8 Ways to *Not* Support Your Friend Who Has Lost a Baby

Hello friends! One of my therapy specialties is supporting families grieving perinatal (miscarriage and stillbirth) and infant loss. This specialty is born out of my own story, one which I may share here someday. Most therapists work with what they know, and I know fertility struggles, miscarriage and infant loss intimately. I wish I didn't know this type of grief at all sometimes. Because I know this topic so well, I also know the not so helpful ways that people try to assist when a family is grieving the loss of their pregnancy or baby. Here is a list of 8 ways to *not* support your friend (or family member) who has lost a baby:

1. Poor Comfort Technique: "You can always have another." It's number one on this list for a reason. When people have just told you they have lost a pregnancy or a child, the last thing they want to hear is about the baby or babies they *might* get to carry in the future. Also, it's insensitive to those families that find achieving pregnancy difficult. Future children/pregnancies aren't guaranteed so short of you being able to see the future and interpret it accurately, just don't say this one at all.

2. Don't say this: "At least you're able to get pregnant." I heard this one at least once, and I have to say, not helpful. It was like, 'Yes, thank you for that. I have been pregnant five times and have one living child. That is not something I want to be reminded of when I am telling you my story.' And, at certain points in our family's story, I would have given anything not to experience pregnancy again because it meant possibly braving yet another loss, and I wasn't sure if my marriage or my heart could take it.

3. Please for the love of everything, don't say this: "Everyone has one." It's factually incorrect, and it's not a normalizing response, like you think it is. This response is trivializing a family's grief. And, even if everyone did experience a miscarriage, does that make their loss any less real? Does it matter any less?

4. Poor Comfort Technique: "There's always adoption." Oh dear, let's not start with problem solving as a listening technique. It never works the way it is intended. And, adoption is not part of every family's story, nor should it be. It is a special process that should be entered into with excitement, peace and joy, not suggested as a 'back up plan' for a family experiencing miscarriage, fertility or infant loss. Frankly, it's none of our business what each couple or family chooses in regards to growing their family. Our job, as a loving family member or friend, is to offer support and happiness, no matter how their family comes to be!

5. Giving weird gifts. This one is hard for people. Hearing about babies dying or miscarriages throws people into a tailspin. 'Babies aren't supposed to die.' So, what do people do when they have no words? They buy gifts, some of which have no business being bought, and some of which send the wrong message no matter how thoughtful the giver was in selecting it.

6. Forgetting to inquire about mom's physical health after suffering a miscarriage or pregnancy loss. Pregnancy is hard on the female body, and most miscarriages are painful and women are often unprepared for this level of pain. Asking the mom how she is feeling and if there is anything we can do to support her physical healing is key.

7. Not respecting family/maternity leave after the loss. If a friend, coworker or family member is taking time off work after a miscarriage, stillbirth or pregnancy loss, give them that time. They need it to physically heal, hold their cracked hearts and be with their main supports. Family leave should be granted to any family suffering such a loss, but it is often not. Advocate for it, if you are a supervisor at a company or an agency. Advocacy brings about change.

8. Bringing up your own loss. Remember, the key to listening is to just be present. If your friend or family member asks you about your experience, then that is your cue to share, but otherwise, it is best to not bring up your grief/loss. Empathy is sitting with people in their pain. Sympathy is looking down on people and saying, "Whew! It looks bad down there. Let me tell you about a time it was worse for me..."

Since this blog is also about helping, here are 4 ways to support your friend through this period of grief:

1. Offer to help in tangible ways. Ask to bring a meal/start a meal train. Inquire if a cleaning service would be helpful. Ask them to make you a list of chores and a time you can come by and help. Offer to watch their other children if they have them so they can rest.

2. If you choose to send a gift, ask the family what would be meaningful to them. Tailor it to their belief system around the afterlife and make it tasteful. A great example of this is that a family member of ours asked us if a religious statue for our garden would be welcome and then sent us a link so we could select our own. It was delivered within two weeks. I still look at that statue and smile.

3. Ask about their baby. Ask about their experience. People want to know that you remember their baby, that you hear them and see their anguish.

4. Listen. Deeply. Listen to understand by asking thoughtful questions, and then prepare yourself to listen more than once, as grief often comes in waves. Give them the gift of your time and patience throughout this process.

Know that all of us have flubbed up in this arena at least once. It's hard to know what to say or do when someone tells you they've lost a pregnancy or that their baby has died. Hopefully this post can serve as a guide in the future.

And if you've suffered loss, know that I am holding you in my heart, right next to my love for my sweet babies that I believe are in Heaven.

Take care of yourself,

Book Review: 'Maybe You Should Talk to Someone'

Good Monday Morning! Today, I thought we should kick off with a book review. Some of you may know that I co-lead a therapist book club, and I LOVE reading. Anything really. For fluff, I read suspense, mystery, or romance novels. For work, I read books written by therapists. In the therapy room, I assign books sometimes as 'homework' for my clients. Bibliotherapy is highly effective and highly under-utilized by therapists and clients alike. Here's a link to a study about bibliotherapy if you're interested in its efficacy in improving mental health symptoms, specifically anxiety or depression. Since I want my blog to be a useful place for clients and people who otherwise may not be able to afford therapy, I thought I would give you a few book reviews to help jumpstart your 'To Be Read' list.

