage you dreamed of when you first fell in love. At the very first link in the show notes you can grab my marriage growth community and that's really going to help. I know that because it's based on the same principles I've used to coach this couple and hundreds of other couples to marriage success over the last nine years. So grab marriage growth community at the top of the show notes.
Speaker 1:Okay, back to the show. Our business became the perfect distraction and a way to numb and what I didn't realize is that I was gradually becoming a workaholic and our marriage started suffering. Jeff saw my messy emotions and it triggered some of his childhood wounds because I was reacting really big and he had grown up watching the women in his life have really big emotional reactions and he felt that something was wrong with him, that he didn't know how to help them and in some ways they were turning to him to get his help and he was eight years old and not knowing how to deal with the help his mom, with the emotions of walking through a divorce and losing her father and whoa. It was triggering a lot for both of us and he didn't know how to support me and I got more hurt by his lack of support and it was just easier not to talk about hard things and we started holding on to offenses rather than working through them, and it was growing bitterness and resentment in both of us and the fun and playfulness that had once been a huge foundation for our marriage was going away. And it was a lot.
Speaker 1:And before we go any further, I just want to pause and check in. Is any of this resonating with you? While your circumstances might be different, is the journey similar? And if any of this resonates with you, and if you find yourself in the beginning of any of those stages or full on in all of what I just shared, I want to offer you something I wished I had had much earlier in my marriage, and that is the Marriage Growth Community, and it's a resource that I have created for the younger version of myself and even for the current version of myself, because marriage is something that's ongoing and to be in marriage in a community is powerful, and if you're looking for resource in the marriage growth community, you will find lessons that will give you the tools that you need to be able to learn what to do, how to even recognize you're being triggered and what to do when you are triggered, and how to begin to face some of the things in yourself and in your marriage that aren't working for you. So if you want that resource, it's the first link you'll find in the show notes under this podcast. I would love to connect with you there and support you in growing the marriage that you long for and learning, before it's too late, what you wish you'd known about marriage. You can actually start knowing it now.
Speaker 1:So let's come back to the conversation of where Jeff and I were, and you know the reality is is that we had gotten to the point where everything I thought marriage was it was gone, and I was like so now, what right Do I need to end the marriage or something else? And the something else was I needed to face myself, and I'm so grateful I chose to start facing myself, and facing myself broadened my definition of marriage and maybe marriage. I began to wonder if marriage might be bigger than a place where I could experience love. Maybe it was a place to become love, and that began to change my world, because I could see how unloving I was at times, and while it was way easier to focus on how unloving my husband was, the truth was we both needed to become love and learn what that looked like and how you could do that. And that's the beauty of what I think marriage is is, marriage is the greatest arena for growth on this earth. Marriage is, is marriage is the greatest arena for growth on this earth, and while when you allow marriage to grow you, you will experience the greatest love available to you on this earth. And yet it starts with that, comes out of growth, that comes out of growing into becoming love. That comes out of growing into becoming love, not waiting for love to come to you.
Speaker 1:And so what I want to share with you is the five things that I am currently aware of that I wish I had known about marriage in the early years, and the first thing that I wish I had known is that marriage is not happily ever after right. First of all, happiness is a fickle thing. It comes and goes like the wind, and if I believe that marriage is happily ever after, I will be sorely disappointed when I wake up to reality. You know, happiness may come in the least expected moments and then it will pass. But joy, on the other hand, is something that I can cultivate and grow inside myself and I can experience even if things aren't going the way I want and that's a really huge depiction of the early years of our marriage versus the current years of our marriage is I was looking for happiness and Jeff was looking for happiness. And when happiness wasn't there, let's just not have this conversation because it's not creating happiness for either of us. Yet joy, when we're focused on joy, we're willing to press into the hard things in the conversation, because we know that joy comes from being able to be in hard things together. Joy comes from watching yourself grow in the hard things, and that creates a very different relationship and a lot of opportunity for growth.
Speaker 1:The second thing I wish I'd known about marriage is that marriage is a daily choice. When Jeff and I stood at that altar and we said I do, and then the next day we got to recognize that we were scared about this thing we'd just done and we needed to choose to say I do the next day. And then the next day when we wanted to be mad about something that the other person did, we got to choose to say I do again. And the next day when, you know, our old fling popped up in our DMs, we got to choose to say I do again. And the next day, when things aren't going the way we want them to go. We get to choose again and again and again. I recognize that in the beginning of our marriage, I let the wedding ring on my finger bring me to take the marriage for granted and the choice that marriage is. One day at a time. And when our marriage almost fell apart, I began to recognize that I had stopped choosing. I do every day. I had stopped choosing. I do in the hard moments. And if I wanted to really get honest about what marriage is, marriage is a moment-by-moment choice to say I do. I do the hard things with you, I have the hard conversations with you. I find a way to resolve this problem with you.
