The Power of Your Story: Resilience & Finding Meaning

I like stories, especially the ones that are rooted in difficult, challenging, and painful circumstances yet have a happy ending. They always bring a smile or tears to my face. These stories give me hope about the ability of people to face life challenges.
 There are also personal stories that do not necessarily have the happy ending that we hope for. However, the protagonist of these stories continue living life with hope, joy, and strength. How is that possible?  I honestly think that it has to do with how you tell your story to yourself and others, how you re-frame your circumstances, and how you find meaning in the middle of pain.
Let's look at these three different behaviors and attitudes:


1. Telling your story to yourself and others
Our narrative is strongly connected to our thoughts and beliefs. The way you tell your story to yourself and others has an impact on how you make sense of the events that are happening to you. For example, if you have been trying to lose weight for many years and you have never been able to reach your goal, what are you telling yourself? Are you telling yourself:"I will never be able to lose weight", "I am a failure", "I don't have hope"? This narrative could become the reason why you stop trying to accomplish your goal. Personally, when my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, our narrative was very positive. There was not any reason to believe that we were going to face difficulties in staying pregnant. My narrative changed immediately once I started facing challenges, and it took a lot of time, counseling, and self-care to change it to a more meaningful and empowering narrative that would allow me to face our realities. Your narrative about your story is usually automatic and we rarely stop to think about what kind of story we are telling to ourselves.

2. Re-framing your circumstances 
What are other explanations for what is happening to you? What are some other ways in which you can look at your current difficult situation? I experienced five early pregnancy losses in a time frame of five years. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life. However, during this time, I re-framed  the pregnancy losses as an opportunity for me to know how my body needed to be healed. I also look at my pain as an opportunity to learn more about myself, my relationship with my husband, my relationship with others, and my relationship with God. Re-framing didn't take away my grief and my pain but allowed me to keep going with hope and strength. When we feel hopeless it is good to re-frame our circumstances to find hope.

3. Finding meaning in the middle of your sorrow 
This is not an easy or fast process, and usually is the culmination of a lot of inner work over a long period of time. Finding meaning is the ultimate engine for a life purpose. I remember the time when I was working through my grief with my therapist. I already had my two children and I was trying to find meaning in all my losses. My therapist asked me to write a letter to my babies in which I thank them for what they gave to me and to my life. Just thinking about it right now makes me want to cry out of gratitude and love because I realized at that point that I had so many reasons to thank my babies. Of course I wish they were here on earth with me, however, through losing them I have been able to find my purpose in life which is helping others! I am also fortunate to have my son and my daughter in my life. My son was my fourth pregnancy and my daughter was adopted after our fifth loss. I was so grateful that I realized how I became stronger during this difficult time.

How can you connect your pain to a purpose? What do you wish someone would have done for you when you were experiencing difficult circumstances? I  invite you to look around you, to listen to people's stories and find out how they found meaning and purpose as a result of pain. These people are making a difference in other people's lives. They are stronger than they thought they were, and they were able to develop resilience. You can do the same because you are worth it.

 From my heart to yours,

Ana Baratta, PhD. LPC.
www.graceandvictorycounseling.com

Effectively Incorporating Self Care in your Life

As a mental health professional, I am constantly reminded of the importance of self-care in being an effective therapist but also in finding balance among my personal responsibilities as a mom, wife, and daughter. Many people use the term "self-care" very loosely and think that self-care is just a matter of scheduling some activities during your free time in order to have fun or to find some peace. However, self-care is more than that, it entails being aware of what kind of activities or behaviors help you to get energized on a daily basis. Self-care could include one or more of the following areas: physical, cognitive, spiritual and emotional.

The key of effective self-care is knowing what works for you and being intentional about how you plan those activities based on your personal life experiences. What do I mean by this? Basically, what works for you during most of the weeks may not be effective when you are having a stressful week, or when you are going through a difficult situation.  For example, if on a regular basis taking a bath or reading a book help you to feel energized, those activities may not work if you are experiencing a very challenging week at work. You may have to engage in additional activities that may help you during those difficult times.

 Here are some questions that may help you in becoming intentional on how to practice self-care based on your particular life experiences and life style:

1. What activities/behaviors energize you on a regular basis? The list is infinite and could include from going to the movies to writing in a journal. The possibilities are many, but the key is to be aware of what activities work for you. It may be that you like going for walks and that gives you energy, a sense of well being but this doesn't mean that this works for everyone.

2. After trying some activities, are these activities working for you? If the activities you tried didn't work for you, try something else. Be open to feel uncomfortable in trying things that you have never tried before. You will be surprised at the types of activities that you will find helpful for you. Learning on how to take care of yourself requires being open to try new adventures.

3. What are some seasons, days of the week, holidays or anniversaries that required additional self-care? This is a very important question to ask yourself because the answer to these questions will help you to prepare for what is coming. For some people holidays are stressful and they may need to set activities to help them deal with it. Personally, I have a hard time during the anniversary of my early pregnancy losses. I know that during this time, I need to schedule additional self-care that is congruent with this situation such as taking a day off at work, writing, talking to someone who understand my grief etc.

