Finding Clarity: Navigating Grief Fog after Stillbirth

Vallen Webb (: 00:01

When grief clouds your mind, it's hard to know what step to take next. This episode dives into how to move from emotional fog to clarity by realigning your energy. Grounded in grief research and the law of vibration, I share practical tools and insights to help you shift from stuck to steady. Let's dive in.

Welcome back, friend. You're listening to the Pregnancy Loss and Motherhood podcast, and I'm your host, Val and Webb. ⁓ Before we jump in, if you are one of my long-time listeners, could you please do me the biggest favor? ⁓ Whatever platform you're listening on, could you please leave me a five-star rating? Leave me a review? Leave me comments? All these things really help.

boost the visibility of the podcast so that more can find us ⁓ and really get the message that they need and the support they need. It would help me so much and I appreciate you all so much. ⁓ So our episode today, I titled it From Fog to Flow, Finding Clarity Again After Stillbirth. And I think it's a really good one. I think there's a lot of us that need this message, especially when we're sitting in that really deep, heavy grief or brain fog.

that comes with grieving. ⁓ So if you've ever felt like your mind just can't keep up, you may feel detached, forgetful, maybe indecisive, you're emotionally drained. You may feel like you just can't function. I just want you to know that you're not alone. ⁓ Grief fog or brain frau... It's called... Well, I like grief fog. We'll stick with that. ⁓ It's real. It is...

not in your head. It's not weakness. ⁓ It's your body and your brain trying to survive something that should never have happened. ⁓ I've talked before about out of order, ⁓ out of order death or somebody else use that term. Maybe Rachel Webster from sharing solace or I think she said that I talk more about

I call it natural. Anyways, the natural order of things are out of out of whack. We were never meant to live without our children. ⁓ So today today we're going to talk about what fog is, how grief affects the brain, how our energy plays a role and how over time we can gently start moving back into flow. Because for me I feel grief.

my god. Grief fog is kind of a block. So we wanna start flowing again. I don't want this to sound too woo, but woo is definitely in here. ⁓ And again, before we dive in, if you are new here, you're one of our newer listeners. Hi, so I hope you're here. I use a lot of mindset tools and I believe in the.

rules of the universe and the law of ⁓ attraction, the law of polarity, all those things. And I utilize those mindset tools to support personal development, which helps our growth and our healing. ⁓ And so as you will see in this episode, beautifully lays it out and I hope you enjoy it. ⁓ So let's start by naming it. What is grief fog? Okay, grief fog, it's sometimes called grief brain.

It's a real and well documented response to traumatic loss and it can include things. These are some of the symptoms. ⁓ Memory loss. You may have trouble focusing. Sleep disturbances. Feeling disoriented or numb. ⁓ Emotional overwhelm or even emotional flatness. Loss of time or sense of direction. definitely loss of time was a real thing. ⁓

I would lose chunks of time throughout the day because I would disassociate to, it was one of my early coping mechanisms, one of my coping habits that I used. but time was elusive and it just felt, oh my God, just, it was hard. Um, and so whether we lose a baby, when we, sorry, when we lose a baby, whether it's through miscarriage, stillbirth, um, TFMR,

tial to surviving the day. In: 2015

And it's especially true for stillbirth where the trauma is often compounded by the shock of the late term loss and the lack of closure that we have. if you've had a stillbirth, you know, they may not have been able to give you an exact 100 % answer of what happened. And that is really hard to deal with. ⁓ So this is your nervous system in survival mode. Your brain is doing everything it can to protect you from more pain, even if that means shutting you down for a while.

So if you're in it, you're not broken. You're grieving and your brain and your body, your mind, they are all trying to protect you, trying to help you just survive for now. And so.

we're going to jump into like the law of vibration. And so this is one of the universal laws. says everything is energy. Everything has a frequency and that includes our thoughts, our emotions and our physical body. So when we're grieving, our vibration is understandably heavy. It's low and sometimes we think we're stuck there forever. It's just how it feels. ⁓ like how can we get out of this? How are we ever going to

get over, I'm using quotes, or move on. I say move forward. ⁓ But how are we gonna do that? I mean, how are we not gonna be stuck forever? But the reality is, hopefully you will not. And this is where grief, so grief is not a flaw. It's an energy that we have to move through.

