What is Gestational Grief and what are its effects?

Creating life is a human and transcendental fact. It is an episode that fully 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 refers: "to hurt is to have loved" Can you love someone you 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, it is avoided. The processes are relegated. They are not shown, they are not spoken. They are silenced and take with them a piece of the soul of whoever goes through it.

• Related article: "The 8 types of mourning and their characteristics"

What is gestational grief?

Freud He said that mourning is a natural process, before 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 love object. 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 lived in a unique way according to the life story of each person, and only that person can go through it. However, as a community and in the age of consciousness in which we are living, we can choose to address and integrate it together, thus walking the path and lightening the load.

Regarding involuntary pregnancy interruptions

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, current times do not give us room to be wrong. Soon we must compose ourselves to continue being productive. “You have to look forward”, they say; and here the mandates to positivism appear.

"Everything happens for a reason". Phrases that to a person in this process only intensify the guilt for her discomfort.

The phases of mourning

I would like to share with you the five phases of grief according to the theory of the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

She divided mourning into 5 stages, which unfold successively, however, she later insisted that the grieving process is not so linear and rigid.

1. Denial

This is a normal and natural reaction to loss.

It is usually an immediate reaction. a shocked response that can bring about a state of confusion or dullness at an affective level.

2. Gonna

After the previous stage, Feelings of frustration or impotence usually appear in the face of the human inability to change reality. This leads to feelings of anger and gonna. In this instance, the person usually attributes the blame for the loss to another factor, such as another person or even oneself. It often 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.

3. Negotiation

It is a common saying, that "hope is the last thing to lose".

In these situations, pregnant people can avoid facing the situation, turning their attention to a process, towards another possible pregnancy for example, not from a conscious decision, but as a mechanism avoidant, for avoid connecting with real emotion.

4. Depression

When the bereaved person begins to accept the reality of the loss as definitive, we enter the stage known as depression. Feelings of sadness, hopelessness are generated, there is a tendency to social isolation or lack of motivation. It may even be that during this specific period, life itself for that person ceases to make sense.

5. Acceptance

After this path, which sometimes, as we have seen, is not necessarily linear, comes acceptance. 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 temporary closure processes, since mourning is spiral, we always go through the same places again, only with a different meaning.

Concluding…

The only way to get 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, giving new meaning, sharing and integrating, which will lead us to a process of accepting a natural duel. As part of life.

For those who at some point go through it, I am absolutely available to listen, accompany and support. I invite you to share the idea that mourning has a bad press but the lighter it is, the more it is sustained in the network.