5 tips for coping with grief after a perinatal death

Grieving the death of our baby is an experience as painful as it is complex.

Grieving the death of our baby is one of the most emotionally painful experiences a mother or father can face. In fact, the management of these feelings can become very complicated and even require psychotherapeutic support.

In this article we will look at some of the key ideas to facilitate the proper elaboration of the bereavement of perinatal deathstarting by defining the most important concepts.

What is grief in psychology?

The mourning is the process through which the person tries to to readjust his emotions and his expectations before a situation of loss of something significant, with which a bond of attachment or love united it..

This loss may have to do with leaving behind a material possession with sentimental value (for example, having forgotten a watch that our grandfather gave us on the train) or it may be related to the death of a loved one.

Of course, grief can occur in varying degrees of intensity, and although it is always accompanied by a range of negative emotions and a sense of discomfort, in most cases it does not result in a psychological disorder.

The implications of infant bereavement

As the name implies, perinatal death is the death of the infant or fetus whose the death of the infant or fetus whose development was in the perinatal stage, i.e., the stage between the birth of the baby and the birth of the fetus.This is the phase from approximately 28 weeks of pregnancy to the first week of life after birth. It is not only a special type of floor because this age group has the highest risk of mortality in early childhood, but also because it has some characteristics that are qualitatively different from other forms of bereavement.

What is most representative of infant bereavement is that we have barely had time to establish a bond in which both of you actively participate. We are faced with the experience of wondering if we have ever existed for our son or daughter, given their underdeveloped nervous system. The idea of not having had time to establish a meaningful relationship makes it more difficult for some people to overcome this type of grief, because they are thinking about the idea of suffering for a mirage, barely a project of a maternal-filial or paternal-filial relationship.

In fact, in some cases they even feel bad because they believe that other people expect them to cope more quickly with this loss.They experience guilt under the feeling that through the expectations of others, they are exaggerated or exaggerated (regardless of whether this social pressure is real or not).

The keys to the elaboration of grief due to perinatal death

Here are some guidelines to follow in order to properly grieve the loss of a baby, although they are not a substitute for effective psychotherapy.

1. Don't force yourself to forget

Part of what makes grieving over the death of a family member or loved one so painful has to do with the dysfunctional strategies we adopt to deal with the loss of a baby. the dysfunctional strategies we adopt to manage this discomfort.. Many times, we actively participate in keeping the sadness and anguish afloat even if we do not realize it.

Of course, it is impossible to perfectly manage these feelings and emotions, and setting this as a goal would contribute to the problem because it would lead to a state of hypervigilance to our own thoughts. However, we can keep in mind some guidelines about what is not working.

And in this sense, something that clearly does not work in any case is to try to block thoughts related to the death of that person. If you try to do so, you will only adopt a greater predisposition to attract to your mind those painful thoughts and images that you are trying to leave out of your consciousness, thus favoring psychological rumination.

2. Put into words what you feel

Before any bereavement experience, it is important to have the opportunity to express in words the emotional discomfort.

This is a psychological principle used in therapy: through what is known as "emotional labeling", we psychology professionals help people to their feelings into sentences and syntagms, creating a more or less coherent whole, as doing so has been shown to help process that emotional pain.It has been shown that doing so helps to process that emotional pain. By concretizing the emotional charge of what we feel using the lexicon available to us, we also limit the power that these negative emotions have on us and we learn not to avoid thinking about them.

In fact, this procedure helps to recover not only from grief situations, but also from traumas, and its beneficial effects remain in the long term.

3. Combine rest with involvement in activities that stimulate you.

After the first few days of recovery, it is a mistake both to spend all day in bed and to devote yourself to work obsessively. so as not to have even a minute to think about the death of our son or daughter.

It is necessary to be able to rest and sleep enough so that our body does not experience physical exhaustion (which weakens our immune system and predisposes us to suffer anxiety and depressive symptoms), and not to be totally dependent on external sources of stimulation, but it is also important not to isolate ourselves, because if our whole mental life is based on being alone with our thoughts, it is easy to fall into psychological rumination, thinking about the same thing over and over again.

4. Close the cycle of your baby's life with a farewell ritual.

Funeral rituals are a cultural universal, being present in almost all cultures.They are present in almost all cultures, ethnicities and tribes, and that's for a reason. It helps us to say goodbye to that person and to adopt a mentality in which we assume that this loved one passes to exist in our memories. That way, we are not constantly frustrated by the expectation of not being able to interact with it as we do with living people.

Of course, the effects of these kinds of events are not immediate, but in the medium and long term, they usually help. And by the way, it is not necessary that the ritual is tied to a religion or that it has to conform to the standards of a system of customs and beliefs. The important thing is that it allows you to say goodbye in your own way, or in the way of friends and family. It is also possible to have one event for the family and a simpler, more private event for you.

5. If you develop a complicated grief, seek professional help.

Knowing how to deal with grief also means knowing how to recognize the point at which you need psychotherapeutic support. Sometimes, grief becomes complicated grief and threatens to lead to chronic emotional distress.. Therefore, if after several weeks you notice that you are still unable to lead a normal life, it is important that you go to a psychologist.

Are you looking for professional psychological support?

If you are interested in psychological or psychotherapeutic assistance for a bereavement experience, please contact us.

At Psicoconsulting we work with adults and adolescents both in our center located in Barcelona and online through video call sessions.