One in four women experience pregnancy loss, yet the grief remains one of the most private and unspoken sorrows. If you’ve felt isolated, carrying the secret pain of a miscarriage or stillbirth, you are not alone. This conversation delves into the profound, often traumatic, experience of pregnancy loss—an identity-shattering event where many wonder, ‘Did my loss even count?’ Join pregnancy loss practitioner Sharna Southan, who turned her own agonizing healing journey into a mission to support bereaved mothers. She shares why so many women struggle to find support, how unresolved trauma can affect your future health, and the incredible power of giving yourself permission to talk, breathe, and finally, be free. Discover the neurological impact of grief and the crucial steps to reclaim joy and wholeness after loss.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. 

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

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Breaking The Silence On Pregnancy Loss And The Path To Healing With Sharna Southan

In this episode, we’re talking about pregnancy loss, the kind of grief that’s often not spoken about. Our guest will share that 1 out of 4 women experiences being a bereaved mom. Do you know 1 out of 4 women who are talking about it and why? What would their life look like if they were no longer carrying the secret pain and gave themselves permission to be free, talk, breathe, and let other people support them? Let’s get into this conversation.

All the way from Australia, here to the show. Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Not only introduce yourself, but tell us how you went from this topic to the number one podcast.

Sharna Southan’s Personal Pregnancy Loss And The 1 In 4 Statistic

Thank you for asking that. My name is Sharna Southan. I am a pregnancy loss practitioner and educator. Everything that I created was everything that I needed in my healing journey. It took a few years for it to eventuate, putting all the puzzle pieces together. Going through my own experience of a miscarriage, I needed support that wasn’t there. No one was talking about pregnancy loss. No one was talking about what I was going to experience through that loss. Everything that they were telling me about what my body was going to go through is completely different from what I was experiencing.

I ended up Googling everything. My husband and I were trying to figure everything out. We were like, “What is happening? Why is this happening to my body? How long is this going to last?” It got to the point where I was bleeding too much and ended up being rushed to the hospital for an emergency DNC. The OB-GYN that was at the hospital was like, “Your body is recognizing that you’ve lost the pregnancy, but you’re going through contractions. It’s not completing the process itself, so we need to go through this procedure.”

In my mind, I felt like I was one in a million going through this. I was like, “I’m the only woman that’s experiencing this because no one is talking about it.” What I was given was not right in terms of the aftercare. He said 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss. I was like, “If 1 in 4 pregnancies and this way, why is no one talking about it? Why do I feel like I’m the only one going through this?”

I was introduced to grief quite early on in my life. My dad died when I was nineteen. It’s not that I knew how to process this type of grief, but I knew that I had to go through the process. I had to feel my feelings. I had to move through what was coming up for me. There were moments of complete numbness. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I felt like I was this shell of a human, not having anyone talk about what this experience was like.

I was piecing things together for myself in my healing and doing what I felt like was right for me. It got to a point where I needed to see a psychologist. I reached out to a psychologist that I had used when my dad died and said, “I need help. I can’t do this on my own.” She supported me in terms of I’d written everything out on paper, what I’d gone through, the thoughts that went through my head through the whole experience, and the fact that I thought I was going to die.

I rang my mom and said, “I’m going to die. No one can go through this, believe the way that I am, and survive.” I had viscerally believed that that was my fate. My psychologist ended up diagnosing me and saying, “You’ve experienced trauma.” I was like, “What do I do with this experience?” I was left to piece things together for myself.

Transitioning From Personal Healing To Professional Support

There were a few months where I was moving through my healing, going through the transitions that I felt like I needed to go through. There was this moment of clarity, like, “I need to do this for someone else. I need to be this person for someone else because I needed that person,” and then everything shifted. Not that it was a distraction, but I was then focused on, “How do I do this? How do I share what I’ve been through so that I can help another woman feel less alone?” That’s the foundation of everything that I do, even the podcast that I run, the certification that I have, and any of the support programs that I’ve created along the way. It was all through the lens of pregnancy loss and how a woman is feeling holistically, mentally, physically, and emotionally on how she’s moving through her loss.

