Hey Julia Woods

Your Self-Worth Sets the Tone For Your Marriage

• Julia Woods

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Julia reveals how self-worth quietly sets the tone of a marriage, from generational scripts and early attachment to the Four M’s that sabotage intimacy, and shares the practices that turned a parent–child dynamic into a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership. She invites you to question core beliefs, feel and grieve, set boundaries, and choose truth as the highest form of intimacy.

• marriage as a space for love, not performance

• the Four M’s that erode connection: mothering, martyring, manipulating, managing

• why unworthiness normalises enabling, denial, and small betrayals

• using a life timeline to reveal patterns and build compassion

• moving from head beliefs to body-based healing and grief

• boundaries that end over-functioning and restore adult-to-adult relating

• redefining love as truth, responsibility, and mutual worth

• daily questions that link beliefs to thoughts, feelings, and actions

• choosing partnership over parent–child dynamics

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

💥💥Everything you need to grow the marriage you long for is waiting for you in the Marriage Growth Community:


https://beautifuloutcome.com/mgc-one-time-offer


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💥💥Everything you need to grow the marriage you long for is waiting for you in the Marriage Growth Community:

https://beautifuloutcome.com/mgc-one-time-offer


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SPEAKER_00:

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 this episode of Hey Julia Woods. I am really looking forward to talking with you about how self-worth sets the tone for your marriage. This is a very real living um development within me of what I'm discovering because I didn't realize how my self-worth was setting the tone in my marriage really until much more recently. And man, I want to get this message out to everyone that is married, that can that is willing to listen, because I believe us doing our backyard work to inquire into what is, how do we view ourselves? What is the worth that we place upon ourselves? Often we can place way too much worth, and other times we can place way too little worth. And a lot of that started in the first thousand days of our life, in how we were received into the world by our caregivers. So this is a deep conversation. I believe this is one that I'm going to keep coming back to. I believe it's going to become a pillar in the work that I do with couples in creating the marriages that they long for, because I believe this is very, very foundational. And so I'm going to jump in and just share with you my journey and what I'm discovering about the impact that self-worth has on marriage. So let's start with the basic foundational aspect that marriage is for love. That is what marriage is. It's an opportunity for two people to come together to commit their lives to each other in an opportunity to love and be loved. And if you don't believe that you are worthy of love, then what is that going to produce in the marriage if the marriage is all about love? Or if you believe that you are, you know, entitled to love or you've grown some narcissistic narcissistic tendencies that begin to bring you to see others as less worthy of love than you are. How is that going to impact marriage when marriage is all about love? So for myself, I came from generations of women who worked to earn love. Love wasn't something that was available freely or for who a person was. It was something that needed to be earned because generationally the women in my family history have not felt worthy of love. And this is what I was produced. This is what I was born into. This is the life, uh, the limiting beliefs. Scientists have discovered that the belief systems are passed down through the DNA. So this is what was passed through the DNA of the women in my family. And my father was one who believed he was much more worthy of love than other people, especially women. Men were much more worthy of love and honor and respect than women were. And I did not realize that this was the basically the tea that I was steeped into until more recently. But to give you an example of what this sense of the women in my lineage believing they were unworthy and that they had to earn love, um, my grandmother was married five times. Um in the relationships that she had, in the marriages that she had, she was abused, she was betrayed, she was abandoned. And, you know, she stayed married to her fifth husband for the longest time until he passed away. But she literally hated him. She hated him and he hated her. My mother, she was abused, she was betrayed, she was abandoned. Um, and I wound up creating a very similar thing in my marriage where I was abused, I was betrayed. Um, and began to realize that it was probably about a year and a half ago when I really started looking at feelings and beginning to let myself feel, that I began to get really, really hungry for what was God's design in marriage? Like love, God is love. And if he created this union between a man and a woman that is about loving and being loved, knowing and being known, what is it that he designed in that? What is it meant to look like? And where that journey began to take me was to get really honest about some very painful things that I was feeling. I began to get really honest about how lonely I was in my marriage. I began to get honest about what I was tolerating and what I had been settling for. I started getting much more, becoming much more aware that I was trying to manage this relationship and trying to manage this thing called love. That in my desire to earn love and to be a perfect wife and to have the marriage I longed for, that I was doing what's called the four M's I was mothering, I was managing, I was manipulating, and I was martyring in the marriage. And this