If you’ve had a miscarriage or a pregnancy loss, you might be feeling very sad, and if that's the case, then my heart goes out to you. I've had twelve miscarriages myself, and so I know what it's like.
The sadness you're feeling might be overwhelming. Perhaps it feels as if your heart has broken.
And it's possible that you might also be remembering other griefs you've experienced in the past. What you're going through now might be reminding you of that.
And perhaps you don’t know what to do with these feelings, or how to cope with it all.
In our society today we don’t necessarily know how to grieve.
It might not feel safe.
Sometimes we’re tempted not to let ourselves go there, and feel those emotions, for fear that we’ll be totally swept away, into something that’s completely unbearable.
And sometimes we get stuck in our grief.
So today I want to talk to you about what you can do to make the grieving process easier.
Because I’ve had twelve miscarriages myself, I’ve experienced the grieving process a lot. And to be honest, for the first six, I would say I didn’t do very much grieving at all.
After each miscarriage, I used to cry for a day or two, but then I would stop, and just push those feelings down, deep inside of me, and shut them away.
And they remained there: feelings and memories that I just couldn’t approach.
And they made the process of continuing to try for a baby much harder than it already was.
If you’ve watched my free video, “3 things you should know, about recovering emotionally after a miscarriage,” you will know that two of the three things 'you should know about' are to do with grief.
Research carried out at Drexel University in the States has shown that for many women it takes a minimum of four months to feel back to normal again, after a miscarriage. And the grief we experience can be as intense as if we had lost someone who had been close to us, and who had been walking around in our lives.
Most people don’t realise this!
We might have been thinking we should be over this by now. Or perhaps there are people around us who think we should.
And those people might not appreciate just how deep the grief we’re experiencing actually is. It can be enormous (especially, as I mentioned earlier, if it’s triggering past grief, from previous losses we’ve suffered as well.)
This is all normal. Grief takes time. It’s not something that passes over night. And it can be very helpful if we have tools which can help to ease us through this process, and someone to guide us, who knows what it’s like.
EFT “tapping” (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is a very effective and simple self-help tool which you can use to help you cope with all of these feelings and experiences. It’s one of the ways I support my clients, to help them in their recovery process after a miscarriage, so that it can be as easy and painless as possible.
In my on-line miscarriage support Video Program, five of the nineteen “tap-along” videos help you to deal with your feelings of sadness and grief:
“Help when you’re feeling upset”
“It feels as if my heart is broken”
“The grieving process – taking it a step at a time”
“My hopes and plans for the baby – dealing with the pain and disappointment”
“Anniversaries – your mind is keeping track and you might feel upset”
Women who have used these videos say that they really help.
(If you would like to try one of these “tap-along” videos for yourself, you can use my free video “How to feel better after a miscarriage”. Almost everyone who tries “tapping” says that they feel better after doing it, than they did before.)
Even though I’ve had twelve miscarriages myself, after all of the healing and supportive work that I’ve done over the years I can truthfully say that it feels now as if I’ve had none, and I don’t feel as if there’s any grief left (- deep down or otherwise!)
I know that that’s possible, and I want to share with you the tools that I’ve used to reach that point. I want to help.
If you would like to know more, about the on-line miscarriage support Video Program, or about working with me individually, wherever you are in the world using Skype or Facetime, please be in touch.
And until next time, I’m wishing you all the very best, in your recovery process after your miscarriage.
And I encourage you to be really kind and gentle with yourself. This is a very big thing you're going through.
~ Rosalind xx