How "Rising Strong" Helped After my Second Miscarriage
Two weeks after my second miscarriage, I felt lost. My roadmap to becoming a mother was once again derailed. I moved about the world without a compass, unsure of where to go or what to do. I was confused: why did this happen again? Is this common? Do people experience multiple consecutive miscarriages?
The most pervasive feeling I was experiencing was grief. My grief was so overwhelming that that it didn’t make sense to me. How could I grieve losing someone I had never met? Someone I had never held? Someone who was only growing as an idea in my mind of who they might become?
Typically, as a therapist, I have a good sense of where to go when I need support. But, after my second miscarriage, I was in uncharted territory. My grief and confusion only intensified when my dozens of weight-crushing questions had ambiguous answers. Why did I lose this second baby? We don’t have an answer for you. What are my chances of losing a third baby? We don’t know. Is there something wrong with me? Probably not. It was probably a genetic error. Can you help me with my grief? Sure, but I’m sure you’ll get pregnant again! This will just be a blip on the radar.
It did not feel like a blip on the radar.
Prior to my second pregnancy loss, I was scheduled to attend a training in Dallas. The topic of the training was learning how to lead a psychoeducational group based on the work Dr. Brené Brown presents in her book, Rising Strong. I am certified in Dr. Brené Brown’s work, called The Daring Way™. The Daring Way ™ is a psychoeducational approach that explores shame resilience and vulnerability. It draws from her research outlined in three of her books: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong.
If you haven’t read Rising Strong, here is a brief synopsis:
In order for us to live bravely (do the things that we want to do but we are scared to do), we have to expect moments when we crumble, when things don’t go the way we want them to. For example, it is a brave and vulnerable thing to get pregnant after a pregnancy loss. We accept the risk that we may have another pregnancy loss. And if, or in my case when, that happens, it can feel devastating. As a result, we start telling ourselves stories that are often inaccurate and self-deprecating. But, if we become aware of those stories we are creating, and if we work with them (or as Brené says, rumble with them), we gain the clarity and strength to try again. Some of the ways in which we rumble with these stories include exploring grief, anxiety, shame, vulnerability, trust, and setting boundaries. By exploring how these concepts play a role in the story we are telling ourselves, we can pick ourselves back up.
As a Certified Daring Way Facilitator (someone who is certified in Dr. Brené Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability), I was eager to attend a training and potentially distract myself from our pregnancy losses. I always found professional development a great form of self-care. I was unaware, however, that this training would also lead to personal development.
The Story I Can’t Stop Telling Myself
We create stories all the time. We think millions of thoughts a day, many of which are off-the-wall, or lacking any evidence. They are simply thoughts. But we don’t often realize that. Sometimes, the stories we tell ourselves start to define us. When we start to believe our thoughts, we start to feel shame.
The Rising Strong process starts with you writing down the story you can’t stop telling yourself. By writing down your thoughts, you become acutely aware of their presence, rather than having them fill up your brain, leaving you to wonder why you are feeling so sad/anxious/unhinged.
Examples of some of the stories people with pregnancy loss tell themselves include:
I’m not meant to be a mother.
I’m a failure as a wife.
No one understands what I’m going through – I must be making this all up in my head.
Why can’t I just get over this? Other women do.
Am I being punished for something?
Maybe I am really screwed up.
I can’t keep a child safe, even before she is born.
These thoughts can lead to feelings of shame. Brené Brown defines shame as the “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” If I have had a pregnancy loss, then I must be flawed. But I certainly don’t want to talk about my flaws, so I assume that others don’t have the same experience that I am having.
No wonder we experience deep shame after a pregnancy loss.
Beginning to Rumble: Shame
After writing down the story you are telling yourself (yes, you actually write it down. And yes, it can be a painful experience to see these thoughts and beliefs written in front of you) the Rising Strong process has you rumble with the emotions embedded in your story.
The first big emotion: shame.
Shame translates to us saying to ourselves, “I’m not enough,” or “I’m too much.” In recurrent pregnancy loss, those sentiments can be:
I’m not woman enough.
I’m not a good enough wife.
I’m not deserving to be a mother.
It could also be:
I’m too fragile.
I’m too weak.
I should be over this by now.
It is important that we explore our feelings of shame because if we aren’t aware of it, our shame can take over. For example, Brené Brown writes, “You can’t engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy one-size-fits-all formula.” This reminded me of a book I read shortly after my first miscarriage; a book with a title that promised me I would be healed from the pain of my miscarriage in 30 days. For me, I was not healed from the pain of my miscarriage after 30 days! You may or may not feel healed after 30 days. But, by promising a prescription that not only has no evidence supporting its efficacy, our feelings of shame and unworthiness might only increase. We personalize it: What’s wrong with me that I can’t be over this in 30 days, when I was promised that this would work! There must be something really wrong with me.