is what, again, this was the tea that I was steeped in. That was what I'd grown up seeing by all the women in my history. It seemed completely normal. I didn't know that this is what I was doing. I couldn't see it because it was how life, I had grown up thinking life looked and how life was supposed to be. Um, it began to reveal itself as I began to stop doing these four M's. So let's just talk about them a little bit more deeply. So the four M's, so there's the mothering, right? So it wasn't uncommon for me to remind my husband of the things that he said he would do or needed to do. Or um, if he said he didn't know how to do something, which there's no reason at his age that he wouldn't know how to do that. But because of this parent-child relationship we had developed, he often came to me like a parent asking me to help him do things that he needed to do, but it seemed normal to us that he didn't know how to do them because he'd never needed to do them, because I was doing all the mothering in this relationship. So there was the mothering. There was the martyring. The martyring is like, um, I just have to do this, right? Like I've got to keep the budget in order. I've got to um, you know, be the main provider in the home. I've got to make sure that we've reconciled this conversation, otherwise, the marriage isn't going to go well. So it was like I felt like a slave in the relationship. I had to do all these things. And in that martyring, I felt sorry for myself. I felt like, why can't he just do the things that I he should do? Why can't he just do the things that I want him to do? And I began to realize that that was a system I had set up in certain aspects of our relationship because I got benefits out of feeling like the martyr. I'd felt like a martyr since I was a kid. That's all I'd known. Again, it didn't seem abnormal to me because it was what I had known. Um, and then there's the manipulating. The manipulating aspect was um, you know, I if there was something I wanted, like I wanted to um go on a trip, or I wanted to um, you know, watch a certain show, or um I wanted to um, you know, go out on a date or whatever. Like I had my ways of manipulating, like, hey, um, you know, I really want to do this, and we haven't done anything like this for a while. And it was kind of like this pathetic, like um giving all the reasons why he should say yes, and then saying, you know, do you want to do this? Right? It was manipulative, like laying out all the groundwork so that it was gonna make it really hard for him to choose anything other than what I wanted. That's an example of manipulating. And then there is the managing, and the managing was um um really significant. I didn't realize how much I was managing, and that was I longed for emotional connection, I longed for spiritual intimacy, I longed to keep growing our ability to reconcile conversations. I longed to have our marriage look a certain way, and what I couldn't see was how I was managing it. I was managing it to look a certain way. Like I was the one who was leading the reconciling conversations. I was the one, if we sat in silence at a restaurant, that was trying to think of what's the conversation that we can have. I was the one that was um basically leading all the conversations, asking all the questions, working to create the connection. And so I stopped doing those four M's to the best that I could begin to see. One, I'd never seen it that I was doing it before. So first I had to start seeing it, right? Because we can't transform what we can't see. But I began to see how these four M's started were showing up day by day in my in our relationship, and I stopped doing them. And as I stopped doing them, as I kept, as I stopped working to be the one that was reconciling conflicts, as I stopped trying reminding him of what he said he would do, whoa, it was painful because the illusion began to fall apart, the denial began to come apart, and I began to see the truth of what the relationship actually was. And what I began to see is that one, it was a parent-child relationship, and two, I began to see that I was very lonely, and I was um really, it was a one-sided relationship, that I was doing most of the work in the relationship, and that was coming out of a sense of self-worth. If I didn't believe I was worthy of love and I needed to earn love because I didn't deserve it, then I was doing everything I could do to get the love I longed for. And it was all about my beliefs. And if you've been following me for long, you know that, you know, what I um the context of the work that I do comes out of the understanding that what we believe produces what we think, which produces what we feel, which produces what we do. So I knew that for a long time I had believed I wasn't worthy of love. And I was mentally doing the work of no, it's not true. I know that I am worthy of love. And so mentally I was looking, I was knowing what was true, but I hadn't slowed down and actually let myself feel. I hadn't slowed down and actually let myself um grieve. We're gonna talk more about that as we go into this conversation today. But I had the marriage that I had created, the marriage that I had can I was contributing to was coming out of a deep, deep seated belief of being unworthy. And it it was really, really, really painful to be seeing it, to be sitting in that I have been doing this belief work for 15 years, but I had no idea I was simply doing it in my head because I didn't, I wasn't letting myself feel. And this deep, these deep-seated beliefs that we are steeped into, they're biological, they're in our body, right? And so I needed to do the deeper work of actually doing it from my heart, and that was all about letting myself grieve. I needed to go back and begin to grieve my childhood. I needed to grieve how much it had impacted me that my parents both said when they found out they were expecting me that I was the worst news they could have ever received to find out