This is a lot. In the pre-show discussion, we talked about the ebb and flow of life. These are heavy topics. I want people to know that the space of heaviness is not where we live our lives all the time. We hold space for people there, but it’s important to know that we laugh, joke, and do different things. Life does continue. It may look different, but it does continue. We would want people to have happiness, moments of joy, and places where they are pleased with their existence and where they are in the world. I don’t take that back. I embellish that.

Knowing this work is so personal based on your own experience, where do you think you found the ability, strength, or bravery to lead these types of conversations and not just listen? You could have chosen to only guest on other people’s podcasts and tip in and out, going back to the 1 in 4 people who have had this experience. In the pre-show conversation, we were talking about how there are very few people broaching this topic. You had the bravery to experience this and then hold space for others.

To be honest, I feel like it could go back to how I was wired as a child. I was an elite athlete, so there was a different way for me to view things. To be honest, I did start off in that one-on-one support space, supporting bereaved mothers directly, but I ended up having women reach out to me asking me how I became that support person. For a very long time, I kept saying, “I can’t be that person. I don’t know how to do that.”

I reflected back on my job as a dental nurse. They ended up employing me to train the new dental nurses to come through. I used my personal experience in not knowing anything about the dental industry. Coming in, what I did was that I drew every single drawing in that dental room. I wrote down every single little thing that was in that drawer so that if the dentist asked for it, I knew exactly where to go and what I was looking for. I designed my own manual.

I was thinking over things in my life where I had this natural ability to step into, “I need to lead myself. I need to do this first for me.” I said no to the initial lot of women who were saying, “Can I learn how to do that?” I was like, “I don’t know how to do that. I’ve done some courses and put things together myself, like a puzzle. I don’t know how to bring that to the world.”

I had more reach-out down the track, and I was like, “This is something bigger than me. It’s something bigger than what I’m doing. How do I do that? How do I make that happen?” I realized I’d already done it in different areas of my life. I’d written out manuals for dental nurses who ended up being like, “This is amazing.” I was like, “That was easy. On a Tuesday afternoon, I put that together for you.” I realized that was a natural gift that I had.

I took my experience. I call it my transitions of healing. It was what I physically and mentally went through. It was almost like each stage of my healing journey. I stripped that back, and then that became the foundation of the programs and the courses. In creating it that way, I was able to go, “If you were going to sit across from a woman who has experienced pregnancy loss or stillbirth, these are the thoughts that she’s thinking. These are the emotions that she’s feeling. This is the trauma that potentially her body is trying to process.” It’s not medical. It’s not something where you’re like, “This is what the definition of this is. This is what the medical system’s going to do.” I’m like, “This is focused on the woman because it comes from my healing journey.” I built it out from there.

I realized I needed to do more training for myself. Once I realized I was physically experiencing trauma, I was like, “I need to know more about this. I need to know more about the trauma and how to support someone else through that. I then realized the neurobiology part was connected quite intricately to the body as well. I was like, “I need to learn more about that. I need to learn more that it’s not just the body, the head, and all of these individual pieces. It is how everything is working together, how your body is working together, and how it needs to heal together as well.”

Thank you for that. Let me circle back. You mentioned a term, DNC. For people who are reading this conversation, can you elaborate on what that means?

It’s a procedure that they go in and take out the baby. They take out all of the tissue that is related to that pregnancy. It is a way to complete the pregnancy for your body to know, “There’s nothing there anymore,” and you can then go through the healing process. I didn’t know of this world at all. Everything was so new to me when they were explaining what was happening. I was on morphine, so all that part of that experience is quite a blur.

It essentially is completing the miscarriage. My body couldn’t do it on its own. They go in and take everything out for you. There’s so much on that that I wish I had been given more to remember my pregnancy by. My baby had died at seven weeks of gestation, so there would have been something there. I don’t know, looking back, if I would have wanted to see anything. I’m not sure, but I was never given the opportunity to make that decision for myself. They were like, “You’ve got to go in. This is what we do,” and then you’re out, you’re in recovery, and you’re sent home with nothing.

When you say bereaved mother, what does that mean versus what I may have interpreted it to represent?

