“Healing was very messy but beautiful at the same time, because God healed my heart in the process of it.”
—Kishea Boyd
Some wounds sit quietly in the heart until life makes them impossible to ignore. Many women carry old patterns from childhood without realizing how deeply those stories shaped their identity. This episode opens space for honest conversations about healing, worth, and the slow work of becoming whole again.
Healed Girls Love Founder Jennifer Jeannette shares her journey from rejection, abandonment, and reversed family roles to discovering the Father’s love and learning how to build a life rooted in truth. Her story shows how early wounds can shape relationships, choices, and self-belief until real healing begins.
Press play for a heart-shaking reminder that God still meets women in the middle of their mess and leads them into purpose.
Key topics covered:
- Mother wounds and father wounds
- Childhood rejection and identity struggles
- Patterns of performance, chasing love, and self-blame
- Healing through inner work and faith
- Breaking silent agreements formed in childhood
- How God revealed unconditional love
- The messy parts of healing nobody talks about
- Purpose, calling, and restoration for women
Episode Highlights:
02:33 Meet Jennifer: Mother Wounds and Father Wounds
05:47 Childhood Role Reversal
08:42 What Love Finally Felt Like
09:59 The Real Healing Process: Messy, Raw, and Layered
14:37 Identity Shift: From Chasing Love to Becoming Love
16:23 Locate Cohort Launching Soon!
Resources:
- Coaching Service: https://www.shapedonpurpose.com/services
Quotes:
03:37 “From a very young age, I felt like that [my father] didn’t love me, and so that caused me to look for love in all the wrong places.” —Jennifer Jeannette
04:47 “Rejection ruled every decision that I made because I just wanted it to be wanted.” —Jennifer Jeannette
06:13 “The mother-daughter relationship role was reversed, and I had to become that responsible person, versus her being that responsible person. I felt like I had to grow up early.” —Jennifer Jeannette
08:09 “When I heard about the Father’s love, that’s when God began to really show me my life.” —Jennifer Jeannette
13:03 “Healing was very messy but beautiful at the same time, because God healed my heart in the process of it.” —Jennifer Jeannette
14:42 “I know who I am. I don’t chase Love. I Am Love.” —Jennifer Jeannette
15:38 “Trust God, go on the journey with God, because it is a journey. Nothing in your life is wasted, and God wants to heal her broken heart.” —Jennifer Jeannette
18:24 “Don’t overthink it. Don’t talk yourself out of it. Don’t say I’ll come back to this later, because later usually never comes.” —Kishea Boyd
Meet Jennifer:
Jennifer Jeannette is a minister, speaker, author, singer, songwriter, and jewelry designer. She is passionate about teaching women how to heal their hearts and fill them with love, while also empowering them to walk boldly in their God-given purpose. Jennifer is the founder of the brand and ministry Healed Girls Love.
Meet Kishea Boyd:
Kishea Boyd is a woman whose journey began not with triumph, but with a search—for identity, purpose, and the heart of God in every season. After serving over 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, where she honed resilience and leadership, she found her true strength not in uniform, but in faith. Rededicating her life to Christ in 1999 marked a turning point, leading her into ministry, mentorship, and a deeper understanding of who she was called to be. Through the joys of family life with her husband, Quinton, and their son, Kameron, and through the challenges that shaped her, Kishea has learned that God’s love never lets go. Today, she lives to help others rediscover identity, healing, and purpose through Him.
Transcipt:
Hey, sis, I see you. The strong one, the faithful one. The woman who keeps showing up for everyone else while quietly wondering if anyone still sees her, you can breathe now. You’re safe here.
I’m Kishea Boyd, The Identity Midwife. This podcast was created to help you rediscover who you are right in the middle of real life. Here, we talk about faith, healing, identity, and the gentle work of becoming. You don’t have to fix a thing, just lean in. You’ve been located.
Kishea Boyd: Hey, sis, welcome back to The Identity Midwife Podcast. If you’ve been rocking with me since Episode 1, then you already know this is not just a podcast. This is where heaven meets your heart. This is where identity gets revealed, restored and reborn. We walked through my story. My military years of being told I wasn’t enough, the hidden battles I carry behind polished smiles, the purpose coach God sent to wake me up, the mirror moment. And then Episode 5, the vision of the waiting room.
