I couldn’t believe it. It felt completely extraordinary.
I could think about my baby’s funeral all the way through, without wanting to cry…
Let me explain. A couple of years earlier, we’d lost our baby at fourteen weeks. It was my third miscarriage, and the hospital offered us a funeral.
Heart-breaking images from that day were seared into my mind.
The beautiful simple service at the grave side… my husband and six friends huddled around a small hole in the earth, on a late December afternoon… a candle in a jam-jar that my friend was holding… my own hands cradling a tiny box, topped with a posy of rose buds, and the moment I laid them both in the grave…
They were devastating memories of loss and grief, and they haunted me. The pain barely seemed to have eased, and as each anniversary approached, I remembered them all over again. It was really hard…
If you’ve had a miscarriage, or more than one, you probably know what this kind of thing feels like. The memory of an event can be so vivid that it feels like it happened yesterday.
We can have a whole catalogue of little ‘movies’ in our minds, which are too painful to watch, but which we can’t help remembering. They can make us feel very sad and low. The pain can be so intense that it physically hurts.
I didn’t know that it was possible to do anything about that.
And to discover that I could, felt like a miracle.
I vividly remember the moment. I was a relatively-new EFT practitioner, and my teacher had suggested to me that I could use EFT to take the pain away from all of those haunting memories.
EFT is Emotional Freedom Techniques, sometimes known as “tapping.” It’s a very powerful and effective self-help tool. And what I did, that afternoon, was to “tap” gently and easily using a very specific technique, and at the end of it, I could think about the funeral all the way through, and I no longer wanted to cry.
It was incredible! I couldn’t believe that I’d done it. I didn’t cry during the process, and I no longer wanted to cry afterwards. It was the most tremendous relief!
The sense of empowerment was enormous. I set about systematically “tapping through” all of the painful memories, from all of the miscarriages I’d had. And afterwards, each of those memories felt softer.
And what I discovered was a pervading sense of peace.
Before I discovered “tapping” I had many memories that I tried to push away. I stuffed them down; locked them up; tried to seal them off in a place in my mind and my heart that I just couldn’t go in to, because it was too painful. (And it didn’t work! They didn’t stay there.)
But after I did this, there were no longer places in my mind that I had to avoid. My thoughts could rest anywhere, without causing me stabs of pain and grief. The memories themselves felt much gentler, and more distant. They felt less connected to me.
And I discovered that I felt less sad.
EFT “tapping” is one of two very powerful and gentle self-help techniques which I now use with my clients, wherever they are in the world, to help them feel more peaceful, after their miscarriages.
Taking the painful emotions away from upsetting memories is one of the things that can help them to feel better. We do it very gently and kindly. They don’t have to re-experience the memories, or talk about any of it at all (unless, of course, they want to.)
Being able to soften this kind of memory is not something that very many people know is possible. And it’s one of the reasons why I do what I do. It transformed my own experience of miscarriage, and I want to help as many women as possible to find it easier to cope with too. If you’d like to know more about any of this, please visit my website.
Whatever is that you’re experiencing, I’m wishing you all the very best. And I hope you find all the help and support that you need, to make it feel less upsetting. I’m sending you my warmest wishes. Take care.
~ Rosalind xxx