970x125
My husband was at work when I might have miscarried. I was lying on the couch in our basement, zoning out to cable news, too nauseous to move. I had been showing what my doctor told us were symptoms of pregnancy—extreme nausea, breast changes, cramping, and fatigue—too early for a test. We had been hoping—praying—I was pregnant with a baby girl. But then, as I lay on the couch, my period started.
The blood didn’t seem real. I wondered if anything was. I felt the cramping but didn’t feel it, its weightiness in my body. I was alone both with the emotional agony and the sense of dissociation from my body.
Trauma Disconnected Me From My Body
I had experienced a bout of psychosis 10 years earlier after abruptly ceasing to take an antipsychotic. Since then, however, I’d rebuilt, developing a professional career in communications, marrying, and earning a master’s degree. Now, it was critical to me that I trust my mind: I had been pregnant. And I had lost that pregnancy.
But still, as the days passed, becoming weeks and months, the realness of my experience didn’t sink in. Of course, most women wouldn’t grasp the profundity of a miscarriage soon after it occurred. But I struggled with dissociation. This loss was real, but it had no clear location for me—physically, emotionally, or socially.
I have long struggled with symptoms of complex trauma (C-PTSD), which includes the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but also difficulty managing intense emotions, feelings of worthlessness, and relationship difficulties. Sometimes, I’ve felt profoundly distant from the world and my own physical self; in the past, I experienced such intense emotional pain, I self-harmed. After baby loss, I dissociated from my body’s experience and my own grief. I could barely cry.
Miscarriage as Ambiguous Loss
Coined by Pauline Boss in the 1970s, the term ambiguous loss refers to a bereavement that goes unacknowledged culturally and familially and has no resolution. A miscarriage, marked by no social rite like a funeral, can resist closure in this way.
For me, baby loss didn’t seem real. A whole future had shattered: I’d dreamed of busying myself in the kitchen, baking bread, with an infant sleeping in a playpen at my feet. My husband had imagined strolling down a sidewalk with me, a child between us, holding our hands: “a sort of bridge,” he’d said.
Trauma’s Impact on Interoception
But, in the end, it wasn’t that society was preventing me from closure, but rather my own C-PTSD symptoms, which included my difficulty getting in touch with my body—my difficulty with interoception.
Interoception is a person’s ability to feel their body’s sensations and interpret them, then act. You are hungry, realize it, and eat. But different conditions like depersonalization-derealization disorder, eating disorders, and PTSD can disrupt a person’s ability to sense and interpret their body’s feelings, according to the Cleveland Clinic. People who struggle with interoception might have high anxiety and difficulty managing their emotions. Like me, they can have a high pain tolerance.
My loss was ambiguous—but it was also happening inside a system that trauma had wired for disconnection. As time passed, any mention of our shattered hopes and dreams made me want to cry. But I couldn’t.
Releasing Grief
Part of me felt relief, though. We had decided it was for the best that we didn’t become parents: I needed to focus on my health, to have the time and space for self-care. I could so easily destabilize if intensely stressed. Though I’d only experienced psychosis once, I still have occasional bouts of paranoia.
I have to take care of myself, I would think. As sad as I was, childlessness seemed safer.
But I remained disconnected even from the relief. I told myself that I had become a mother, if only for a moment. Nothing clicked, though. I couldn’t feel my grief, my joy.
We share rituals for grief, a language surrounding mourning. And we want our griefs acknowledged: a sympathy card, a home-cooked meal dropped off by a friend, a simple “How are you doing?” But this loss of mine had gone unacknowledged by others—but also by me.
Society has a set of “grieving rules,” Kenneth Doka first suggested in 1989, an unwritten code that specifies when, where, for how long, and for whom people should grieve. Sometimes, these rules are written: Personnel policies dictate how many days off a person is allowed for what type of loss.
But loss doesn’t follow a playbook—so many of us experience what Doka called “disenfranchised grief.” These losses are invisible and so aren’t communally processed. Certainly, miscarriage is a disenfranchised grief. So, for that matter, is the grief accompanying a mental illness diagnosis.
Dissociation was protecting me from my grief. But, as long as I dissociated, my loss would go unintegrated. If I remained out of touch with my body, this grief would be unresolved. What, I wondered, would it mean to come back to my body and its pain?
Sinking Back Into the Body
Recently, during a PTSD episode, I began to breathe deeply, trying to calm myself with the belly breathing a therapist had once introduced to me. As my stomach rose and fell with each breath, feelings flooded me. A tear ran down my face. Then another. And another.
I began to weep gently. Suddenly, I was moving into my grief—and then out of it again, out and in, out and in—with each wave of breath. Suddenly, I felt my grief, a heaviness in my chest I hadn’t been able to feel before.
In the end, I didn’t seek to feel my grief. But when I slowed down, it came.
Discovering My Breath
In the weeks that followed, I continued to do regular belly breathing. I enjoyed these respites from the stress of daily life, these brief moments to reconnect to my body and its wisdom. My body was wise, I suddenly perceived. And, as I sank into my breath, I began to feel more spiritually connected. Meditating, I would pray, too.
In a study of U.S. college students’ responses to the 9/11 terrorist attack, Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues found that certain students were more resilient: those who also experienced positive emotions, like gratitude for their own safety and deeper love for their community, were able to thrive despite the emotional blow.
As I breathed—and even began to do the occasional yoga flow—I reconnected with my faith, which has always been an important part of my life, but also gets pushed aside when I dissociate. But now, greeting the new day with a sun salutation, I feel the presence of God. Reflecting on Fredrickson’s research, I suspect I’ve been growing more resilient with each deep breath.
A year after my hopes for a child were shattered, my grief now has a location—my body. And, as I’m breathing into my loss, I’m discovering, not closure yet, but a still point.
