Day 6: The Language We Use

Identifying Emotions in Pregnancy Loss

Identifying our emotions can be difficult when we experience a pregnancy loss. This is because there are so many emotions we can experience, and different people will feel different things.

Today, we are going to connect the thoughts we’ve identified over the last few days, and connect them to an emotion. How do those thoughts make us feel?

We are also going to talk about a few different emotions that can arise in pregnancy loss. You might feel some of these, or you might not. And maybe some you didn’t realize you felt until now.

Vulnerability

Getting pregnant is a vulnerable thing to do. We put our hearts, and our bodies, on the line. We trust that our bodies are going to keep a growing baby safe, and when we experience a pregnancy loss, we feel let down. We experience pain, which is always vulnerable. And, we are vulnerable if we decide to share our loss with others. Are you feeling exposed right now? Are you feeling uncertain? That’s vulnerability.

Grief

This is common feeling in pregnancy loss. Grief is not just reserved for death and dying. We experience grief in many different situations, and pregnancy loss is one of them.

When we grieve, we experience loss: we have lost something. In this case, we have lost our future child. We lose the dream of being a parent, of growing our family. We also experience longing: we’ve longed to become parents, and for many of us, that longing might have been involuntary. We long to be whole, and now we feel incomplete.

And finally, we feel lost. After a pregnancy loss, we are forced to reorient ourselves to a new reality, a new world. A world we were not expecting to live in when we first became pregnant. Maybe, if you’re like me, you never expected to have a pregnancy loss in the first place. You become part of a club that you never imagined you would be a member of.