Speaker 1:The third thing I wished I'd known about marriage is marriage is a giant mirror. Not so fun to get honest about, but it is true. A spouse that lives with you day in and day out. They see all the things. They see the mood when things aren't your mood, when things aren't going the way you want. They see your attitude when your dreams are crushed. They see your resistance when you aren't getting your way. Marriage mirrors back to you who you are, as your spouse is watching you, and they're mirroring back to you who you're being. This is a continual gift of feedback that has the power to help you see what you can't see so you can grow into who you want to be. And when you begin, when I began looking at my marriage like a mirror, wow, it started growing my ability to grow these character traits like respect and empathy. There we go. Empathy no, I didn't.
Speaker 1:When I felt apathy in the marriage, yeah, it helped me recognize. Okay, how am I offering apathy in this marriage? How am I being apathetic rather than realizing that I'm becoming indifferent and I need to press through the loneliness that I feel and move towards intimacy? Right, because apathy is the result of loneliness. When we're lonely in a marriage, we either move towards intimacy. Right, because apathy is the result of loneliness. When we're lonely in a marriage, we either move towards apathy or we move towards intimacy and our marriage. At times when I felt apathetic or felt my husband was apathetic, I got to sit with the mirror and look at wow, is there loneliness that I have been moving to apathy? And I saw that it was. And it gave me the power to recognize the work that I needed to do to grow the intimacy I longed for.
Speaker 1:The fourth thing that I wish I'd known about marriage is marriage is two villains and heroes falling in love. Inside, every human is a hero and a villain, and when two humans fall in love, their heroes and their villains fall in love. Their villains know that they can partner in playing small and staying comfortable by repeating the past, their past right. And then our heroes know that together we can create, we can become the best versions of ourself. And every moment, in every conflict, in every tension, in every argument, our villains and heroes are fighting, and that's really what the war is, and we get to decide which one's going to win. Am I going to make myself right and walk away, believing that he just doesn't care or she just wants to control me? Or am I going to walk away? Am I going to stay in it and know that, hey, we can learn something in this? What am I learning and what are you? And how can this help us grow the marriage that we long for?
Speaker 1:And the fifth thing I wish I'd known about marriage is that marriage grows through tension. Tension between a husband and wife is a beautiful sign that the relationship is alive. Now, early on in my marriage, I thought tension was bad and so we work to avoid it, and, however, that is completely not the case. It's. You know, avoiding the tension creates more intensity. It doesn't actually, you know, resolve anything, and once I realized that tension is what produces growth, my husband and I began embracing it and learning to work through it. As we face the tension and allow it to grow us. Our marriage is growing stronger as we grow self-awareness and partner in working through the tension that arises. So these are the five things that I wish I had known about marriage, and, as I've begun to embrace these things, it is creating a very, very different marriage. The marriage that I always long for is what these things are producing. So that is it for this episode of.
Speaker 1:Hey, julia Woods, and I want to ask you would you do me a quick favor If you have ever gotten any value out of this podcast, and you haven't already, would you please leave us a five-star rating and give a quick review in the app that you're using to listen right now? It just takes a few seconds, but it can make a huge difference in helping spread the news about this podcast and helping me see the value of what I can continue to share with you in marriage growth tips and interviews here. So in this episode, I shared the valuable mindsets that I wish I had known about marriage, and if you want to learn to live in these mindsets, click that very first link in the show notes and this will take you straight to a resource that will offer you exactly that. I will guide you step by step into what it takes to have the marriage that you long for so you don't have to wish you knew takes to have the marriage that you long for. So you don't have to wish you knew. You can start living what is needed to experience the love that you long for. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:I'm Julia Woods and no-transcript no-transcript. Now I have a quick favor to ask of you If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating and a quick review in the app that you're using to listen right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable marriage growth tips and interviews here. This episode shares the power of what can happen when a spouse takes responsibility for who they are, being one conversation at a time, and if you want the marriage that you long for, click that first link in the show notes and this will take you straight to the resource that's going to solve that for you. I can't wait to connect with you inside my membership where you can get the support you need to grow the marriage you long for. 24 seven. All right, that's going to do it for the show. My name is Julia Woods. I'll talk to you next time.