Afraid to Bond After Prior Pregnancy Loss? Why & What Helps
The pain and despair you felt after your pregnancy loss was unlike anything you’ve gone through before. You grieved not only the loss of the baby/fetus/embryo, but also the life you had anticipated had the pregnancy gone to term.
Whether you wanted to start trying to conceive right away after the loss or whether it took you some time to feel open to the idea again, here you are, pregnant again, and terrified.
You may find yourself hyperaware of symptoms (or their absence), white-knuckling your way through the days until your next ultrasound, and not wanting to get “too attached” to this pregnancy. It feels dangerous to connect, because what if it turns out the same way it did last time?
If this sounds like you, you're not alone and you’re not failing at being a parent. You’re trying to protect yourself the best way you know how.
This is a studied response, not a personal failing
A 2006 study followed pregnant people through a subsequent pregnancy and compared those with a prior miscarriage to those without one. Birthing people with a loss history reported significantly higher pregnancy-specific anxiety in the first trimester than people without that history, even after accounting for how many pregnancies they'd had before (Tsartsara & Johnson, 2006). That anxiety comes from a body and a mind that already learned, the hard way, that pregnancy doesn't end with a live, healthy baby.
What that means for you: the guardedness you're feeling is backed by research findings. You're not the only one holding back your hopes from a pregnancy you desperately want. And holding back isn't evidence that something is wrong with you or your capacity to love this baby; it's evidence that you've been here before and it went badly, and your nervous system remembers.
Hope and dread can occupy the same body at the same time
Nobody warns you that you can want something with your whole self and still panic every time you think about wanting it. You can stop feeling nauseous and immediately flash forward to being told devastating news about the pregnancy. You can buy one small item for the baby and then feel the need to hide it in a drawer or from your spouse, just in case.
Both of those things, the wanting and the bracing, are happening in the same person at the same time. Neither one cancels the other out. You don't have to choose between hope and fear here. You're allowed to carry both, even when it's exhausting, and even (especially) when people around you only want to feel hope.
What tends to help
You don't have to white-knuckle your way through this pregnancy alone, and you don't have to wait until the baby arrives to get some relief.
Give yourself permission to be scared, angry, frustrated, or any other feeling. Let the feelings exist as something to notice and respond to, but not give it all your power. Set a timer and let yourself remember your pregnancy loss, bonus points for talking about it with a spouse or friend.
Tell yourself: “I am pregnant right now,” “I will cross that bridge when I come to it, for now, I am pregnant” or “I am pregnant until a doctor tells me otherwise.” These mantras will root you in reality and the present moment.
Talk therapy with someone who specializes in pregnancy loss gives you a place to say the unsayable parts out loud: the guilt about not feeling connected yet, the intrusive thoughts about what could go wrong, and the anger that this pregnancy doesn't feel the way it "should." A specialist will help you understand what your anxiety is trying to do for you, and they'll work with you on ways to tolerate the waiting without it taking over every hour of your day.
A support group made up of other people pregnant again after loss puts you in a (virtual) room, with people who don't need you to explain why you're checking for movement every twenty minutes. You stop being the only one who gets it.
Bonding after loss often doesn't arrive the way it did before. It tends to build in smaller pieces, a little more each week, especially once you have somewhere to put the fear instead of carrying it silently. You don't have to force a feeling that isn't there yet. You're allowed to let it come in on its own timeline, with someone alongside you while it does.
Reference
Tsartsara, E., & Johnson, M. P. (2006). The impact of miscarriage on women's pregnancy-specific anxiety and feelings of prenatal maternal-fetal attachment during the course of a subsequent pregnancy: An exploratory follow-up study. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 27(3), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/01674820600646198
