141: The Panic After the Laugh- Grief, Guilt, and Permission to Live

You laughed for the first time in what feels like forever… and then the panic hit. Who am I to laugh when my baby died?

If that's you, you're not alone, and you're definitely not the first mom to feel it. In this episode, Jennifer gets honest about the guilt that floods in right after a laugh, a smile, a single good moment. She remembers it from her own life: laughing at something her husband said, and then freezing in shame, certain that joy somehow meant she was forgetting her twin daughters.

Here's what she wants you to know- the laugh was never the problem. It's the story your brain tells you afterward. This episode is about gently loosening the grip of that guilt, and learning that you can carry your baby with you into joy instead of leaving them behind in your pain.

What you'll learn:

• Why that wave of panic shows up the second you catch yourself laughing, and why it isn't a sign that something's wrong with you
• The quiet belief that grief is the proof of how much you loved your baby (and why it keeps you stuck)
• How "guilt becomes your job" when there's no baby to care for, and what to do with that
• Why being miserable forever was never actually honoring your babies' memory
• The difference between leaving your baby behind and bringing your baby's love with you
• A simple sentence you can say out loud the next time the guilt tries to flood in
• How Jennifer uses neuro-linguistic programming to talk back to the cruel thoughts instead of just believing them
• Why laughing at 7pm on a Wednesday is actually a really good sign
• The permission you've probably been waiting for someone to give you

Read the full blog post here

Want to go deeper on releasing the guilt spiral? Jennifer walks you through her three steps inside my 3-Day Experience for Moms After Baby Loss: navigatingbabyloss.com/workshop

https://navigatingbabyloss.com/workshop

Free workshop for moms grieving stillbirth or pregnancy loss. Learn simple, trauma-informed practices to release guilt, calm the what-ifs, and honor your baby's memory with love instead of pain. Includes bonus Grief & Guilt Release Journal.

Download my FREE "Guilt and Grief Release Journal" at navigatingbabyloss.com/journal

WHERE TO FIND AND FOLLOW ME!

• Website-  https://www.jennifersenn.com
• Tik Tok-https://www.tiktok.com/@navigatingbabyloss
• Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/navigatingbabyloss/
• You Tube-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz-2MCEY5PRiF6p6VB_2lxA

Transcript

Okay. I want to tell you about a moment that I have with my new clients all of the time. Almost every single one, we are sitting on a Zoom call, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation they say something like, "Jen, I have to tell you about something really weird that happened, and I don't know what to do about it."

I laughed. And I don't mean just a little crack of my smile. I mean a full actual laugh. My husband said something that made me laugh — and then for one second, I felt like I forgot. I felt so guilty that I was laughing. I was in a panic, because what kind of a mother laughs when her baby died? I remember feeling that so much, the guilt of honestly just laughing.

And every time, I want to reach out and put my hands on hers and hug her and just say, "You're not the first person to ever say this to me. You don't need to be ashamed. You will not be the last." Because I felt it just like that myself.

And I have something that I want you to know about what happens in that moment. I had two little boys at the time, and they were so sweet and they were so joyful. I remember really struggling with, how do I do this? How do I find joy and enjoyment in these sweet angels that I have? But also, what does that mean? What does it mean if I'm laughing at them and living my life and we're doing fun things and we're enjoying life — and then what happens to these babies that I lost, to these twins?

I really, really struggled with that. So I want you to know, this is not just you if you're feeling this way. And it's something a lot of moms are embarrassed to say. They really don't say it to anyone except to me, because I understand this. This is the exact conversation that I have with moms all the time.

And what's happening is, the laugh isn't the problem. It's what happens after. It's that moment where you're in the panic, the freeze. When you're just like, "Wait, what am I doing? Who am I? What kind of a person would do this? What does this mean about me?" And so you have this mental loop that's going on and on and on.

Because on one hand, you're really wanting to feel like yourself. You're wanting to get back into that normal part where you're enjoying your family, or you're laughing with your friends, or you and your partner are laughing and having a good time. But right next to that, you feel this urge — maybe it's even like a commitment to your baby. Like, you are the one that holds the memory of this baby. What you've seen in the past few weeks or months or years is that no one else remembers them. No one else remembers them like you do. So you are committed to keeping this baby's memory alive, and you owe them this. And almost like the grief is the proof of how much you love them.

The grief is the proof that they were here. They were here. Can't you see how sad I am? It's because I lost my baby. And if I laugh and let my guard down, it must mean that I'm forgetting them, and that I must not actually have loved them as much as I said I did.

So this is one of the most common things I hear from moms I work with, because it's really painful, and it's so confusing. It traps her between two impossible scenarios that feel so impossible. It's either to be miserable forever to make sure that your baby's legacy lives on and prove how much you love them, or you're okay and you do things and you experience joy and happiness, but in your mind, you punish yourself for it.

So this is something I teach in my workshop, which I'm very excited to say I am changing up a little bit. I am going to create a three-day experience for loss moms, where we come together every single day for three days and just be together in a workshop in real time. So, little sneak peek at what's coming.

But the brain's job is to keep you in the story that is happening right now. As soon as you lost that baby, your brain wired itself around the reality of what happened. After you came up for air, grief became this new normal for you. Sadness is your new home. And so when something comes out that is different than that, it seems really strange, and it scrambles your brain, and it makes you feel like, "I just don't know how to even react anymore. Who am I?" Because there's such a huge identity shift.

But when there's not a baby to take care of, when there is nothing to do, when you thought this season was going to be so busy for you — quite often what happens is guilt becomes your job. Guilt becomes the thing that you do. And so you find places everywhere you can to take you back, to hold onto that memory.

