Pregnancy Loss and Infant Loss
Providing therapy for you or your partner to support you through
your Pregnancy Loss or Infant Loss in Calgary and online in Alberta.
Experiencing a loss is never easy and unfortunately pregnancy loss or infant loss can be invisible or kept in silence.
This can leave you feeling so incredibly ALONE.
Often times life keeps going on around you and you need to pretend like everything is fine, when internally you are struggling.
Processing a pregnancy loss or infant loss in a supportive and confidential counselling space can start to give you some release.
You won’t just move on from grief, but you can slowly learn to grow around it.
No matter what that loss looks like for you, you have a right to grieve.
No one can tell you the right way to grieve and despite what we sometimes have been told, grief is not linear. You also do not just need to “move on” from your grief.
Here are the types of loss that are supported by Wild Path Counselling:
Termination for Medical Reasons (TFMR)
Abortion
Ectopic Pregnancy
Miscarriage
Stillbirth
Neonatal Loss
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
A pregnancy loss or infant loss can cause incredible grief and trauma. Trauma is something that gets stored in both our brain and bodies. This is why Wild Path Counselling specializes in trauma and grief therapies that will support the brain and body.
Treatment for Pregnancy Loss and Infant Loss
EMDR Therapy
EMDR is an evidence based treatment that stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. It utilizes bilateral stimulation, which means it activates both sides of the brain in order to reprocess distressing memories. When we experience the trauma and distress of a pregnancy loss or infant loss our amygdala (the fight, flight, freeze response system) gets activated. Flashbacks and “sticky memories” are being triggered by this. In EMDR therapy, we work to soften these memories without having to fully go into all of the details. That fight, flight, freeze response becomes deactivated in association with the memory and can provide relief from the distress and future triggers. We can utilize eye movements to do this, but there are other ways to also created the bilateral stimulation such as hand held buzzers or auditory sounds. EMDR has become a well researched and effective strategy to address perinatal trauma, birth trauma, or distress. Check out the video at the bottom of the Perinatal Trauma page for more about EMDR therapy.
Grief Therapy
Grief therapy can be helpful to your healing journey and may be a part of much of the work that we do for your pregnancy loss or infant loss. We will allow space for grief in all of it’s forms within the therapy room. There will be opportunity to explore things like the loss, memories, healthy grieving, restoration, memorialization, boundaries, and growing around the grief. This may include utilizing some somatic techniques, sandtray therapy, creative outlets, and allowing you to identify how you can best grieve what you need to grieve. Grief therapy can involve some psychoeducation for you to know more about your own grief and exploring how this has impacted you and your relationship with others. Despite what some may say or what you have heard grief is not linear. We will leave space for the messiness of your grief and explore the right that you have to grieve in your own individual way. No matter what your pregnancy loss or infant loss looks like it deserves to have the space to grieve that loss.
Somatic Therapy
Often with grief we also experience trauma, and with trauma we also experience grief. Trauma is stored in our brain and bodies. Somatic therapy is therapy relating to the body that works well to treat trauma and grief because of the focus on the body. This type of therapy might include mindfulness therapy that helps us to have increased non-judgemental awareness. It often will involve grounding. Grounding is something that we utilize to keep us in the present moment. Staying in the present moment is important to grief healing because dissociation is something that our brains and bodies like to do in order to protect us from the distress caused by pregnancy loss or infant loss. Dissociation has been the wise protector when we needed it. However, we want to start to allow your body to be more present and “grounded” again in order to start to slowly process the grief and trauma. Somatic therapy can also involve body movements that allow for a release of the trauma that our body is holding. With a pregnancy loss or infant loss your body can hold a lot and might benefit from somatic therapies.
Compassionate Holding
Being met in a therapy session with empathy and compassion can have an incredible healing impact for infant loss or pregnancy loss. Healing in relationship and feeling heard in a neutral and confidential space, allows you to be seen and heard and will help you to feel less alone. This can also be restorative for those part of you that were not previously seen or supported by others you have been in relationship with or care providers involved in the pregnancy loss or infant loss. Offering you compassion and teaching you to offer compassion to yourself can have a powerful effect on things like shame, rage, guilt, anger, defensiveness, sadness, blame, exhaustion, and the other emotions that often become triggered when you experience a pregnancy loss or infant loss. All of you will be welcomed with a non-judgmental and supportive approach that can encourage growth and healing. Compassionate holding might be what you need to start healing
Parts Work
This probably sounds weird, what is this?Well, parts work offers us a way to notice that we are made up of many different parts. These parts of us may be familiar and have been around for a while, or perhaps they are new and surprising and have shown up more since the pregnancy loss or infant loss. They may be things like emotional parts, people pleaser parts, numbing parts, identity parts, and more. We can utilize therapies such as The Dissociative Table or Internal Family Systems Therapy to examine these parts and how they have protected you, controlled, taken over, been dismissed, proved safety, created boundaries, and impacted who you are. When we examine our parts outside of ourselves, it allows things to become externalized that are often so internal to us. This can provide a wonderful healing container that might be what is needed to move you forward. Examining these parts and the way in which they can show up in pregnancy loss and infant loss may be helpful in your healing journey.
Sandtray Therapy
Sandtray therapy might see like it’s something just for kids, but it can also be incredibly effective for adults. It is kind of like Art Therapy in that you are creating something, but what you are creating is done by choosing figurines and placing them in the sand. When we utilize something like sandtray therapy to process pregnancy loss and infant loss, we are accessing another part of our brain that is different than our cognitive brains. What we know from the study of neuroscience is that when we utilize our bottom, top, left, and right brains, we have more opportunity for change and healing in therapy. Sometimes things that we do not cognitively “know” will show up in a sandtray and we can then process it or it could be a way that we process something that previously felt stuck. The other benefit is that it connects with our playful side that often adults will tuck away. This can encourage us to connect with our younger selves and again, maybe access healing in a different way. The somatic nature of sandtray therapy can also offer the healing that our bodies need in order to move through the grief of a pregnancy loss or infant loss.