Grief After Abortion
This week’s guest is Herdyne Mercier. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Grief Coach, retreat facilitator, and transformational speaker. Herdyne’s life calling is to create non-judgmental spaces for broken hearts to heal and purposeful living restored.
Podcast: Redefining Grief is her weekly podcast
Website: http://herdynemercier.com/
In every episode of this podcast I read a blog post I’ve written and we follow up with a conversation about the topic at hand and what it means for women and their ability to thrive after abortion. Happy listening and as always feel free to send me your reflections and questions.
Show notes:
9:57
Grief is a normal reaction to any loss10:36
”Grief can be very isolating”10:42
”Stop policing my grief”10:59
”What people don’t understand is that we are all grievers”
… “some of us have been muffled” …12:32
”I’m able to go out there and plant a seed and watch it; for me that represents hope.”13:05
”In acknowledging your grief you can turn it into something.”13:19
The biggest mistake that people make is that they that they don’t realize that ”Grief is an emotional thing not and intellectual thing”14:18
Shortening the process of grieving15:11
Grief Flare-ups16:42
Why grief feels unnatural17:35
The Truth Anchor- represents freedom
Our secrets aren’t really secret18:25
”Shine a light on it to be truthful with myself”19:08
”God, I thought you had my back”19:57
”You have to allow yourself to get quiet and don’t allow the distractions. of your heartache to have you not listen to the whisper”20:31
The Heart Anchor
broken hearts don’t break us “In the midst of chaos you still have purpose”21:26
The Community Anchor
Free Slack Group- Grief Crusaders22:05
Find community that will see you, and hear you, and not judge you23:01
The Faith Anchor
”a lot of us use faith to mask how we feel”25:09
The Restoration Anchor
restoration isn’t going back to normal; the goal is to evolve27:43
”too many people get stuck in grief and try to go back and make it the same”30:09
”Happiness and sadness can co-exist in a delicate balance”31:29
”I think a lot of us have a hard time standing in our truth, because standing in our truth truly means accepting all of us”32:17
”a lot of us stay in bondage of the blame”33:49
How unresolved grief shows up: workaholic, emotional eating, suicidal behaviors, drinking a lot, isolation, not wanting to be around anyone who is happy, being in toxic relationship…35:27
www.herdynemercier.com
The Truth Behind Grief36:28
Podcast- Redefining Grief
The post:
As I navigated the waters of my own abortion, my heartache started melding with the pain of the collective. I felt it quickly, long before I started sharing with others. Instinctively I knew that the club I just entered was dark, quiet, and thick with untold stories, stories of millions of women held captive by their secrets. I felt their pain start flooding in and layering on top of the already heart tugging experience of deciding to choose termination.
This collective energy I felt was not of women bearing the weight of personal guilt, shame, or regret. For some women those things exist, but what I felt was uncertainty, oppression, and confusion. This collective energy I tapped into during my abortion was a result of years of stacking stories of disconnection. Grandmothers disconnected from their children, sisters disconnected from each other, friendships that never connected at the heart, young girls disconnected from their maternal elders. Everywhere I turned the systems felt broken. Everywhere I looked there was a layer of loss. In my own sadness I could now see the unresolved grief that had always surrounded me. My abortion gave me a lens to see and feel what I’d been overlooking. In a time when I needed support more than ever I was swirling in a sea of collective grief and disconnection.
In our face paced society, everyone is going-going-going and most of us are missing-missing-missing. We’re missing the lessons, missing the point, and missing each other. Connection to self, Spirit, and one another is being broken by our overwhelming work hours, our constant search for more, and our ability to “plug in” and detach from our present moment. In all this disconnection we’re losing sight of who we are and what really matters. We’re absent when we need each other most.
So much of the pain I felt in the process of my abortion was the pain of a collective emptiness. It was the deepest loneliness I’d ever felt. I felt like I had stumbled across a break in the system and was swept into an isolation room for cleansing before reentrance. I now had access to a level of brokeness I’d never felt before. Despite the weight of this realization, I knew it wasn’t me that was broken, it was the human culture I was living within.
All human beings grieve. Merriam-Webster defines grieving: “to feel deep sadness or mental pain”. In the world I grew up in, grief was reserved for loss of a loved one you cared about, and even then it had to fall into boxes that didn’t disrupt the system too much. Grief was only entitled to behaviors that kept other people comfortable: funerals, girlfriends, support groups, therapy, alone time… As soon as it slipped into, or disrupted everyday productivity a red flag went up. Things got awkward.
We weren’t taught as human beings how to manage our own grief, much less the grief of someone else, and in a band-aid society grief like many other things, was reserved for boxes, so as not to disrupt the whole.
The problem with this cultural experience is that human beings feel grief ALL the time, and they have no idea what to do with it. Let’s look back to the definition “to feel deep sadness or mental pain”, sounds pretty human right?
Loss of an idea
Incompletion of a goal
Lack of direction
Loss of a job
Loneliness
Threatened safety
Parting ways of a friend… this list could go on for pages.
In our daily lives, there are so many layers of grieving that go unattended to, that when the big stuff comes like death of a loved one, or in our case abortion, we move into complete shock and often confusion. The loss turns into a culmination of all our grief, and it comes exploding out with an eruptive force. Sometimes we recover from this explosion, sometimes we do not. Grief calls for our attention and if it goes unresolved it builds again until the next eruption.
During the course of my abortion, there was grieving, but mostly there was an understanding of deep sadness and mental pain followed by a lack of tools to manage it. At a time when what I needed most was connection, I felt completely disconnected from the world. I was fortunate enough to have some close loved ones who allowed me to grieve, but even they didn’t realize that I wasn’t just grieving for myself, I was grieving for us all. I was grieving in this broken place in humanity where we abandon one another right when we need each other the most.
Abortion for me was a “death” of many things:
A baby that wouldn’t come
A loss of the trust I had in my body and in birth control
A loss of disillusioned reproductive freedom
A change in my relationship
Friendships that wouldn’t withstand my choice
Loss of “control”
