Welcome back to the Her Fertility Podcast. In this episode, we are going to dive into the experience of pregnancy loss, and if you have experienced pregnancy loss, I am deeply sorry for your experience. Pregnancy loss is something that. I truly believe no woman should have to navigate on their own yet the statistics show that one in four pregnancies ends in a loss, and we know that women are suffering in silence after their loss.
And in this episode, we're gonna unpack that experience so that whether you have experienced loss or you have, a friend that's experienced loss, You have more support tools to use. pregnancy loss is impacting one in four pregnancies.
Statistically speaking, one in four will end in a loss. And I say that repeatedly because to me it's a wild statistic that we should be paying more attention to.
And so pregnancy loss is the loss of a pregnancy. There are of course varieties within this. You can lose a pregnancy at any point in the pregnancy. Statistically speaking, the majority are in the first trimester. But I would argue it doesn't really matter when it happens.
It is still very. Challenging to navigate. And the reason why, and I think that this is one of the most unspoken truths about pregnancy loss, is unlike other loss that we experience as humans, right? We might lose a pet or a loved one. And those are really hard experiences. Those are hard on the heart, on the mind, we feel the feeling of grief and loss and like really missing that person or pet, and that is a valid experience. Of loss, but pregnancy loss also is happening in your body. So your body is also experiencing what was being pregnant and now not being pregnant. And there is a beautiful book called The Body Keeps the Score that dives into how.
The physical body has memory and there is an experience living in your system, and this is why sometimes therapy doesn't work for people, or therapy can actually feel more triggering for somebody who's had a miscarriage because it's all in the mind when we're like talking about it.
But this is something that's happened in the body. So if we're not addressing the body as well and supporting that part of you, then it might be causing more harm than good. When we can start to see pregnancy loss as its own thing, yes, there's grief involved, there's loss involved, there's all of that, but it is its own category. It is not like other losses. Then we can start to support women in a real way who've experienced this. Now, if you've been around my work at all for any length of time, you've likely heard me talk about the nervous system and I argue, especially when it comes to loss, we have to understand what's going on with the nervous system, but we also equally need to understand what's going on with the subconscious mind.
So let's talk about both, and then at the end, I'm gonna give you some new perspectives that might help shift this for you. If you really feel. Stuck in the experience of your loss and like you don't know how you're gonna move forward and so a review of the nervous system.
We know that our nervous system has two states. It's sympathetic or survival state, and then the parasympathetic or rest and digest state, and in its survival state. It can look different for different people. So you've likely heard there's a fight, flight, freeze, fawn response. Those are not one thing.
Those are four different ways that we respond when we're in survival mode. All because our system is wired for survival. Not because you're weak, not because you can't handle it, not because of anything else other than you're human. And so your nervous system might respond to this thing that is a threat, right?
Like grief and loss are painful, and the subconscious mind's job is to keep you from pain. It's gonna perceive this then as something that's threatening because it's causing you pain. Therefore, your nervous system is going to respond with one of these four ways. So if your system is responding with fight.
This might look and sound like you are very defensive of the loss of what happened. When somebody brings it up, you immediately become angry, aggressive. You might like bite back with a like. Whatever the response is. Like, we don't talk about that, or How dare you ask me, or whatever. It looks different for different people.
Um, you feel physically tense in your body, like you are about to engage in a fight, whether you know, that comes out of your mouth or not. Um, so that would be a fight response. A flight response would be kind of the opposite, where you completely. Ignore or disregard what happened. You might be one of those people who like had a pregnancy loss and then you just like shove it, push it back anywhere in the corner and move forward.
These are those people who are like, yeah, I had a loss. No problem. Let's get pregnant again, and like completely. Fly away from the experience, and I'm saying this all with deep love and compassion. There's nothing wrong with these responses. These are just ways that we respond as human beings because we're human.
So that's fight and flight. Then there's the freeze response. The freeze looks like you literally don't breathe like you're holding your breath. You're so afraid to do anything. You feel frozen in time, like the world is moving around you and yet you are in the same place, like emotionally. You even maybe physically like you're not leaving the house like you are frozen.
That's a freeze response. And then the fun response is if you think of fawning over like, like literally not having even the strength or the ability to get up and it's just, oh, this is something that's happened. It's knocked me over. I have no energy to do anything else but be in this fawn response.
That's fun. So these are the four ways in which you might be responding to the pain of. Pregnancy loss. And again, all of these are natural, normal ways. There's nothing wrong with them and they're also not something that you have to continue to loop around and process. And you can absolutely process through them, and when I support people, especially after pregnancy loss, we absolutely work through the grief. Because if it's living in your body we don't want it to get stuck there and we need to move that out, so then we have to understand the subconscious mind. Now, the subconscious mind is that 95% of your brain that's always on that we don't have cognitive.
Control over. So we have our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our mind, the mind that can think and reason and logic. And then the subconscious is the thing running the show truly. That from childhood has been scanning your environment for threats. Why? Because it is wired for survival. And so when you're a child and you touch the hot stove, the subconscious mind is like, yikes, that's hot.
Don't do that again. And it records that as, Ooh, that's painful. Don't do that again. Well, when it comes to really anything related to infertility, especially pregnancy loss, your subconscious mind records this experience as, yikes, that's painful. Don't do that again. And the mind has a lot of different ways in which it acts to keep you safe.
And it also is informing your nervous system. But the nervous system is also informing. The mind. So because your body experienced the loss, the physical body is informing your subconscious mind that this is a painful thing, that we don't want this to happen again. And then your mind is informing your body, this is a painful thing and we don't want this to happen again.
