Rebuilding After Stillbirth — How Personal Growth Shapes Our Healing

Vallen Webb (: 02:24

Hey love, welcome back to the Pregnancy Loss and Motherhood podcast. It sounds so good to say that. today in this episode, we're gonna talk about how we rise, not just how we survive after loss. And I'm really gonna share how personal development became a lifeline for me after Evelyn died. We'll talk about what it means to grow with your grief, not in spite of it. And really how healing doesn't mean forgetting, it means evolving.

And so really I wanted to start with like a personal reflection from my early grief days and actually I don't know if I'm gonna post the video, but I have my journal right here that was given to me after Evelyn died and Literally the first first page well after that, you know, this notebook belongs to I Could only write the date subject baby Evie date 721 19

I could not read anything. then, and so I'm so sorry if this makes you sad or cry, but I really want to share where I was in my head space. It looks like I wrote another one on 7-21-19, July 21st, 19. This was the day after she died.

My heart is broken. My arms are empty. My belly is droopy. My boobs are heavy. My baby is with God. I'm angry, sad, devastated. What happened and why?

I don't know if you remember your very, very early days of just being kind of in a haze of denial. Like my beat, my body was just pregnant. My baby was just okay a few days ago and now she's gone. Like it made absolutely no sense. so this, I didn't put a date on this, this journal entry, but

th of: 2019

Why this baby? Why did God have this in my plan? And I should just have faith that this was His will and that there is a reason. I don't feel like I'm grieving appropriately. I cry randomly throughout the day, but I'm struggling just to maintain my functioning level at bare minimum. I have to go to the funeral home tomorrow and I'm so scared and so upset that I'm planning a funeral for my baby's death. She was supposed to be home with me, breastfeeding and crying and spending time with her sisters.

and that was all taken from me. A rare occurrence which now makes my baby and I a statistic. My milk coming in is the biggest reminder of the fact that I didn't have a baby. Plus it's super painful.

and makes me just want my baby. And all I can think about is having another baby. Now I will tell you that this was, this had to have been two or three days, probably three or four days after Evelyn was, when I gave birth to her. And because I didn't even know my milk was gonna come in, I was given a pamphlet in the folder that I brought home.

But I never made it that far. And I'm sure somebody at the hospital told me, but there's no way that I was processing that or even worried or thinking about that in any way. And I also want to say to just this.

Apparently labor contraction can sometimes cause a placenta to detach. So of course, when you lose a baby, we do research and we try to figure out everything we can about stillbirth or whatever loss we had. And apparently that is one of the causes. And it's one that made sense to me because as soon as my contractions started, she stopped moving. And so for me, that's my reality. And that's kind of what I believe happened.

along with the court accident.

But I just wanted to give you an idea of where my headspace was.

That was heavy. Now I wanted that personal reflection because I also want to talk about this whole moving on versus moving forward myth. And I will have to tell you, absolutely hated this notion. I will tell you that nobody ever told me that. Actually, I'm sorry.

I take that back to people. Two people told me that I would move on and I would get over it. And, I will not name names, but I hated this notion and.

Always seeing this though, this idea of moving forward, moving on, seeing it on TV, social media, like at the time,

it just really struck a nerve with me. Like no matter what happened in life, no matter what happens in life, we don't just get over it. We actually have to change. We have to neurologically change in our brains to continue to learn how to live in a different way with those circumstances that we have. We have to jump through so many obstacles. We have to sacrifice, we have to change.

And this is when I had made the decision that I would move forward with her. She will always be with me. I will celebrate her. You know, she'll be with me in her urn or in spirit and just wanting to tell you as well, please know you don't have to move on. These were our children and moving on to me implies to forget about it, to act like it didn't happen, to leave it in the past, never to think of it again.

All these terrible things really just imply moving on. And that's just not what we're doing. Just a reminder. Just take all the time you right? Moving on, it's like a breakup in middle school or high school after two days. Nope, this is a lifelong experience that we carry with us, right? It's not something that we can just write off as, yeah, we just weren't meant to be like as kids, always changing our minds.

and really

into personal development in: 2016

and it was a really, really hard thing to process. I realized if I wanted things to be better, if I wanted to feel better, I had to be better. And I had to be the one to make the plan and do the things to change my life. I was in a really rough place mentally after Violet. man. Violet was probably six months old.

seven months old at the time. was still breastfeeding. We had just moved to Washington from Virginia and we knew nobody. had nobody. I was severely depressed, like wanting to die depressed. I don't think I've ever said that out loud because I feel shame around that, you know, knowing I have two little girls and I felt that way and I was the only one they had, but I had to do it. And so

I got on Amazon, which, you know, we haven't utilized too much yet, but I found John since since zero spoke, you are a bad ass. And

Literally, I've read I read that book three times in the first like those seven months that he was gone While crying in the bathtub at night after my girls had gone to bed because things were so hard

I didn't have, I will say my dad came to visit of course, but dads can only do so much, Emotionally supporting, know, especially not physically being able to support me, like helping with the kids and stuff. He was there for me. But I was alone. And over the course of those seven months, I was literally unveiling this new version of me.