4. What are you telling yourself when you are practicing self-care? Our self-talk has a lot of power on our emotions and on our behavior. If you are engaging in self-care but you are telling yourself that "I should be doing something else" or "I am not a good parent by taking time to myself" or "I really don't need this", "I should be strong", then self-care is not really happening!
What you tell yourself is the result of your family culture and the implicit messages you received about what it means to be a good mom, dad, husband, wife, daughter or son. Moreover, they could be the result of our beliefs about what it means to be a strong person. When you find yourself felling guilty about engaging in self-care, remember to dispute those thoughts and replace them with the truth. The truth is that self-care is extremely important for your well being. Self-care will result in being a better partner, mom, dad, husband, wife, daughter and son. You will have something to give to others because you took care of yourself.

From my heart to yours,

Ana Baratta, PhD., LPC.

Grieving After a Miscarriage

This picture is from a memorial dedicated to all children regardless of their age. It states:

My Precious Innocence
You are part of me and will live in my heart forever
I will always remember you

For many people who have experienced one or multiple miscarriages, the sentiments expressed in this memorial are real. Grieving by itself is a very complex process which is not easy to explain to someone who has not experienced it. In the case of grieving after a miscarriage, it really gets more complicated. There are multiple reasons for such a struggle and it is important that if you have experienced an early pregnancy loss to be gentle with yourself and know that what you are going through is normal. Some of the challenges that women and couples who experience early pregnancy loss face are the following:

Dealing with disfranchised grief. This term could be intimidating but simply it means sometimes miscarriage is not considered by some people (health professionals, friends, family members ) as a "real or valid" loss.  Personally, when my husband and I lost our babies (yes, for us they were our babies), we were surprised how many people didn't know what to say to us, didn't express any sympathy and inundate us with comments such as "don't worry, you will get pregnant again" or "well, it was not actually a baby". The lack of validation and people's reactions can add to the pain already experienced by the couple. It is normal to feel a terrible sense of loss after a miscarriage but unfortunately many suffer in silence.

Lack of rituals. When a loved one dies, there are rituals in place by society to process the loss and to allow us to grieve. With miscarriages, these rituals sometimes are not available. This situation makes the grieving process more difficult and isolated. My husband and I had five miscarriages and only one hospital offers us the opportunity to honor one of our babies through a memorial service. For the first time, I felt that my loss actually happened and that I was allowed to openly grieve my baby.

Couples experience grief differently. In most cases, women are more open about their grief and their emotions. They expressed their grief through crying, sleeping, and sharing their loss with close friends and family. However, it is very common that men get into action and protective mode instead of dwelling in their feelings. Their main concern is how to support their wives/partners during this difficult time. They may not share their pain and could act as if life goes on. His reactions could also be hurtful to his wife/partner, specially when we think that there is only one way to grieve. I remember the day that after our third loss, my husband got two dogs (and we already had one at home) and shortly after a tattoo (a cross with three tears representing our losses). I knew that this was his way of grieving and I support him the best way I could.

Guilt and Shame. Experiencing an early pregnancy loss carries sometimes a sense of responsibility in women. Questions and thoughts such as what did I do to cause this? "I should have not exercised", What if I didn't eat this? etc. These type of questions and thoughts are normal part of the grieving process since we are trying to make sense of what happened. Trying to find a reason for the miscarriage provide us with some sense of control of the situation. However, it is important to know, that there are multiple reasons of why we experienced miscarriages and those reasons have nothing to do with something that we did or didn't do.

So, where do we go from here:

• Be gentle with yourself. You are going to have good days and not so good days and that is fine. You just experienced one of the hardest experiences for women and their partners.
• Engage in activities that may help you in understanding what the loss mean to you. Some of these activities include writing in a journal, blogging, joining a support group such as RESOLVE. These activities can help you share your story and make meaning of your loss.
• Create your own rituals. This is a very personal thing to do and it all depends on what makes sense to you. Some ideas could be: planting flowers, creating an album, writing a poem to your baby, performing a ceremony at home or at church, or lighting a candle.

• Advocate for yourself. It took me a while to learn to how to advocate for myself after my miscarriages. I learned that many people say inappropriate things because of lack of knowledge and understanding. I found myself "educating people" and advocating for myself many times. This is true with friends, families and even doctors. 
• Do what is best for you and your partner. It is fine if you are not ready to try to get pregnant again, if you don't want to go to baby showers or if you want to see an infertility doctor...it is all ok! People have opinions but what counts is what you think will be helpful to you and your healing process.
• Counseling/Couples Counseling. After a miscarriage some women may need the support of a therapist to help them make sense of their situation. Sometimes, couples counseling is necessary to understanding how each other are dealing with the loss. There is nothing wrong in looking for support and help!

From my heart to yours, 

Ana Baratta, PhD., LPC