Episode 43: Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Addiction, Abuse, and Awakening: Haley's Journey to Divine Healing

⚠️ Disclaimer

This episode discusses domestic violence, trauma, and suicidal ideation. Please listen with care and use discretion. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.

Take action today: Donate to Safe Harbor of Eastern Kentucky 

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In this episode, I share an honest and raw conversation with my brave friend Haley, a woman whose story of survival, healing, and spiritual awakening will help you believe in the availability of miracles.

Haley opens up about her childhood in an abusive home, the years she spent in a violent marriage, and the devastating cycles of trauma and addiction that followed. But she also shares the turning point—the divine moment that set her free and guided her back to truth, peace, and her Divine purpose.

Together, we talk about:

• What it’s really like to live through and recover from domestic violence
• Why leaving an abusive relationship is never simple
• The difference between sobriety and true recovery
• How trauma shapes our choices and self-worth
• The miracle moment that changed everything for Hailey
• What healthy love and boundaries look like after abuse

This episode is a testament to the fact that even after the deepest pain, healing is possible—and it gets to be miraculous.

This episode is a testament to the fact that even after the deepest pain, healing is possible—and it gets to be miraculous.

This episode was recorded for Domestic Violence Awareness Month and we’re sharing stories and experiences of brave women who have faced and overcome domestic abuse.

Haley’s story reminds us that healing begins when we surrender trying to do everything by ourselves and that even in the darkest moments, reaching for the Divine is always a miraculous option.

If you or someone you love is experiencing domestic violence, please reach out for help.

• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or thehotline.org

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Hey gorgeous.

I love you.

I'm so proud of you.

