On Miscarriage and Space Holding

Holding Space…

How to be a better listener

At the beginning of 2020 right before the world turned upside down with covid… I experienced a miscarriage at the end of my first trimester. For a time it alos turned my world upside down. I was shocked that it happened to me, that as a birth worker I knew so little about loss, that it was so common. I was shocked at how despairing I felt- the anger, hopelessness and self-doubt. But what most surprised me was the way other people responded to my situation in real time and how vulnerable I was to their words. 

You see women have a tendency to feel shame around just about anything to do with sexuality, fertility, loss, birth, and mothering. And we are so quick to blame ourselves. It’s even in the language, “I lost the baby.”  Of course we didn’t lose it.  In fact most miscarriages are due to a chromosomal mix up, not a glass of wine, working out too hard or not taking “care of ourselves.” Because of this initial response toward shame, we often isolate ourselves in our grief. So after some space and some therapy I decided to put some words to some feelings. 

Writing about my miscarriage, grief and the wisdom that was birthed from this experience has not been linear.  If you’re looking for a detailed play by play of the miscarriage itself, this is not it, but maybe I’ll share that too eventually for anyone seeking wisdom around that process. This is more of an exploration of how emotion moves and what it means to hold space for that.

The idea of space holding is a biggie in circles of birthworkers and other spiritually inclined folks- but often I think we get it wrong. Holding space is the easiest thing in the world, and yet in a culture programmed to always be “doing something” it can also be the hardest. To hold space for someone else is to sit with someone in whatever experience they’re having. You aren’t pitying them- there is no higher and lower dynamic, instead you are being a companion to their process. And you trust that without your interference, they will move through it, all on their own. You cannot hold space and try to make someone feel better at the same time, because then what could be a shared experience of humanity becomes a savior/victim dynamic, with no one winning. 

The thing is, we are all uncomfortable with discomfort. Other people’s suffering makes us uneasy and we want to fix it. We want to back away from it. We want to look on the bright side, encourage positivity, or say things like “at least it isn’t...”. We want to do anything except sit in the icky silence of someone’s tears, or the wallowing of their darkest feelings. But the thing is, when they are witnessed, those feelings shift all on their own. Think about a child who has fallen down. If you don’t react but simply hold space for them, they will cry it out and often within moments go back to playing.

What happens if we consistently encourage others to dust it off too quickly and keep going? They stuff their feelings down and become armored. They learn to avoid vulnerability, to avoid being seen, and therefore lack a healthy emotional life. Emotion is meant to move, that is what it does, but when you refuse to feel it or you can’t witness another feeling it, you cut it off at the legs and it can’t go anywhere. The feeling gets stuck. When I was alone and gave myself the space to feel my grief would move. It changed shape over time, it ebbed and flowed in waves. When a well- meaning friend would try to bright-side it or make me “feel better” the feeling would get stuck and it would often take days to thaw the defense mechanism so it could move again. 

Knowing how to hold space is important for both grief and birth. We cannot rush grief, it has its own rhythm.  And we cannot rush birth because it has it’s own rhythm too- one that is often exclusively up to the mother and baby. The key I’m finding when it comes to holding space for another is that we first have to hold that space for ourselves. If we push away our feeling, talk ourselves out of them, or try to create meaning too soon, we won’t experience the feeling as it is, and eventually find the lesson. 

For doulas, there is a deeper question this brought up in me. I experienced some difficulties with this pregnancy before I lost it. I had a feeling, for weeks, that something just wasn’t right.  A primal fear really, that would come up at 3 am after my third time getting up to pee in the night.  It was a gnawing anxiety that kept me up for hours.  Because I’m very much a natural birth person, who trusts the physiology of the body, I didn’t want to go in for an ultrasound. I also got advice that everything was probably fine, to trust the process. I wanted to trust the process too, so I over-rode that fear, which was really my intuition speaking to me.  

What this showed me (in a visceral way) is that sometimes fear is our intuition giving us a message… and the only person who can discern that is the person experiencing it. So when it comes to supporting clients in the birth world, the kindest, most supportive thing we can do is dialogue with their fears as they arise. Don’t brush them off, don’t tell a story about someone it all worked out perfectly for, don’t push your own narrative or re-frame. If I can support my clients to discover their own inner wisdom, I’m doing my job right. But this is a hard concept to put to words, and it’s even harder to put into practice. 

What I wanted deep down, was clarity. I wanted to go to my midwife and get an ultrasound, something I had previously sworn off during pregnancy. And what I needed was for someone to parse that out with me and give me permission to change my plans. I finally did, and I found out that even though my body looked and felt pregnant, the baby had stopped growing and there was no heartbeat. I knew exactly when it happened, because that’s when the fear arose for me. That’s when the sleepless nights started, the grief just under the surface started to bubble. And once I knew, I could surrender to what was happening, to what I had lost. I could hold space for myself to process reality. 

Birth and grief are not so different, and in some ways I feel like in learning to let go of my plans, my expectations, and finally of my pregnancy, I’m better prepared to hold space for birth to happen- whenever that time comes. I will be better doula and hopefully a better friend. Because none of us are in control here on this Earth, and birth, life, and death move to their own mysterious rhythms.