Immediate Aftermath of Miscarriage
The falling hormone levels in your body after a miscarriage might magnify your sad feelings into full-blown depression, but this effect should fade within a few weeks. Your feelings may range from sadness to anger to depression. You may feel as if your body failed you, especially if you had wanted the baby for a long time. You may even feel guilty, wondering if something you did caused the miscarriage. You may feel a temptation to review your entire medical history and everything you did during the pregnancy in order to find a reason why it happened, but try to resist the temptation. Miscarriage causes rarely have anything to do with anything you did.
Facing Daily Life After a Miscarriage
You may feel like you see babies and pregnancy everywhere you look after a loss. TV commercials, baby shower invitations, and even walking past the diaper aisle in the grocery store may begin to bother you. You may feel jealous of pregnant women and mothers of new babies, especially those who seem to get pregnant easily. If so, your feelings are normal and valid, but knowing that may not make you feel better. Give yourself space to grieve. Expect to have to deal with the five stages of grief:
DenialAngerBargainingDepressionAcceptance
Friends and family may provide comfort, additional stress, or both. They may be unable to relate to your feelings and say unintentionally hurtful things to you, even if they’re trying to help. If your support network isn’t helping, consider finding a support group.
Relationships and Miscarriage
Pregnancy loss may bring partners closer together, or it may throw severe strain into the relationship. Men and women frequently react differently to loss. Although men typically report similar grief initially, they might talk about their feelings less and move past the emotional part of the loss more quickly than women. Women may interpret this as men not caring about a miscarriage, and men sometimes respond by believing that women dwell too much on the pregnancy loss. Couples need to share their feelings and lean on each other through the experience. Men should remember that women might feel the loss very deeply and might need more time and more talking to get past the grief. Women need to understand that even if men do not grieve as long or need to talk as much, men do care about and grieve miscarriages.
Specific Tips to Cope With Miscarriages
These tips may also be helpful in coping with your grief:
Honor your baby with a statue of an angel, a pendant (numerous online retailers sell miscarriage memorial jewelry), a tree or a special garden Keep a journal Find a support group Take time off