And it can feel like this endless loop if you feel like you're on this endless. Loop of, like, I'm broken. Something's wrong with me. How am I ever gonna get pregnant again? What did I do wrong? All of those thoughts. That is just because you're human and your system is designed to keep you alive.
Not necessarily to thrive, and it's just doing its job and by thinking, oh, you know, I must have done something wrong to cause this pregnancy loss. It's my fault. What's wrong with me? What the mind is actually trying to do is to keep you safe from the pain, because if it can make sense of the loss, then.
It feels like I can control that thing in the future. And this is where we get in these internal battles with ourselves, because the truth is we likely won't know why you had a pregnancy loss. And unfortunately for us, the mind loves to make sense of things. It loves a story. We, at our core are storytellers.
There's a theory in communication that humans are homo neurons, meaning we are storytellers and we make sense of life through story. But when there isn't a story to tell, when there isn't a cause and an effect when there isn't a way to make sense of the thing that happened, the mind doesn't love that.
It doesn't love to sit with that, and that's where giving yourself something to think about. And creating the story for yourself can actually provide relief, not because we don't wanna live in reality, but because the mind is looking for something to make sense of what happened to you. The mind wants to know why this hurts so bad so that it can not do it again in the future and keep you safe.
And if you're tracking with me, then I'm going to give you some ways that you can have a new perspective on what happened so that your mind has a story to tell itself, not because this is necessarily fact or true, or like we have evidence and I think this is where we get really lost because. The social narrative is like we need the data and the evidence and the proof.
Yet there is so much unseen in fertility. There's such a magical component to it all that there is just part of it where we're not gonna have that. And if you can accept that, then we can create a story for you that isn't self degrading, that isn't putting you at blame. And that will help the mind have a full story loop that it can, you know, feed on.
And so this is where, a lot of people will turn to their religion or their belief system and lean into this is an angel in heaven, or. This was all, you know, part of the bigger plan. And if that helps you feel better, then run with it, right? Like that's fine if that's your narrative. But what I wanna offer you is maybe a different perspective and a new way to think about it. So there's a book called Spirit Babies where I first heard this idea, and the more that I work with individuals who've had loss and then gotten pregnant, the more that this idea feels actually very true to me. And so that's why I'm sharing it here again, we're in the, more magical part of all of this.
And the idea is this. That the soul wasn't lost. So while the pregnancy didn't continue, the soul was not lost, and that there is a beautiful special space somewhere where these little souls are until they come earth side to be with us here.
And instead of the soul being completely gone, it's just that that little soul returned to its safe space on, you know, the energetic side, the magical side, the rainbow side, whatever side you wanna call it. I like to think like they traveled across a rainbow bridge back to where they were before, and they're just waiting again.
It's not that they were lost, it's that they're there and they're patient and they're very loving. And even though you lost the pregnancy, you didn't lose that sweet soul.
And so I invite you to try that story on and see how it feels for you. And if it feels good, then that can be the story. That your mind is searching for and you can continue to, process the loss and then move forward in a really beautiful way where you open back up to the possibility of conception.
Just like all of the beautiful members inside the Fertility Frequency Collective are doing.
My collective is designed to help open you up to the fertility frequency, which means the openness to be fertile and conceive, and having this type of story loop can help you and I wanna share one last note here. Last night. I can't, I can't even make this up last night, so I didn't actually know I was gonna be recording this podcast today. But it is very serendipitous what I'm about to share with you.
So last night I was doing my personal meditation that. I, me and my husband do every night. We do 15 minutes of meditation before we go to bed. We keep each other accountable. I'm so grateful for that and most of the nights I try to just have an open mind and allow what comes and. Last night I was doing very good with my open mind, which isn't always easy because sometimes there's a lot going on up there.
Um, but I ha I just felt really like grounded and um, all of this sudden it was as if this sweet little girl came to me in my mind with a little piece of white paper that was folded in half. And she was so eager to hand it to me and so I took it and as I looked up, I saw that she was running back to join a bunch of her little friends and souls.
And it was as if all of these little perfect children were there and they were all reaching out to hand me their piece of paper. That was folded in half. And so, you know, I magically like grabbed a basket because only in your mind can that happen. And I like in my mind, grabbed a basket and they started filling the basket with their notes and they were so excited and like just such a feeling of love.
And I said, thank you, you know, for this moment. It was so sweet and so precious. And I just got the sense that they were asking me to take these notes to their future mamas, because this is what I do.
I work with women who are ready to be mamas, right? And so I just like confirmed. Yes, I will. I will share your notes with these beautiful women. And I opened one of the notes and it said, I love you. And like I'm getting teary eyed now talking about it because even though, yes, this was in my meditation, in my mind it felt so real.
And if you are listening to this. And it feels real for you too, then that's a message you were meant to hear for whatever reason from me right now. And so there is some sweet soul on the other side who loves you and wants you to know that. And like I said, I wasn't planning to record this podcast today, but I was working and I went on a walk and there was just this thing in me that was like, go record the podcast.
Because I had the time to do it, and I wasn't even thinking about this moment until, you know, we were kind of deep into the podcast. So I, I'm sharing it out of trust that it's landing where it needs to land and so if any of this resonates with you, I'm so glad and I hope that you will find the support that you need through my Fertility frequency collective, because in there we do lots of this support work for both your mind, your body, and your heart, and so
thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening all the way through to the end of this episode. It means so much that you're here.
Thank you for joining me on this week's episode of the Her Fertility Podcast. I am so grateful you're here. If you found this episode valuable, then I'd love for you to join me on the next one. Share it with a friend and rate the episode with a five-star review so that the podcast can reach the women who need it most.
If you have any questions about what you just heard, please connect with me on social media at herfertility.support. Find the right type of support for your fertility journey in the show notes below.