How To Manage Parenting Grief
Kirsty Marie Denny specialises in trauma, neurodivergence, and sensitivity, empowering her clients to transform their lives through energetic kinesiology. Her focus is on each individual’s unique gifts and challenges and the root causes of distressing symptoms.
When we become parents, naturally our focus shifts heavily from self to other and this is part of the beauty of raising a child. However, this focus can sometimes lead us to deny or not fully process our emotions, including the experience of grief, whether or not anybody has died.
What is grief?
Grief can be defined as the intense pain or distress that accompanies loss. In the case of parents, the most obvious cause of grief is the death of a baby or child, including miscarriage at any stage of pregnancy. This kind of loss is, of course, a terrible pain to bear. Parents who have lost a child often report total shock, as if the world is crumbling around them, a deep sense of the injustice of losing someone so young, and a profound longing to see and hold their child again.
This type of grief is deep and wide and can’t be circumnavigated without serious consequences. Grief is, as many would say, love with nowhere to go, and this energy of love is a powerful force.
Until recently, miscarriage or stillbirth was often not spoken of much publicly, and friends and family of those experiencing it were unsure whether to acknowledge it.
Fortunately, the tide is turning on this, and many parents of babies miscarried or stillborn are choosing to publicly acknowledge their loss and commemorate their babies in beautiful ways.
Acknowledging loss
I haven’t personally experienced the death of a child, but what stands out to me about people’s reports is their desire not to have their pain sanitised or swept aside. They wish to have their children acknowledged and for people to continue speaking their names and telling their stories. They don’t want to forget, love and pain want somewhere to go.
In this way, we are moving towards a healthier recognition of grief, particularly in the West, where there is often less tradition and more discomfort around death and dying. There is growing awareness that ignoring grief, tucking it away into a dark corner of our soul, is not healthy other than as a very short term survival strategy, for example, in the very early days after a loss when we’re in shock and must organise logistics, or if we’re in an unsafe situation and need to save the full force of our grief for later.
The stages of grief
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously described five stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She later added an initial shock phase and a testing phase between depression and acceptance, where a person will begin to re engage in life in new ways. Read more about the seven stages of grief here.
These stages are certainly a useful reference, but it is widely recognised that not everyone goes through all these stages, certainly not in a specific order, and that the experience of grief is deeply personal and dynamic.
Grief without bereavement
But what about the kind of grief where nobody died? Is this real grief? There can be a sense of not being entitled to name and feel this type of loss. Kenneth Doka came up with the term disenfranchised grief in his 1989 book about hidden sorrow to describe this type of often unacknowledged loss. The pain of grief isn’t a competition, it doesn’t bend to the laws of logic, and just as in the case of a bereavement, it doesn’t go away because of a reluctance to feel or process it. This type of grief may also be referred to as non death, ambiguous, or nonfinite loss in different contexts.
Types of non-death parenting grief
There are many types of disenfranchised grief that can arise for parents. Often, these are related to situations where the reality is in stark contrast to how they imagined parenthood and their child’s life would be.
Birth trauma and grief
Trauma and grief can be interconnected in complex ways, and one of the most common types of grief is that related to a traumatic birth, or simply one that didn’t align with the parents’ vision. This can involve a mixture of factors such as physical pain, injury, and fear, or feeling disempowered and even bullied into unwanted interventions by medical providers, usually well meaning. With or without significant trauma, a birth that was difficult or not aligned with the parents’ hopes for themselves and their baby can create an intense feeling of loss. This grief can be compounded by separation from the baby if they require medical care in a neonatal unit.
What’s more, grief over a traumatic birth tends to be eclipsed by the immediate need to intensely care for a new life. Many new mothers will have heard the phrase, ‘the important thing is that you have a healthy baby’, or similar, and wondered at the conflicted feelings they have about this statement. Naturally, they agree that their baby’s welfare is the most important thing. This conflict isn’t selfishness, but the sense of being subtly gaslit, of being told that their experience simply doesn’t matter.
Breastfeeding grief
This one is personal for me, so I’ll recount some of my story by way of illustration. Of course, whether breastfeeding is felt as a loss is personal to each individual. For me, breastfeeding was a huge part of my vision of motherhood and how I would bond with my baby. I expected it to come fairly naturally. Then my first son was born and everything just felt hard. He had significant feeding problems, tongue tie, reflux, torticollis, gut issues, and he cried and cried and cried. My dream of how motherhood would be was miles apart from the reality, creating a real sense of loss.
I felt like I was letting my baby down as he was so unsettled, and breastfeeding was by far the most painful aspect of this ‘failure’ for me. It elicited the type of grief that feels like a gaping wound with jagged edges despite the fact that nobody died.
Of course, things could have been much worse, my baby was growing well, but people’s assurances that he was basically fine and that I should focus on this didn’t help, quite the opposite, in fact.
Breastfeeding grief can also be related to women feeling betrayed by their own bodies, or by a lack of support or healthcare around breastfeeding. There can also be a feeling of being judged or excluded due to the way they feed their babies.
Other common sources of parenting grief include, but are not limited to:
Babies being preterm or having health problems requiring separation from parents and hospital stays.
