UnFuck Your Brain™ After Abortion
Episode 5 of Master Coach Week
Kara Loewentheil is a Master Certified Coach with a B.A. from Yale and J.D. from Harvard Law. In the last four years after pivoting from a legal career, she has grown her life coaching business from 0 to 7 figures. She's the host of the iTunes top-rated self-help podcast Unf*ck Your Brain which has been downloaded 10M times, and she has been featured in outlets like Marie Claire, Mind Body Green, MSN.com, and The Huffington Post. Kara lives in New York City. Learn more at unfckyourbrain.com.
Show Notes:
1:22 Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching
2:26 Kara’s AMAZING introduction
3:45 “I have worked on, around, or relating to abortion my entire life…”
4:07 “We know that more than ⅓ of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime and almost no one talks about it”
4:59 “My perspective on feminism and the reason I’ve always been so focused on it has to do with autonomy”... “autonomy, intellect, & sex”
5:34 “It seems so obvious to me, there’s no way for women to have autonomy in society if they don’t have control of their bodies… abortion is a normal part of reproductive healthcare that ensures that”
6:06 “Women since the beginning of time have been helping people get pregnant and not be pregnant”
6:22 “If we don’t have this, the rest of this doesn’t matter; we can fight for pay equity but if you have to be pregnant 13 times in your life because you can’t get access to birth control or abortion when you need it… what does it matter, you’re not going to be able to go to the office”
7:37 “the things that I found most shocking were around maternal mortality and health care”
8:23 “people are dying and getting very sick having children in very preventable ways”
9:26 Black Birthing Lives Matter, irth- Birth Without Bias
9:55 UnFuck Your Brain- teaching women how to identify how they’ve internalized socialization and sexist messaging, and what to do with that
12:26 What does a fucked brain look like?
12:36 Clean vs Dirty Pain
12:46 “Because the discussion is so polarized … there’s no space to discuss the negative emotions… there’s just not enough room for nuance on the whole spectrum.”
13:09 “Our society is so deeply steeped in the idea that motherhood is biologically natural and a woman’s greatest calling… thousands of years of programming”
13:56 “all of these decisions in our lives preclude one future or another and this is just a very clear one”
14:17 “The part you want to watch for is the shame… women are so socialized to believe that they are supposed to put everyone’s interest in front of their own, especially their own children”
15:13 “I regret it because I think I wouldn’t have to feel this bad about myself if I hadn’t done it”
15:28 “Our brains love to pick one things from the past and think this whole thing would have been different if”
17:39 “Women are weak, they are of the body, their bodies lie, they are unpredictable, and untrustworthy…” leading to the belief- “I can’t trust my body”
18:34 “Women are socialized in general to regard their body as their adversary and be willing at the drop of a hat to blame it for anything that goes wrong”
19:37 ‘I don’t know how to take care of myself’ starts in the decision makes and goes all the way through
19:49 “Women are painted as irrational, emotional, not as logical as men, not as capable of making decisions, not fit for leadership”
20:21 “Women are socialized to constantly distrust themselves and doubt them selves”
20:20 “Women are always one step away from declaring ourselves incompetent”
20:28 “modern conception that bodies are optimizable like computers”
21:14 “Best science of the day is us trying to figure out what the hell is happening inside out bodies”
21:43 “Your body is ultimately kind of an unmanageable thing; it’s an animal”
22:55 I had the abortion because my partner told me I had to or he convinced me too…
23:23 “From a coaching perspective, whenever we feel guilt, or shame, or worry we made the wrong decision we want to put the responsibility on someone else”
23:49 “If we could go back there and coach you then…”
24:28 “Why do you want to live your current life telling yourself you didn’t make that decision?”
24:53 “You don’t need to blame and shame yourself, and you don’t need to blame anyone else...”
25:35 “You don’t want to have the feeling you’re having now and you don’t know how to resolve it so you want to blame it on someone else”
26:06 “The biggest problem is believing that your life would be different if you had made a different choice”
26:32 “We are constantly looking for what I call ‘exits off the human condition’... we’re constantly looking for some way to get a break from being a human”
27:09 “There are people who have children and regret that choice… that’s the most taboo thing to say”
28:05 “Regret is not caused by a circumstance or a choice; it’s caused by your thoughts”
28:34 “with any sensitive topic one of the best things we can do is desensitize it a little”
29:29 “The medicine is different depending on the issue… everybody needs a little different of the opposite of how they are”
31:22 “You past is as over as ancient Rome… your mistake is you think your past creates your life now. Whatever I did yesterday is as over as the murder of Julius Caeser”
32:14 “as soon as it’s over it only exists as you think about it; you get to decide what that’s going to be”
32:35 “when you believe that you’ve made a mistake, what basically do is you program your brain to go look for all the evidence you made a mistake”
33:03 “You have to redirect your brain on purpose.”
33:11 “there’s so many turning points and we fixate on the big ones… every single decision you make fractals off into a million realities”
34:11 “you’re happiness has to come from your own process, you have to create it on purpose”
34:53 “you’re making your love and acceptance for yourself conditional on not making mistakes”
35:52 “If you’re gonna be here what’s the point in spending your time focusing on that one thing you think you did wrong, you rob yourself of the ability to bunch of other different stuff differently”
36:16 I don’t deserve to be happy after abortion
36:57 “It’s not a deserving based system”
37:27 “Sometimes it’s just easier to laugh at how wrong your whole theory is”
38:08 “so much self-imposed suffering that is unnecessary”
38:28 “my work in the first part of my career was about physical autonomy, and now it’s about mental autonomy; you really have to have both.”
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