And I believe in your ability to create a life you absolutely love.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Girls Who Recover podcast with Dana Hunter Fradella, where incredible women just like you, go to transform life's biggest setbacks into your most powerful comebacks so that you can live a life you. Love. I'm your host, Dana Hunter Fradella, transformational coach and founder of Girls Who Recover, and my mission is to pull back the curtain on our mistakes, failures, shame and personal disasters, and light the way for how to use those to create your biggest and most gorgeous comebacks. Follow the show now. Grab your iced coffee and turn up the volume for girls who recover. Let's light it up. Welcome back to The Girls Who Recover podcast with your favorite host, Dana Hunter Fela. And this week is all about bringing awareness to domestic violence, and it is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you Hailey, who has. Bravely agreed to come and share her experience, strength, and hope with us as a community. And Haley, please take it away. Tell us a little bit about you and your story. Okay, great. I am excited and just really grateful and taking in the opportunity that God has given me to tell my story and potentially help another woman. So I was I'm just gonna dive right in and try to tell the experience quickly because my heart just completely loves to focus more on the strength and hope part, but basically my, parents were divorced when I was very little. I was still a baby. I grew up in between both of them. My father was very abusive. Physically, yes, but also verbally. Mentally there were many insults every day. I me and my sister. We were just pounded with these terrible things about us. We were nothing but whores and we would never be anything in life. We were an embarrassment to the family. We were stupid, we were retards, we were all of these things. We were, we, and those things became embedded, right? I completely came to believe those things. Took them on as my identity. And when I was 15, I met. The person that I'm mainly going to talk about my the person that I married and he is the father of my children, and he picked up right where my dad left off, right? It started in the beginning as teenagers with a lot of verbal and psychological abuse. A lot of game playing. He would say, I love you and we're together and yeah, we can be together. And then he just wouldn't talk to me for a month and he would call me and tell me, go kill yourself and hang up on me. And he would call back and say, I was just kidding, huh? No, really. Go kill yourself. And so it just started as games like that as a. As a young girl, as we got older and drugs came into the equation and life got more serious, there were kids involved, it began to get somewhat physical. This is years into the relationship and through the years it got progressively worse and worse. It the abuse in every arena, right? So I. I can remember being in nursing school and I was sitting there and I was hearing about the statistics of abusive relationships and how less than 1% of them ever become. Not abusive, right? Less than 1% ever recovery. And at that point, I was still not completely convinced that I was in an abusive relationship because remember, I had gone through years of his psychological. Terror and what is it they do grooming, right? Yeah. Before the physical violence ever started, right? There was little incidences here and there, like one time when we were a teenager, pick me up, threw me in a sink, scared me and stuff like that. And in the beginning with the physical stuff, it was mainly fear. He would punch me in the head and as to not leave a mark and stuff like that. But it was mainly. Abuse on a level to where I was completely terrified for my life. I just knew this is it. I'm about to die. Before I ever started experiencing significant sexual, psychological, super significant psychological broken bones, all of that stuff it progressed for me in a way that allowed my brain to. Say he's not that bad. He'll get better. If he was that bad, he would be doing this and this, and by the time it got to this and this, my brain was so sick that I could go nowhere. I was so paralyzed. It's devastating to me, this country, the society that we live in. That's that, that tells battered women. Just leave, it can't be that bad. Or she would just leave and, yeah. Not only do we have financial restrictions when it comes to that, a lot of us end up having children with our abusers. We have all of the, we have lives with them, finances joint property, children, all of these things in which we can't escape them in that way. Not only are those the barriers, but the main barrier in my experience was my own mind. I got to a point towards the end where my brain was so traumatized that I literally could not make. A decision to, to really do anything. It was like a it was like at some point my brain just shut down. It couldn't, yeah. It couldn't function anymore. I could not make a decision to get up and go to the grocery store on my own. It just much less make a decision to like plan to get away and I'm gonna do this and this, and everything's fine. The brain no longer works like that. When you're, when you get that deep in with somebody that truly gets off on your pain, it got so terrible towards the end the psychological abuse. So it, my story is that in 2020, a huge part of my story, in 2020, I went to rehab and I got sober. And the following year I lost a baby. We had at this point he had been sober. Sober for over. For nearly three years. And so I noticed, I just wanna, like for the listener, I noticed that you put his sober in quotation marks. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean there? Absolutely. So he worked a program for about six months and a recovery program that where there was actually some evidence of a. Change as a human being and his responses and a spiritual experience. But after that, he just replaced one addiction with another and he became addicted to making money and exercise and stuff like that, right? He stopped working a program and he was basically a dry, he was dry for most of your, so you're sober, but you're not recover. You're still an asshole. You know what I mean? Like the difference between sobriety and recovery. Absolutely. Absolutely. Got it. Yes. Got that. Okay. I got it. Got it. Yep. I got sober. I struggled significantly with alcoholism for many years just because I could not, I just couldn't take the pain that I was in. I had to have something to numb it, and in 2021, we had bought a house and we lost a baby. We lost our home in the hurricane. My sister, that was a year younger than me, that grew up with that same father and believed those things about herself, that he told us she died of a drug overdose after, a year and a half sober, she relapsed on heroin and the second time she died and then my mother died of cancer and I lost everything so quickly. I had never experienced loss. And we came into all of this money from our, house being destroyed, all this insurance money. So he decided he was gonna switch career paths and he started using steroids again and he started beating me and cheating on me again. And I can just remember being eight months pregnant with our first boy and, he was leaving. I he never tried to hide the cheating from me. It was like he threw it in my face, right? And I'm on the, on my knees in the front yard begging him, please don't go. Please don't go. And he just, laughed at me and told me how pathetic I was, and he left and he went in and had sex with someone else. And so my self-worth as a woman. Was lost. And then we came back to Mississippi and my children heard a fight from another room and a CPS case was opened and CPS for domestic violence and CPS was. In my life every day telling me, you don't do this. We're gonna take your kids, we're gonna take your kids, we're gonna take your kids. And DPS is Child Protective Services, correct? And at that point I, I was dealing with that fear and ultimately I lo I lost everything so quickly and I ultimately ended up losing my mind. This abuse. He, he ended up introducing me to crack cocaine. He told me later that he got me hooked on it, on purpose.'Cause he knew that I would be a fiend in all of these things. And he would, after the CPS thing happened, I would not. Call the police anymore. And he knew that. So that was when the real physical stuff really started. I had, I walked around with just broken bones in my face. I had a black eye eight months outta the year for 2022. Just, kept trying to kill myself. Just, covered in bruises all the time and just broken and no escape and just got crazier and crazier. And towards the end, my PTSD from everything got so bad. It was like I. It was my, it was like the flashbacks of not only things that he had done, but also things that I had done, like walking away from my children to, smoke crack cocaine and things like that. It, it got to where it was just like a minute by minute. Like all day, every day, just flashback after flashback. Just shrieking and fear from my own mind, right? Like it didn't matter how drunk I got. It didn't matter how much weed I smoked, it didn't matter how much drugs I did, it didn't matter how much medication I did, I was on like 10 different psych meds. Nothing made my brain stop. And I thought that I was hopelessly mentally ill, right? And I, I kept answering the phone for him. He's in jail and I just, I keep doing everything he's saying and I've lo I've lost everything because of this relationship, and I still am. I'm in it and I can't, and I cannot understand why. So long story short I had an experience with God where I did not believe in God from a very young age because I went to Catholic school, not because my parents were Catholic, but because we had money. So I would get in the car and I would tell my mom what I learned about God that day, and she'd be all drunk and she'd be like, that shit's not real, but I had this this. This longing in me to connect with the creator and. Despite what my mother said, but when I was in third grade, my teacher told me that if I died that day, I was going to hell'cause I wasn't baptized. And from then on I wanted absolutely nothing to do with something like that. No. How can we blame you when nobody's blaming you, Hailey? Nobody's blaming for that. I'm so sorry. I just lemme just take a breath there. Okay. I'm just gonna be like, okay, God is. Okay. Got it. I took my breath for you. I just, I told the story on the podcast a couple of times. I went to, too, went to Catholic school for the exact same reason that you did. And one of my dogs got hit by a card, so I went to the priest, this is in the eighties. Okay. So the, and then I said the, pumpkins with Jesus in heaven. And he said, oh no, she's not. She doesn't