When we go through loss, we struggle to identify who we are. We are still a mom to that baby. I say bereaved mother in the sense that you are still a mom, and you are grieving the loss of your child. When I mentioned pregnancy loss, there’s so much that falls under that. There’s so much that falls under the bereaved mother as well. In my eyes, that’s the reference point I have.

The Importance Of The Term Bereaved Mother For Identity

That is an actual beautiful term because you hear miscarriage. It describes an activity, something that happened. When I hear your interpretation of a bereaved mom, especially for that woman who may have never brought a child into this world, may feel like that loss didn’t count, but it did, and she was and still is a mother, that is important for identity, correct?

Absolutely. One of the biggest things that happens with pregnancy loss is you lose your sense of self and identity in that, because then, you don’t know who you are, where you fit, and what label you can put on yourself. You’re like, “Am I a mom? Did what I went through count? Does that exist in the eyes of society?” It does create a huge identity fracture.

Knowing that for myself personally, there were questions that I was asking myself the whole time because I didn’t have a pregnant belly. I didn’t have anything outward for people to go, “Your baby died. You had a pregnancy, and now it’s not there.” It was like, “Where do I fit? Were they real enough for society to deem me a mom?”

That identity piece is huge. It ripples out through so many different elements of a woman’s life after loss. To be able to know that you are a mom, and you can celebrate Mother’s Day. You can celebrate all of those things that society does on the outside for moms who have children outside. You can still participate in that. It’s a choice that you make. I made that choice. I was like, “That’s who I’m going to identify with because I was a mom. That pregnancy was real, and it made me a mom.”

That is a lot to consider. Hearing your experience and then thinking 1 of 4 and why the conversation doesn’t exist, it could possibly be how hard it is to have that conversation or to be able to outwardly speak and say, “This happened to me. We’d rather keep it private. No one knew. It wasn’t shown. No one was aware. I don’t want people looking at me strangely. I don’t want the pity look.”

Inside, there are a lot of things that are still unsettled. For the 1 in 4 who are tuning in to this show, it’s right here in their throat, and they wish they could say something. It could have been 10 or 20 years, but it’s still right there. What would you share with them about the power of sharing your story and what it has done for you and other women?

For me, it was personally realizing that when I started sharing what happened to me, I had a lot of women reaching out, going, “That happened to me, too.” I was only sharing that it had happened. What that gave permission for other women to do was share their story as well. It doesn’t matter if it was 1 week ago, 1 year ago, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Once we are able to open up and share about what our story is, especially with this topic, because there is so much stigma around it, it is like, “Society may not have seen me pregnant, so why should I talk about it?” Inside, your body is screaming. You’re trying to navigate these big emotions, possibly trauma.

I experienced trauma. You can’t ignore that. That affects how you show up as a partner. That affects how you show up in your workplace. That affects how you show up if you have living children. When we start to share our story, it gives permission for someone else to go, “She shared hers. Hers might’ve been quite similar to mine. Maybe I can share mine, too.” At least allow that to be okay. Allow it to maybe one day be the norm, where we can start sharing our story more openly and not receive the pushback from society that we do get.

Thank you. The choice to share our story, the choice to allow ourselves to grieve, and the choice to allow ourselves to receive help, and for the people around us to know that we are suffering. In the work you do with people, have you had an experience where someone could not bring themselves to allow that? If so, how did that impact how they showed up with a partner in life, in work, and in other things?

I haven’t personally worked with women who have chosen that. I have been in spaces where I’ve seen that conversation play out. There was this one lady who consistently, for over a year, kept reaching out to me, wanting support. Every time I offered support to her, she wouldn’t do it, and I would see her post in a Facebook group, consistently grieving in pain. She’d been in that space, from what I remember, for about ten years.

From what I know, it, your pain doesn’t go away. It will intensify over time, and I get it. Not moving and not healing is probably a lot more comfortable, because healing and moving forward is going to bring things that maybe you’re not prepared to do, see, witness, or feel. It can be scary when you choose not to do the things, as I witnessed in this lady.

She kept reaching out. It’s not that she was working with me at the time because that wasn’t what she was intending. She only wanted free tools that she could use, but she still chose not to use them. She was still showing up, consumed by her pain. That is a choice. It doesn’t have to be your forever place. The pain that you’re in doesn’t have to be forever. When we choose not to do the work, I get it. It’s scary to do it, but you are also choosing to continue with that same pathway.

