Pregnancy After Loss: Understanding Your Feelings and Finding Support

Finding out you're pregnant after experiencing a miscarriage, stillbirth, or other pregnancy loss can bring up emotions that are difficult to put into words.  As a therapist who has personally experienced miscarriage, I understand how painful this loss can be - and how news of a subsequent pregnancy doesn’t necessarily erase those hard feelings.  

To get to this place, you grieved.  You gathered your courage and took a step forward to try again.  With this news you may feel excitement. You may feel hope. There may also be fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, guilt, or a constant feeling that something could go wrong.  Often, many of these feelings exist together, all at the same time.  

You may have desperately wanted to become pregnant again, only to discover that this pregnancy doesn't feel the way you imagined it would.

Instead of feeling at peace you may find yourself checking for symptoms, feeling intensely anxious before every appointment, counting down the days until the next ultrasound, or cautiously preventing yourself from becoming too attached to your baby.

If this sounds familiar, you're not doing pregnancy "wrong," and you’re certainly not alone in how you’re feeling.   Pregnancy after miscarriage, stillbirth or loss can be an incredibly complicated emotional experience.  You may feel the weight of other people’s expectations that you be happy to be pregnant again, while silently carrying the grief and fear that is still present within you, while also trying to make room for hope about what can come next.   

I’m Victoria, a Colorado-based perinatal therapist.  I often see clients in my practice who feel confused about how complex the emotional experience of becoming pregnant again after a loss can feel.  In this post we’ll talk about the different feelings that many women experience during this time, how to care for yourself during these challenging months, and how prenatal therapy can support you in feeling less alone, overwhelmed and more grounded during your pregnancy.

Common Feelings in Pregnancy After Loss

There is no single emotional experience of pregnancy after loss. You may feel differently from one day - or even one hour - to the next.  You may also feel differently than other parents you know who have gone through the same experience.  Sometimes, this leaves us feeling as if our feelings are “wrong”, invalid or disproportionate to the experience of loss.  I assure you, this is not the case.  Everyone grieves and copes differently, and there is no one “right” way to feel.  

You may find yourself experiencing some, all or none of the below feelings:

• Anxiety about another miscarriage or pregnancy complication

• Fear that something will go wrong

• Grief for the pregnancy or baby you lost

• Difficulty feeling excited or connected to this pregnancy

• Guilt about feeling happy when you are still grieving

• Anger or resentment toward people who seem to have uncomplicated pregnancies

• Hypervigilance about physical symptoms (fixating on every sensation you experience in your body, frequent Googling or checking Reddit forums for reassurance)

• Fear of getting attached to the baby only to experience another loss

• Difficulty trusting or feeling confident your body

• Feeling disconnected or emotionally numb

• Worry before ultrasounds, prenatal appointments, or other milestones

• Relief after receiving reassuring news, followed quickly by another wave of anxiety

• Fear of buying baby items, making plans, or telling other people about the pregnancy

Pregnancy after loss does not have to be just one dominant feeling.  You can be both excited and terrified. Hopeful and grieving. Grateful and angry. In prenatal therapy, we can help you make room for all of it. 

Why Anxiety, Grief and Trauma are So Common in Pregnancy After Loss

Sometimes a pregnancy loss can feel truly traumatic.  Trauma isn't determined solely by objective markers of an experience.  What feels overwhelming or frightening to one person may not feel the same way to another. A miscarriage, stillbirth, TFMR or neonatal loss can involve fear, physical pain, medical procedures, uncertainty, powerlessness, confusion and profound grief. The experience may continue to affect you long after the physical aspects of the loss have ended.  You may experience flashbacks or intrusive memories related to your previous pregnancy and loss.  You may experience intense negative emotions such as anger, fear or shame.  You may find yourself avoiding spending time with friends who are pregnant, finding reasons not to attend baby showers, or struggling emotionally around babies and children.  All of these experiences are trauma responses.  

Then you become pregnant again.  Suddenly, the physical sensations, appointments, waiting periods, and milestones of pregnancy may bring back even more reminders of your previous loss. 

Your brain and body may start kicking into high gear to try and prevent this totally-out-of-your-control experience from happening again.  

A cramp that might once have felt like a normal pregnancy symptom can suddenly feel terrifying. A decrease in nausea can send you scouring the internet for reassurance. An upcoming ultrasound can feel less like an exciting milestone and more like a test you are afraid to fail.  You may find yourself constantly scanning for danger because you know firsthand that a positive pregnancy test doesn’t always lead to the outcome that you hoped for.  

All of this doesn't mean you are being irrational or pessimistic - it means you have been through something painful, and your brain is trying to protect you from experiencing that pain again.   Your brain may not buy that nothing can go wrong in pregnancy.  It knows otherwise.  The support you need during this time looks like making space for both fear and hope, loss and connection; honoring the lived experience that you’ve had, while making space to hope for something different.  

