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Issue 2
Coping and growing through miscarriage
Adriana Peñaloza-Clarke and Ingrid Collins explain how they support their clients through this painful process.
No name, no face, no date of birth,
No hour of death, no plot of earth.
You never breathed or kicked or cried
And yet, for us, you lived and died.
(Read at the Whittington Hospital "Act of Remembrance", October 2002)
There are few events in life more traumatic than a miscarriage. It affects the lives of the mother, her partner and the wider family whether some of them have been made consciously aware of the pregnancy or not.
As soul therapists, when we join in the work of healing the effects of a miscarriage we consider that this involves addressing many different areas. We look at the effects of the miscarriage on the emotional life of the person, in their sense of identity and the stories they carry about themselves, in their physical body and in their soul energy. We also consider the role of the spiritual being that had manifested physically as the potential new member of the family.
Even though we respect how different each individual case is, we find there are commonalities in the work of grieving. Miscarriage is something that happens to people; it is not something they choose to do, nor something they actively make happen. For this reason, it is usually difficult to deal with. People are left to deal with the painful consequences of something they were not active agents in provoking. For some, it creates a sense that they cannot take an active role in working towards healing. This is a very disempowering experience that often spills into other areas of their lives.
A miscarriage is a loss. The emotional work that a person or a family needs to do is similar to that which we need to do when we lose any other loved one. In the case of a miscarriage, the space for acknowledging the loss and grieving is in many cases denied. When we are confronted with a painful reality, we are tempted to think that it has not happened, and in this way we can avoid the difficult emotions that go with it. Miscarriage is one of those experiences which we can easily pretend hasn't happened. If we do so, we hope, the pain will go away and we'll go back to being OK. Unfortunately, things do not 'disappear', and in many cases, when we start working with people, the effects can be seen to be very clearly permeating other areas of their life. For example, a woman who had suffered two miscarriages came for Soul Therapy sessions because she was aware of how she had changed from being a positive, happy outgoing person to someone who was not enjoying life as she used to; she was losing hope that her new business could do well, and was avoiding meeting her friends. She thought she was indulging in self-pity if she allowed herself to be sad for the miscarriages, and therefore, she didn't. After all, "the babies were never really there". The big question here is, weren't they?
From the instant a woman is aware that she is pregnant, her whole experience of the present and the future changes. Even if we 'don't get our hopes up', even if we try not to allow ourselves to construct future dreams which include this new being, we can't avoid relating. And in the same way that we need to say good-bye to anyone who dies, we need to say good-bye to the soul, the baby that we had and that we dreamt of, and to the dreams of the mutually shared future. In Soul Therapy we have a beautiful intervention that we find has great healing effects in our clients. After talking with our client about what has happened in her life, we guide her to go to a safe place and invite her to have a special spiritual encounter with this being. To give her a name, greet him/her, and say good-bye. As we carefully guide our clients through the process, we give spiritual hands-on healing. Every time we have worked with a client in this way, the effect has been a very positive, emotional, healing one. People actively participate in saying good-bye, acknowledge what has happened, and have a sense of completing something that was unfinished. This usually allows them to move on in their lives, finding, to their surprise, that the 'strange' changes that had taken place in other areas of their lives suddenly disappear.
There is a very powerful realisation and process of understanding at the spiritual level that can be helpful for people who have experienced miscarriages. In our lives we tend to think of pregnancies as something that we have control over, and the loss of pregnancy as something we can convince ourselves about (e.g.: it didn't have a life yet, as it had never been born; it isn't a baby, it's just a group of cells until it is a live birth, and so on), something we can make deceptions about, something of which we are the agents. Even in the case of unplanned pregnancies, we tend to think that all that happens is of our doing. From a spiritual perspective we look at things in a multi-perspective way, and by doing so, we also consider the input of the soul that comes into the pregnancy. From this perspective, we believe that a child also chooses its parents and the moment he/she comes into this world. All souls need different times in this world.
Some need many years, some a few days. In Soul Therapy we take into account the purpose and the project of the soul that comes into a woman's womb, even if only for a few brief days or months. When we do that, we open ourselves to the awareness that there is someone else participating in what has happened. Other purposes and aims are being fulfilled. This has a liberating, comforting effect on the parents, some of whom have never before allowed themselves to admit ideas of spirituality, and consequently of the soul's purpose, into their conscious awareness.
Finally, it is important to address the effects that a miscarriage has on our ability to dream about our future, to hope, to be constructive. Many times we hear our clients say "I want to be pregnant, but I do not allow myself to get excited, to think about it, because I am terrified of the disappointment if it happens again". By creating this kind of 'protective device', we place ourselves under impossibly difficult circumstances. We cannot avoid hoping, sending a positive energy into the future. Healthy human beings naturally tend to do this all the time. By trying to stop and oppose this process we have to invest an incredible amount of energy into a negative process against the natural flow of our lives. The by-product of this is high levels of anxiety, low energy and restlessness.
The saddest thing is that even if we work very hard on instructing ourselves not to hope, not to dream, if things go wrong we will be equally sad and disappointed. So we embark on this huge, difficult task, for no real gain at all. The only thing we achieve is to live the present in a very hard way. If things go well, why have we spent so many days giving ourselves a hard time, working against our natural instinct? If things go wrong, we will be as disappointed and sad, anyway. So what is the benefit?
We encourage our clients to let the process flow. If they don't feel tempted to indulge in dreams of the future, that is all right. What is important is not to actively work on opposing by swimming against the tide of hope. In Soul Therapy we deeply believe that the more positive energy we put into our future, the more it will be there for us, in one way or another.
"Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells".
(Seamus Heaney)
Ingrid is an educational psychologist, registered spiritual healer. You can contact her on 020 7935 0023. She is the author of A Year of Spirituality, MQ Publications, £6.99.
Adriana is a a co-director of the Soul Therapy Centre in London she trains groups in the different techniques of this, both in England and abroad.
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© Juno Magazine 2007 |
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