From everything that I know for myself, the work that I do, and the clients that I’ve served, when you can choose to do that for yourself, there is so much beauty on the other side of it. It’s not easy, but it’s also going to get you to the place that you know is possible for you. If you want to be happy again or you want to be able to enjoy life again, that is possible. When we choose not to do it, it compounds over time, and it will intensify. At some point, something has to give. There will be health issues or sicknesses. Maybe you have a complete breakdown, whether it’s a mental illness. There is something that your body will say, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep going the way that you’re going.”

That is very true. Earlier, you spoke about the neurological impact of grief. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more, and what surprised you about finding out about that?

Neurological Impact Of Pregnancy Loss On Reproduction And Safety

It’s all very fascinating. This is where my brain goes. I’m so geeky. I nerd out on all of that stuff. I wonder, “Does anyone even want to know what happens?” Our body is always in constant communication. It’s not an either-or. It’s not your brain or your body. It’s not going to see a therapist and then ignore everything else that’s happening below the head.

What’s happening is a direct communication, especially if you want to fall pregnant again, or especially if you want to have a healthy outcome, potentially for that new pregnancy. When you go through pregnancy loss, your brain and body make this direct correlation. It’s an equation that pregnancy equals danger or pregnancy equals loss.

If you don’t work on that equation between the chemicals that are released from your brain into your body and the communication that’s coming from your body to your brain, the end result is that there’s a part of your brain that is in control of your reproductive system. That part of your brain is at the end of all of the other signals that go through your body.

If all of those signals are signaling danger, that part of your brain is going to be like, “We’re going to shut down reproduction.” What it does is it suppresses a chemical that is meant to enhance your fertility. Your brain has made the call, “Let’s suppress this chemical,” and then your reproductive organs go offline. Your body is receiving the information, “It’s not safe to reproduce right now.”

Until you can work on that initial equation or until you can stop that alarm bell sounding in your brain, that’s also sending a signal to your body that it’s not safe to go there. It’s also in the felt sense of your body that pregnancy equals danger. It’s not an either-or. Sometimes, your body can trigger that alarm or signal of, “This is unsafe.”

Sometimes, the memory of certain things or the association of things that your brain has made can automatically sound that alarm as well. It’s like this cascade of events that end up resulting in your body being like, “It’s not safe. Pregnancy isn’t safe.” The one thing that she wants the most, the desire that she wants the most, is what her body is telling her is dangerous. It shuts everything down.

I already knew about the trauma element because I could feel it in my body, but you don’t necessarily understand all of the chemical signals that are going on inside your brain. You can’t feel that. In making the connection between what was happening in my body and the communication and signals that were coming from my brain, I was like, “That’s happening.” It was almost like this missing piece. I had the trauma understanding.

I also knew that when we are in a survival state, our body naturally will not feel safe. It’s very primitively designed. It won’t feel safe to fall pregnant. Understanding the chemical signals that are coming from your brain and the sequence of events that lead there was interesting. I’m sure I’m only touching on the surface of it all with the whole neurobiology of it.

That’s fine. In line with the idea that our body does not like pain, we, as humans, don’t particularly want pain. Could that be why people stray away from doing the work that you talk about in their grief journey? They’re like, “This pain that they’re in, I know what this looks like. I’ve been here. This is fine. I have to hope that that work will do something. What if I do all that, and nothing happens? What if I do all of these things, and it doesn’t change my situation? Being here is where I will stay.” What would you say to the person who has that mindset?

I get it. Humans are very averse to pain. We don’t want to feel pain. It’s comfortable where you are. You’re probably not feeling too much pain, but I also invite you to ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you feeling any sense of joy? Are you feeling any sense of aliveness in yourself? I know what it’s like to be there, and I didn’t feel alive. It was like the color had been turned out of my world. It took my husband to pull me out of it. It took me a lot of internal conversations with myself to realize what he was seeing.

