If you are following along and you have read part II, I mentioned that I had decided that I didn’t want to give up on my faith. But I was still so angry and hurt, and I didn’t really know how to move forward. Unfortunately, there was no fast forward button to emotional and spiritual healing. It was going to take time.
I did a lot of personal journaling during this time. Journaling is a great way to process through your feelings, and for myself, I’ve found that it is a great way to start to heal from emotional wounds. (*The cool thing is there is actually brain science to support this!)
Here’s an excerpt from my journal dated January 10, 2023:
“I feel so numb. I can’t worship, at least not well. I go through phases. Every time I read about God’s love and faithfulness, it triggers me, and I feel dead inside. I think “not me” when I read those. I guess He’s those things to everyone else.”
I told my therapist I was just so tired of feeling bad. “Of course you are!” she told me. However, she told me that my job right now was just to “feel my feelings.” I hated that advice. Where was the quick fix? The pill that would instantly make me feel better?
As “fun” as feeling my feelings was, I needed a few more tangible things to do with my time. I knew there would not be a quick fix to heal from this, but I needed to feel like I was actively working towards it. In addition to journaling, I started running. (Side note: anger is GREAT fuel for running!)
I also decided to cut back on a few of my obligations (I often volunteer at my church and in the community) – I chose the one thing that was causing me the most stress, and I told my team I needed a mental health break. I was honest with them about infertility and the toll it had taken on me, and they were all very supportive of me stepping back.
When I could stomach reading the Bible, I decided to read Psalm 86. For a long time, every time I read it, it made me so angry. It spoke of a God who hears my prayers and who answers me in my time of distress. Needless to say, that was not what I was experiencing… But I wanted so badly to believe it. So I read this Psalm each day, and tried to let this truth soak into me.
I do think there’s something to be said for the “fake it ’till you make it” method of having faith. I don’t mean being inauthentic with God, but I think sometimes just going through the motions, if it’s all you can handle, is okay. I still went to church, but I didn’t like it. I read a little of the Bible, but it made me angry and I didn’t feel like it was true. If I prayed, I told God that it seemed like He was ignoring me and that prayer seemed futile and what was the point of all of it???
To me, it felt like I was going through a faith crisis – but looking back I can see now that it wasn’t so much that I was losing my faith, but that my faith was going through a time of growth and change (which was extremely unpleasant!)
One other thing I tried was something I had never thought to do before. It sounds a bit blasphemous at first, but I decided I needed to forgive God. My word for 2022 was “forgive,” and it just made sense to me to try it. Really, it was a way for me to try to let go of my anger towards God. I told God I forgave Him for letting me have that dream. I told him I forgave Him for not giving me another child. I tried to remind myself of how much I have needed forgiveness – so if God could offer me some grace, why couldn’t I offer some back to Him?
If the idea of forgiving God is too far-fetched for you, maybe another exercise to try would be to just decide to trust God in the unknowns. Choosing to believe that good can come from bad – or as my mentor believes, “maybe God has something better in store for you.”
Amazingly, healing slowly began to happen. On January 25, 2023 I wrote:
“Well, I’m not really sure what happened, but I find myself not thinking about pregnancy every day anymore. I don’t feel gut-punched anymore. How can I be getting over this so quickly? It’s been 3 weeks since I got the news.”
That’s not to say that I was totally over it, or that it didn’t still hurt – but the intense pain was wearing off. There were moments during the year where I would get triggered and the pain would flare up again, but it began to feel more like an emotional scar instead of an open bleeding wound.
Lastly, despite 2023 getting started off on the wrong foot, I decided that I wanted 2023 to be a good year. So I intentionally planned things to look forward to. Our family decided to take a trip to Hawaii in April of 2023, and it was the perfect place to try to relax and be at peace during this hard time. Obviously, a trip to Hawaii may not be feasible for everyone, but even something as simple as taking a mental health day from work or planning a coffee date with a friend could be great ways to be kind to yourself during a stressful time.
*In the book The Whole-Brain Child, the authors talk about the two sides of our brain. The left side loves meaning and order. The right side specializes in emotions and feeling all those BIG feelings. So when you write about an emotional experience, you are integrating both sides of your brain – you are using your left brain to process what has been going on in your right brain. As the authors would say, “name it to tame it.” (Siegel and Bryson, p. 27)
Threads of Anxiety 