Grief after a miscarriage or baby loss can look very different from person to person. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, and everyone’s processes and timeframes are different. In this piece of writing, I will look more at some of the common and understandable responses that women may have after a loss.
1. Challenging Emotions
After miscarriage or baby loss, it’s normal to experience a whole range of emotions. Some of these emotions may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable to you and you may not know how to respond to them.
- Anger. You may feel angry at yourself, others, healthcare providers, or the situation in general. Anger can be especially difficult for women, as it’s sometimes confused with aggression. Many of us are raised with messages (directly or indirectly) such as, “good girls don’t get angry,” which can make it easy to suppress these feelings. With this, it’s easy to suppress anger. However, anger often signals that a deeper emotion, such as sadness or fear, needs to be acknowledged. When we try to push anger aside, we risk missing the underlying emotions and unmet needs that it points to.
- Envy. Envy often highlights the longing we have for something in our own lives. There can often be an assumption that envious people will go on to hurt others. But this is rarely true. Seeing other pregnancies or babies can naturally trigger reminders of what you deeply wish for. Feeling this way doesn’t mean you will (or want to) hurt anyone else. It’s simply a reflection of your own loss and desire.
- Emptiness. After your loss, you may feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you. Dreams, plans, and hopes can feel as though they’ve been lost as well, leaving a hollow space inside. This emptiness can make returning to everyday life feel heavy or even meaningless. You might find that the relationships, activities, and passions that once brought you joy no longer feel fulfilling.
After a loss, it’s normal to experience a whole range of emotions. Connecting with and fully experiencing these feelings is an important part of processing your pain, but this process can feel overwhelming. Give yourself time, space, and permission to feel your emotions without trying to change them. Journaling can be a helpful tool, and having a supportive person (whether a trusted friend, family member, or therapist) can provide you a space to express your grief and emotions.
For many people, grieving doesn’t only involve being immersed in emotional pain. Engaging in parts of life that aren’t focused on grief can also be an important part of the process. This might be returning to routines, finding new routines, or reconnecting with activities you used to enjoy. Balancing time spent with grief and time spent in the world can help you gradually process your loss and adjust to life after it.
2. Lonliness
Many women feel like they’re alone after a loss. Miscarriage and baby loss is often an invisible loss that isn’t recognised or understood by many people. It’s often seen as somehow different to other losses and this can lead people to mistakenly expect the grief to only be short-lived or something that is erased by subsequent pregnancies or existing children.
During a time when it is so important for all aspects of your grief to be heard, acknowledged, and validated, these responses from others can feel incredibly isolating. If you find that those around you aren’t able to offer the support you need, you may find comfort in online communities, therapy, or books that share experiences of miscarriage (I’ll link some books that you may find valuable here, here, and here).
3. Trauma Response
We know that roughly 20-30% of women develop trauma-related symptoms at some point after their loss. A traumatic event is one which leaves you feeling helpless or unsafe either physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Many aspects of miscarriage and baby loss can be traumatic.
After a traumatic event, you may experience symptoms such as:
- Feeling anxious. This may show up with racing thoughts, feeling overwhelmed, having a rapid heart rate or struggling to sleep.
- Having flashbacks or nightmares to the trauma which make it feel like you’re living it again in the present moment.
- Trying to avoid situations and people which remind you of the trauma.
Processing trauma effectively involves connecting to a sense of safety before exploring the difficult memories. This allows the traumatic experiences to be stored in the brain in the same way that all our other memories are. Once this has happened, the past experiences no longer dominate your present and symptoms will ease. Working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands the nuances of perinatal trauma will give you the appropriate support through this process.
4. Blaming Yourself
Even though miscarriage and baby loss are almost always caused by medical factors outside of your control, it’s very common for women to blame themselves for their loss.
This can be especially true when there is no clear explanation for the loss. Our minds really struggle with uncertainty. Humans evolved to survive by detecting patterns and predicting outcomes. When the outcome is unclear, our brains desperately look for an explanation. This can easily lead to self-blame as a way to try and understand what has happened. Although this response is natural, self-blame can add even more distress to grief.
Self-compassion is a valuable antidote to self-blame. Self-compassion involves us being sensitive to our suffering and committing to alleviate and prevent it. When we relate to ourselves in a compassionate way, we offer ourselves the same care and understanding that we often do for our loved ones. Moving from self-blame to self-compassion doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, we can slowly strengthen our compassionate voice so overtime it becomes louder than the blaming voice. Here is one helpful exercise you may want to try to start developing self-compassion. If you’re finding yourself meeting resistance and blocks to being self-compassionate, therapy with a practitioner trained in compassion-focused therapy can help you to overcome these.
5. Finding Things Difficult Again
I wish I could tell you how long your grief will last or that you are through the worst part, but sadly grief doesn’t work that way. Things might get better, and then you may find things difficult again. Anniversaries and milestones can often be difficult reminders of your loss and bring back intense emotions.
Often, the most overwhelming period of grief tends to last around 6 months, but this can vary person to person. It takes time to integrate your loss into your life and to move to a new version of yourself where your grief is not always at the forefront.
Final Thoughts
Everybody grieves differently. This means that you may relate to some of the points in this article, or you may not. Either way is okay. If you’re struggling after a loss, I hope you’re able to find things that can support you through your grief.
If you feel that 1:1 therapy could be supportive, here you can book a free 20-minute consultation with me to discuss what therapy could look like and to answer any questions you may have.
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