What Is Gestational Grief And What Are Its Effects?
Creating life is a human and transcendental fact. It is an episode that completely mobilizes those who go through it. I usually say that Women do not always give birth to life; sometimes we give birth to pain.
The Argentine psychoanalyst Gabriel Rolón says: “to mourn is to have loved.” Can we love someone we have not yet met?
In a hegemonic world, structured by a capitalist mandate, oriented towards pleasure and enjoyment, talking about pain is not a mainstream topic**. Pain is boring, uncomfortable, avoided. The processes are relegated. They don’t show each other, they don’t talk. They are silenced and take with them a piece of the soul of whoever passes through them.
Freud said that mourning is a natural process, when faced with the loss of something or someone. We can say that the work of mourning is a process of psychic elaboration in which we develop mechanisms to face the loss of the object of love. In the case of gestational grief, this experience of loss arises in the context of an involuntary gestational interruption.
Pain is subjective and non-transferable. This means that each process is experienced in a unique way according to each person’s life story, and only that person can go through it. However, as a community and in the era of consciousness in which we are living, we can choose to address and integrate it together, and thus accompany the path and lighten the burden.
We plague the networks of pregnancies and births. Sharing losses remains taboo. Today it resonates with me to put it into words, to say it. Women also give birth to pain.
Being a fact that happens very often, it is difficult to express it. Because?
On the one hand, the current times do not give us room to be bad. We must soon pull ourselves together to continue being productive. “You have to look forward,” they say; and here the mandates for positivism appear.
“Everything happens for a reason”. Phrases that only intensify guilt for a person in this process for his or her discomfort.
The phases of grief
I would like to share with you the five phases of grief according to the theory of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
She divided grief into 5 stages, which develop successively; however, she later insisted that the grief process is not so linear and rigid.
1. Denial
It is a normal and natural reaction to loss.
It is usually an immediate reaction, a shock response which can bring about a state of confusion or dullness on an emotional level.
2. Anger
After the previous stage, Feelings of frustration or helplessness often appear in the face of the human inability to modify reality. This leads to the appearance of feelings of anger and anger. In this instance, the person usually attributes the blame for the loss to another factor, such as another person or even themselves. It usually happens that at this stage the woman may feel alone, misunderstood and direct her anger towards the medical staff, towards her family, towards other pregnant women, which in turn generates guilt and discomfort and reinforces the feeling of loneliness. .
It is a common saying that “hope is the last thing you lose.”
In these situations, pregnant people can avoid facing the situation, turning their attention towards a process, towards another possible pregnancy for example, not from a conscious decision, but as an avoidance mechanism, to avoid connecting with real emotion.
4. Depression
When the grieving person begins to accept the reality of the loss as definitive, we enter the stage known as depression. Feelings of sadness and hopelessness are generated, there is a tendency towards social isolation or lack of motivation. It may even be that during this specific period, life itself for that person stops making sense.
5. Acceptance
After this path, which sometimes, as we saw, is not necessarily linear, acceptance comes. It is a state of calm, associated with the understanding of death and other losses as natural phenomena in life.
The inevitability of loss is integrated. Of course we are talking about processes of temporary closure, since grief is spiraling, we always go through the same places again, only with a different meaning.
Concluding…
The only way to go through grief is to go through it. This is connecting with the emotion that emerges. No judgments, no demands. It is precisely the fact of putting into words, elaborating, resignifying, sharing and integrating, which will lead us to a process of acceptance of natural grief. As part of life.
For those who go through it at some point, I am completely available to listen, accompany and support. I invite you to share the idea that grief has bad press but the lighter it is, the more it is sustained online.