have a soul. Pets. Jesus doesn't allow pets into heaven'cause they don't have souls. And I was like, I'm out. I'm out. I look, I literally looked behind him and there was Jesus on the cross, like blood streaming on his face wounds. Like it was not the, it's not great marketing. You know what I mean? And then I found out that my, the animals that I love most of my life aren't eligible. And I'm like, okay, I'm done. Okay. Thanks. Gon, according to me, love you meeting. I do have a little bit more hope since Pope Francis and the current, the current hope, but we'll see. We'll see. God forgives everybody. You know what I mean? All right, let's keep going. Absolutely. Yes. I, so needless to say, I struggled. I struggled significantly with a relationship with a higher power, and I actually came about a relationship with a higher power by challenging him with these I refer to him as him just'cause it's easier. I don't think that God has. Penis or anything like, don't get but he does. I love it wherever he is. But anyway for the purpose of this podcast, hold on. It gives it, that does give a new meaning to the reality of God is deep down within us. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Okay. Alright. I actually came about my relationship with God by challenging him. I don't believe in you, and if you're real, I need you to do this and prove it to me. And I don't I don't think you love me. And if you're real, I need you to do this and prove it to me. And, the first couple of times that a prayer, an asshole prayer, that's what I call that a prayer like that got answered. I was like, eh. Kinda weird, it's coincidence, after a handful of times it's oh, okay. Maybe I'll entertain this. Okay. So Im not hearing you right. Your prayers were answered. You would a, you would make Oh, for sure. The prayer and then the prayer got answered. Got it. Stupid prayers. I call'em stupid prayers. I, and I always tell people, this is my experience. Nobody ever told me that I could pray anything like that. Nobody ever told me that I could cuss God out and be like, Hey, I don't fing believe in you. If you're real, do this right now and then it gets done, right? Because I'm an intellect, right? So if I can't understand something, then I'm not gonna mess with it, and I can't, I could not get to a point where it was like, there's a God and you're not gonna, you don't get to understand them. And so I, by challenging him and being a jerk and praying these stupid prayers, and that's what I always lead people to, Hey, if you don't, if you don't believe in him, why don't you try praying something stupid that only he could do? And see what happens? So one of my favorite speakers in recovery is because we come in and we're like, I don't believe in God, and he says, nobody really does. Let's pray. Exactly. Let's do, let's see what happens. It's like magic, right? You're right. Long story short, I ended up having an encounter with God. The recovery program that I work talks about some talks about the spiritual experience, right? And some of us get these sudden and profound. Spiritual experiences were like very suddenly and drastically. Our response to life just changes. Most of us get the educational variety. It takes some time and other people start to notice it before we do and all. That's what most of us get. And I had experienced a little bit of the educational variety here and there. I've been in and out of these programs since I was 18 trying to get it. And I never could.'cause I would never submit. I would never surrender and. I would never just say, okay, fine. Let's do it your way and mean it. I like, I'll say that, but I didn't mean it. And so the moment that I did, I had this sudden and profound spiritual experience where everything changed in me. There is absolutely no medical or scientific explanation as to the miracle that happened to my mind. I just laid down that night and went to sleep for the first time in six months. Without help. Like that. I to whereas before the PTSD is so bad that I can't even sleep for more than an hour without waking up. And that's after taking 10 different things, at least five of each of those things to fall asleep. And I get an hour of sleep for months and months and months and months. That's what my life was. And yeah, that, so that happened to me. And. It was only, and I did that by challenging God too. I had tried to kill myself with a pretty, pretty foolproof suicide attempt two weeks prior and it didn't work. And when I woke up, I instantly knew what was responsible, right? Like I used to be an ER nurse. Okay? I know that you don't sit around and sat in the seventies. All day long and not die or at best be brain dead, right? Yeah. And so I wake up in the s And are you talking about blood pressure? Seventies. Oh oxygen saturation. Oh, oxygen saturation. Okay. Alright. So if you come into the ER with an oxygen saturation of 70, you are getting that's a level one. You have a life-threatening deal going on. You're getting a room immediately, and most of the time you're getting intubated. It's a true medical emergency. So I tried to, overdose on heroin, and I was not an opiate user, right? Like I tried it a few times. It wasn't my thing. Heroin, fentanyl, whatever it was. The last time I went and bought crack, I got a bunch of heroin to, and I did at least 10 times the amount that I had seen my husband die off of 10 times, right? By the time I'm even