Baby Loss Awareness: When Your Baby Has Died, But Your Love Has Not | Therapy Tent

There are some losses that are difficult to put into words.

The loss of a baby can be one of them.

Perhaps you experienced an early miscarriage and never got the chance to hold your baby. Perhaps you experienced a later pregnancy loss, stillbirth or neonatal death. Perhaps your baby died before you had the opportunity to tell many people they existed.

Whatever your experience, you may be carrying a grief that feels difficult for other people to understand.

You may find yourself asking:

“How do I grieve someone I barely got to know?”

“Why does this still hurt so much?”

“Does anyone else remember my baby?”

“Am I allowed to call myself a parent?”

“Where is God in all of this?”

Baby Loss Awareness Month, and Baby Loss Awareness Week, offer an opportunity to remember babies who have died and to acknowledge the families who continue to grieve; because although a pregnancy may have ended, or a baby may have died, the love does not simply disappear.

Here at Therapy Tent, we believe that grief deserves to be witnessed. We also recognise that for many people, faith and spirituality are an important part of how they understand themselves, their family and their loss. For those who want it, there can be space for those questions too.

Loss is not simple

One of the most painful things about baby loss can be the sense that the world has not recognised the enormity of what has happened. Perhaps you were pregnant for only a short time, but you had already chosen a name, perhaps even had decorated a nursery, bought tiny clothes, imagined birthdays or pictured what your family would look like.

Perhaps you never had the opportunity to make those plans at all.

There is no minimum length of pregnancy required for a loss to matter, and no particular number of weeks at which you are “allowed” to grieve deeply. There is no requirement for you to have held your baby in your arms before your relationship with them can have meaning.

For many parents, the loss is not simple.

Why can baby loss feel so lonely?

Baby loss can be an incredibly isolating experience. Even when you have loving family and friends around you, it can sometimes feel as though you are grieving in a world that has already moved on. People may not know what to say, or they may feel uncomfortable talking about your baby because they are worried that mentioning them will make you more upset. Sometimes, people stop talking about your baby because they believe that they are helping you to move forward, when actually what you may desperately want is for someone to remember with you.

Often, you may return to work before you are ready, emotionally or physically. You may see pregnant women, babies or families with children and experience a wave of grief, and even anger, that takes you completely by surprise. Social media can become difficult too, particularly when your feed seems to be filled with pregnancy announcements, birth stories and photographs of babies. You might find yourself avoiding certain places or people because you simply do not have the emotional capacity to navigate those feelings yet - and that’s ok. 

There can also be a complicated mixture of emotions. You might feel genuinely happy for a friend who is pregnant while simultaneously feeling heartbroken that your own baby is not here. You may love the children you already have and still desperately grieve the child you have lost. You may want to try for another baby while also feeling that moving forward somehow means leaving your baby behind. These feelings can be confusing, but they are not wrong. Grief does not always make logical sense; it is the response of a heart to something that mattered deeply.

For some parents, there can also be a painful sense that other people have forgotten. You may still think about your baby every day, while the people around you have returned to their ordinary lives. Perhaps you want to talk about your baby but worry that other people will find it uncomfortable. Perhaps you wonder whether you are still allowed to call yourself a parent. These are some of the reasons why having somewhere safe to talk about your baby, your experience of pregnancy or baby loss, and your identity, can be so important.

There is no right way to grieve 

There is no single way to grieve after losing a baby. You might cry every day, or you might hardly cry at all. You may want to talk about your baby constantly, or you may find it almost impossible to say their name. You might want to keep photographs, scan pictures, hospital bracelets, footprints or other precious reminders close to you, while someone else may find these things too painful to look at. Some parents have many memories and tangible reminders of their baby, while others may have very little that they can physically hold onto - and that isn’t always from a place of choice. 

You may experience sadness, anger, guilt, jealousy, anxiety, numbness or even moments of relief. You may feel completely overwhelmed one day and surprisingly okay the next. None of this means that you loved your baby any more or any less. Grief can change from day to day, and honestly, sometimes from hour to hour.