When we choose to stay there, we’re also not choosing to change anything. If you want something to change, you have to do something different. You have to try something different, even if it’s 1% different. It doesn’t have to be this huge, grand gesture of, “I’m going to do all of these things.” What’s 1% different? What’s 1% in the way that you feel could be moving you forward?

With all of what’s happening in your body, if your body doesn’t make the connection that healing is safe or that pregnancy is safe, then the outcome that you want might be further away than what you think is possible. Your body needs to feel safe. To make your body safe, we have to shift it out of where it is. It could be something simple, if it’s just that 1%.

Thank you. Do you help people if their husband is in a different mindset than where they are in this process of being a bereaved mother?

Navigating Grief When Partners Are In Different Mindsets

That’s one of the hardest things. What I know for sure is that men grieve, too. They just grieve differently. My husband and I felt like we were on a completely different page throughout the whole grieving process. There were a lot of fights. There were a lot of questioning why he was doing something or why he wasn’t feeling the way that I was feeling. I have a connection in the States with a man who does bereaved father work. I’ve spoken to him before. Everything I knew that was true for me, my healing, and my husband was what he was saying.

A lot of times, we can get into dark places in our relationships because we assume the other person should be at a certain point doing a certain thing because that’s where we’re at. Our relationship to the baby, our hormones that were released in that pregnancy, and our emotions are all so different from what their relationship was to the baby.

A lot of the time, what I found was that my husband was trying to control the situation because he could see that I was falling apart, and he didn’t want me to. He was trying to protect me. I didn’t realize that. I was  like, “Why are you talking about those stupid, insignificant, meaningless things?” He was trying to help me in his way. That’s when we can open the communication with them and have a safe place to talk about where you are and what you’re feeling. That was when things started to shift for us. It has to be a very intentional space. It can’t be a random conversation.

What I found with most males was that they don’t like to sit and chat, so we went for walks. When I spoke to this other man as well, he was like, “Men will maybe go to a bar, or they’ll sit shoulder-to-shoulder with other men.” Go for a walk. Do something where you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and you’re not face-to-face, whereas most women like to talk face-to-face. It is being able to open the communication in a safe environment where there’s no judgment on either party. Even if the other person doesn’t want to talk, that’s okay, too. Have that space and know that that’s available.

Thank you. I love that. We have to remember that they love us, they’re protecting us, and we’re what’s important. We didn’t get here because we weren’t trying to have a child, and we’re both trying to deal with it in our own way. For the person who is reading this conversation, what is one thing that you would want them to take away from this discussion?

That you’re not alone. You’ve probably heard that in multiple different ways and from multiple different people. Maybe on social media, you see that a lot. You’re not alone. There are people out there who know how you feel. There is support for you. The one thing I would invite you to do if you aren’t ready to seek support or someone to talk to is to sit with where you’re at. What do you need? What do you feel like you need? It’s not what other people are going to tell you what you need, how far along you should be, or how much emotion you should be feeling.

I’m a very emotional person, so for people to tell me, “You shouldn’t be crying. You shouldn’t be grieving,” I was like, “This is me. This is who I am. I’m going to cry right now.” Regardless of how far out you are from your loss, you need to witness where you are. You need to know what it is that you believe in for yourself. You stand in for you.

When you’re ready, reach out because there are people out there who do know how to support you through that. Sometimes, it’s not going to come from a therapist or counselor. They have their place, but what I noticed is that sometimes, you need something different, and that’s okay. If you are seeing a therapist or a counselor, and it’s not working, don’t stay for the sake of staying. Find someone who can understand where you’re at and what you’re feeling, and help you move forward.

Thank you. Where can people connect with you?

I am mostly on Instagram. If you want to reach out to me, go there. Everything that I share is an extension of me and what I believe. It’s @ReproductiveLossLeadership. Also, the podcast has a page of its own, which is @PregnancyLoss_Podcast. If you’re experiencing pregnancy loss, I have a lot of conversations on the podcast specifically around that. My business page, @ReproductiveLossLeadership, is the gaps that I see in pregnancy loss care. Why you still might be feeling the way that you’re feeling is because you haven’t been able to be met yet by a professional who can fully see the whole picture of what you’re going through.