you know, this version where I started taking radical personal responsibility for my life. You will hear me say that a lot because it is something that I had to do. It was a version of me where I worked out every day. I got a membership at a local gym that was close and they had childcare. This version of me that wanted to look better, feel better, act better. And over the last nine years, guys, I've worked tirelessly.

feeding my mind with books and tools and resources and education that would help me on this journey because I know that it's a lifelong journey. And it's like that journey that...

is what changes our life, developing ourselves, our mind, our spirit, our bodies. And honestly, it just stuck. Like, if you saw my bookshelf, if you saw my journals, like...

you would know. So after Evelyn died, I took to writing, I took to journaling. This book, this journal that I read from is literally specifically for the first year after she died. I never finished it, of course. I also had another one that I bought off Amazon or no, sorry, somebody gifted it to me on Amazon. It was very religious and spirit godly.

So it wasn't my favorite, but it had good journaling prompts. But I knew that in order to get better, I had to get better. And grief is a strange thing because sometimes you can't tell if it's grief or if it's depression or if it's postpartum depression.

And so I also utilize talk therapy a lot to process Evelyn's loss. Um, because we had a lot, we had other things that happened after Evelyn died. I don't really talk about it a lot. I talk about it sometimes. So if you've, you've listened to an episode where I actually explained what happened, um, one day I'll do a podcast episode about all of it, but I had to feel better. I wanted to be a better mom.

a better human, a better person. So that is where the personal development came in and why it was so important for me. I've also tried things like sound bath healings and reiki energy healing.

And all these modalities honestly do something different and they support your soul. And that really turns into I wanted to talk about

So there's this term called post-traumatic growth. And so this isn't about getting over your loss. It's really about becoming someone deeper, wiser, softer, stronger because of it. And that I believe is what happened to me. It's really the kind of growth that cracks you wide open. And it really invites you to rebuild in a way that honors your baby always.

but also the woman that you're becoming because of the loss. And I wanna preface this by saying that some people don't view their loss as traumatic. Some people do. And again, there's like a spectrum of severity and trauma. And it's very personal, right? It's...

very subjective to each person.

So after losing a baby, this type of growth, post-traumatic growth can look like speaking your baby's name without shame. Even if your voice is trembling and you're nervous and you're worried about the outcome, you have made the decision to do it anyways because you know it's important to you. It could be setting boundaries because your energy is just sacred, right? We don't have...

great energy stores and grief. I'm, I two months, it'll be Evelyn six birthday. And I don't know since she died, I'm just not energetically who I was before. I don't, I don't think, this can look like trusting your body again after it felt like it betrayed you. Like I read in my journal, I think my body betrayed me at that moment in time. I don't believe that anymore.

This could look like finding purpose in the pain. So whether through advocacy, support work, peer support, motherhood, motherhood can be your sole purpose, you know, or simply living more intentional with purpose. And like I do with Evelyn James and Company, I needed to help people as a way to help myself. And honestly, that was a journey on its own.

This can look like feeling joy without guilt. The first time you laugh again and you don't feel like you've done something wrong. It's that duality because in the beginning, especially for me, I felt so guilty when I felt any type of joy. If I felt a smile creeping up on my face because of, know, smiling or laughing at my girls, I thought that I should be just...

chronically devastated all the time. So when you can do that without guilt, that's growth.

Another way this could look is reconnecting with your intuition, your power, your voice, because you've walked through that fucking fire and you've lived and...

Reconnecting your brain, that mind body connection and your intuition because if you were like me and you may have felt just a tinge that something might be wrong but you didn't do anything about it and maybe blamed yourself, it's so important to get that trust back with your intuition. I don't know about you but I am a human design like geek. I don't know everything there is to know about it but I know about me.

And I'm a manifesting generator and I specifically use my intuition to guide my decisions. It's the only way I make my decisions. And so knowing that I didn't trust myself when I was pregnant with Evelyn and then she died, that was probably one of the hardest things for me to get over and to trust again. This could also look like holding space for others because you now speak the language of loss and love in the same breath.

That's what's great. Like there are programs, peer support programs, like with Star Legacy Foundation and some others where you can just go, you can talk with these other moms who are having these losses and really supporting them and just holding space for them. And then this could also look like believing in your future.

carrying your baby with you.

It... I don't know. It's hard to...

It's hard to understand what our future looks like when our baby dies.

I don't think there's a way to... It's hard to explain. But being able to believe in that again, that there is a future where you're gonna be okay, that's growth.

So it's just remembering that grief and the healing and the journey of life in general, guys, it's not linear, it's not pretty, but it's real. And growth after loss looks a lot like survival, which turns into strength and resilience because you've had no choice but to survive those worst days.

And unfortunately, that is where our resilience and our strength grows when we deal with the hard stuff.

