Allowing Grief After Abortion
Episode 2 of Master Coach Week
Krista St-Germain is a Master Certified Life Coach, grief expert, widow, mom and host of The Widowed Mom Podcast. When her husband was killed by a drunk driver in 2016, Krista’s life was completely and unexpectedly flipped upside down. After therapy helped her unfurl from the fetal position, Krista discovered Life Coaching, Post Traumatic Growth and learned the tools she needed to move forward and create a future she could get excited about. Now she coaches and teaches other widows so they can love life again, too. www.coachingwithkrista.com
Show Notes:
2:03 Krista’s introduction and story which includes the loss of her husband in a tragic car accident
2:37 “Therapy was very helpful, but life coaching was what helped me love my life again, and decide who I wanted to be after that loss”
4:36 Grief comparison
6:52 Emotions are vibrations… “we like to have somewhere to go”
7:29 “Accepting that bad things happen… is more challenging to us that being able to assign blame, and compare and despair. It still doesn’t feel good but it makes sense that we’d want to distract ourselves… it’s easier to compare and despair”
8:46 What’s really happening under there is grief, but it looks like anger
8:59 “The way I like to conceptualize grief, is it’s just a person’s thoughts and feelings about a perceived loss”
9:50 “we can normalize all of it”
9:58 “That’s so much of what causes suffering is the judgement of what we’re experiencing.”
10:12 “Thoughts aren’t morally right or wrong; they aren’t good or bad, but they do create different feelings”
10:58 ... but I did this; I am responsible for the grief that I am feeling…
12:31 “Once we understand the pattern of why we did what we did we can either use that as a weapon against ourselves or we can use that as an opportunity to have some compassion”
12:47 “What we are best served to do is go back and understand why we did take that action”
14:01 Abortion was not the gameplan
14:39 “Why do we look back and then assume that we did it wrong; it’s so unfair to ourselves”
15:17 “We tend to be very black and white; can we allow some grey?” … “can it be hard AND; can it be painful AND”
16:00 “Can we just let it be hard for everybody and just love ourselves when it’s hard?”
19:43 “It was all the things from the beginning from me”
20:28 Allowed to feel grief and hope
20:49 “Hope has always been a word for me that had significance in my life”
22:03 “I already had experience taking something horrible and deciding what to do with it on purpose”
22:44 “Who do I want to be, what do I want to create?”
23:59 “Constantly being able to tell what we can control and what we can’t, and then making a decision”
24:11 Know which circle you are in- everything you care about & everything you can influence
26:02 “Incessantly thinking I shouldn’t be thinking the way that I am”
27:30 How do we model our abortion experience?
27:56 How do we tell our story for the generations that follow us?
28:56 This is a choice that I made and I can live an empowered life after
29:37 “If we experience something as trauma we have the opportunity to use that as the springboard to become more of who we want to be, but it’s not a moral obligation to do that”
30:55 “We really want to become discerning consumers; what works for me might not be what world for you?”
31:38 How could this have been God’s plan?
32:36 “We all have agency and agency is a part of God’s plan?”
33:04 “At a marco level choice is a part of God’s plan”
34:24 Krista’s Podcast episode ‘Everything’s OK and everything’s not OK’
35:00 “Even when we’re in the most painful place we’ve been it’s part of the human experience”
35:52 We can still have fun when we’re talking about hard things
