In this first episode of Empowered Marriage, Helen Harrison discusses the importance of and the hurdles and difficulties couples experience when dealing with emotional intimacy in a marriage.

Needy, Naggy and Controlling are behaviours born out of a wounded part in you.  Instead of being an I, you've become a we and you've immersed yourself into the relationship and you don’t know who you are. You don't know what you enjoy, what you like, what you're passionate about, what gets you up and gets you going.

If you’re on the receiving end of someone who is needy, nagyg or controlling you may walk on egg shells, dilute yourself down, not share your inner world with your partner.  Feel trapped, chained and restricted.

And if you are needy, naggy or controlling, what needs am I not getting met?  Being able to fulfil those needs for yourself, but also communicating clearly.  Having very good communication and speaking with respect, assertiveness to be able to say what you feel and what you need and what you want.

We all want to be authentic and real.  Living with freedom, creativity, spontaneous choice, love, openness, respect, for a long-term empowered marriage.

5 secrets to a long-lasting empowered marriage:

1. Have your own identity
2. Be a team
3. A balance between positive and negative
4. Being equal
5. Letting go of the expectations

An empowered marriage is filled with love and commitment, trust and openness.  You enjoy each other in your life and your marriage is filled with respect and assertive fantastic communication. There's a very strong commitment and love there. There's a trust. There's an openness.

How do we create an empowered marriage? Have your own identity, be your own person.  People can lose themselves in marriage. You are your own unique individual, authentic self.  Working as a team, a partnership with all that occurs in a marriage. 

Being able to openly express what you're feeling. Balance the positive with the negative, being able to openly express it and talk about it.  Being equals how ever that looks for you both.  It's about letting go of the expectations that you have on your partner.

What do people with high self-esteem behave like? 

How are self-esteem and the elephant in the living room connected? 

The elephant in the living room is an expression that means a couple has a problem, but neither partner is willing to face or address it.

A checklist to see if your self-esteem is healthy - knowing it can change daily - but the foundation is to know that you are special, worthy and lovable no matter what is happening in your outer world.

Self esteem and the elephant in the room are closely linked.  Understanding that its your responsibility to fill your own esteem up and not waiting for your partner to do it for you.

Two qualities are needed to deal with the elephant in the living room.

Working through your conditioning strategies, patterns from the family of origin and understanding the masks that may be worn are also enormously helpful in talking about the elephant in the living room.

The sexual energy within yourself when on and open, means you’re alive, you're motivated, you’re creative, you're very much more connected to yourself.

What begins to happen when the sexual intimacy is less, is does tend to happen over time, then you start spending less and less time together and you become disconnected.

The return of closeness and sexual intimacy can happen - by slowing down, by dedicating the time and the energy that it's going to take to accomplish that. It's about owning what's going on inside of you and being very honest with yourself.  How do you communicate and perhaps make changes in that area so that you can aim for and achieve the empowered marriage that we all deserve and want.

In this episode of Empowered Marriage, Helen Harrison talks about the reasons for resentment, the effects they have on a relationship and the steps to overcome the feeling of resentment so you can live in an empowered marriage.

When you're feeling hurt about something in your marriage it can build up over time.  It's lots of little resentments that have built up and built up and you feel that you've been wronged in some way. You’re not being heard, validated, perhaps you feel invisible and not important.

Feelings under resentment can include anger, sadness, doubt, grief and many more emotions. Getting to a place where you can learn to stop feeling the resentment and instead feel gratitude, peacefulness and compassion is the pathway to an empowered marriage.

When you accept and get to that place of gratitude and that place of peacefulness, you are no longer in the victim role and you can remove yourself from the negativity associated with the hurt that you feel inside.

The result, when you're not carrying resentment, is you're very present and you feel peacefulness. There are several steps in the process of acceptance and I look forward to sharing them with you in this podcast episode.

Have you ever stopped to notice your thoughts? The quality of your thinking reflects the quality of your life. If you have empowering thoughts, they will create a wonderful nourishing life with high self-esteem, resulting in you feeling fantastic about yourself. Alternatively, if your thoughts are critical of yourself and the people in your life, they will weaken you and in the long-term affect your self-esteem and the quality of your marriage.

Questioning and challenging your thinking helps you to understand the beliefs that you currently have about yourself. Once you have uncovered the limiting and sabotaging beliefs, then it’s necessary to find ways to change them.

Be patient with yourself because it can take time for a new positive belief to take hold. It does depend on the amount of internal resistance. If there is no resistance you can instil a new belief in one day. You will know when your new belief has taken hold because you will act in accordance with it resulting in a more empowered you and empowered marriage.

There is no room for other characters in your marriage.  Some examples of a character can be a pleaser, martyr, victim or a bragger. When you are acting those out or you are being that character, you cannot be honest about what you want in your marriage or what you think in a conversation or what truly brings you joy. It is impossible for the person that you're with to really know you and love the true authentic you.

All these characters avoid loving themselves and you may see yourself in several them or predominantly in one. Looking for love ‘out there’ results in you allowing someone else to define how you think and feel. You don’t have to face and love yourself.

Ask yourself how your life would change if you filled up your own love first and you were able to let go of the characters that you may be playing.