I’d like to give my guest an opportunity to be the host. This may not be as challenging for you because this is what you’re good at. Any questions you may have for me?

It’s different, though, because it’s not my podcast.

Let’s see if you struggle. I doubt it.

We all navigate grief differently. I needed to be on a mattress in the lounge room, watching Shrek, the movie, over and over to help me through what I was feeling. How were you able to navigate grief for yourself?

I was a workout junkie. I moved the elliptical machine into the front room. If I was going to be up at these odd hours, I was on the elliptical. I was doing kickboxing. I needed to hit something and not be in trouble for doing that. That was a safe way to do that. It was also a combination of my faith. It was reading the Bible more, understanding this limited life that we have, and understanding what my faith said about the life there afterwards. It was allowing my family and friends to hold me up and to see that this was the most difficult experience I’ve ever had and that I needed them. It was accepting the help that they would bring me.

All of that has been the way for me, as well as journaling and having a therapist. As grief impacts us in so many different ways, I realized I needed a lot of different ways to be able to go through this. I had two siblings on the West Coast. I had somebody in different time zones, so I had different people to call because this was hard, and still is. You mentioned earlier that to some extent, grief will always be a part of my journey, but with what it looks like, I believe a lot belongs to me on how I navigate it and how I work in it and through it.

I love how you said that you had to have multiple different ways to move through it. We don’t wear one pair of shoes for every occasion. You can’t wear heels and go and run out and do a workout in them. We need to understand that it is like creating a team of things around us, creating something that can hold us in all of those different elements of grief, and to also know that it’s not this one-and-done thing. There’s not one moment in your life that’s going to disappear. It’s something that you learn to carry and hold. It is how you hold it, and then how you navigate it each time it comes up.

The Epiphany That Grief Cannot Be Fixed Or Resolved

I would also like to add the epiphany that came one time in therapy that this cannot be fixed or resolved. When people think, “If I work with a coach or a therapist, this is going to become fixed.” The only way that it will be fixed is if it never happened. Everything is going to be different. We don’t get that version of what that looks like. That reality seems very simple, but in profound grief, realizing the finality of it was hard. It also gave me permission to say, “We’re going to have to do something different, because I will drive myself mad trying to hold on to what is impossible to get again.”

That’s what drove me into depression. It was trying to hold on. It doesn’t help you. That’s where we think, “If I do hold on, everything will be okay.” When we choose to hold on, it’s almost like we stay in suffering. I ended up being diagnosed with depression at that point. It doesn’t serve us to try to hold on to what everything was like when everything was different.

I would agree. That’s a good question. Any more?

Not off the top of my head. That was the first thing that came to me. It was your husband who died, right?

Yes.

For me, when my dad died, I was nineteen, trying to navigate my life as a child without him. He was only 49, so he was young. I still often think about how my mom navigated it because it was her person, the one she’d chosen to grow old with. She’s a ball of anxiety in her life, and I feel like it’s because she wasn’t able to process a lot from when he died. I know you said you had the support of your family, which I know my mom had as well, but then there was also the navigating life and general day-to-day things without being able to ask him a question. How were you able to navigate that?

Those are tough. Our son was nineteen when his dad passed. Our daughter was 22. I was grateful that they knew their dad until an adult age. That gave me some peace. Unfortunately, my husband’s family had a lot of cardiac issues. There were a lot of conversations about how, if he died before 55, what I needed to do, what that would look like, and a lot of things in that way.

We have godparents for our children, who would legally be their guardians if my husband, Mark, and I both passed. There was a lot of opportunity to have them lean into our children as they were growing up. When Mark passed, I was like, “We set ourselves up for what success would look like in this situation.” I would ask my brother or my children’s godfather, “What do you think about these different choices I need to make?” Mothering is forever. Parenting isn’t like, “You’re eighteen. Off you go.” She’s 30, and she could be right here on my lap if she could.

I remember it was also a struggle. My therapist said, “Your children have you.” I was struggling like, “Tina would do this, but Mark would do this,” and back and forth. I was like, “I can only be who I am.” I had to come to terms with the decision that what I’m making has to be enough because that’s all I have to give. I can’t wrestle trying to be him and myself. When I let that go, trying to be both people, I didn’t break them. They’re still here. I had to do the best with what I had.

