Healing Your Heart After A Pregnancy Loss
⌛ By Kaylin R. Staten ⌛
I honestly wish I didn’t have to release this book.
Today marks a bittersweet moment in my professional -- and personal -- life. It’s the release date for my latest book, Healing Your Heart: A Prompted Journal for Pregnancy Loss. I wrote this book because suffering two miscarriages has changed the trajectory of my life.
You can learn more of my story within the eBook’s pages, but I will give a brief synopsis here. I lost my first-ever pregnancy on June 4, 2019. I had never known grief like this, and it overwhelmed my entire soul. I floated through each day in a succession of grief. The rest of 2019 is a blur because I trudged through the grief. In August 2020, I gave birth to our rainbow baby, Luke. On April 20, I lost a second pregnancy. It ripped my world apart yet again, and I dealt with PTSD that compounded this next episode of grief.
Losing two babies broke my heart, and I will never get those pieces back.
Those are the CliffsNotes version of my three-year story. While many of the pages in my new book contain prompts to help women going through this type of loss, the book also includes the story of my two miscarriages. I know how it feels to lose a part of you. We cannot anticipate these moments. They flow in and out of our lives, a constant to wake up with us every morning and fall asleep with us every single night.
This book is a much-needed resource -- one that I wish I would have had during my two miscarriages. While I did find prompts to get me through (and I am forever thankful for them!), they weren’t exactly what I needed at the time. I created this prompted journal to get to the heart of women’s stories and to keep children’s legacies alive. We carry them with us, and often, we don’t delve into how we feel about that. We push our emotions to their limits until we can’t feel them anymore.
I wanted to create this journal to help the healing process. I realized after my second miscarriage that I didn’t fully go through every emotion with the first miscarriage. I experienced severe PTSD and lived in a comfort zone of “Skyrim,” comfort food, journaling until my right hand was sore, and shutting out the majority of the outside world.
If you have found yourself here, reading this blog post, and you have experienced a similar loss, this prompted journal could be for you. Here are a few ways that you can heal your heart by using this journal (or writing about your loss in general).
Specific Sections
These sections are designed for you to talk more about your pregnancy in general, the miscarriage process, and your child’s legacy. They can be filled out any time as you fill out the rest of the journal. The beauty of a journal like this is that you can fill out the questions at any time. You can fill them out all at once or take it a question at a time every day. These questions will allow you to see where there could be gaps in your treatment, the healing process, boundaries, self-care, and more during your miscarriage process. There are so many prompts in these sections that I wish would have been available to me, especially the medical-treatment-based ones.
Sample questions include:
What were your initial reactions when you found out you were pregnant?
Which miscarriage indicators made you begin to worry?
What did you envision for your child?
12 Weeks of Prompts
A lot of journals last 6-8 weeks. I wanted to extend the weekly prompts for 12 weeks, which is a full trimester. Spending more time delving into your feelings and then assessing them will let you know where you are in your healing process. You will also be able to speak with your child on the written pages. This ritual will help you feel a bit more normal, even if you feel your world is spinning out of control.
Sample questions include:
Write about how you feel.
Which stage of grief are you in? Describe that stage.
Do you feel like yourself this week?
Letters To Your Child
After the initial 12-week prompts, there are monthly prompts until your child’s due date. If you pick up this journal well after your miscarriage, no worries. Use those 12-week prompts from when you start the journal to 12 weeks after that. Then, you can pick up on the monthly letters to your child -- no matter where you are in the process. Honestly, I am starting the journal now, well after the first 12 weeks of both miscarriages. These letters will allow you to remain close to your child’s memory and further find your own version of healing.
An Audiobook + Fillable PDF Extras
In addition to the standard eBook and print versions, I wanted to make this prompted journal as accessible as possible. The eBook version comes with a fillable PDF if you would rather type out your thoughts. It also comes with the audiobook version, recorded by me, if you would like to listen to the stories, poems, information, and journal prompts and then write at your leisure. If you’re anything like me, you are likely multitasking while doing everything. At the end of the day, I want the information contained in this eBook to be available to anyone anywhere -- right when you need it the most.
If you or someone you know would like to order the eBook or print versions, both are now available! The print version is a beautiful matte hardcover book in full color. I love being able to handwrite in a journal. I’m old-school that way, but I wanted to make this journal available for those who want to type, record audio, or handwrite their responses.
Please note: These blog posts are not clinical, although we will provide symptoms and other information. These posts are based on my experiences with anxiety and mental health in general. If you or someone you know needs help, visit a website like Mental Health America to learn more.
Kaylin R. Staten, APR, is an award-winning, accredited public relations practitioner and writer based in Huntington, WV, with 18 years of professional communications experience. As CEO and founder of Hourglass Media, she uses her compassionate spirit and expertise to delve into the heart of clients’ stories. She is a recovering perfectionist, mental health advocate, wife, boy + cat mom, and Leia Organa aficionado. Connect with Kaylin on LinkedIn.