The trouble with that is, somewhere along the way you start believing that feeling like this, feeling guilty, means that you love them. That being in pain means you're being a good mother to the baby that you lost. And that was something that I did for a really long time. I thought, as long as... I mean, my life was over as I knew it, and I was pretty sure there was nothing else to look forward to. My life was ruined. I would never be the same. I could prove it. I made my husband suffer, I made my kids suffer. Everyone suffered, because I was so determined to never be any shred of who I was before.

But what I realized after a long time is that that was not serving my babies' memory. That was not keeping them alive. That was only thinking about the awful stuff. It wasn't honoring the time that I had with them, the dreams that I did get to have because of them, and it didn't honor how I wanted to live my life. Because as you know, once you experience this kind of loss, you have such a different outlook on life. You appreciate things most people don't ever get to know that they need to appreciate. You become a better mother to the children you have. You can become a better partner. It takes work, but you can become a better partner, because we get to the place where we thought no one else will ever understand this loss and what it meant for us, so we are going to hang in there.

And this is the opportunity that you can do. I am not one to do toxic positivity. I will not do toxic positivity and tell you to move on, and that's how you get past it. No. What I love for moms to think about is bringing your baby with you. Like, what if you could laugh at something your husband said? What if you could laugh at that show on television and just know that that in no way is being disloyal to your baby? That your baby would want you to live that way. Your baby would want you to be a good parent to the kids that were here before them. Your baby would want you to be a great mom to the baby that you have after, because you have this whole new world, this whole new way that you see this new baby — in a totally different, more appreciative way than you ever did before.

And that's because of your baby. Because you're bringing that baby's love with you. You're not leaving anything behind. And once you realize that you can do that, it is so freeing. Because then you get to put down the beat-up stick. You get to put down that stick that you keep beating yourself up with. And just know, you're human.

This is an impossible situation. No one knows how to react to these things. There is no manual. Even if there was, we wouldn't read it. But by being happy, by making plans — that was another thing. I refused to make plans, because I had a very big lesson that life doesn't go as planned. And so I just was not setting myself up for failure ever again. But what if you did? And what if those plans worked out? What if you did decide to have another baby? What if that baby was born and brought you so much joy? And then that truly is the way to honor the baby that you lost — is by living.

Your body and your mind are doing whatever they can to keep you alive, right or wrong. If you laugh, it's okay. It's just your body saying, "We need to breathe for a second." And it's okay. The laugh is not a sign of betrayal. The laugh is survival sometimes, and sometimes that is the thing that breaks you out of it.

So this is the kind of thing that my clients and I work on together. I talk so much to them about neuro-linguistic programming, which is a process that I teach them on how to say things in a way that becomes true for them. Because your brain will make whatever you say become the truth. And that's what neuro-linguistic programming does. We know that it does that. So how can we hack it so that it tells us things that are much more kind and easy, that feel just better all the way around? How can we do that?

So, refusing to let those thoughts come in — they're going to come. They're going to come. But what I teach my client is, what happens when they come? Do you just believe them to be true? Do you repeat them? Or do you talk back to it and say, "Yeah, I know. I know I feel really weird for laughing right now, and it does not feel like I deserve to laugh, that I should be laughing. My life is a mess. But this is how I'm going to honor my baby. This is how I refuse to let this grief ruin my life, because my baby would not want that for me."

Don't let the grief run the show. You take charge. The grief is going to be there. It's been 26 years for me, and it's still there. What I do now is, I'm in charge of it. I'm in charge of what happens. I'm in charge of how I think about it and how I feel about it, and I have chosen to think and feel about it a whole different way.

I had a client who just told me that she didn't think she'd laughed in, like, eight months. Eight months. That's a long time. And the first time she did, she called me crying. Now, we've done a lot of this work. We've reframed what that means. We've given her permission to be happy again. That's a lot of what I do with my clients, because that was what was lacking for me — someone to give me permission to say, "It's okay for you to still be in pain, but it's also okay for you to keep going and create a life that looks way different than you thought it was going to." Because they both can be there.

So the next time you catch yourself laughing and you start to feel that panic — because I know you have — say one sentence out loud to yourself. That was just a laugh. I'm still the baby's mom. The laugh did not change what happened. The laugh did not make anything better or worse. It's just a laugh, and right now, it's okay.

Give yourself permission, and stop that. Stop your brain from trying to tell you that there's something wrong with you, because it will. Your brain will just keep going until you stop it and say, "It's okay. I'm okay. It's okay for me to laugh and still know that I am in pain and that my baby's still here."

So my request for you this week is to lay down that beat-up stick. I want to give you permission — not because you need my permission, but if you laugh, it's okay. I'm pretty sure no one has told you that yet, so I'm going to. You have permission to smile if it comes up. You have permission to laugh without a panic attack. You have permission to have a moment that feels almost normal again, and not punish yourself for it for the rest of the day. You have permission to feel a flash of joy and not mistake it for forgetting about your baby. You have permission to be a human being who is coping the best she can in a situation that no one should ever have to cope with.

Laughing will not change what happened. Smiling does not change what happened. Having a good 10 minutes does not take anything away from your baby. You still love your baby, and none of that will change, ever. None of that is at risk. You're not betraying. You're not forgetting. You are just surviving. And surviving — if you laugh at something at 7:00 PM on a Wednesday — is a great sign.

So if today is the first day that you laugh, or the second time, or the 100th time, and the guilt tries to flood in afterwards, just remember: you get to choose how the end of that story goes. You get to choose what you tell your brain that means about you.

I would love to invite you into my workshop, where we talk about all of this and so much more. Just go to navigatingbabyloss.com/workshop and sign up, and then I will teach you my three steps to reduce the guilt spiral and give you strategies that you can use in everyday life for the rest of your life, as you are living this life with this grief without your baby. So I will stick that in the show notes.

But until next time, I am sending you so much love.