Grief and Coping After Miscarriage
Just as there are a wide range of emotions one can experience as a result of infertility and loss, there are a myriad of ways to cope.
Women struggling with infertility or experiencing multiple miscarriages describe a wide range of emotions. There is almost always a profound sense of sadness and grief related to the loss of becoming a mother and growing a family. There is also commonly anger and resentment for being the one to deal with this problem. Some women feel a tremendous sense of guilt or shame as if there is something fundamentally wrong with them or their bodies or that they have done something wrong to ‘deserve this.’ Some women vacillate between feeling numb and experiencing excruciating emotional and psychological pain, loneliness or despair.
Weathering these intense emotions and the psychological roller coaster of dealing with infertility can take a toll on women’s emotional and physical health, one's sense of self and relationship with a significant other and at times friends and family. Just as there are a wide range of emotions one can experience as a result of infertility and loss, there are a myriad of ways to cope.
The greatest challenge is finding your path that allows you to fully mourn this loss and move forward in a way that is in line with the life you want to live. There are some fundamental elements to this process. Good emotional, psychological, and physical health builds on a very basic foundation of getting good sleep, eating well, drinking water, and exercising regularly. These behaviors foster and support resilience and the strength needed to tackle these strong emotions, grief and difficult conversations with your partner, friends and family.
Next, recognize that you are not alone and no one should walk though these life experiences without support. In my experience women often come to me because they have never in their lifetime had to ask for help or rely on others for emotional, psychological or physical help. Helping women become clear on what sort of support they want and need, identifying who is the best person to ask for help and how best to ask for help in order to get your needs met is often a first step in building supports.
Finding your coping mechanisms after a miscarriage
Next, identify how you cope. What do you do when you feel all of this? Commonly, and understandably, women want to avoid these feeling. Avoidance can take on may forms and may look like not going places or seeing people because they remind you of this misery, or you have a glass or two of wine, beer or whatever, or you throw yourself into your work or activities that keep your mind busy. Avoidance behaviors only prevent you from processing grief and prolong misery. Not avoiding however feels insurmountable when you don’t have the tools to cope. This is often another place where I see women entering treatment or therapy. They recognize that their avoidance is not actually working to help them, it often hurts them, but they can’t seem to find any other way to cope that feels safe or alleviates their pain.
Avoidance behaviors only prevent you from processing grief and prolong misery.
For some women there is fear that if they allow themselves to really feel the pain of loss, they will never recover. They imagine they will never stop crying or it will never stop hurting. Grief has a way of never stopping until we really feel it, embrace it and let it go. This allows us to fully digest the loss, and once we do, we can then let it go. Trusting in this process with a loved one or professional can be very helpful in moving through grief.
Dr. Constance Guille is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at MUSC. Dr. Guille completed her psychiatry residency training and sub-specialty training in perinatal psychiatry at Yale University. She established and is currently the Director of the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Program at MUSC. The mission of the program is to improve the mental health of pregnant and postpartum women through clinical care, education, teaching, and clinical research.
