Brett’s story
Brett shares his experience of opening up about his losses and how talking has helped him.
I have finally realised that talking helps! … It is good to talk and be open and share your experience even with a stranger…trust me I know.
Over the past six years, my wife Alice and I have experienced multiple miscarriages. I have struggled to come to terms with each and every one. I actively avoided talking to anyone but Alice about the grief. I felt that I needed to be strong for her and support her, but inside I was struggling with so many emotions and felt I was slipping into a silence. I needed to tell people how I felt but it is hard to explain to people you are struggling with the grief of pregnancy loss when you are not the person that has gone through the physical miscarriage. However, I later decided that is a stigma that needed to change.
I contacted the Miscarriage Association and asked them if I could tell my story and publish it on their website. As I started to type the words flooded out like they had been waiting to come out for years. I wasn’t opening up verbally, but this was the start of me sharing my grief. Just a few days later I shared this story with my family and friends and began the process of coming to terms with the grief.
More recently, I volunteered to take part in a project that puts two strangers together to talk about grief from pregnancy loss. I chatted with a woman who has experienced multiple miscarriages via Zoom for an hour and in this short hour I learnt that I was not alone in my feelings and that even though we were strangers we shared similar emotions in our grief. A lot of our conversation centered around how effective talking was in helping us cope with our emotions. This project was the first time that I openly talked about my grief with someone outside my circle of friends and family. It was an amazing experience from the minute we met until we said goodbye.
I have finally realised that talking helps! It doesn’t matter if you are the partner or not, you go through similar emotions and you get angry at the same things even laugh at the same things. It is good to talk and be open and share your experience even with a stranger…trust me I know.
You can read more of Brett’s story here.