Grief and the Stubborn Taboo of Miscarriage
One of the more challenging aspects of miscarriage–besides the profound pain and sadness–is feeling like it’s not okay to express the emotions of loss. Little to no room is given to women or their partners to talk about miscarriage, let alone to grieve. Miscarriage stubbornly remains one of the last taboos.
“Usually I’m an open book, but I never felt like I could publicly show my grief,” says Rebecca, who miscarried twice and lived in constant fear of losing a third while she was pregnant with her oldest daughter. “When I did tell people, I was frustrated because it didn’t seem like they could listen, or weren’t comfortable listening, to my sadness.”
Rebecca’s experience of miscarriage itself is incredibly common. At least one in four pregnancies end in loss.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, it just comes with the territory of being a woman, being a parent. But I was legitimately sad,” Rebecca says, holding back tears. “If you’re sad when your mother dies, for instance, you get to be sad, you get to be sad out loud.
“How come I don’t get to be sad about this?”
As a clinical psychologist and someone who’s dealt with miscarriage firsthand, Dr. Jane Parker feels our society is ill-equipped to deal with grief. Our culture undervalues both intentional space and ritual ceremony for processing grief and its attendant feelings.
“We need to have space to talk about grief,” Parker says. “Space to celebrate but also respect perspectives, respect that pregnancy loss is a thing that happens in women’s lives. Normally, it’s just brushed under the rug.”
Bearing witness to grief and trauma, Parker claims, is key. The act of witnessing the powerful emotions that move through us in grief can actually bring us closer together. When those emotions are shared, we’re able to grow and heal faster.
A few weeks before I met Parker, last spring, she’d attended a grief ceremony based on the spiritual teachings of Sobonfu Somé, who passed in 2017. She was of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, whose grief rituals play an integral role in community connection and healing. Somé and her husband had a vision that Westerners need to learn these rituals because they’re out of touch with their grief and it’s causing them to destroy the world. In her own clinical work, Parker sees that repressed feelings often fester and become much bigger problems, like depression, shame, guilt, anger, and disconnection.
“It’s essential that we have other people,” Parker argues. “Because you can cry, and I can cry about my miscarriage, cry about feeling like a failed woman. But something doesn’t happen if nobody loves me through it in that moment. We need to be seen. And then we can turn around and do it for someone else.”
Science backs this up. According to researchers at Columbia University and the Dulwich Centre, the most difficult stories we so often keep to ourselves lead to significantly faster healing and greater overall wellbeing when we relay them to others. In fact, simply hearing someone else’s story conveys similarly strong psychological and physiological benefits.
“Grief comes in waves,” Parker explains. “It comes and then it’s gone. And then we’re there on the shore. We don’t know how we got here, but the wave got us here, and so now I can hold space for you.”
Parker’s own experience of grief reveals another facet of pregnancy loss: silence begets silence.
Parker feels that the internalized shame of having had a miscarriage turns into silence that then communicates unconsciously to everyone around them that they should be silent too. In her opinion, women do a great disservice to other women (and their partners, families, et al) by not breaking the silence and speaking their messy truths and sorrows.
“It’s terrible,” she groans. “Like I’m going to crawl into a hole and suffer by myself, and that’s what you should do if it happens to you. That’s the message, whether we intend that or not.” That’s certainly the message Rebecca heard.
I ask Parker what helped her out of her grief and isolation besides connecting with other women who had been through it.
“Time,” she says. Healing doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it linear.
Parker can’t stress enough the importance of sharing one’s story and the courage required to do so. This brave act presents both a personal and a broader public-health challenge. People need to be able to listen–physicians, doulas, friends, employers, partners–and prepared to act in service and with compassion.
“We heal through sharing our feelings and our stories. Space needs to be given to what is being felt, and that it’s allowed to be named and felt and seen,” Parker urges. “That’s kind of all we need to get in touch with our own capacity to heal ourselves.”
Loss presents an opportunity for connection as well as self-growth.
“When we know how to share our stories and give them voice, it’s a liberating tie that binds us to others and makes us more in touch with our own spirit and purpose.”
Parker sees a strength and resilience in herself and in her patients who are able to grieve.
“It’s so hard when you’re in it, but you’ll have so much more to offer this world and so much more appreciation for life.”
Parker prescribes a hefty dose of self-love, patience and kindness, and implores women to break the silence around pregnancy loss. After all, our voices and shared experiences are often our greatest strengths.
This post was adapted from the Miscarriage Story Project. Pseudonyms were used to protect the privacy of interviewees.
