Therapy for Support with Pregnancy Loss & Baby Loss
If you have experienced the loss of a pregnancy or the loss of a baby, you may struggle to label or talk about your experience. If you have talked about your loss with others, you might have felt unsupported, unacknowledged, or misunderstood. Or maybe, aside from with your partner, you haven’t talked about the loss of your baby or your pregnancy with anyone at all. You may find yourself feeling isolated, overwhelmed, anxious, sad, numb, or stuck as you try to process and wade through the waves of grief on your own.
The loss of a pregnancy and the loss of baby tends to be misunderstood, ignored, and minimized in our culture. Even those who love and care for you may not know what to say, and their words may come off as dismissive or hurtful. For example, often with good intentions, people make harmful comments when someone has experienced a miscarriage, such as “at least you know you can pregnant” and “at least you weren’t that far along”.
A main focus of my practice is supporting women and birthing parents who have experienced the loss of a very much wanted pregnancy or child. I am invested in supporting women and birthing parents of any gender (and non-birthing parents of any gender) who have experienced any type of perinatal loss and are needing support with their grieving process. I know how hard it can be to find people who understand and can wholeheartedly meet you where you’re at with empathy. My main approach in therapy is to use a grief and mourning lens. I want to support you as your process your thoughts, feelings, and sense of loss, while also helping you explore strategies to cope, identify meaningful rituals, and find ways to memorialize the child you longed for or the child you loved. In my role as a mental health professional, my role is not to make the grief go away, but to provide support and companionship inside your grief (to quote Megan Devine). In addition, if feels helpful, I can also utilize cognitive-behavioral strategies to help you identify and reflect on negative core beliefs you may hold about yourself, attitudes and rules you may hold about the world around you, and unhelpful automatic thoughts.
I have the most experience supporting clients who have experienced an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage (the most common form of pregnancy loss), recurrent pregnancy loss (two or more consecutive pregnancy losses), and termination for medical reasons (for example, terminating a pregnancy due to a prenatal fetal anomaly or because the mother’s health or life is at risk).
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
Read more about perinatal loss and coping strategies here (a post in my blog called Bigger Than The Whole Sky and Loss Moms/Parents)
Together, we can work toward:
✔️ Acknowledging the loss you feel, finding outlets for grief, and allowing yourself to mourn for as long as you need
✔️ Finding healthy ways to express your emotions that may accompany the loss of a pregnancy or baby, including sadness, anger, frustration, powerlessness, isolation, and loneliness
✔️ Developing strategies to cope with grief and other feelings that may accompany grief, such as depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and medical trauma. This includes both short-term strategies to help you process and get through the present moment, as well as more long-term strategies such as ritualizing or memorializing loss in in a way that is meaningful to you.