Like sadness that teaches you how to sit with others and theirs. We know nothing can be fixed. So we know most what will help is just being with them silently.

like grief that teaches you how to love harder, softer, and with more intention than ever. Like this is a part of the post-traumatic growth.

that I'm realizing I'm really good at now. I'm a much softer person, mainly just aggressive during the week before my period. I'm like the prickly peach, prickly pear.

learn loving softer, loving harder, being so intentional about how I spend my days with my family and making sure they know how much I love them every day. This is something I've been having such a hard time with lately. It's a limiting belief I have that when things are really good, something bad is going to happen. This is not a truth. It is a limiting belief that I grew up thinking because of my my my you know, the people that I was surrounded by parents.

believed. And so when you lose a baby, you really get scared of everything. And lately that that that anxiety has been creeping up a lot. But again, this is the journey. You're not broken. You're rebuilding your revamping your

The version of you that's emerging, she's powerful, she's rooted, she's a mom like no other.

I just, this mindset work that changed everything for me was about repetition.

And it's more stuff we'll talk about, holding thoughts on the screen in my mind. Seeing me in a better place, seeing our family in a better place. know, grieving sometimes, but living life mostly better.

I think it's always an important reminder too, just grief isn't just about pain. It's about how to transform that pain. When we lose the baby, we don't just lose a child. We lose that specific piece of us, that version of us. You know, the dreams that we had that included that baby. Our sense of safety in the world because it's such an out of order death, we are not meant to lose our children.

in that devastation, something else can emerge, which is the deeper, more powerful version of who we are, right? We're moving through, we're growing because of it.

And so, okay, so I wanted to share this scientific piece.

As much as I talk, also want you guys to know that a lot of what I talk about is rooted in evidence-based information, which means it's scientific. Like it's something that's been proven. So there were these psychologists, Richard Tadeuszki and Lawrence Calhoun, who introduced the concept of post-traumatic growth, which we just talked about and all the ways that it can happen.

and the positive psychological change that can occur as a result of struggling with these highly challenging life circumstances. So their research really identified five domains of growth that we excel in later down the road because of what happened to us. That's our relationship with others. So it really deepens our connections and our empathy towards others, right?

new possibilities in life.

I think we start to see things differently and it really just opens up these new paths and opportunities.

let's see. So we have appreciation of life. Sorry, I skipped that one. Appreciation of life, which is a renewed gratitude for just the simple things that every day I'm so thankful that I got to wake up today. I'm so thankful I have another chance with my, my children. I'm so thankful for this life. Okay. The relationship with others deep in connections, new possibilities in life, the new past. So that's three, four is personal strength.

recognizing the increased resilience in our strength, realizing that when bad things happen, we know that there are way worse things that could have happened and we learn how to process these things without losing our minds, without reacting. We learn how to deal with unwanted life circumstance.

And then the fifth one is spiritual change. So really experiencing a deepening of spiritual beliefs or practices. But honestly, it can be another way. I know initially for me, no, still, I mean, I just

God is a very traumatic topic for me from growing up. And so for me, it was opposite. I lost my faith and some people do, but I know people who initially feel that way, but it eventually deepens. So don't worry if you feel that way, if you feel that God has given up on you and all these things, it may come back around and you may see it a different way.

And these studies, they've shown that individuals who have experienced profound loss, such as losing a child can really experience significant growth in these areas as opposed to other people who haven't experienced these profound losses. So not saying that our grief and this loss is a great thing, but we do become better humans apparently. So.

really just

The thing about grief, forces us really to confront the core of who we are, our being. It challenges our beliefs, our identity, really our understanding of the world. But through this process, we can truly emerge more aligned with our true selves.

We can reevaluate our priorities. We can have increased compassion. We can really empower ourselves and others.

embracing the new new selves, right?

And so.

The company that I have built, Evelyn Jameson Company, it's a pregnancy loss support and training company. the core, one of the core foundations is believing, we believe in the power of mindset work as a tool for healing. Practices such as mindfulness, journaling, affirmations can really support the journey through grief, which helps cultivate the self-compassion, fosters that resilience. It really encourages a growth-oriented,

orientated, oriented, oriented perspective. Grief is a profound teacher. It teaches us that while the pain of losing our children is immeasurable, the journey through grief can lead us to a more powerful existence. And it's sad that we have to go through this to experience that. I'm sure there's ways to experience it without experiencing the loss but

As we wrap up this episode, just want you to remember you do not, you don't have to go back to who you were. You get to build something new, someone new, if you really want to. It is a personal choice and there's no right or wrong. There truly is not. And so just remember how strong, how powerful you are. You're not alone on this journey. You are not.

Remember to look out for the mini episode at the end of the week, where I will share one actionable tool that will help you on your personal post-traumatic growth journey. I guess we'll call it. I'm so happy you were here today. Make sure to check out the links in the show notes, whether it's to join our email, follow us on Instagram.

at valinweb.official. Check out the white elm bag. That's the only thing that I ever talk about, the only thing that I share with you guys. I'm an affiliate for them because I have bought a bag from them and I've loved it for years and I truly believe in their company and the direction they're going. Vegan leather, they're gorgeous, amazing, check them out. And I will see you next week for another episode of the Pregnancy Laws and Motherhood Podcast.