Self-Coaching After Abortion

This powerful episode includes a recap of the Honor Your Abortion series, a brief look into racism and the most powerful tool I’ve found for self-coaching through life’s challenges.

Happy listening and as always feel free to send me your reflections and questions.

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This powerful episode includes a recap of the Honor Your Abortion series, a brief look into racism and the most powerful tool I've found for self-coaching through life's challenges.

Show Notes:

Next week I’ll be resuming guest conversation podcasts. I’m looking forward to sharing some amazing topics and people with you.

As a wrap up to the Honor Your Abortion series. Here’s my recap:

• Moving forward in any direction without honoring your feelings is near impossible. Unresolved and unattended to emotions slowly burn away at our lives. We may be able to cover them up, or push them aside for small amounts of time, but they are always impacting our present and our future. One of the best ways to process feelings about or related to your abortion is to find a safe non-judgemental person to hold space with you.

• Even if you don’t like your reason now, there was a point in time when you believed that abortion was the best choice for you. Honoring that place in yourself invites room for self-forgiveness and self-love. You are not obligated to like your decision in order to honor it. Many of us have made choices in the past that we would make differently if given the opportunity to go back in time, but that’s not how it works to be human. The only way to go back now is to live fully forward.

• What you want matters. Identifying and honoring your desires is the most powerful way to honor your abortion. Living into your wants is listening to and loving the most sacred part of yourself.

• After you’ve identified what you want, it’s time to start living forward. Every step toward your visions is a step well taken. Happy people have felt the sting of failure, they know the pain of rejection, they’ve messed up and tried again more times than you can imagine. To build a future you love takes a commitment that inevitably honors your abortion. You living fully is the greatest gift you can give to the woman you were when she made her choice.

This is all big work. Just because I introduced it in a month does not mean you should be able to process it all in a month. There are no rules about how many weeks, months, or years one might spend exploring their feelings after abortion. Some work many feel done, and then come swinging back in as you grow and change. Honoring your future is life long work. As long as you have life, you have a future to honor. I’ll be releasing a workbook on this topic sometimes this coming year, and I’m always available for coaching as you grow into the best version of yourself in this wild and complicated thing we call life.

I’m going to spend the rest of this episode teaching you the number one tool I used in my own healing and that I use with all of my clients. It’s a tool I learned from Brooke Castillo. The tool changed my life so much that I certified in her school and have been Life Coaching women like you ever since. Brooke’s tool is called “The Model”.

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve made it 30 episodes into this podcast without teaching you this tool, but this week I am seeing what a perfect week it is to teach your The Model.

For those listening to this episode in months and years to come, today is the first Day of June. It’s been almost three months since our country moved into full pandemic mode with Covid-19, and we are now facing the reality of nationwide protesting and rioting after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in uniform. Even without conviction I use the word murder carefully and intentionally. Our country is in a state of deep pain; we are facing the results of 400 years of the oppression of black people. We need The Model now more than ever, not just for abortion, but for life.

I like to explain The Model as math for mindset. It’s a formula for you to see what’s happening in your own brain. It’s a way for you to categorize your life that puts you back in the driver’s seat. It’s a way for you to take back your personal power.

The model is comprised of 5 elements of the human experience:

1. Circumstances,

2. Thoughts,

3. Feelings,

4. Actions,

5. and Results.

Everything in our life falls into one of these things.

You can think of Circumstances like facts. They are beliefs that are accepted by the vast majority of people. Not the people in your small circle or community, but all of humanity.

Since we’ve all been led here by the topic of abortion, I’m going to use examples regarding abortion, but you can use the model to address everything in your life. Some circumstances you are coming to this show with, might look like:

• My IUD was displaced.

• The pregnancy test read positive.

• I had a medical abortion procedure in 2017.

• Direct quotes- He said, “…” She said “…”

By nature circumstances aren’t right or wrong. They simply exist as pieces of our experience. They will illicit very different thought responses in different people.

When we understand that circumstances are simply facts, we can notice and sometimes choose our thoughts about them. Noticing and choosing our thoughts as human beings is where all our power lies.

The second part of the model is our Thoughts. Thoughts are the sentences in our mind that come when we experience a circumstance. Most of the thoughts we have in any given day are involuntary. Our brain is like a computer and when it experiences a circumstance it scans for ways to process that experience through words we’ve already seen, said, or heard in our lives. These involuntary thoughts may or may not be useful in our lives.

If we look at the above circumstance- My IUD was displaced -there are many different thoughts one might think in response. Here are a few that come to mind for me:

• “That sucks.”

• “This wasn’t part of the plan.”

• “Birth control isn’t 100% effective.”

• “It happens.”

There are no right or wrong thoughts. Remember your brain is processing like a computer so you can hit “save” or “delete” on each of the thoughts it presents you. In real time most of us don’t hit save or delete, so our brains automatically choose “save” on the first thought that comes to mind. This happens fast and it’s why it can feel like our lives spin out of our control. When we believe and repeat our own thoughts, conscious or unconscious, we create well trodden pathways for our brain to follow in the future. Imagine a field of grass. If you keep thinking the thought, “This sucks” your brain depresses the grass like a path. There are countless other ways to walk through that field, but if you walk the “This sucks” path a few times and the grass starts settling down you are going to be drawn to walk that way over and over again.