'Maybe You Should Talk to Someone' by Lori Gottlieb holds a special place in my heart. It's a memoir of Lori's experience with an existential crisis in her thirties and forties, and how she navigates attending therapy for herself while holding space for her clients. It is, hands down, the best book I have read about psychotherapy in a long time. It's funny, it's real, it's warm. Her stories and her clients' stories shine through each page as a beacon of hope for all of us.

To give you some context, I would like to set the stage of where my life was when I read this book. In the year prior to me picking up this book, my first daughter had died of a congenital birth defect and was stillborn. I was navigating fertility issues, recurrent miscarriages, and the heaviness of grief in my marriage, which was still very young and untested. I'm not certain how I came across Lori's book, but from the moment I opened it up, I felt like she was speaking to me.

Lori tackles everything in this book: grief, trauma, broken relationships, love, sex, cancer, death. You name it, and somehow she has managed to share a client's story that resonates with that particular theme. She shows all of us her vulnerability in going to therapy for the *first time* as a therapist herself. Wendell, her therapist, is witty, warm and unpredictable. He helps her find herself again, and wrestle with her fears of dying.

My favorite quote in the whole book is this: "People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical. We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when it will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we're all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive."

When people ask me to recommend books about therapy, this is often my first pick. You will laugh, you will cry, and at the end, you will be grateful for the time you spent with this book open on your lap. You can purchase it here. Let me know what you think about the book in the comments below or send me an email. I'd love to discuss it further with you!

Anxiety Busters: Welcome your Thoughts

Hello, hello! I can't wait to hear from you about your sunshine and sweat challenge is going. It's helped me this week to refocus on spending more time outside with intentional movement. I hope it's helped you reset or reduce your anxiety symptoms as well.

We're on to our final anxiety buster tip: Welcome your Thoughts. I'll explain what I mean by that

in just a moment.

Let's set the scene for you first: You woke up this morning and you felt your anxiety already lingering from poor sleep the night before. Your mind drifts to prepping for the day ahead, and instantly you are filled with dread. You think to yourself, "Why can't I get it together like everyone else? What is WRONG with me?" Then you feel bad for thinking those thoughts and you attempt to push them down. Your brain then rebels even further and introduces an image of you crashing your car on the freeway while driving to work. "Whoa! Don't think about that, don't dwell on that. Quit thinking about that," you mumble

to yourself as you attempt to get ready for the day. The anxious thoughts increase, and you feel worse and worse as the day goes on. In fact, the more you try to push down these anxious and unhelpful thoughts, the more intense and intrusive they get.

Whew. That's a scene that I know feels familiar to many of us. It's like I was in your brain for a second, wasn't it? I know what the anxious brain sounds like, because I have one as well. Mine is very creative when it comes to worst case scenarios.

Let's break down what is going wrong in the picture we painted above. Anxiety typically works like this: activating event+ thought= consequences (namely the behavioral or emotional responses we ultimately exhibit). In this particular case, we saw the activating event, which was getting ready for work after a poor night's sleep + the negative thoughts about self and the intrusive images of crashing your car while driving to work = increased anxiety response all day long.

What can we do to break up the formula above and reduce our anxiety response? We 'welcome the thought.' The mistake many of us make with anxious thoughts is we attempt to push them down, much like you would push a beach ball beneath the water and hope it doesn't pop back up again. We all know what happens in that case. The ball not only pops up above the waves again, but it also pops up even higher than before. It's similar with anxious thoughts. When we attempt to shame them into going away or push them down, they come back either in the form of more thoughts or increased physical symptoms related to your anxiety. Welcoming the thought would look like: When our brain introduces the image of the car crash, like in the scenario earlier, we would say internally, "oh hey there anxiety, I hear you. You're trying to protect me. Thank you for showing up today. I think I've got this." Then we take a deep breath, and we repeat it every time a thought or image like that appears. We 'welcome' the thoughts by thanking our anxiety for showing up as a protective part.

Your anxious part loves to project worst case scenarios as a way to “prepare” you for, and thus potentially prevent future loss. The problem is some things in life— no amount of worrying could prevent them or the emotional fallout afterwards. Ask any mom who’s had a child die. Or a widower. Or a young man diagnosed with terminal cancer. They all know now. Anxiety did nothing to prevent tragedy. All worrying does is steal time and joy from the present. Joy is the most difficult and fragile human emotion because we are constantly scanning for danger, thus diminishing our happiness. We think to ourselves, “There is no way this indescribable joy will last. Something will come along and take it, so I won’t stay present for it. Because losing this would be too painful and I wouldn’t survive.”

The secret is, most of the things we worry about don't actually happen, and worrying about them didn't prevent bad things from happening anyways. All we can do is thank our anxious part for being here, because it's obvious it cares about our wellbeing. When we listen to our anxious thoughts, often they become quieter. And when they are quieter, we can find space to use other coping to help us manage in times of difficulty.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! Welcoming the thought takes practice. Don't give up after two or three times. Your anxious thoughts may not quiet the first few times, because you've been ignoring or shaming them for so long. I believe in you.

Take care of your circle and yourself,