Recently, one of my mamas asked about how to deal with grief in a positive way and try to minimize the trauma and harm to her baby during development. We know that our stress state does affect the baby; they do feel it! It affects how their nervous system develops so we do want to minimize the stress we put our baby through.
Grief is love by another name.
When talking about grief, it's important to remember that grief is love by another name and in a different form. Having experienced grief myself, that knowledge was comforting in helping me not feel guilty for expressing the grief and love that I had for the people I have lost. I can let go of the judgement, I can know that it's a good thing that I feel like crying and mourning that person however often that needs to happen. Dwell on that love. The good memories and all of the wonderful things that we appreciated about that person (or beloved animal). Being able to dwell on those good memories also triggers a good part of our nervous system.
A few things that can help:
Lean into loving those around you even more. This taps into all those positive hormones that our body needs to support a healthy pregnancy and bonding for baby that also supports their healthy nervous system development.
Spend time with loved ones and things that make you feel happy.
Sit in the sunshine and soak it all in. This is important for baby's development as well.
It is all about balance.
Think about balance. If you need to cry, cry with absolutely no shame, guilt, or judgement. It's a sign of your great love for the ones you lost. But then balance it with joyful moments.
It is all about balance. It's not about stifling emotions but rather about feeling them, honoring them, and making time for joy.
We are complex humans and we don't have to stay in a sad state all the time in order to be grieving. We can enjoy life and we can miss them because they aren't seeing it with us. And then we can enjoy it again and in a split second we can cry because we miss them. We are complex individuals and we get to have the whole range of emotions.
That is how we heal; by feeling all of the emotions.
Once I heard a writer express the healing of the grief wound is like the stitches of a physical wound. Sometimes a wound is so big and gaping, we have to put stitches in it to hold it together. It was described to her that the ups and downs of her emotions were like the stitches in a wound. We vacillate between sadness and anger and joy and peace. We go back to our grief. And then we come back up to ecstasy of how beautiful the sunset is and then we go back to our sadness. That is how we heal; by feeling all of the emotions.
It is a beautiful thought to think that those ups and downs are actually normal and good and healing. Let them be. Nurture those feelings that are loving to bring balance.
Hear it from me here:
Thank you for listening 💗