done doing it halfway through. I'm nodding out and I just laid down and I told God I can't do this anymore. I'm, i'm done. And I was at peace with it. I wrote my daughter a suicide note on the mirror and told her I was, sorry. My oldest daughter, she was in a group home in Jackson, Mississippi at that point. And I, I woke up in the er 12 hours later, she called me. That was at nine o'clock in the morning. She calls me that night from the group home and I don't answer, not that unusual since I'm doing drugs, right? And she said I knew something was wrong. So she sent the police to do a welfare check on me and they came in and apparently I'm blue and everything else. And so I wake up in the ER and they're putting oxygen on me, telling me we've already Narcan you twice and you're satin in the seventies. You have to keep this on right. You won't let us intubate you. Apparently I'm acting like an asshole with a surprise, blah, blah, blah, and anyway, so I immediately knew what was responsible for the next two weeks. I was constantly suicidal. And then I finally tapped out and I said, God, if you're not gonna let me die, I need you to fix me. And he did. And that was November 26th, 2023. I told him, I'm sorry for everything I've ever put in front of you. I'm gonna give you everything. I'm gonna give you my children. I'm gonna give you my marriage, I'm gonna give you my money, my future, everything. You can have all of it no matter what. I'll follow you and my entire life changed, right? I had all of these problems that I just don't have anymore. I was on seizure medicine my whole life. I had problems from all the crack cocaine I had smoked. We smoked like a hundred grand worth crack cocaine in seven weeks, right? Like when I smoked crack. Like I, I smoke it. Okay. And I had all of these mental problems, bipolar, lifelong anxiety, depression, all of these things I was on, so many different medications. All of it was just instantly gone. Okay. I take nothing today. I don't have seizures. I don't have heart problems. I don't have any mental illness. I have no symptoms. I have not spent a day in the bed.'cause I just didn't feel like getting outta bed in almost two years. Whereas before I was in the bed for five years straight. It's a running joke with one of my daughters. She's mom, remember that time you didn't get outta bed for five years? That's how mentally ill I was. And, so today I take nothing and I pour into that relationship with my higher power. I get up, I live for it every day. And only through an encounter like that only through experiencing the love. The creator of the universe and him telling me, Haley, specifically, I love you so much, I'm going to heal everything in you. Only through that encounter was I able to escape that abusive relationship because now that I know what love truly looks like, it'cause, it's not it's not like God chose to do this when I was like doing all the right things. It's not God literally took me at the most broken, dirtiest, most destitute place that and lifted me from that place. He did it in a way to where he made it very clear Hey, this is nothing that you did. This is simply because I love you. And he took me from the lowest place that I ever could have imagined. And it was like he just set me on high. He and a, and an encounter with a love like that changes you. An encounter with a love like that makes you look at. The father that has verbally berated you your entire life and lied to you and manipulated you, and the husband, now ex-husband that has, abused you in every single way and tried his damnedest to not only tear you down, but to make sure that in the process of tearing you down, you feel as much pain as possible, malignant in his abuse. Like it's, it was not enough for him to to hit me. It had, he he got to the point where he was so abusive. He had to infiltrate every part of my being with pain, physically, sexually, emotionally. Psychologically he was going to make sure that I knew that I was absolutely worthless and nobody wanted me but him. And the more he did that the closer I got to him.'cause he was all I had, that's what I believed, right? Only through an encounter with the creator of the world where he reached down and showed me what love really was I able to break free of that? That is the only, it sounds like it. That sounds like a miracle to me. Oh, it was absolutely. Can we just claim that as a miracle? And that's one of my favorite parts about being in recovery and then also about listening to story after story of okay, but when you have even this much willingness, you get a, you can, you're available for a miracle. Yeah. And that's, so what's the tell us That's almost two years. Congratulations in. Thank you. Tell us about the, tell us about the journey home in the last two years. So the journey in the last two years, he was actually incarcerated for the first year and a half of that. And that allowed me, to get alone with that creator that saved me and step away from that. I got distance, I got separation, and I was able to heal and grow and allow God to make me into this human being and take my character defects and turn them from, very harmful things to myself and others and to the most beautiful things about me by, flipping them right. And I was always. Extremely verbally abusive myself with my mouth, right? Like I was never one to be violent, but I was going to make sure that you wanted to kill