Miscarriage and Meaning: an Interview with Danielle Ireland
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Danielle Ireland: speaker, actress, ballroom dancer, licensed therapist, recovering perfectionist
Miscarriage is sometimes called a silent loss.
Women often carry the sorrow in isolation. And yet, the experience is surprisingly common. 1 in every 8 known pregnancies ends in miscarriage.
How can you support a friend or coworker who has lived with this grief? You can get valuable tips by listening to this episode of the Handle with Care podcast.
Danielle Ireland is a speaker, actress, and a licensed therapist and she shares about the miscarriage of her son. Danielle reflects on the importance of empathy, how partners can grieve differently, and why it really bugged her when people kept telling her, “I’m sorry”.
You can find the Handle with Care, Empathy at Work podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. And you can listen to the episode here…
Here are three helpful takeaways from my conversation with Danielle:
There is power in sharing your story of loss. Miscarriage is often a private burden, unseen to a wider world unless the parent chooses to share. Danielle shared how meaningful it was to have multiple nurses come up to her in the recovery room to share that they too had lost a child in miscarriage. They spoke words of hope and camaraderie to her in the midst of a very dark time…and gave her confidence to know that her healing journey did not have to be silent.
Partners grieve differently. As her therapist asked her, “Can you allow your partner to experience grief differently than you?” What does it look like to give the other person space and allowance? This is deeply resonant with my own experience of walking with my husband through our seasons of parental loss.
“I’m sorry” can sometimes sound redundant or abstract to a person suffering. I often tell people that saying “I’m sorry that is happening to you” can be a really good go-to phrase, but this take-away is a good reminder that there is no one-size fits all approach to comfort. For Danielle, the “I’m sorry” felt hollow. Which brings me to the point 3b. Pay attention to the person you are communicating with. If they seem like they aren’t responding to your phrase, whether it is “I’m sorry” or something else, file that information away and try something different the next time you interact with them, like “I was thinking of you and how hard this must be.” The best comforters are those that pay attention and are consistently adapting to the person in front of them.