It was hard to change and accept what version of my future would look like versus what I planned. That part is continually having to make the steps further away from what I had planned it would be to the version I am now, which is happy. I do enjoy my life. The anniversary of his passing and his birthday are still difficult times for me. I assume that they probably will be for a lifetime because I spent 32 years with him.

It has been helpful to lean into my girlfriends and my other relationships. I’m glad that not only did I have a good marriage with my husband, but I maintain relationships outside of that. When I was starting to dip low, they would come and pull me out. Those relationships were independent. My girlfriends know me. That has been amazing.

That’s what my mom needs. She withdrew a lot from everyone at that point. Even now, she’s still very much withdrawn. She has remarried and is happy, but a lot of those connections that she had when we were kids with other families have all dropped off. I feel like that makes it a lot harder. You said you’ve lost your husband, but then you’ve had your friends come in and hold you. I was 19, my brother was 17, and my sisters were 15. She felt like she had to hold it together for us, but in doing that, she pulled away from so much that could have supported her and could still continue to support her, too.

My husband got to 49, which was where my dad died. I was like, “Holy heck.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “I couldn’t imagine losing you now, as my mom did.” She had four young kids. I didn’t think that his getting to that age was going to be so emotional for me, but I was hugging him extra tight. I’m like, “Don’t go anywhere.”

Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for sitting on the other side of the podcast and letting me lead the conversation. I also like to allow my guests to wrap up the conversation with any final thoughts because this is your conversation. I was just able to help guide it.

Give Yourself Grace And Permission To Be Wherever You Are

I enjoy sharing my story. I don’t ever want to sit on the other side of other people and then think that I’m this unicorn person because I’ve been able to build all of this stuff from my personal experience. I’m not. I’m a normal human like everyone else who went through something challenging and saw the possibility that I can use my experience to change this. I love sharing my story and being asked questions that potentially spur something a little bit different in the way that I show up.

If there was anything to leave with, it would be to give yourself grace and permission to be wherever it is that you are. If it’s hard, then let it be hard. Don’t try to rush through it. Witness where you are and allow those emotions to come through. Sometimes, these emotions need a physical outlet, and our body knows that. What does that look like? Maybe it is journaling. Maybe it is that you have to go buy a punching bag. Punch a pillow. Punch the bed. Scream into a pillow. Allow it to be there. Try not to rush through it. The moment we try to rush through it and dismiss it, it pushes pause on that emotion. It doesn’t stop at all. It will just unpause at a later time. Allow yourself to be.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you for having me.

Important Links

• Sharna Southan
• Sharna Southan on Instagram
• @ReproductiveLossLeadership on Instagram
• @PregnancyLoss_Podcast on Instagram
• What I Wish I Knew Beyond Pregnancy Loss Podcast

About Sharna Southan

Sharna Southan is the founder of the newly renamed International Institute of reproductive loss & trauma leadership and creator of The Pregnancy Loss Recovery Method™ — the only trauma-informed, neuroscience-backed methodology built specifically for reproductive loss and trauma support.

After her own miscarriage in 2017, Sharna identified a gap in the care available to bereaved mothers and spent six years building the framework that didn’t exist. She now trains women globally through the Pregnancy Loss & Trauma-Informed Specialist Certification, hosts the podcast What I Wish I Knew After Pregnancy Loss, and is currently completing her first book.

Sharna is pioneering reproductive loss as a distinct and specialist field and is on a mission to raise the standard of care available to every bereaved mother, everywhere.

Sharna Southan. Reproductive Loss Practitioner | Educator | Speaker

Founder & Lead Educator — Reproductive Loss Leadership

Founder — Reproductive Loss Institute

Creator — Pregnancy Loss Recovery Method™

Lead Educator — Pregnancy Loss & Trauma-Informed Specialist Certification

Developing leaders in reproductive loss & trauma care

ABN: 52609624683

Website: www.sharnasouthan.com

Loss Leadership: https://www.instagram.com/reproductivelossleadership/

Certification: https://www.instagram.com/reproductivelossinstitute/

Podcast: https://www.instagram.com/pregnancyloss_podcast/