It's an energy we have to process and get through day by day, moment by moment. And this is where alignment comes in. And you've probably heard that word before, alignment, like in the healing and personal development world. But let me explain what I actually mean by it. So alignment is when your inner world, so your thoughts, your values, your energy, matches the actions that you're taking in the outer world, okay?

It's when you feel it's when how you feel and what you do are moving in the same direction and it often feels easy. ⁓ It feels like clarity. There's peace even if your circumstances haven't changed.

but you're moving through life in alignment. You're doing what you say you're gonna do. You're doing what you plan to do and things start becoming easy because you're in alignment.

⁓ Some people don't like the word alignment and that's okay. can think of it, ⁓ another word is like attunement. That's another word you even say. ⁓ And attunement means you're tuning into what your body, your heart and your life are really needing and responding with presence instead of resistance. So it's just kind of a subtle difference in way of thinking about it. ⁓ So when I say like we're gonna go, we're going from fog to flow,

I'm not talking about snapping out of our grief. I'm talking about finding the little ways, little steps to realign or re-attune ourselves to life again. When we're ready, I wouldn't say you should do these things. If you're in your acute grief, your initial grief, maybe your baby has died in the last few months, even the last year or two, it may or may not be the time for you. If this doesn't feel right, you don't have to do it.

you will know when you're ready to kind of start shifting that energy.

And so here's what I've learned in my own healing. So we can't bypass grief, but we can gently shift our vibration, our energy bit by bit. So we're not frozen in that heavy stuff forever. ⁓ And again, this isn't about positive vibes only, although I love the quote and I love good vibes as well, but it's about alignment. And that's alignment with our truth, with peace, with movement.

⁓ we're going to have those bad vibrational days no matter what. Even if we aren't grieving like life, there's always going to be highs and lows.

⁓ And so it's not about avoiding the lows either. It's about learning how to process through them, how to get through it. ⁓ And so here are some ways that we can begin to move from fogginess to flow state. And these are not quick fixes, but they're more like gentle practices that meet you where you are and honor your grief. So the first thing you can do is awareness.

Start by noticing the fog. Notice like, wow, I feel like I can't think straight. I can't put together a grocery list. I can't think about appointments. can't, I can barely take care of myself. And don't judge it. Just name it. Be like, wow, this is the grief fog. This is what she's talking about. I'm in a fog right now. This is my grief brain at work. It's protecting me.

⁓ if we, you know, that awareness alone softens the pressure to change it drastically and right away and get rid of it. ⁓ and we can also reframe like, okay.

Like I just said, like this is my grief brain at work. And then adding to reframe is it's protecting me. It's trying to help me.

Number two is micro movement. So grief, it kind of tells us to freeze. And then flow asks us to move. But we want to do it gently. OK? Nothing crazy. And literally, I mean it. So listen to somebody. So step outside barefoot for 30 seconds. Nothing big. my god, there's a Barbie doll out in the yard. Let's just walk to go get it in our bare feet. Like literally.

Do that for 30 seconds, like just 30 second little walk out in the grass. Drinking a full glass of water, it's moving through your body. This movement doesn't have to be like full cardio for 90 minutes, okay? Stand in the shower, whether it's hot and cold, whatever you wanna do, and breathe. Breathing is movement. I'm not even joking, breathing. Why do you think breathing, um...

Exercises are so important and so essential, right? They change and shift your mood and your feelings in your body. It brings you down to a baseline. It alleviates stress and calms your nervous system. Breathing is movement. so just movement, any type, shifts your vibration even if it's

barely noticeable.