And maybe today, the waiting room becomes real. Because today, I get to introduce you to the first woman stepping out of that room. The very first butterfly coming forth. Her name is Jennifer Jeannette. She is a minister, a speaker, an author, singer/songwriter, if she can below, and a jewelry designer. She is the Founder of Healed Girls Love, a branded ministry built on teaching women how to heal their hearts, fill them with love, and walk boldly in the purpose God placed inside them. And today, she’s going to talk with us about Mother and Father’s wounds. The stuff so many of us carry, but rarely have a safe place to unpack.
Before we jump in, y’all you know the drill. Pause real quick and like, subscribe, and drop a comment. I need to know I’m not talking to myself out there. Engage with me so the women who need this can find it. All right, let’s get into it. Jennifer, thank you and welcome. I am honored, truly honored, to have you as my first guest. And so please introduce yourself to the women.
Jennifer Jeannette: Hello, ladies. I am Jennifer Jeannette, and I am so excited about what God is going to do in this space today. I am here to share what God has placed on my heart concerning my mother and father’s wombs. And I hope that you can gain something from my story to help you in your journey.
Kishea Boyd: So Jennifer, just briefly share a little bit about where you’re from? Where were you raised? And how were you brought up?
Jennifer Jeannette: So I am from a small town called Leesville, Louisiana. It was outside of a military base where we were a military community. I grew up in the household with my mother and my grandparents. My grandparents had 15 kids, so there were a lot of people in the house. I grew up to two drug addicted parents. My father lived in New Orleans, and he was not present in my life. So that’s kind of a little background story for me.
Kishea Boyd: Wow. So how would you say your relationship with your father shaped the way you saw yourself growing up?
Jennifer Jeannette: So from a very young age, I felt like he didn’t love me. And so that caused me to look for love in all the wrong places. So at a young age, I became sexually active because I was trying to feel voids inside of my heart.
Kishea Boyd: When did you first realize something here is affecting me deeper than I thought, or than you thought?
Jennifer Jeannette: So when I moved to North Carolina, I was around 22 years old. I was in church, and I was introduced to the Father’s love. And when I heard about the Father’s love, that revealed to me that I had been looking for a father figure all my life, and that I had been operating from rejection my whole life.
Kishea Boyd: So what did rejection look like for you?
Jennifer Jeannette: Rejection looked like having sex at a very young age. Always trying to be in a relationship from a very young age, getting pregnant young, sleeping with married men. I was just trying to feel loved. And whoever was there to comfort me, that’s what I gave into. So that’s what rejection looked like for me. It ruled every decision that I made because I just wanted it to be wanted. I just wanted to be loved.
Kishea Boyd: What did that wound teach you about yourself, even if it wasn’t true?
Jennifer Jeannette: It made me feel like that no one would ever stay, that I wasn’t worthy of someone really loving me. For me, I felt like I had to perform, and that love was conditional. I never got to experience that unconditional love, and it made me feel unworthy of it.
Kishea Boyd: If you could pinpoint it, what lie did you hold on to the longest?
Jennifer Jeannette: The lie that I held on the longest was that I was unloved.
Kishea Boyd: Is there anything else you would like to share about your relationship with your father?
Jennifer Jeannette: I realized that as I got older, that because he was addicted to drugs as well, that he loved me from the best way he knew.
Kishea Boyd: That is beautiful. So let’s switch gears a moment and talk about your mom. So what was your relationship with your mother like when you were younger?
Jennifer Jeannette: So my relationship with my mama when I was younger, it was kind of complicated because we lived with her, and she was on drugs. It was distant. I was disconnected, and I felt like I was taking on her role. So I felt like the mother and daughter relationship roles were reversed, and I had to become that responsible person versus her being that responsible person. So it made me kind of resent her a little bit, because I felt like I had to grow up early because of the actions that she was doing.
Kishea Boyd: So what was the relationship once you got to be a teenager or high school? How was high school for you?
Jennifer Jeannette: So basically, I was just kind of doing my own thing, because I haven’t lived with my mother since I was 16 years old. So basically, she was around, but it was like I was doing my own thing.
Kishea Boyd: So what silent agreements or beliefs did you carry from that relationship that followed you into adulthood?
Jennifer Jeannette: I believe that I had to do everything on my own. I believe that I had to go get it for myself. Because when I was growing up, no one ever really took care of me. I was out here in the world trying to figure everything out on my own. I just believed that was going to be my way of life, figuring it out on my own.
Kishea Boyd: And so I guess I’ll ask the same question about your mom, and it’s okay if it’s the same answer, what did that wound teach you about yourself even if it wasn’t true.
Jennifer Jeannette: It taught me that I couldn’t depend on other people. But today, I know that’s not true.
