Emily Martyak

Emily Martyak Counselor->SAHM

06/18/2026

Women ask me all the time, “How did you learn all of this?”

The truth is, I learned it because I had to.

When PMDD, postpartum struggles, and hormone symptoms started impacting every area of my life, I realized I couldn’t keep accepting that extreme suffering was simply part of being a woman or part of my life.

The first book I read was Hormone Intelligence by Aviva Romm MD | Women’s Integrative Medicine . It was the first time someone put words to experiences I had normalized for years.

Then I read In the Flo by Alisa Vitti , and something clicked. I began to see connections between my symptoms, my cycle, my lifestyle, my nutrition, and my mental health that I had never understood before.

One book led to another. Then another.

Thousands of pages of books, research studies, podcasts, trainings, and conversations later, I still consider myself a student.

My background as a counselor taught me to look deeper into women’s health through a mental health lens, but my own healing journey taught me that our minds and bodies were never meant to be separated in the first place.

I don’t share this information because I pretend know everything. I definitely don’t. I share it because I know what it feels like to suffer without answers and to have no direction in darkness.

And if you’re here, searching for answers too, you’re in the right place.

Episode 1: How I learned all of this.

06/17/2026

“Should I become a mother if I have PMDD?”

Only you can answer that question. It’s not a decision to take lightly.

But if you’re asking me—a woman who lived with severe PMDD, survived the darkest days of postpartum, and has since put her PMDD into remission—my answer is yes.

Before I became a mom, I managed my PMDD by disappearing. I would isolate myself for entire weekends, ignore texts and phone calls, binge and restrict, and spend impulsively.

Every month, without fail, I became convinced my life was falling apart. I would text my boss that I wasn’t meant for my job, that I wasn’t capable, and that I should quit. I was coping, but I wasn’t coping well. The difference was that no one truly depended on me.

Motherhood changed that.

Suddenly, I couldn’t disappear. The phone calls I used to ignore became cries I couldn’t silence. The weekends I used to spend hiding became days filled with feedings, meals, and the constant needs of two children I love more than anything.

Having children didn’t change whether or not I had PMDD. It changed what living with PMDD required of me. I knew I needed support if I wanted to be the mom I wanted to be, so I started looking for answers. I tried treatments. I kept going, even when it got really dark.

My husband carried me through seasons I couldn’t carry myself. My children gave me a reason to keep searching for healing, and my faith reminded me that this was never about having enough strength on my own.

A friend recently told me, “It’s less about your limitations and more about what God can do through you.”

PMDD can make motherhood harder, but it does not make you any less capable of being a great mom.

Build your support system. Take your healing seriously. Ask for help before you need it.

Motherhood is a choice I would make again and again and again. Because without my husband and my children, I honestly don’t know if I would still be here today. 💜

PMDD doesn’t just affect the person experiencing it. It touches every relationship and person around them.To the partner...
06/15/2026

PMDD doesn’t just affect the person experiencing it. It touches every relationship and person around them.

To the partners who carried a little more, loved a little harder, and stayed through the hardest days: thank you.

I’m sorry for all you’ve also had to bear and witness, but I’m grateful you were willing to do it.

06/15/2026

Anger is a normal human emotion. It can show up when your needs haven’t been met, when you’ve been touched out for days, when you’ve been carrying the mental load alone, when you’ve been sleeping poorly, under-eating, overcommitting, or running on stress and caffeine.

Rage feels different.

Rage can feel consuming. It can feel like your brain and body have been hijacked. Small things suddenly feel unbearable. Noise feels louder. Clutter feels suffocating. You know your reaction doesn’t match the moment, but you can’t seem to access the version of yourself you know is in there.

When those experiences show up during the luteal phase, improve shortly after your period begins, happen in most cycles, and begin to impact your relationships, work, parenting, or ability to function day to day, it’s worth taking a closer look at PMDD.

I’ve learned that our hormones don’t exist separately from the lives we’re living. The way we eat, sleep, move, rest, cope with stress, and care for ourselves shapes the way we experience our cycles.

Your hormones are always responding to the environment you create for them.

If you’re living in a constant state of overwhelm, pushing through exhaustion, ignoring your body’s signals, and carrying more than you were ever meant to carry alone, your luteal phase will often be the first place that shows up.

Sometimes that’s PMDD. Sometimes it’s a nervous system that’s been stuck in survival mode for too long. Sometimes it’s both.