that I was in existence. And that the chaos in their lives at that time, my mother said, I could, you were never rocked, I couldn't, you were never cooed over. I could simply feed and clothe you. That was it. And one of the things that came in the process of choosing to face my childhood, I literally just read a journal entry that I wrote about two years ago. And it was a prayer that I was praying to God, and I said, God, I see that I'm very resistant to look at my childhood up until now. I've been very resistant to get honest about what actually happened. And will you help me stop resisting and actually start doing the work of the deep healing of what happened back there? And so one of the things that came out of that was I decided to do a timeline of my life and actually tell the truth of what had happened to me. And I thought I had told the truth, right? But I was one who didn't like to talk about my childhood. I was like, that's back there. I don't need to look at it, it's over. That's not who I am anymore. But I decided to actually do a timeline. And I'd never done a timeline. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how to do it, but I just started listening to my heart. I asked my heart and God to lead me. And so for me, I wound up um calling my sister and just asking her to help me understand the houses that we lived in. Like I knew I was born in this one house, in this one town. And then at some point I knew we moved to another house in another town. And so I just asked her, like, how old was I when we moved to those houses? Um, what are the things that you noticed about how my life was in those seasons? And I began to make this timeline from the beginning of what I knew, stories I'd heard about what it was like when my parents found out that they were expecting me, what stories that I'd heard about what it was like when my father was working out of town Monday through Friday, um, throughout that, those beginning stages of my life. And I did it all the way up until that day. And man, it was extremely revealing. One, it was helpful to see my life from a bird's eye view and to begin to see like, what did I believe? What were the things that I remember my parents telling me about me? Like, um, you know, you better get that look off your face before I slap it off. Um, you know, my father, I had extreme dyslexia and I didn't know that I was extremely dyslexic. But my father would sit, we would sit for two hours, just tears streaming down my face, with my father saying, You literally, you cannot be this dumb. Please tell me you're not this dumb. And just various things like that, and the punishments that I would receive and what I believed about myself in those punishments. And I gradually made this timeline. And I did it different a couple different times. I, I, it just needed to emerge out of me. And the first time through, it was very enlightening. And then I'm like, wow, there's a whole lot more that I could expand on. And so I did it again and made it even more expansive. And then I did it a third time. And each time, what it began to reveal is how that lack of nurturing and love that was offered to me, how it had impacted how I seen myself and how I viewed myself. And I began to realize that I had I started to grow empathy and compassion for myself. I started to see how I had developed these belief systems as a child. And it made sense why I had developed those belief systems. But then once I became an adult, I started seeing how I was actually choosing to keep putting faith in those same belief systems and keep believing that I was unworthy of love and that I needed to be perfect in order to receive love, and that if I messed up, then people would abandon me. And I started seeing how I was the one as an adult actually recreating those same systems, those same experiences of abuse and abandonment and betrayal. And wow, it began to help me feel this deep sense of unworthiness, how it had been developed into me, and yet the impact of what this sense of unworthiness was doing in my adult life with my husband, with my children, with my friends. And I started standing for the truth. I started realizing that it wasn't true that I was unworthy, that I actually was very worthy of love, and that if I didn't start standing for my own worthiness of love, that nobody else was going to. Because as long as I believed and kept thinking and feeling and acting out of unworthiness, that's how I was teaching everyone else to care for me. That's how I was teaching everyone else to treat me. And I began, as I began to live and stand for truth, the truth that I am worthy, that I am so worthy, that God cares about me, that he sees me. I started seeing how much God loves me. And as I began to see that and stand in that truth, all of a sudden I began to care for myself in new ways. I stopped tolerating a lot of the things that I had never even noticed were abusive in my relationship. I'd never realized these small betrayals of my husband saying, I will do this certain thing and then not doing it. I'd never seen that as a small betrayal. But I started realizing, wait, that's a betrayal. And when he would say, um, you know, I'm gonna stick in budget, and then he didn't stick in budget, or I'm gonna buy this one thing, but then there would be two of them that showed up at the house or whatever. I'm like, wait a minute, this is abuse, this is betrayal. And I had been so blinded to it because I believed I was unworthy of love. And as long as I believed I was unworthy of love, I wasn't going to see the things that were unloving in my relationship. I began to set boundaries to stop the enabling. And as when I could, when I stopped enabling him, now all of a sudden I had space to actually care for me. I was over caring for him and undercaring for me. And I began to shift that around. And it wasn't like not caring for him in the ways I needed to. I started seeing that the ways I was caring for him had actually been quite