Kishea Boyd: That’s good. There are so many women out there feeling the same way, so I know they can relate. And so what lie did you hold on to the longest?
Jennifer Jeannette: The same, I was unloved.
Kishea Boyd: Do you remember the moment where God started pulling you out of that?
Jennifer Jeannette: Yes. When I was in church, as I talked about earlier, when I heard about the Father’s love, that’s when God began to really show me my life. That’s when he began to show me, baby, you’ve been operating from rejection your whole life, that what you’ve been experiencing is not who I am. And so I was about 27 years old at that time. I was pregnant with my daughter, and that’s when God really began to woo me, and really began to show me, hey, I love you.
Kishea Boyd: Wow. So what did love feel like?
Jennifer Jeannette: So growing up, it just felt like it wasn’t there, that I had to go try to find it and chase it myself. So when God began to reveal his love to me, it felt amazing. It felt like, oh, wow, I can really experience this. That my mother and father not loving me didn’t mean that I wasn’t loved. So it began to feel good. It began to make me feel good about myself. Because it was like, hey, I am worthy of this. Hey, I can experience this.
***If your heart’s been heavy, if you’ve been searching for clarity or peace, I invite you to pause. Encounter Coaching is a one on one space where you can lay it all before Jesus and let him speak. Every encounter is different, but the outcome is always the same. Freedom, healing, and truth. Take the time. Give yourself this moment with the Father. The link is in the show notes.
Kishea Boyd: When you were walking out that process of experiencing God’s love, what did healing actually look like for you? Not the cute version, the real version, the raw version.
Jennifer Jeannette: Girl, healing was a mess. You hear me. So in that moment, I just shared, I began to have knowledge of His love. But then I had to walk it out so that it could get deeply down in my heart. And y’all, I have been on this journey for 18 years. So this healing journey was layer upon layer. Because what I realized, even though I had the head knowledge that God loved me, because of all the broken places and of all the things that I had been through, I didn’t have the heart knowledge. Therefore, during that time, I cheated on my ex husband because he kept rejecting me. And I would talk junk to my parents, sometimes judging them. But one time, I cheated twice, so it was messy. But in it, I was going to this church, and that’s when I began to learn about inner healing. And so during that moment of learning about inner healing, God began to unlayer the wounds in my heart, and he began to show me things about me. Because the whole time that I felt unloved, I was always blaming my parents. But he began to show me myself. He began to show me what I was doing, because he was my standard. And so in those moments, I found myself apologizing to my mother and father all the time because I had judged them for years. And then when I cheated, I lied, I covered it up. But then I got so convicted to the point where my stomach would bother me. I remembered saying to God, God, I need to tell this man the truth, but I’m not strong enough to tell him that. And so that thing tortured and bothered me until one day he asked, did you do it? And it was at that moment that I knew I couldn’t lie anymore, and I told him the truth. He was like, he was done.
I began to beg. I wanted my marriage to work, but he ended up leaving. And when he left, I went through a season where I cried for four months straight. And in those months, I remember just listening to a thing on YouTube by William McDowell, and it was just like a two hour thing of him singing his good song. And in that moment, God was healing my heart. It was rough. I was depressed. I didn’t even know I was depressed, because I didn’t know what depression looked like to me. All I knew is that I was hurting. His song, You Are Not Alone, he was singing those songs, and those songs were healing me. And when I got up from them for months, I asked God, how did I get here? And God began to show me how I ended up in the situation that I was. So my stuff was a little messy. I was doing a little cussing with my ex because he was sleeping with somebody else. I was cutting up a little bit. But it was those inner healing moments that really kept me, so it was very messy but beautiful at the same time, because God healed my heart in the process of it.
Kishea Boyd: Thank you for sharing that. That is amazing. I know there will be so many women who can really resonate with your story. So the next question I’d like to ask you, one of the things that I talked about in one of my previous episodes on the podcast was the mirror moment that I had. And so when I was going through my own journey of figuring out who I am, I looked in the mirror, and it was as if I was looking at a different person. So I’m wondering, could you tell me if I’m wrong, do you ever had a moment where you looked in the mirror and you saw what God saw in you for the first time? And if you did, what was that like?
Jennifer Jeannette: Well, I’m gonna say that my moment was one morning when I woke up and remembered how I was saying that there’s a difference between having that head knowledge and that heart knowledge. And this was on Valentine’s Day, actually, of this year. I woke up, and I was secured in the love of God. I had changed. I didn’t have to look for validation from a man anymore. I didn’t have to look for validation from my parents. I woke up and knew that I was finally where I belonged, and that was in the arms of Jesus, and knowing that he truly loved me. So that was my mirror moment.
