Former first lady, Michelle Obama, has recounted the “tough times” she once faced in her marriage to Barrack Obama, ex-US president, admitting they once needed marriage therapy.

Michelle was speaking to Oprah Winfrey as part of the 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour with WW at Barclays Center in New York on Saturday in front of a crowd of 15,000 people.

The former first lady also opened up about the ups and downs of her marriage to the former president.

The 56-year-old author, who recently won a Grammy for the memoir ‘Becoming’, admitted that raising a family is hard. She added that they had to undergo counseling after the birth of their daughters.

According to her, people sometimes need objective persons to hear them out on the challenges in their marriage following that raising a family could sometimes “take a toll” on mental health.

“Sometimes you need an objective person to just hear you out. If I’m going to show up equal in this partnership, I have to be able to make myself happy,” Michelle said.

“I had to stop focusing on what he wasn’t doing and start thinking about how to carve out the life that I wanted for myself, with or without Barack.

“The more I succeeded in defining myself for myself, the better I was in my partnership. Marriage is hard and raising a family together is a hard thing. It takes a toll.

“We had to worry about what parties they (their daughters) were going to, whether there’s alcohol. I had to know who the parents were. Every weekend for me was hard.

“They (the daughters) are gone, thank God. We have more emotional time, emotional energy. It’s just me and him and the dogs.

“We’re coming back to that point where we see each other again because some of the hardest times in our lives we just escaped, we survived it.

“We went through a tough time, we did some hard things together. But now we’re out on the other end and I can look at him and I still recognise my husband. He’s still the man I fell in love with.”

Michelle and Barrack recently earned accolades from admirers across the globe after the duo participated in a project which saw them make furniture for school children in Malaysia.