unloving, that I wasn't loving him or loving myself. And so a lot of what began to happen was I began to feel every day. I began to let myself feel what was actually going on in my body. I began to actually grieve the loss, the loss of my childhood, the loss of what had been missed in our marriage, what had been missed in how I was had parented my children in many of the same ways my parents and my grandparents showed me. I'd showed my children the same approach. Um, I started actually confessing the truth over myself. And this, you know, it it I had always struggled with people having their mantras and their affirmations. And I was like, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna be quote unquote one of those people, which is terrible, but it's all a part of being unworthy of love. And this wasn't to me, this wasn't a mantra. This wasn't about standing in front of the mirror. And I'm not saying that that doesn't work for people, it just was something that I was struggling with myself. And so I began to do some homeopathic um work. And in that homeopathic work, my body began to show that I was actually rejecting love, that I was rejecting um protecting myself. And so on a daily basis, as I took this homeopathic medicine, I would let myself say it from the depths of my heart, I am a perfect and whole being. I receive love, I am safe. And it felt so awkward and uncomfortable in the beginning. To say that I'm a perfect and whole being, it really felt like I was telling myself a lie. Like I'm like, I don't think that's true, but I'm gonna say it because that's what I've been asked to say. But the more I said it, and the more I cared for myself, and the more I looked at how do I see my granddaughter, like and my grandson and my newest granddaughter, I'm like, I totally see that they are perfect and whole beings. Yes. Do they have a villain? Yes. And it doesn't change that they are a perfect and whole being. And the more I said it, and the more I let myself look at how this shows up in how I see other people, I began to believe it from a core level, from a deep, deep level within me. I began to do some EMDR sessions and some acupuncture and began caring for myself in deep ways. I hadn't done that. And what I can tell you is over the last two years of this journey, I am becoming love in a way that is real. Like it's not love like I've got to perform in order to get this love so I can get give this love. It's like I'm feeling love that's being birthed from deep within my soul. Like I'm receiving love from the source of love that's unearned, that's unachieved, that's unperformed for. And this love is like taking root in a way I've never experienced in my life. I'm starting to see how much a lack of self-worth was bringing me to be self-focused, to be self-absorbed, to be self um res self-reliant. And the more self-focused I was, the more selfish I was being in my love because I was giving to get. So I actually wanted to enable him. I wanted to feed his narcissistic tendencies, I wanted to feed his entitlement because all of those were ways of earning love, which is so. I sit back now and I'm like, whoa, that was a sick form of love that was merging out of this sense of unworthiness. It wasn't love at all, because love, true love, lives in truth. And what I had missed in not being able to feel was letting my body begin to reveal the truth to me. I needed to be honest about how my actions were being unloving. And it all came back, it all came out of this belief system that I was unworthy of love. Because if I didn't believe I was worthy of love, I was actually subconsciously going to be pushing love away. If I'm unless worthy of love, I can't be a vessel of love. I will be a vessel that's all absorbed with self, like looking at everything I'm doing, like, oh, that was the wrong thing to do. Oh, that wasn't perfect. Oh my gosh, they're they're gonna hate me because I did that. And oh my goodness, my, you know, my kids must think I'm a terrible mother. Who's all that about? It's all about self, it's all about self-absorption and trying to make myself perfect. And man, it was devastating the relationships that mattered the most to me. And I had no idea that I was unknowingly repeating the generational patterns of women who were living as victims in their marriages, and I was no longer willing to be unloving to my husband or to myself. I needed to start standing for truth. I needed to start telling the truth about my worthiness, about my husband's worthiness. He's worthy of knowing how to do the finances. He's worthy of looking honestly in. Sitting in the true pain of what's bringing him to not live as his word. But as long as I was managing it, as long as I was mothering him and reminding him, hey, you said you would do this. You know, are you gonna keep, are you gonna follow through? Or hey, you said you would do this, you didn't do it. And then I would go into self-pity. I would go into um feeling like a victim and blaming and shaming rather than wait, let me step back and look here honestly. How honest, how often are you not doing what you said you were gonna do? Whoa, there's a bigger problem here. Are we willing to get really honest about what's going on here? And as I began to live in the truth, I was willing to let the marriage die. If that's what needed to happen in order to have the marriage that I longed for. And what has been happening over the last two years has been the hardest, most painful experience that I've walked through. I recently heard that mental health is living in reality at all cost. I began to blow up the illusion of my lack of worthiness. I began to blow up the illusion that my husband somehow was more worthy of love and respect and being cared for than I was. I began to blow up the illusion of what I'd been raised in. I began to blow up the illusion that was in my marriage, and I started to live in the honest truth. Without the four M's, without mothering, martyring, managing, and