When You Don’t Recognize Yourself After Pregnancy Loss
After pregnancy loss, we are often confronted with the hard reality that we don’t feel like ourselves. We don’t recognize the person in the mirror. We don’t recognize our anger, sadness, or negativity. We don’t recognize ourselves as the friend who doesn’t want to hear another pregnancy announcement. We don’t recognize ourselves as the employee/ employer who doesn’t care about workplace dynamics. We don’t recognize ourselves as a partner who is easily irritated or doesn’t want to be touched. We might not have energy to engage in hobbies we used to enjoy or have the capacity to remember birthdays. These can be scary realities to face when we are already feeling hopeless and defeated.
After loss, so much of our energy goes toward grieving. Even when we don’t consciously notice it, there is a background “buzzing” that depletes our resources. We are left with fragments of our usual capacity and yet, we might have the same expectations of ourselves- to remember things, to enjoy things, to show up to events. I often walk my clients through the reality that we aren’t ourselves after loss. That when the rug has been ripped out from under us, we are scrambling to make sense of a world that has lost its security and predictability. Particularly after child loss, our brain struggles to comprehend a loss that goes against nature. As parents, we aren’t prepared to pick out an urn, to plan a funeral, to live a life without our child. So, to exist in a reality we can’t possibly fathom, our identity is required to shift and adapt.
Some of these changes are temporary - like disrupted sleep or heightened irritability. Others may be more enduring, such as a shift in perspective that clarifies what truly matters. When a client tells me they are struggling with their identity in loss, I affirm that.
“Yes, you have to be different. The you before this earth-shaking loss doesn’t exist anymore. You know too much. You have felt too much. You can’t go back to that innocence. And that is so painful. Our loss of innocence is a secondary loss we must mourn. But not all the things that have changed - or will change -are negative.”
Precious Scars Counseling is named after the practice of Kintsugi- the art of rebuilding broken pottery with gold. The piece looks different than it did before, it has visible seams where there was once symmetry. But it isn’t ugly or less valuable. There is beauty in those precious scars. After loss, we need time and space to rebuild those cracks and fill them with gold. It is painful and time consuming, but so worth the effort.
If you’re struggling to recognize yourself after pregnancy or child loss, you don’t have to navigate that alone. Therapy can provide space to grieve not just who you lost, but who you used to be- and who you’re becoming.
