Our Thoughts Impact on Our Emotions

Day 6: The Language We Use

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.

Anxiety

I wake up to my dog kicking me in his sleep. The clock by my bed says 2:30am – more than enough time to fall back asleep and still rest well before the alarm goes off at 7am. And then, the inevitable thought train kicks in. It starts slowly: I have to make sure to pull the chicken out of the freezer before I go to work. Do I have everything to cook dinner? I forgot to call my mom today – I hope she’s not mad me. I think my sister is mad at me. She hasn’t talked to me for a few days. What did I do to offend her? Is she going to stop talking to me altogether? Is she mad that I’m taking attention from her since I lost the pregnancy? And, why did the lose the pregnancy? Maybe the doctor was wrong – what if the baby was still alive?

And that’s when the thought train is full-speed ahead, and it feels like there is nothing I can do to stop it.

Anxiety is fear, worry, and stress. Anxiety is clenched fists, a tightness in your chest. It is the inability to take a deep breath, and the inability to slow your breath. Anxiety is the worry that I’ll have another miscarriage. The stress of doing everything “perfectly” to protect your next baby.

Forgiveness

Are we ready to forgive ourselves? Are we ready to forgive our bodies? Are we ready to forgive the doctor who we feel might have wronged us? Or our family member who did not reach out to us when we were hurting?

Forgiveness is one of the hardest feelings to accept, because it requires us say goodbye to something. Forgiving my body means that I first have to accept that I don’t have the body I thought I had before my pregnancy loss. Forgiveness means accepting that my family member who I thought would support me won’t be able to. However, when we forgive, we free ourselves from hard feelings. Desmond Tutu said, “…when I talk of forgiveness, I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person. A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood…”

Forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean we allow certain people back into our lives, or we approve of unwanted things occurring. Forgiveness means setting boundaries – it means I either make changes to keep you in my life, or I make changes to end our relationship.

Task for Today

Today, take time to identify the emotions that arise for you. While emotions are not specifically language, they inform our language. When I know what I am feeling, I can speak to myself in a way that validates how I feel. I understand things in a different light – emotions shed light on our experience. And, ultimately, propels us to navigate how others speak to us with regard to pregnancy loss as well.