Number three would be intuition as a compass. So after loss, can often feel like we, you know, our brains can't lead us. ⁓ Right. We're kind of frozen. We're kind of stuck. We can't think about the future, you know, but our body can our gut can. Right. That's where intuition lives is those feelings deep down in

or gut or stomach. So like waking up every morning, what do I need today? What do I need today? Close your eyes, pause, wait and listen.

See what it tells you.

Number four, reading and gentle input. ⁓ You can read something calming like poetry or spiritual texts, ⁓ even affirmations. These things can pull you from a really dense energy to something a little clearer. ⁓

And then for me, ⁓ reading things about grief, ⁓ some suggestions could be like The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. ⁓ This really talks about how we store our grief, store our trauma in our body and how movement and moving can help release. ⁓ Untamed by Glennon Doyle is a good one. I haven't finished it. I've only read half of it.

But it's definitely a good one.

Number five, community and safe witnessing. So when we isolate ourselves, I kind of talked about this in the previous podcast. ⁓

our vibration lowers. And when we share space with someone who can hold our grief, who can witness our grief, especially others who've lived it, we shift. Grief is not meant to be carried alone. That's why support groups, friends, doulas, therapists matter so much. We were never meant to do this alone. We were never meant to grieve this tremendous thing alone. So when we isolate,

We get even lower than just the grief, okay? Because we're expecting ourselves to carry it alone.

Number six, time and compassion. ⁓

All of these things are great, but I also want to remind you that we can't rush.

We become clear in the time that it takes. And grief fog, it'll probably last longer than you expect. But it doesn't mean you're broken. It means your brain, your body, and your soul are still healing from the deepest kind of loss. So you really have to be gentle with yourself, really lowering your expectations in how you think and how long you think it's going to take. And the clarity and the flow will return.

And it's often though in more of a whisper, okay, than like a lightning strike, ⁓ maybe subtle.

So.

For me, just, the fog stayed for a long time. ⁓

Probably a year and a half to two years. And it got lighter and lighter, but it was still there. I would literally, I mean, I still, I still forget sometimes what I'm saying mid-sentence. I would feel like I wasn't even in my body. And I think what was pivotal for me in the turning point, it came when I stopped expecting to go back to normal.

I started realizing that there's a normal that I'm in. And I just started asking myself, how can I just take one little step today? Even in the beginning, I definitely didn't understand the word aligned or even know what that meant. But just what one step will help me forward today? And honestly, guys, that thing was brushing my teeth, ⁓ getting dressed, doing my hair.

just doing something for me. ⁓ Other days it was writing me and Evelyn's story or writing a letter to the doctors that I was upset at or.

Building the business that has been one of the biggest things that helped me start clearing out the fog because I'm also processing through the podcast, through the breathing work, through the training work I'm doing. mean, that's what's helping me.

That's where my shifting started beginning when I could.

It started with my hygiene and starting to take care of myself again. It started with the care that I was giving to myself and letting myself feel. Because there were times I thought I didn't deserve to feel good or to lose weight, you know, lose the baby weight or anything. ⁓ So I just if you're in the fog, I want you to know again, you're not doing anything wrong. This is part of grief and a part of healing. ⁓

And when you're ready, there are tools, there's support, there's movement. And when you start wanting to become aligned, what's true for you, even the tiniest little baby steps, you're going to start shifting that energy and shifting your vibration. And ⁓ you're going to start inviting that flow and that clarity back in when you're ready. You don't have to fix it all. You don't have to do it alone. You just have to stay, just stay curious about what might feel a little better today.

You're in the in between. And I'm sending you so much love and energy and beliefs in you, my belief in you and your next steps. ⁓ Remember, please share this podcast episode with another mom. You may know who needs it. ⁓ I'm again, you guys know I'm trying to grow this podcast and you are you are the.

the people that are helping me and I need your help. me. So if you could share it with somebody who needs the message, please do. And again, make sure to please leave a review, leave five stars, send me an email if you want to talk ⁓ and we'll see you next week. Bye friends.