yourself with the things that I said to you. I was gonna go that low. I was relentless. I wasn't gonna stop. I was like a caged animal, I was just so angry and harmful to people around me. I was so hateful. I was enraged for the first 33 years of my life. And he has taken this mouth that was my main weapon and made it the kindest, most loving, encouraging vessel. If I could get rid of this I would actually be a really good speaker, right? But he'll get rid of that on his own time. I'm on a podcast, Mr. Charles. Edit this part out much longer, like 20 minutes because it's fine. I'll be out there in a minute. Charles. Yeah he has done those things. So the life that, so I was able to get alone with him and allow him to work on me and build me into this person and build this life for me. The first, just, hang on. So get alone with him. You're talking about creator God. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking about God. Got it. Okay. I was just, I was given separation from the thing.'cause the reality is that I was ne I was never gonna reach this place while I was with my ex-husband because I would ha, I would try to have a relationship with God. I would try to talk to my kids about God and all of that. But ultimately, a truly abusive human being is never going to allow you to have a relationship where you're worshiping the creator because you have to worship them. Yeah. That's what I was dealing with. And I so they're not supportive of you having any relationships with any other people, especially God and, excuse me. So he got outta jail six months ago and he actually had his own encounter with God, not quite. He called me one morning, he said, what did you do? What did you do? I did not talk to him most of the time that he was in jail after I had that experience, and it started with one week. This is someone that I have answered the phone. Like I could be having somebody write me a check for a million dollars and if he called my phone I was gonna be like, Hey I'll be right back. That's how I was with him, right? So after this experience. It started with one week. I said, you know what, he's still in jail. I said, we're gonna go contact, we're gonna go no contact for one week. I'm letting you know I'm not gonna answer the phone for one week. And that one week turned into a year because after I answered the phone a week later, I realized that when I do not communicate with him, there are things inside of me that don't come out. There are things inside of me. There are feelings inside of me there. There's anger, there's resentment, there's this movement from this place of peace that I have. And those things don't happen when I don't speak to you. And I got to where I loved those things. I ch I valued those things. I got to where. I was not willing to be moved from them. So after a week I pick up the phone, he's acting the same as he always does. And what do you know, A week turned into a year and I answered the phone. He got out of jail and he called me that morning and said, what did you do? What did you do? And I'm like, what? I'm not doing this. You know what I mean? And he was like no. Tell me what you did. You have peace. Like you're not crazy anymore. You're so different. What did you do? I said, I just tapped out, dude, like I, I just tapped out. I said I gave everything to God. He said, how long did it take? I said, your whole life could change today. Just like that, right? And he did have an encounter with God an amazing one. And I think that was a moving thing for him, especially for somebody that's done such heinous things, to have the creator of the world to reach out and say, Hey, I, I know everything you've done and I love you too. Yeah. He is not where. I am at spiritually or in his recovery, but we do have children together. He was not, his rights were not terminated on his children. I have full custody of all of my children back today as well. Wow. By the way our three children that we have together, I have one more that, that her dad has custody of her, and she's very happy where she is and I see her as well. The three children that we have together today we handle those things together and we're friends. Just, but there are some major boundaries involved. And he realized very quickly, he, we all revert to our old behavior. So when he got uncomfortable with. Me not doing something he wanted very shortly after he got out of jail. He tried to come at me sideways and he realized very quickly Hey, this is not the same person I have always dealt with, right? Like I have boundaries today. I, if I love God, then that means that I love what God loves, and God has made it very clear to me that God loves me. What does that look like for you? What is a boundary that you're, you feel super good about, that's protecting you, loving you? I just abs, I just have no tolerance for the manipulation. I, as soon as I recognize it, I will say, Hey, this conversation isn't gonna be good for me. I'm gonna go ahead and let you go. I'll talk to you later, and I'll hang up and I will not answer the phone until later. I follow through on things that I said. There's no toxicity involved anymore. There's no, I'm saying I'm gonna call. I used to reduce stuff like that just to. Stir him up more and piss him off more and control him and get him to do what I wanted to do. There's none of that involved for me anymore. I am not interested in any of the games. I don't I