Hurting The Ones You Love: How Did You Break This Cycle?

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LaDawnna describes how she broke the cycle of hurting the ones she loves.

LaDawnna:
I broke the cycle of hurting people I loved by, I wanted to love. I wanted to be in love and I didn’t think I was capable of loving anybody because I was so cold for so long.

And so I just kept thinking if I stopped hurting people then maybe I can start loving people. I had never had it.

And one day I had a dream that I was in love and there was a man standing there. He had no face and I just saw the back of him and I knew that I loved him.

And I thought, oh, this feels so good, I want this. It took me three years to find that. IT took me three years to know what love feels like.

And from that point on I wanted to do it with everybody. I just wanted to be in love with people, any people.

I didn’t like women. I thought they were the most stupid people on the planet because I saw them go through so much, even growing up.

And not in a bad way but I wanted to be a man, not because I am homosexual or anything, but they had the power and I wanted to have that kind of power.

I wanted to have that kind of authority that men had and women didn’t have that. So I wanted that.

So wanting to have that power and wanting to feel that love and knowing that I wouldn’t be abused at the same time was what I strived for. So I had to start changing, which meant I had to see me for who I really was.

The reason why I didn’t love people was because I didn’t know how to love me. Even though I thought I did, I didn’t.

I started loving my own company, being by myself was okay. I didn’t have to have people around. I didn’t go through stages of depression anymore.

I was starting to love me because I had something to look forward to – that love that I saw, that I felt. It was so real and I said, this has to be it. This has to be why people go through things. It has to be. I wanted it. I wanted it.

So I started changing myself. I started reading books about self-improvement and loving myself and I started telling myself more of that.

And I started talking to people who were positive about their own lives and then when people would say negative things to me, even about themselves, I would go back and rethink that conversation and then try to have it again with that same person and come up with a different answer.

If they would say something like, “Oh my life is nothing.” I’d go, “Oh your life is worth something. You are still here.” Everything they would say negative, I would say something positive.

So when people would say negative things to me I would come back with something positive. This is why my life is like this.

There was a long time I thought my life was in vain. Everything I went through was for what? Then I opened up the Lighthouse. Then I started meeting women who went through the same thing that I went through.

And I thought to myself, okay, I want to leave something when I go. I want to have a legacy. I want people to know that my life meant something.

So I had to change my inside and my outside so people that have gone through the same thing that I have gone through have to know that, yeah, you can be changed.

When I tell people my testimony, they can’t believe it. First thing this woman told me one time I was speaking and she said, “You haven’t been through anything so how in the world can you tell us about our life?”

And she was angry, and I said, “I have been through everything you’ve gone through and probably more.” And I began to tell her what was going on and what had gone on in my life and how I made up my mind.

I am not going to blame my mother for my past. I am not going to even blame the people for my past but I am going to grow with that. I am going to take those things that I went through and I am going to make them a positive thing in my life so that can help somebody else. That’s what it’s all about.

If I don’t want my life to be in vain then it has to mean something. So every single situation that I have gone through had a meaning. It was for somebody else.

It’s not about me. My life is not about me. It’s about helping other women or else what else do we have? What else?

Somebody needs my help. Somebody needs to know that even though I was beaten and all those things happened to me, I don’t look like anything. I don’t look like my past.

I don’t carry my past on my shoulders. I only carry it so that I can tell somebody else about it, and that’s it and I don’t live there anymore. She is gone. She has moved on and now this new woman is coming about and she loves herself. She loves life.

I look up in the sky now and I could smell flowers when there’s no flowers around. This is something beautiful. I can hear the birds. When most people, they hear noise, I hear the birds.

I love humming birds. There’s something about them that’s just pure to me. That’s what I like and it’s about being a woman. I love being a woman. I love being me.

When people say, “Well who would you like to be?” Me, that’s who I would like to be – me, no one else.

I don’t care what people have. I know what I have and I know my worth and that’s what we try to teach women. You have to understand what you are worth, not just in dollars and cents but period.

About LaDawnna Hudson:
Pastor LaDawnna Hudson is the CEO and founder of Women of Power International as well as the first lady and pastor of Shield of Faith Christian Center in Mesa, Arizona. LaDawnna's desire to help women stems from her early years of abuse, depression and poverty. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan in the late 50's, the fourth of nine children, she saw firsthand the struggle of her mother and other women being undereducated, suffering with low self-esteem and being abused by men who treated them more like property than wives. She too suffered hard times, she was raped, beaten, strangled, suffocated, ran down by a car and married to a man who tried to kill her twice. LaDawnna's journey through her troubled past motivates her to help other hurting women change their lives.

Visit LaDawnna at her website