Guilt can be particularly painful after baby loss. You may find yourself going over what happened again and again, wondering whether there was something you, or your service providers should have done differently. You might ask yourself whether you should have noticed something sooner, gone to hospital earlier, rested more, worried less or somehow protected your baby. These questions can be incredibly difficult to carry, particularly when you know intellectually that you could not have controlled what happened. Sometimes, in the case of termination for medical reasons, these questions and guilt can be overwhelming. 

Counselling cannot change what happened, but it can provide a safe space to explore these thoughts and feelings without judgement. Sometimes, simply being able to say out loud the things that you have been carrying privately can begin to make them feel a little less overwhelming.

What about the grief of a father or partner?

Baby loss can sometimes be spoken about primarily in terms of the mother's experience, but partners grieve too. A father or partner may be grieving the loss of their baby while also trying to support the person they love through an incredibly painful experience. They may be carrying their own sadness, fear, anger or helplessness, while feeling that they need to remain strong for everyone else.

Sometimes partners grieve in very different ways. One person may need to talk about what has happened, while the other needs to keep busy. One may want to remember every detail, while the other struggles even to say what happened. One person may appear to be coping, while privately feeling devastated. These differences can sometimes create additional strain within a relationship, particularly when each person assumes that the other does not understand or does not feel the loss as deeply.

There is no single way that grief has to look. Sometimes counselling can provide space for each person to understand their own grief, while also helping couples navigate the fact that they may be grieving the same baby in very different ways.

What if people expect me to have moved on?

One of the hardest parts of baby loss can be the feeling that the rest of the world has continued while your own world has changed completely. Work continues, other pregnancies are announced, babies are born and children grow older. You may find yourself wondering how everyone else can carry on as normal when something so significant has happened to you.

There is no universal timetable for grief. You may find that certain dates become particularly significant, such as the date you found out you were pregnant, your baby's due date, the date your baby died or the date you expected to give birth. Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays, anniversaries and pregnancy announcements, even things like the ‘back to school’ photos people share, can all bring grief unexpectedly close again.

This does not necessarily mean that you have gone backwards. Grief often comes in waves, and sometimes a particular reminder can bring feelings back with an intensity you were not expecting. A difficult day does not erase the progress you have made, and having a difficult day months or even years later does not mean that you are failing to heal.

When might counselling help?

You do not have to wait until your grief becomes unbearable before seeking support. Sometimes counselling is helpful simply because you would like somewhere safe to talk about your baby and what happened, without having to worry about protecting somebody else's feelings or making them uncomfortable.I have people work with me only a few months after their loss, and others who come decades later.

Baby loss counselling may be particularly helpful if your grief feels overwhelming or difficult to carry, if you are struggling with guilt or self-blame, or if you find yourself repeatedly replaying what happened.  You might be experiencing significant anxiety or depression, struggling with your relationships, feeling isolated from other people, or finding it difficult to cope with subsequent pregnancies or the idea of becoming pregnant again.

You may also find counselling helpful if significant dates, pregnancy announcements or seeing babies and young children trigger intense emotions. Perhaps you feel that other people have forgotten your baby, or you simply want somewhere that you can talk openly about your loss without being told that it is time to move on.

None of these things mean that you are grieving incorrectly. They may simply mean that you are carrying something very heavy and could benefit from having someone walk alongside you.

You are not alone

Baby loss can be a profoundly lonely experience, but you do not have to carry it entirely by yourself. You deserve somewhere to speak honestly about what happened, without having to minimise your loss because you are worried about making somebody else uncomfortable. Somewhere you can say your baby's name, talk about the things you miss, the things you never got to experience, the anger, the guilt, the love and the questions.

And if faith is important to you, you can bring that part of yourself too. You do not have to separate your emotional life from your spiritual life in order to receive counselling. Sometimes the two are deeply intertwined, particularly when we are trying to make sense of something that feels impossible to make sense of.

At Therapy Tent, we support people experiencing grief, loss and difficult life transitions. Our counsellors are trained and open to working with faith, alongside evidence-based psychological approaches.

Sometimes healing begins with something very simple: having someone recognise that your baby mattered, your loss matters, and your grief deserves somewhere to go.