With the ability to experience another’s emotions, it is as if the other’s feelings are mine. With practice and refinement, this gift allows me to share and experience an energetic field of another. I am aware of the dance of consciousness that takes place between all individuals when they interact. In the shared space of two or many, the potential for insight arises. Remembering that 1 + 1 is greater than 2.
~excerpt from Courage Under Siege Vol VI, Hurt to Healing
Many women, myself included, experienced trauma relating to pregnancy, miscarriage, or other painful experiences relating to our fertility. We are incubators for a healing and evolving humanity. This role opens us more deeply to empathy. Finding empathic and understanding others to share and heal the pain can take time to revisit. Years may pass in the unfolding of your healing.
Sharing our loss, whether a stillborn, a living child lost, a miscarriage, an infant placed up for adoption, or abortion remains a deep chasm for many women. There is a hole, a sense of unfathomable loss. In sharing my experience, I hope that Courage Under Siege Vol VI, Hurt to Healing offers light, community, and release for others.
- Did you know that the blood-brain barrier allows the genetic material in a fetuses blood to reside in the mother’s brain? Is this a part of why we feel a deep sense of “something missing?” The DNA of the father of the little being is carried over to the mother through the blood-brain barrier as well.
- We are hesitant to share our pain until we find another person who can empathize and have a shared understanding of the deepness of the loss. The inability to share often results in repressing the feelings until there is a comfortable time to open the wound for healing.
- There may be secrets held – perhaps guilt, anger, or shame. Many experience harsh and unkind responses from their doctors or loved ones. Wounds serve as self- protection and wait to find release. Significant others are unable to empathize with us as much as they might wish to be there for us.
As an intuitive and metaphysical practitioner, I understand conception as an act of grace. It is not something we control or a decision we make independently. It is an agreed-upon spiritual contract from our higher soul plane. The incarnating being choosing to enter and we participate. Some Buddhist practices believe that a being may not need to live beyond conception. We are neither the masters of their design nor their length of time on this plane.
Finding shared empathy with others, and cultivating compassion and forgiveness for ourselves and the being that resided within us, no matter for what length of time, allows acceptance and love to arise. Healing these wounds frees us to act from a growing integrated place of wholeness.
I invite you to provide feedback and share your experience if you choose. Any conversation is in complete confidentiality.
Kathleen.
As someone who has experienced miscarriage and stillbirth AND who speaks openly about it, I’m “that friend” people turn to when they or somebody they love experiences that trauma. Over the years I’ve had this conversation with women who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal losses, and the common thread is SHAME. Many of the women I’ve spoken with carried a sometimes decades-old burden of feeling as though they (we) had failed at the most primary purpose of the female of the human species – shepherding new life into being. That shame combined with the FEAR of being rejected (a reasonable fear: we don’t like to talk about things like this… it freaks people out!) keeps us hidden away, tucking the grief and the fear and the anger and the loss and all those perfectly normal responses deep inside like some kind of penance. It’s almost overwhelming when we find each other and “I know what you mean” rings true in a literal sense, and that deeper level of shared experience creates a conduit for healing. We shouldn’t need to have worn the exact same shoes, however, to share humanity, to allow those connections that say “You are part of my tribe, and I want you to be as whole as you can – let me help you get there.”
And it’s certainly not only in this space where this happens. I’ve seen this with military folks, too, as another example. It’s true that those who have not seen the horrors of combat probably cannot comprehend. But we don’t need to have walked the same path to offer loving space for healing to occur. We just need to accept that those differences in experience exist, and despite that we are all humans, starving for connection, afraid, ashamed, that our experiences make us somehow less-worthy or less-fit for “polite space”.
Thank you for this writing, Kathleen. ♥