Reaching Gestational Milestones

One of the particularly difficult aspects of pregnancy after loss can be reaching milestones.

You might find yourself thinking:

"Once I make it to 8 weeks, I'll feel better."

Then you reach 8 weeks, and maybe even get to have your first ultrasound.  You feel better for a day or two, but then the anxiety starts to center around another milestone.

"I'll relax after the genetic testing."

Then another appointment appears on the calendar.

"I'll finally let myself get excited once I’m out of the first trimester.”  Or maybe the point at which you lost your last pregnancy feels like the significant milestone to surpass.  

But when you reach that point, you’re confused about why you still feel afraid.

After experiencing a pregnancy loss, your brain may have a harder time trusting the process.  You have lived experience that things don’t always go according to plan. 

If you had never experienced pregnancy loss, you may have been able to relax after the first trimester.  Now, you may find yourself feeling more skeptical of generic platitudes from your doctor.  You may find yourself looking up statistics for second-trimester losses, or the age of viability.  You may fixate on details that you wouldn’t have thought twice about in another life.  

All of this can feel very frustrating and confusing.  You may have expected that becoming pregnant again would put all of your fears at ease, and feel angry that you’ve been cheated of a relaxing prenatal experience.  One helpful tool to cope with these feelings can be to work on adjusting your expectations.  Maybe your fear and unease isn’t going to abruptly go away after a specific milestone like you thought it would.  Maybe it will be more of a gradual decrease that is impacted by significant week-markers and appointments, but not fully eliminated by them.  And if this is the case, how can you care for yourself during this pregnancy, knowing that fear, grief and disconnection may be present in some capacity throughout?  That’s where therapy comes in.

How Therapy Can Help With Pregnancy After Loss

Therapy can provide a space where you don't have to minimize your experience, manage anyone else’s feelings or pretend that joy and optimism are the only things you’re experiencing.

You can talk about the loss.
You can talk about your fears.
You can talk about feeling disconnected from this pregnancy.
You can talk about the fear that allowing yourself to hope will somehow make another loss more painful.

A prenatal therapist can help you process sadness, fear and traumatic aspects of your previous pregnancy or loss, while also developing tools for managing anxiety during your current pregnancy.

Therapy may also help you:

• Find ways to feel more present during your current pregnancy

• Cope with uncertainty between appointments

• Prepare emotionally for ultrasounds and other pregnancy milestones

• Identify anxiety and reassurance-seeking behaviors that may be contributing to it

• Develop strategies for managing intrusive thoughts

• Understand how your pregnancy or neonatal loss may be bringing up feelings from other losses throughout your life

• Work through guilt, anger, grief, or fear

• Reconnect with your body after a difficult pregnancy experience

• Communicate with your partner about what you need, logistically and emotionally

• Make room for hope without feeling like you're betraying the pregnancy you lost

Ultimately, seeking therapy during pregnancy after loss is here to help you feel less alone, more grounded and build tools to get your needs met.

Support for Dads and Non-Birthing Partners

Pregnancy after loss can be complicated for partners, too.

Dads and non-birthing partners may experience their own grief, anxiety, and fear while simultaneously trying to support their pregnant partner. They may feel pressure to remain strong or positive, even when they are struggling themselves.

Partners can also experience pregnancy differently because they may not have the same physical reminders of the pregnancy that the pregnant person does.  This may create a painful disconnect in a pregnancy where fear makes feeling connected even more challenging.  

One partner may want to talk about the loss frequently while the other avoids the subject. One may feel ready to celebrate the pregnancy while the other remains guarded.  Neither response necessarily means that one person cares more than the other - each of them may just be coping differently.  

Making space for honest conversations can help. Instead of assuming you know what the other person needs, try asking:

"Do you want reassurance, or do you just want me to listen?"
"How can we support each other when anxiety comes up?"
“If being your support person is too painful for me right now, how can we get you professional help to make sure your needs are being met?”

Work with a Perinatal Therapist to Cope With Pregnancy After Loss

Pregnancy after loss can bring you into an emotional space that is difficult for other people to understand.  This experience presents an enormous weight of fear and uncertainty. You don't have to navigate that uncertainty alone.

Working with a perinatal therapist can give you a place to process your loss, make sense of your complex feelings, and develop ways to cope with anxiety and difficult emotions, one day at a time.

I’m Victoria, a perinatal therapist based in Denver, Colorado - one who gets how complicated pregnancy after loss can be.   I see clients living throughout Colorado, New York and New Jersey.  If you’d like to talk more about how I can support you in the emotional aspects of your pregnancy after loss, please reach out.  I offer all prospective new clients a free, no-pressure 15 minute phone consultation to get all of your questions answered.  I’d love to learn more about how I can help you on your journey.  

Therapy isn't about convincing yourself that everything will definitely be okay.  It's about helping you feel supported enough to move through the uncertainty from a place of groundedness, while making room for grief, fear, and hope along the way.