In pregnancy loss, we are not just experiencing shame as it relates to our identity, but we might also be shaming ourselves for the grief we experience. Grief is not linear, and grief does not have a timeline. Grief does not promise that we continue to feel better over time, consistently. Rather, there are days when we feel better, and there are days when we feel worse. By normalizing this grief process as an individualized experience, we can potentially reduce some feelings of shame.
Rumbling with Grief
In Rising Strong, grief is defined in three ways: loss, longing, and feeling lost.
Loss is a by-product of grief; the feeling that we are missing something. Understanding loss, for me, was straightforward: I had lost my second baby. Longing, however, was not something I had considered prior to the workshop. Longing is defined as “an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, and for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we’ve lost.” I was longing to be a mother, I was longing to grow our family. And that had been taken from us. For me, this led to feeling lost.
Feeling lost is defined as the personal reorienting grief often requires us to do. This might lead to changes in our physical, emotional and social worlds, and it can change our identity. When I lost my second child, I had to reorient to the idea that I was no longer going to be a mother with a living, breathing baby in a few months. I had to do a major pivot, and reorient myself to a new life that I had not planned on living.
Feeling lost generally accompanies grief, in that grief requires us to reorient ourselves. After a pregnancy loss, we are reorienting our bodies physically by being pregnant, to suddenly not being pregnant. We are also reorienting our plans, hopes and dreams. I had to let go of the plans I had made for my babies to arrive in this world. The next year that I had mapped out was now erased. I went from being an expectant mother to a recurrent miscarriage survivor. How do we reorient ourselves after that?
Moreover, how do I reorient myself when I am grieving a dream? While I was pregnant, I had no memories with my child. I didn’t even have a face to recall. Women and couples who experience pregnancy loss grieve losing something that was not yet breathing, someone they had not yet held. They grieve the loss of an identity (mother or father), and the loss of creating the family they had so hoped to create.
Brené Brown defines this type of loss as ambiguous grief. Ambiguous grief is different from other types of grief in that we have lost something or someone that is either still alive or was never born: divorce, job loss, ending a dear friendship, and pregnancy loss. We don’t often know how to respond to this type of grief, because it typically isn’t honored in our culture. We don’t allow for the time and space to heal from this type of loss.
We reorient ourselves, and we allow for this space to heal, gradually, by mourning.
Mourning
As we neared the end of the workshop, the facilitator instructed us to do something that honored our grief. Take an action step that would allow us to mourn. I wrote a letter to my unborn babies, and held a small memorial service for them.
It was a warm, sunny January day in Dallas. I removed myself from the group to complete this exercise outside. I sat on a bench in a garden, underneath a willow tree. Birds were singing. It was the perfect spot for a memorial. I expressed my love and gratitude to my babies, and I cried. A real, deep, cathartic, cry. It was the first time I felt I truly allowed my emotions to pour out of me. Instead of holding them in, trying to stay strong so I could go to work, be with friends, or not be too emotional in front of my family, I allowed myself to feel the weight of my loss. And it helped.
The mourning process is crucial to our healing. It is important that we honor our grief by memorializing it. That might be we hold a memorial service. It can also be we connect with other parents who have lost their pregnancies and share our stories in a way that connects us. Whatever we do, we must allow ourselves that space to mourn and memorialize.
When I returned to the group, I looked back at my original story I was telling myself. After my memorial service, I was able to rewrite my story. My original story was:
I want to give up. I’m a screw up. Screw motherhood. Clearly, I’m not meant to be a mother. I’m too sensitive about this - this is probably why some people haven’t reached out to me. My husband will probably get bored with me if we don’t have a child. What am I being punished for?
A shame-filled, demeaning, blaming, degrading tale, full of lies, confabulations, and wildly inaccurate perceptions. But, after my memorial service, my story changed:
I feel sad I can’t give my family what we want. Being pregnant allowed me to feel hopeful. I felt connected to my partner. Just because I feel failure does not make me nor my body, by definition, a failure. I can honor my grief and my pain, and I can trust that I am not alone in that.
By rewriting our stories, we are not hiding our pain. We are acknowledging it and holding it up, free from shame, and full of self-compassion. This acceptance doesn’t mean that you have wiped away pain; rather, you have accepted the event, and the deep hurt, and by doing so, have provided your grief an outlet. Acceptance means we are rumbling with our grief, and not turning to shame.
This doesn’t mean that trying again isn’t hard. In fact, after a pregnancy loss, there is immense strength in saying, “let’s try again.” The courage to try again doesn’t mean we don’t feel fear. But, by returning to the Rising Strong process, we feel the courage to do so. As Brené Brown says, “We are the brave and brokenhearted.”
For more information on Rising Strong, by Dr. Brené Brown, visit her website: www.daretolead.brenebrown.com.