Charis Your Life with Charis Santillie

My Connection to Abortion

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Episode notes

This is my Mom’s story, which is now mine to share. She passed away on Thanksgiving Day of 2013 due to liver disease from alcoholism. The first time I got her into rehab, she wrote some journal entries. This was rare; my Mom did not write or keep any other journals. She also did not frequently express or process her true emotions.

The day I did this recording was the day I was finally emotionally ready to read every word of the three letters about her pregnancy and what happened when she was pushed into traveling across the world to a foreign country by herself for an abortion when she was 18.

What You’ll Learn:

- What she wrote to her boyfriend in her “Letter to John” (I’ve changed his name to John, as in John Doe)

- What she wrote in her “Letter to Baby”

- What she wrote about her pregnancy and the aftermath

- How her abortion story connects to my life

- Where I now stand on the issue of abortion

Knowing what I have come to learn about fear, emotions, trauma, and this human experience in general—I now understand that she was scared to death to feel her feelings. So she stuffed them away. Eventually, she drank them away. It breaks my heart to know she went through what she did. And then to consider that when she was 45, her whole world crashed down with our hot air balloon accident. I saw her lose so much—yet at that time, I had no clue how scary loss must have been for her.

More stories need to be told about all kinds of life experiences. More people need to unlock the doors of rooms inside them where they’ve buried their feelings. More forgiveness and understanding will result. And then we won’t feel so divided.

Life is full of paradoxes, and this story is just one of many examples of that.At the core, we are each dealing with the same inner challenges fundamentally; we’re dealing with our fears and the feelings we’ve locked away in our own inner rooms.

Resources: - Take a look at some special photos of my Mom when she was 18, as well as my favorite photo of her later in life here: https://charisyourlife.com/blog/my-connection-to-abortion

- Episode 005 How to Take Your Power Back: https://pod.fo/e/12fe39

- Episode 009 The 28th Anniversary of the Hot Air Balloon Accident: https://pod.fo/e/132cd5

- Get support from my FREE training ‘Your First Step to Better Life Balance’ https://charisyourlife.com/freetraining