don't, I just don't have any, I don't have any. In ever putting myself in a position to where I draw my self-worth from another human being again. So self-love looks like respect. It looks like boundaries. It looks like. No tolerance for the old toxic manipulative games. It looks like no tolerance for any name calling. It looks like no tolerance for you trying to control me or disrespect me. I, if it's not love and humility, I just have gotten to a point where I just don't wanna be a part of it and I'm not gonna be a part of it. I can hang up the phone like to say oh, I'm unavailable for that. Yeah, I'm not, that's exactly what, that's exactly what it is. And I never had that part of me inside of me. I never I was, there was another situation after that, probably a month or so later, where he had been very mean or disrespectful or something like that. And then when he called me back he was like, I just wanna say sorry, or he was texting me'cause I wasn't answering. He was like, I just wanna say sorry. I know you need to hear that. And I told, I called him and I said, you said one thing that I'm gonna address. I said you said that you know that I need to hear that. And I said, no, I don't. I said, that girl is gone. Like that person that, that needed you to come back and say sorry and explain why you did all of those messed up things and said all of those messed up things. That person that needed that, sorry to feel better. She's gone. Like she doesn't exist anymore. I do think that when it comes to domestic violence, in my experience, I did all the therapy. I did all of the the. Trauma therapy for abusive relationships and everything. I did the medication, I did the self-help stuff and the reading, the books codependent no more and all of these things. I talked to people and got advice until I was blue in the face and. All of these other things. In my experience, the only thing that got me away from the abusive situation that I was in and is the foundation of me being able to lay down at night and have peace knowing that I will never be abused again, is my relationship with God. What about your, so I just wanna mic. That's a mic drop, right? Because we can come up here and talk about okay, you need therapy and you need EMDR, you need massage, and you need somatic wellness, so you need exercise. And really it's all of those are synonyms for a relationship with a loving God, absolute or creator. The universe, the thing that beats your heart. You know why it beats your heart.'cause fucking loves you so much. Yes. Absolutely. Cant help itself. Just keeps you going. And then the other thing is I'm cur, I'm curious about. What do you know about who you are that you didn't know before this experience? I had no idea who I was before this. I thought I identified, I truly identified as these things that are so far from who I actually was, right? So I identified as mentally ill, bipolar, crazy. Hateful. I hated everybody. I hated people. I didn't wanna be around people disguised it with being an introvert. Very socially paranoid. I was the person that if I said hi to you, I was still thinking about how you probably thought I was weird with the way I said hi two weeks later. Like I was that you obsessive thinking, right? Remember I was I was I, for 33 years, I had the two men in my life and they were bound and determined to get to convince me that nobody liked me, right? Every, and then the third grade teacher who's you're definitely going to hell, like just in case. So just, which is like also patriarchal man dominated religion that designed to keep women small and silent and abused. Okay, but that's me on a tangent. Absolutely. Lemme come back to you, Hailey. Absolutely. Can, so you didn't know who you were, so who are you now? Who do you know yourself to be? And then I have one more question before we sign off. I really wanna talk to you all day long, but because. I identified as all of those things that I listed and come to find out the creator of the world put nothing in that in me when he created me. Like, why would, what kind of creator would create us to be that way? It was literally, man, all that stuff's manmade. You know what I mean? Absolutely. It's, yeah, absolutely it is. And so to today, I am, I'm I, my, my life revolves around loving God. And trying to be good to his kids. I didn't know I was coming on this podcast with you today, but look at your shirt so it's not I'm gonna have, we have to put this on, it's, I'm gonna have to put it on YouTube. I know. Especially the other thing I was chuckling about is you put a lot of things in quotation marks and I love that so much and I don't wanna interrupt you to explain, but if you see what she's doing, you're gonna get it. So definitely no, you can put me on there. That's fine. This is gonna come up on the YouTube channel a little bit later. Okay. So I think that this sweatshirt that I didn't wear on purpose this, go ahead and tell us there what your it says, love God, what your sweatshirt says. It says, love God, love people. And like today, like that's who Haley is today. My whole life is just loving God and loving other people and and loving myself, right? Love has boundaries. Love has discipline. Love is there's actually a really good book that tells us what love looks like. It's. It says that it's patient and it's kind and it hopes all things. The Good book and it. Yes. Yes. Hailey, hold on. I wanna tell you, I