The next part of the model is arguably the most important part. Those of us who use the model in our lives often write it down in lines. This third part is the Feeling line.

Every single thought we think, regardless of whether it’s voluntary or involuntary creates a feeling. A feeling is literally a vibration in our body. It’s a physical experience triggered by our thoughts.

Many of us have been taught that feelings are something that happen to us as a result of a circumstance. We have been raised to believe that other people’s actions or words can cause our feelings. How many times have you heard a parent teach, “Say sorry, you hurt her feelings”? Or make an assumption, “That must have hurt your feelings.”

These common phrases seem innocent enough but they lead to unintended consequences and unconscious beliefs. If we can recognize that our thoughts are what create our feelings, then we take back our power and claim agency over our lives. We start to see that abortion can’t hurt is, and neither can other people’s thoughts about it.

Exploring the model, let’s keep going with the example from above.

Circumstance- My IUD was displaced
Thought- “This sucks.”
Feeling- Defeated

I remember very clearly the moment when I realized the IUD I thought I had was in fact missing, thus explaining my unplanned pregnancy. I felt a complete sense of defeat. In my body it felt heavy, dark, tight, and stationary. The defeat felt like a lead weight tying me to an unintentional future.

It would have been very easy for me to believe that IUD having fallen out was the cause of my feeling defeated. I could have explained it as a birth control “failure”. Truth be told it wasn’t a failure at all. I knew when I chose it, that there was up to a 1% chance that the IUD would not work. I wanted to believe that I was among the 99+% chance that it would work, but that’s not how my story ended. The IUD didn’t fail, it worked perfectly as described. I just landed in the statistic I hoped not to. The IUD falling out did not cause my defeat. The thought “This sucks” is what led to me feeling defeated. I could have, and since have, trodden down a very different thought path in my brain, one that leads to a more effective feeling for the future I desire.

This leads us to the next part line of The Model. Action.

The action line is the reason our feelings are arguably the most important thing in our lives. All of our feelings invite us to take action. When we can identify and examine the actions we take from the experience of different feelings we start to see how powerful The Model is.

From a feeling like defeat some of the actions I took were to:

• blame my body,

• curse the failure rates,

• question my decision to choose an IUD,

• wish I wasn’t a woman,

• and give up on other things I wanted to believe.

Every single one of these actions was leading me to one place- a sucky life, put them all together and I was swimming in a big pool of “Life sucks.”

And that’s how The Model ends. It’s like a formula AND a story. The last line of The Model is the Result. All of our actions lead to results. So here’s what a full model as I’ve described above looks like:

Circumstance- My IUD was displaced
Thought- “This sucks.”
Feeling- Defeated
Action- Blame my body, curse the failure rates, question my decision to choose and IUD, wish I wasn’t a woman, and give up on other things I wanted to believe.
Result- Life sucks.

Results always have a direct connection to the thoughts we think. We can choose our thoughts and choose our results, or we can let our survival brains choose our thoughts involuntarily. Either way we’re choosing. One choice is active, one choice is passive.

In my case the involuntary thought “This sucks” came from my belief that being in the less than 1% failure rate was a bad thing. Everything I’d ever been taught about birth control, and life, led me to believe that you did not want to be in the failure rate. That failure was a bad thing. I probably even thought when I had it inserted, well that would suck to be in the 1%, but I’ll take my chances.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with letting our involuntary thoughts run the show. The point of The Model is that we see where each of our thoughts are leading us. Once we see, we can choose. Once we choose, we stand in our power. And in our power we create our lives and our futures.

So now what?

Self-coaching after abortion can look like you identifying the voluntary and involuntary thoughts in your brain and running The Model on each of your thoughts. Doing this will bring new thoughts to light. Run Models on those too. Self-coaching with The Model is the cleanest and most organized way I’ve found to create a life I love. It keeps me from spinning out of control and gives me a tool to take back my personal power. In that power I don’t just choose my thoughts, I choose my results.

At the beginning of this episode I talked about two things. One was the 4 week Honor Your Abortion series, and the other was the Racism we’re being asked to explore right now in the United States. The Model is the number one tool I use while coaching my clients. Sometimes I’m running models in my head, or in my notes, and sometimes I’m exploring them directly with my clients. It’s taken me almost 3 years and a certification to get a good grasp on the Model, so if you are struggling or have questions as you introduce it to your life, don’t beat yourself up. Self-coaching is amazing, but even coaches need coaches to wade through models. It’s hard to see your own life with clear vision and outside perspective can feel like a breath of fresh air.

Last night my coach and friend, Kerryn Simmons, called me from across the globe to help me understand some of my models regarding racism and my actions. There were tears. There was laughter. There was also relief. She helped me take responsibility, she helped me find compassion for myself and for others, she helped me see what I was struggling to see through my big feelings.

The Model works the same for abortion, as for racism, as for parenting, as for marriage. Once we learn how to use it and know when to accept help working through it, it can become the most powerful tool we’ll ever use.

It invites us to act, not react.
It invites us to create, not destruct.
It invites us to step into the best possible versions of ourselves.

We’ll mess up.
We’ll get confused.
We’ll even fall backwards sometimes.

But with The Model, we’ll keep going.

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If you are one of the 1 in 4 women who have had an abortion in your lifetime,
and you are not thriving the way you desire: