HEALING TAKES TIME AND THAT’S OK

Miscarriage is a real grief, and for some people it can take a long time to heal, and that’s OK. The women I see in my therapy practice struggle with two things the most: one is not being understood and not having their story heard, and the other is the layer of guilt and self-blame they carry. We do not understand the reasons behind the vast majority of miscarriages, and women will often turn that in on themselves.

There’s a lingering stigma and misunderstanding around miscarriage, and women often feel they’re not entitled to grieve, especially not if it’s earlier in their pregnancy or if they already have a child. In the latter scenario, people might say, “Aren’t you lucky you already have a child” or “At least you can get pregnant”. There’s an assumption that their grief must be less because they have a child, and that they can just crack on and have another. But that woefully bypasses what a pregnant woman has experienced. She’s lost a child – who would have been a future sibling – and her imaginations of a future family.

As a psychotherapist – and having experienced miscarriage myself – one of the most powerful things I can do is encourage them to tell their story, and this doesn’t often start with the pregnancy test; it can start with “I met my partner, we fell in love and decided to try for a family…” For many women it can help to be listened to – to be looked in the eye by someone with compassionate curiosity, and to tell them what happened.

Julia Bueno is a psychotherapist and author of The Brink of Being: Talking About Miscarriage (Little, Brown)