wanna tell you something. I'm having this like a spiritual breakthrough. You're like witnessing, I'm in the middle of this because I'm working the, I'm working the work again. And this breakthrough that I'm having is that love without truth. This is what my mentor said to me. My, my mentor, she said love without truth is trying to feed somebody baby food. Love and truth have to coexist. So I can love you all day, but if I don't, if you aren't like you're doing that, you're loving yourself by coming on this podcast and telling us the truth about your experience, right? And you're telling your. Ex-husband, the truth about what you're available for, and you're telling your kids the truth about what's possible for them and who you are now, and you're yes, loving and you're also telling the truth at the same time. I just wanna acknowledge that now. We'll probably do a whole series on this, but it's like we can love love. Love, but if we aren't also lovingly telling ourselves and each other the truth, then we've missed it. Jesus had a lot of truth to say, like he loved everybody and also told the truth about what his, he told the truth. So he had a lot of grace and he had a lot of truth. I love you so much. Can I put your, yes. So normally the people I interview, this is interesting, they have businesses so I can put their business in there, but do you have a social media or an email that I could share if someone heard your story and was like, oh my God, I have to talk to her? Not right now. Maybe not put it on my social media just because I don't want to remain anonymous. I want you to share my face and my name. But if it were attached to my social media, then obviously my. Abuser May, may see an, we'll figure out, a, we'll figure out, like a covert way to I tell you what, dear listener, while Hailey and I figured this out on the backend, you can DM me and I will connect you with Hailey if that's what she wants. You can say my name, if you wanna share it on your social media you can type it. Just don't tag me. And you can you can spell it in listeners if you would like to for a request message Me. I really just do Facebook'cause I'm a mom. Ma, I'm sorry. Y'all don't you ever apologize for being a MoMA or Facebook. Okay. That's where my people are. Okay, Hailey. We've got one more minute. If you could give the woman who needs to hear this, who is listening right now, one piece of advice, what would you say to do or be first? If I could go back and I could tell myself during those times my, my broken self that thought that things would never get better if I could go back and I could just hug her and tell her like, Hey you make it out on the other side of all this and there's a life waiting for you where you are so loved and you are so confident and you belong. You belong, like you've never felt like you belonged for even a second, right? It's even in your own home. If I could go back and tell her, you get all of that simply by surrendering to the creator of the world, right? And if you don't want to, if you find that hard, ask him to make you. I don't have it in, I don't have it in me to want a relationship with God and want to surrender things to God. That stuff is hard. God, I had to tell him, God I can't give you all these things. I need you to make me. Yeah. That's, we need to have another episode about this because I have so many, let's do it. Experience so many experiences where it's I can't do it myself, so I'm gonna need some help. And Ada. The help came for now he has made me do every make me, I've ever asked him to. I'm like, I can't do much on my own. Self will. Interesting.'cause I relied on willpower for so long, which is a total failure. So now, yeah, it's terrible. Reliant creator, reliance. I love you so much. Will you open your heart and hear this from mine? Yes. Kaylee, I love you. I'm so grateful for you and your bravery. I'm so freaking proud of you, and I believe in your ability to create a life that you absolutely love. Thank you for being. The peak guest on girl tumor recover. I love you so much. Thank you so much, Dana. Yeah, we'll talk more about this, all right. Oh, whoa. Did you just feel what I felt? There is a whole lot of that and more to help you create miracles in your life. On upcoming episodes of the Girls Who Recover a podcast now ranked in the top 5% of podcasts globally. If you've built a strong recovery foundation and you're feeling ready to break through life's glass ceilings, let's make it happen together. In the show notes, you'll find a link to book a free one-on-one conversation with me and in that conversation. We'll get clear on what next level success even looks like for your life. We'll create some powerfully aligned goals and a plan. We're gonna talk about the big thing holding you back, and you will walk away with a roadmap for how to create a life you are obsessed with. Because hear this from me, my friend. You deserve. Success and freedom and the full identity of a woman who knows what she's capable of and who she is. And I wanna help you get there. So book your free call in the notes. And if you love this episode, follow us five stars, write a review, share it with your best friend, share it with your mom. And in case you haven't heard it today, I love you. I'm so proud of you, and I believe in your ability to create a gorgeous life. You are madly in love with starting. Right now and I'll see you in the next episode, blah.