"And I'm like, 'You know what, you don't want to be with me because that's just going to be a life of misery for you and for me. It's just going to make us both miserable.'
"But then we had a great conversation about it after we broke up, like probably a year-and-a-half later, where he said, '[Being controlling] doesn't make me feel good. I don't know why I try to do it. It makes me feel terrible.'
"And I said, 'Well, why don't you stop? Because in my experience, if you're doing something and it's making you feel bad, the best thing to do is to stop it.' And also he had to know how it was to be without me."
The couple relocated from Melbourne to Bologna in January, when she relocated her entire family following an attack on their home.
Speaking to Tommy Little on The Sunday Project, the mum-of-four revealed another reason for the move, saying that her eldest son's battle with leukaemia when he was just six years old had inspired the family to go on an "adventure".
"Our eldest son Lewis, who's 15 now, and healthy and beautiful, had leukaemia when he was six, and was in treatment for four years, and nearly died," she told the presenter.
"For so long we couldn't go anywhere, we couldn't travel anywhere — I mean we went to the hospital, we went home."
Kate says she and her family are planning to live in Italy for a year. She and her husband, Peter moved to the northern Italian city with their children Lewis, 15, Sunday, 14, Artie, 12, and Jan, nine.
The radio presenter has continued to co-host her HitFM radio show alongside Dave Hughes, who still works from Melbourne.
