Honor Your Decision After Abortion
This episode is part two of a four part series. Should you choose to participate, by the end of the series you will never think about your abortion the same way again.
Happy listening and as always feel free to send me your reflections and questions.
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Show Notes:
Last week in part one of this 4 part series we talked about Honoring Your Feelings. Some of you may be already noticing some shifts in your life. Maybe it’s a little less hard to think about your abortion, maybe you’re not judging yourself as much for feeling sad, maybe you you finally allowed yourself to get really angry, or nothing really changed but you feel less alone. Keep going. This work takes practice, life doesn’t have finish lines; it’s filled with more and more opportunities to practice.
This week we’re talking about Honoring Your Decision. I try my best to be all inclusive knowing that not all people who have abortions identify as women, and that many people have multiple abortions, so this week when I refer to your “decision”, think of abortion in whatever way feels right to you, as one decision or as multiple.
I could also have called this Having your Own Back, or Honoring Your Experience. Honoring Your Decision is really about seeing where and how you made your decision, and accepting that it was the perfect choice for you to have made.
Because most people who come to me have a few hard feelings to overcome before they can move into actively living the life they made their choice for, much of this episode will be speaking to working through feelings associated with questioning or processing your past decisions. We’ll explore why you were doing the best you could have, with the tools you had to work with at the time you found yourself carrying an undesirable pregnancy.
But, some of you listening may have come here feeling amazing about your decision and are ready to dive in and live a brighter and more purposeful life in honor of it. You are totally my people, I see and feel you all. If you’re in this amazing crew of listeners, hang in there with me and don’t miss the next two episodes. They are going to rock your world. You can keep listening here if you have lingering bits of confusion or wondering to work through, or perhaps for the pure delight of following your curiosity.
Although I do think it’s possible with willingness and commitment, you’re not obligated to like that abortion is a part of your story, or to believe that it was all meant to be, for now we’re focusing on acknowledging abortion as a part of the past that made you who you are today. The most important element of Honoring Your Decision is acceptance. The choice you made is a part of your story. Honoring your decision is honoring you. Rejecting your decision is rejecting you. To change how you feel about abortion you have to change how you feel about you.
There’s a short video on my home page. If you haven’t seen it, now would be a good time to watch. It’s followed by a link to print a free mini book that I created especially for you. In it I talk about one simple concept- Keep Choosing YOU. When you made your choice to abort there was something inside you that said choose you:Choose abortion to raise the family you already have. Choose abortion and find a healthy relationship. Choose abortion and get back your health. Or maybe choose abortion as your way of keeping you and that baby from further suffering.
It doesn’t matter why you chose abortion. The healing you crave isn’t in the why. The healing your are craving is packaged in accepting that for one reason or another you believed that abortion was the right option at the time you were asked to decide. Abortion is a decision we only get to make once, but our minds still try to tempt us away from having our own back. Our brains can easily fill with thoughts that encourage us to question the decision we’ve made, but we have to keep choosing. One of my teachers and mentors Brooke Castillo says that we have to “keep our decisions” and that “The secret to keeping a decision is to have a collection of thoughts that support it.”
One of the feelings I see women struggle with the most after abortion comes from a state they label as some version of regret: remorse, guilt, shame, longing…
Understanding the permanence of abortion, it makes sense that these feelings become so common. We can’t say sorry and ask for another chance. We can’t study harder and try again. We can’t change our minds. Because of this reality it’s tempting to create a collection of thoughts that do not support or honor the choice that we made.
I even see it with women who genuinely believe they made the right decision. I felt some of these feelings myself. I questioned decisions I made long before the pregnancy, like whether or not I should have used different birth control, chosen a different career, or planned better for our future.
As soon as we start questioning our decisions, most of us start collecting thoughts that validate or prove we made the wrong one. If we don’t like how we feel it makes sense that we look for ways to validate that the reason we feel so awful is that we made the wrong decision, but here’s the truth. It’s possible to feel sad, mad, disappointed or just plain icky and still have made the right decision. We’re allowed to feel those things while simultaneously honoring our decisions. We don’t have to muddle the two together.
This might be a hard one for some people to agree with, but I believe that regret is an escape. It’s one of the ways we avoid feeling things we don’t want to feel. It’s much easier to say, “I would choose differently if I could go back, or “I made the wrong choice”, than it is to say, “I did a hard thing and it feels terrible.” Living life wishing we had done it differently keeps us stuck, feeling through something hard opens doors for new opportunities. Regret feels easier in the short term, but we pay for it in the long term. Acceptance feels harder in the short term, but it rewards us in the long term.
The truth is that if we could go back, like really go back we would make the exact same choice because it is the one we were supposed to make. Not only is it impossible to go back, but even if you could go back to those exact moments, you wouldn’t have the perspective you have now. We can’t go back with retrospect. What people really mean is “If I had known it would feel this bad I would have chosen differently”, but there’s no upside to this thought. You never could have known it would feel this way until you decided, and you only could have decided with the information you had at the time that you had it. Regret won’t serve you. Regret is your imagination rewinding backwards and thinking you could have seen into the future with some kind of magic crystal ball that doesn’t exist in our human capacity.
All that being said it’s perfectly normal and human to question your decision, and wonder what could have been. To make the transition into Honoring Your Decision, you have to start creating a new collection of thoughts. You have to use your imagination as actively to create a future as you have been to imagine the past. We can all agree that in the current state of humanity we have no way to zip back to the past or ahead to the future. Using our imaginations to punish our decisions keeps us stuck, but using our imaginations to step into a future we desire has the potential to create amazing things. Building a collection of thoughts to support our future is how we Honor Our Decision.
The amazing thing about abortion is that we can use it as an opportunity to grow in ways we never could have grown without it. With a little creativity we can see that our choice really was made in love, it really did happen for us. Abortion is proof that we can do hard things, and if we can do hard things than ANYTHING is possible. A bright and beautiful future lies ahead when we’re not afraid of feeling hard feelings.
To dive into some of this work yourself grab your journal and start by identifying where you are.
How do you feel about your decision?
What is the current collection of thoughts that keep replaying in your mind?
Are you thinking more about how you made or might have made wrong decisions?
Or more about how right your decision was?
What will happen if you keep thinking the way you’ve been thinking?