Understanding the difference matters because it changes the way you care for yourself.

06/14/2026

Thank you for showing up for yourself, for me and for our world.

I am so grateful to God every time I hear that a woman has put her PMDD symptoms in remission. I am humbled and so appreciative of God putting me on this path when I find out that what I shared had any part in it.

Thank you for sharing your pain with me. your wins with me. your struggles. your confusion. your determination.

Thank you for it all. It never gets old to see comments like these from women who I don’t even know. How incredible is it that we can support each other like this?

It happens slowly through a thousand tiny messages that teach us what our bodies mean, what they should look like, what ...
06/13/2026

It happens slowly through a thousand tiny messages that teach us what our bodies mean, what they should look like, what they should be capable of, and how much of our worth is tied to them.

Some of those messages come from people who love us. Some come from doctors, teachers, magazines, social media, relationships, or complete strangers. Most are never intended to cause harm, but over time they become the lens through which we see ourselves.

When I look back on my own life, I can see how many of the beliefs I carried about my body were never conclusions I arrived at on my own. They were stories I absorbed little by little until they felt like truth.

Those stories shaped the choices I made every day. They influenced how I nourished myself, how I coped with stress, how I moved my body, how I cared for myself, what I tolerated, and what I believed I deserved.

And over time, those choices shaped my health.

I think many women can trace their own story back through a thousand tiny messages and find the places where they learned that being smaller was more important than feeling well, that being skinny was more important than being nourished, that being desirable was more important than being at peace, or that shrinking ngtheir body was always the answer.

But, what I’ve learned is that I wasn’t really fighting my body, I was fighting the story that had been created about my body.

Once, I decided to change that story, my entire life changed for the better.

For years, PMDD convinced me that I was too much.That I was too hard to love. To easy to be abandoned. Every month, I wa...
06/12/2026

For years, PMDD convinced me that I was too much.
That I was too hard to love. To easy to be abandoned.

Every month, I was certain this would be the month he finally had enough.

But every month, he stayed.

He sat with me through the tears, the rage, the hopelessness, the endless search for answers, and the versions of myself I barely recognized.

He learned my cycle alongside me, carried way more than his share when I just couldn’t, and never stopped believing there was a way forward and a way out of this, even when I couldn’t see it myself.

People often ask how I got here.

And, the truth is that PMDD remission wasn’t a journey I walked alone and I’m not sure that I could have.

Behind every part of my story is a husband who never stopped showing up. For me. For our family.

A man who showed incredible strength, patience and love in the face of unspeakable obstacles.

A man who became the man God was calling him to be and the one God knew I needed.

And I’ll never stop being grateful for that. I’ll never stop being grateful for him. ❤️

pmddsupport

06/11/2026

Ladies. Eat a damn steak.

We’ve got women trying every supplement under the sun, tracking every symptom, wondering why they’re exhausted, anxious, overstimulated, raging before their period, craving everything in the pantry…

…while surviving on iced coffee, a protein bar, and vibes.

And before someone says, “Well I eat plenty.”
Maybe.

But calories and nourishment aren’t the same thing.

You can eat 3,000 calories a day and still be undernourished. You can be overfed and undernourished at the exact same time.

I think we’ve become so focused on eating less, weighing less, shrinking ourselves, fitting into the jeans, fitting the aesthetic, and hitting the number on the scale that we’ve stopped asking a much more important question:

Is my body actually being nourished?

Because your body doesn’t know you’re trying to fit into a size smaller. It knows whether it’s getting enough protein. It knows whether it has the minerals, vitamins, healthy fats, and nutrients required to run thousands of processes every single day.

The problem is that most women have been taught to see hunger, cravings, increased appetite, and shifts in energy as something to fight against instead of something to pay attention to. Those things are often information from the body, especially during the luteal phase when many women suddenly notice symptoms they were able to ignore the rest of the month.

One of the patterns I see over and over is women responding to those signals with more restriction, more caffeine, more appetite suppression, and more trying to power through. Meanwhile, the body is still asking for nourishment.

For some women that means eating enough food. For others it means eating more nutrient-dense food. For many women it’s both.

PMDD is far more complex than food alone, but I do think we’ve normalized a level of undernourishment that many women don’t even recognize anymore. Then we’re surprised when our hormones, mood, energy, and nervous system struggle to keep up.

Sometimes the answer is more complex than food.

And sometimes the answer is to eat the damn steak.

06/10/2026

Always check for fire 🔥

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