manipulating, I was left in reality. And I began to sit in the honest truth of what our marriage was and what it wasn't, and began to set some really uncomfortable boundaries, began to take some really uncomfortable stands. And what began to merge out of it was something new, something true, something real. And my husband began to step into the truth of his worthiness, and I began to step into the truth of my worthiness, and out of it began to emerge two people living shoulder to shoulder. What I didn't know is in the parent-child relationship, we kept fighting for one of us being above. When I stepped into the parent role, I was above him. And then when I sat, you know, when in that he was, he would betray me or he would not do what he said he would do. Then all of a sudden I sunk to the child. And he he became this person above me that had all the power and all the control in the relationship. And what's emerging is two people actually living shoulder to shoulder. Two people actually living in the truth and the honesty of what we're up to. And where what is it that I'm doing? What is it that I'm feeling that's bringing me to do that? What is it that I'm thinking that's bringing me to feel that? And what is it that I'm believing? If this is how I'm showing up, what is it that I must be believing about myself, about my spouse, about my marriage? And as excruciating as it is sometimes to get really honest about what that is and what that um sounds like and what it feels like, man, it is uncomfortably loving. Like love and pain go together. And I was trying to live a marriage that where love was just free of pain. But what I've come to in standing for truth and standing for love is that truth, honesty is the highest form of intimacy, and the truth cuts, the truth is painful, and yet it's what sets us free. And I'm discovering what love actually is in such deeper ways that it feels like I'm discovering love for the very first time. And what I'm discovering is that love starts by actually living in the truth about what love is. Love is not being a doormat, love is not enabling, love is not seeing someone beneath you or above you, love is not mothering someone or managing someone or manipulating someone or feeling like the martyr in a relationship. Love is living in the truth of I am worthy, and you are worthy. And how am I showing up in that today? And as I shared at the beginning, like I'm just really beginning to grasp this pillar that has been significantly missing in ways I had no idea it was missing. And my hope and my prayer is that I'm gonna keep getting better and better at um articulating what I'm trying to communicate and articulating the reality of what we have walked through. But as I come to a close today, I just my hope is that these words have connected for you, that they've brought insight for you, that they have meant something to you, and that some part of this is connecting. And I I imagine what I'm making up in this moment as I bring this to a close is I might have created more questions for you than given answers. And that is that is beautiful because that's what I'm here for. I want to live in such a way and invite people into questions because I know that if you will question, if you'll begin to question what your reality is, you'll begin to question what you believe about yourself, what you believe about your marriage. Like maybe you believe that the marriage you long for just isn't possible. Maybe you believe that your spouse just doesn't really care about you. Maybe you believe that you're not enough, or that you don't have what it takes to be a spouse, the spouse that you want to be, or to have the marriage you long for. Man, will you let yourself get really, really, really curious about those things? Because those things are driving what you're thinking, they're driving what you're feeling, and they're driving what you're doing, and they're creating the reality of the marriage that you have. And I just invite you to slow down and actually start looking deeper. What is it that I believe about myself? And how is that showing up in my relationships today? And if this has been valuable, I would you share with me, would you leave in the comments underneath this podcast what you're taking away? If you have questions, would you email me? Um, and let me wrestle with your questions with you and let that lead me to future podcast episodes of what's emerging in my life as I do this deeper, deeper work. I am so grateful to get to be in this work as a person and as a coach walking with others because it lives in me. It's every year I grow deeper into truth and deeper into awareness of what this healing journey looks like, what this gift of transformation actually looks like. And I thank you for the honor of walking with you in this. And I just invite you to join me in the journey. If you want more tangible, practical applications in the show notes below, you will find the marriage growth community. And whether you are a spouse who is feels like your marriage is failing, if you're a spouse who feels like you're doing the work all alone, or you and your spouse are ready to dive in together, I ask you, would you join me in the community? As I am doing this work of self-worth, the power of what wants to happen through that community is just birthing in much deeper ways in me. And I'm excited about some deeper things, some deeper ways that I'm uh seeing evolve that want to be a part of what it means to live in community and have the support of community in looking at our self-worth and what are we, how is that showing up in our lives and in our marriage? So thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to connecting with you and hearing what comes out of this podcast for you. Thank you so much. That's gonna do it for this episode of Hey Julia Woods. 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 24-7. All right, that's gonna do it for the show. My name is Julia Woods. I'll talk to you next time.