Can acupuncture help me to come to terms with my miscarriage?
Usually, when we talk or think about bereavement, it’s in the context of losing someone close to us who we know and love well – a member of the family, perhaps, or a close and cherished friend.
But there is another bereavement experience that is less obvious, both in the fact that it’s less commonly talked about, and also in the sense that it’s a loss that can often be experienced in isolation, with most people never knowing it’s even happened.
Miscarriage creates its own kind of grief. It’s no less powerful or distressing than the grief we feel when someone we have known well passes on, but it does have its own characteristics that can make it uniquely hard to process.
Before I continue, I want to be clear about something, because miscarriage is a topic that understandably triggers exceptionally strong emotions.
The purpose of this article is not to debate the status of a fetus. I’m aware, as doubtless you are, that different people have different beliefs about when a fetus becomes a ‘person’ – it’s the same argument that has fuelled the abortion debate since time immemorial.
Though I have my own view on that, as I’m sure you do, I write what follows with no personal agenda or intention to offend.
When I use words like ‘person’, ‘baby’ or ‘child’ it is because that is overwhelmingly the language of women who have miscarried, and above all else my priority here is to honour and respect their emotions and their distress rather than trying to satisfy one side or another of a polarised moral debate.
Similarly, in what follows I describe the experience of pregnancy, motherhood and miscarriage as it applies to most women. There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule.
With those caveats declared, let’s look at why miscarriage evokes such singular grief, why it’s impossible to place yourself in a mother’s shoes unless you have been through miscarriage yourself and how acupuncture can help you to process the grief and mental anguish of losing a child in pregnancy.
A unique relationship
From the moment she falls pregnant, a woman begins to build a unique relationship. She is her unborn child’s sole provider of food, of nutrients, of protection. The bond she establishes from this moment on is one thousands of years in the making.
For this woman, the care of her child is the absolute priority and that role is carried out pretty much to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.
The fetus, unseen by anything other than an ultrasound scan, may not exist in the real world as a fully functioning person, but it is likely at this point to be the most important human relationship in the mother’s life.
This bond is also established at lightning speed – a mixture of primeval instinct, DNA and unarguable genetics.
The baby, by its own turn, knows nothing more than its surroundings and even this knowledge is instinctive rather than conscious. But he or she, too, forms unbreakable bond with the mother.
No one else involved in the baby’s creation has a relationship with it that comes even close to replicating the strength of emotion that connects it with its mother.
Guilt and shame
I have discussed before, in articles about fertility, that the emotional responses of women who are diagnosed with infertility often wrongly include shame and guilt driven by their inability to do something that, on the surface, appears to be so easy for others.
The same is true for many women who suffer miscarriage. In a species whose sole original purpose was to reproduce, the female body is built to conceive, bear and give birth to children.
When that process goes wrong and the body ‘rejects’ the baby, many women report that they feel as though they have failed in something that is basically the job they were designed to do.
These feelings of guilt and shame are different to those we may feel in a more ‘conventional’ bereavement setting.
Yes, we may feel guilty or shameful that we didn’t make more of the relationship we had with the person we lost, that we weren’t kinder, didn’t visit more, that we took them for granted, or didn’t appreciate them more.
But in miscarriage, guilt or shame often relate to the role the woman believes she has played in the passing of the life she had nurtured.
That these feelings are misplaced doesn’t make them any less painful or real.
Depression
In most cases, starting or adding to a family is a dream come true for the mother, father and any siblings old enough to understand the sense of expectation that surrounds the planned arrival of a newborn.
When miscarriage rips that dream away from us, the sense of loss and despair can be overwhelming. Often it can lead to a prolonged period of depression that is typified by inconsolable grief, anger, sleeplessness and sudden and unexpected crying.
Painful as they are, these feelings are healthy and to be expected.
Articulating grief
Grief is often silent. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges in processing grief is finding a way to articulate how you feel. It’s rarely, if ever, healthy to keep feelings bottled up inside and many women (and fathers) report that they have found some form of talking therapy or counselling to be helpful.
Talking about how we feel is often helpful because it is a way of acknowledging the grief we are experiencing. All trauma needs to be acknowledged before it can be healed, and if talking therapy or counselling isn’t for you, then finding some other way of accepting that you feel as you do is important.
Acupuncture and miscarriage
Put very simplistically, acupuncture treatment focuses on the body’s organs – with different conditions or issues associated with different organs. In acupuncture, grief is strongly linked to the lungs and the large intestine – organs that we call the Metal Element organs.
That makes sense when you think about it because both organs fulfil a cleansing function – the lungs of waste air, the large intestine of waste material. They perform a similar role for our emotions, expelling those that are not useful to us.
Grief is natural and healthy and is part of the psyche’s way of allowing us to process loss. But sometimes those emotions can become stuck, leaving us unable to continue the forward momentum of life.
Ancient Chinese medicine believes our physical and mental wellbeing all stems from the energy life force – or Qi (pronounced chee) that we all have.
At times of emotional or physical crisis, the pathways through which our Qi travels can become blocked, resulting in prolonged physical and/or emotional symptoms that can be debilitating and unhealthy.
This can also be the case when we experience a traumatic event like miscarriage.
Acupuncture can help here because it is designed to clear those blockages or interruptions through the use of superfine and completely painless needles inserted into the skin at specific points on the body.
This process helps to unblock our feelings, allowing us to acknowledge their impact, process them and move on.
There are also studies that suggest acupuncture can also help to reduce the chances of miscarriage by helping mums-to-be maintain good balance in their physical and mental health.
If you’ve been affected by miscarriage and are struggling to come to terms with the loss of your unborn child, why not get in touch for a friendly, supportive and informal chat and see how we may be able to help you to understand why you feel as you do and move past your grief.