Kishea Boyd: Wow, I love that. So who are you now that you were not before?
Jennifer Jeannette: So now, I know who I am. I don’t chase love. I am love. I flow from love, and I operate from love. Love is my ministry. Love is my call, and that is who I am. Where before, I was broken. I was wounded. I didn’t know who I was. I was chasing identity. Now, I am love.
Kishea Boyd: So what do you believe God has called you to carry for women?
Jennifer Jeannette: Because I know who I am now, and because I know I’m loved, he has given me a mandate to bring other women on that journey to teach them that they are loved, to teach them who they are, to teach them that they have a purpose, and to encourage them to walk that out.
Kishea Boyd: Wow, I love that. So for the woman listening who is where you used to be, what would you say to her right now?
Jennifer Jeannette: I would say to her, trust God. Go on the journey with God, because it is a journey that nothing in your life is wasted. And that God wants to heal her broken heart.
Kishea Boyd: I love that. Is there anything else you would like to share before we wrap up?
Jennifer Jeannette: Let love be your guide.
Kishea Boyd: Awesome. I love that. So Jennifer, how can women connect with or follow you, or get your resources if they want to go deeper?
Jennifer Jeannette: So I am at Healed Girls Love on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. I am Jennifer Jeannette on YouTube, and I have a website, healedgirlslove.com.
Kishea Boyd: Awesome. Well, you heard it here, all right, sis. So if you are still here listening to us, I already know this episode was for you. Maybe you heard your own story in Jennifer’s words. Maybe you’ve been carrying your own father wounds, your own mother wounds, your own feelings of abandonment, your own, why wasn’t I chosen? Why wasn’t I protected? All those different types of questions, maybe you’re even mad at God. Maybe you’re numb. Maybe you’ve been high functioning and smiling, showing up for everyone else. But internally, you feel like you’re still sitting in that waiting room. Daughter, you have been located. This is not random. You didn’t just happen to press play on this episode. You were guided here. And before this episode, Jennifer and I prayed together.
I know that if you’re listening to the sounds of my voice, her voice, we know that it is God ordained. And so the same God who saw me, the same God who saw Jennifer sees you. And I want to tell you this, you do not have to stay stuck in that waiting room. You do not have to keep circling the same mountain, the LORD is calling you forth. Now, I’m going to say something very specific. And if your spirit leaps, you’re going to know this is you. There are 12 women that the Lord has highlighted to be a part of the very first Locate cohort that’s launching soon. Locate is my intimate small group experience where we sit with God and listen for who you truly are. We break agreements with lies and old labels. Walk you through identity, healing and clarity. And help you step out of that cocoon into who Heaven has always said you are.
While I’m saying this, you feel that heat in your chest, that tug in your belly that, oh, my God, she is talking to me. Then, yes, I am talking to you. Don’t overthink it. Don’t talk yourself out of it. Don’t say I’ll come back to this later, because later usually never comes. Here’s what I want you to do, email me at hello@theidentitymidwife.com, and you just let me know, I just listened to the episode with Jennifer. So if anything resonated with you for her, her information will be in the show notes so you can get in contact with her. And if you also feel led, and if you’re part of my 12, reach out. You don’t have to figure it all out. You don’t have to know the HOW. You just have to respond, and so leave a comment. Again, like, subscribe, and type LOCATED. That’s your faith response. That’s you raising your hand in the spirit saying, I’m not hiding anymore.
Jennifer, thank you again for sharing your heart, your story, your journey. I know that there be so many women that are blessed by your transparency. You are a gift, and we thank you. We thank you for walking out your journey even when it was hard. We thank you for this moment, opportunity to even be in your presence, whether it’s virtually or not. But to all those who are listening, you’re not crazy, you’re not too late, you’re not too broken, you are not behind, your father sees you. He’s been watching over you this whole time. And if you’re listening to my voice right now, that means there’s still an assignment in your life. I love you. Jennifer loves you. We are praying for you even if we’ve never met. Until next time, you’ve been located.
Before you go, take one more breath. The same God who shaped you still sees you. Every scar, every tear, every wind, nothing about your story is wasted. Today, speak to your heart, share with another woman who needs a reminder that she’s not alone. And when you’re ready to go deeper, everything you need is waiting for you in the show notes. Until next time. I’m Kishea Boyd, The Identity Midwife. And daughter, you’ve been located.