Having a medically complex or high needs baby, or children being diagnosed with chronic illnesses or disabilities at any age.
Loss of your old life, body, or career.
Loss of the pre baby relationship with your partner or other changes in relationships.
Grief that is not directly related to parenting, for example, the death of a friend or wider family member, or the end of a relationship, may also be complicated or prolonged due to the intensity of caring for children, especially in the early years.
In the case of new mothers, feelings of grief can be intensified or complicated by the huge hormonal changes that occur and the risk of postpartum depression.
Don’t compare or trivialise
Of course, the specific scenarios that trigger a grief response and its intensity are individual to each parent. Having a child with a life threatening long term disability, for example, is a different scenario from breastfeeding grief or having had an unplanned C section. However, the truth is that comparing or rationalising our pain doesn’t erase it, and it’s important to allow ourselves to feel what we feel and to acknowledge and navigate our grief rather than trying to skirt around the edges.
None of the above causes of grief, or any other, is a reason to feel guilty, even if the loss seems trivial or self centred, for example, the loss of your old identity or way of life.
Unacknowledged grief can lead to depression, low self esteem, resentment, physical ailments, and an overall reduction in the ability to be present and move forward with life.
In my personal experience of breastfeeding grief, the advice I would give to my postpartum self would be to get more support with processing the stress and loss. I did have a little bit of counselling, but frankly I was more focused on fixing and coping at the time. With the schedule of pumping, sterilising, trying to feed, trying to settle, and hoping that the next day would be the day it magically got better, there wasn’t much room for feeling my feelings in a healthy way.
Ways to work with parenting grief
As previously mentioned, try to allow your grief, making space for it and not minimising it through comparison with the grief of others.
Often it is therapeutic to find someone to deeply listen and be present with you in your pain, whether this is a counsellor, psychologist, healer, or simply a friend or family member who has this capacity.
In addition to talking to a trusted person, find ways to move and express the energy of grief without shutting it down. Activities that may help you to process include exercise, dance, visual arts, music, journaling, meditation, or energy work.
Grief as a catalyst
Any type of dramatic change or emotional upheaval, including grief, can reveal existing wounds, pain points, and limiting beliefs. Grief is a process in and of itself in response to loss, but additionally can point us to deeper truths about ourselves and our subconscious conditioning.
Even when there is no particular grief involved, parenting is itself a masterclass in becoming aware of our own stressors and pain points through the way we are triggered by our children’s behaviour and challenges. When we can be conscious of our emotional responses as parents, for example, we feel angry or overwhelmed when our child is angry because we were not allowed to express anger as children, this can initiate a process of reflecting on some of the less optimal facets of our own childhoods, and another type of grief.
In my case, breastfeeding grief, and the many other ways my parenting experience didn’t align with what I imagined, exposed much deeper levels of my own subconscious beliefs. These included a sense of not being good enough, needing to be perfect, and being helpless in the face of suffering. The process of illuminating these beliefs and patterns and working through them was painful, but ultimately transformative.
Grief as a vision quest
In many cases, once we’ve navigated the initial stages, the experience of grief can be a catalyst for finding deeper purpose in our lives. Loss naturally leads us to turn inwards and to consider what is of true importance to us in life and perhaps, how we can alchemise an experience of pain to be of service to others.
Honour your own individual journey. Remember that babies and children are incredibly perceptive and if you are harbouring grief and hurt, they will feel it, even if they are unaware of exactly what it is they are feeling. By addressing your pain, you are creating a much clearer emotional space for your children as well as yourself.
There is timeless wisdom in the saying, associated with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and other Indigenous traditions, that healing yourself affects seven generations forward and back, or more. The inner work you do creates profound and sometimes unexpected ripples of healing and transformation in the world.
Pathways towards integration
Grief isn’t necessarily something we completely move on from, particularly in the case of a bereavement. Many prefer the idea of growing your life around the grief, as in Lois Tonkin’s Jar Model of grief, read more about this here, or integrating it such that though the grief still exists, so does joy and meaning in life.
There are many ways to work with grief, and what works for you may not be what works for another. Explore your options, perhaps counselling of various types, working somatically with the body, addressing the realms of subtle energy and intuition, or any combination thereof.
Kinesiology is a powerful yet gentle way to work with grief, including the stages, the way it’s stored in the energetic body, the way it links to past grief, and our subconscious beliefs about ourselves and the world. This type of work can also provide powerful assistance with reconnecting to a sense of purpose and meaning in life.
It’s always a deep honour for me to hold someone in courageous acknowledgement of their grief, whatever type it is. Kinesiology sessions are available online worldwide, or get in touch for an in person session in Auckland, New Zealand, by appointment.
Kirsty Marie Denny, Kinesiologist and Neurodivergence Specialist
Kirsty Marie is an energetic kinesiologist who believes in each human’s capacity to thrive as their unique and authentic self. Kirsty navigated chronic health challenges in her 20s and an intensely stressful early parenthood experience. Having transformed her own life as well as her children’s, she is on a mission to empower others. She specialises in supporting those who are highly sensitive, neurodivergent, or who have experienced trauma. Her approach is truly holistic, incorporating practical lifestyle coaching as well as energetic processes for balancing the brain and body and transmuting emotional stress.
