Navigating grief through the pregnancy loss & infertility journey…
Grieving processes are both cultural and personal processes.
The culture you were raised including your family, society and religion in is likely to have informed the ideas you have about what grief is, if and how it’s acceptable to publicly or privately mourn, if and how if it’s appropriate to support someone grieving and much more. From this cultural soup our own beliefs and behaviours around the process of grieving evolve.
From a modern western-centric perspective, grief is often reserved for the physical death of a person who has lived. In addition to this, we’ve also outsourced much of the business of death, making it a much less personal and connected ritual.
Because of this, the loss of someone during conception, pregnancy or birth can be a little forgotten, taboo or uncomfortable for people to know how best to process the circumstances or to support you.
Thankfully so many things are changing. You can now apply for a birth certificate for miscarried, aborted or still born bubs. Many hospitals have bereavement support that allows you to spend time with your baby to both connect and say good bye. This in only the start of the grieving journey.
Infertility is an incredibly harrowing journey that may include multiple losses and sometime even require letting go of traditional ideas around pregnancy and birth an exploring other options including sperm or egg donation, surrogacy, adoption, fostering, emerging uterine transplant surgery or being child free. These and barriers to access of these options are also experienced in the LGBTQIA+ community. Another part of the process that may require grieving is if your birth plan does not go to plan.
ALL of these changes and challenges require a grieving process. Similar to when a person dies, when a dream or expectation cannot be realised, this too needs to be taken care of with gentle compassion. Grieving also helps makes space for opening into new a new identity with new perceptions, beliefs and needs and can allow you to open up to other possibilities and opportunities for the future.
Navigating Grief with Somatic Psychotherapy
Time alone doesn’t heal for everyone. Individual beliefs about your right to grieve and how you ‘should’ do it can limit your own ability to process the many and varying emotions that you will experience over time.
Though there are some models of ‘how’ to grieve that lay out a particular process that is moved through over time, I’ve found that everyone’s personal journey with grief is different, because we are all different! We have different beliefs, cultures, capacities and traumas that influence how we engage with our circumstances and ourselves.
The power of somatic (‘of the body’) psychotherapy is in listening to and feeling through the wisdom our systems have outside of the beliefs of the ‘mind’.
By learning to listen to, trust and act upon some of this wisdom and harmonising it with the identity pieces that live in our minds, we come to a more holistic understanding and acceptance of ourselves.
Feelings both arise in and are expressed through the body as much as they are via the mind and words. Talking can be incredibly cathartic, but can also be re-traumatising. Somatic psychotherapy strikes a balance between developing the language to structure our narrative and give meaning to our experiences and giving the body permission to feel through what it needs to in the ways it feels good. This helps create system-wide congruence so we feel aligned in our bodies, minds, emotions, identity, values and actions.
It’s incredibly freeing to experience this process of ‘embodiment’. If you’d like to work through any part of your own grieving process you can book a discovery session today. I’d love to support you.
Ramone Bisset
