I’m going to talk about something deeply personal here and it may get uncomfortable, but I
feel this is something that needs to be shared. A dialog needs to be opened because I’ve
never seen this talked about openly. I know there are others suffering as I have. You are not
alone.

Trauma takes on all different forms. Mostly we tend to think of it as external, something that
happens to us. Mine was internal, rather than external. So it wasn’t from what someone else
did to me, but rather from what I felt that I did to myself. I had a miscarriage. Again. My body
betrayed me. Again. I grieved, oh how I grieved the death of our child, but I kept my grief
quiet. We hadn’t announced this pregnancy yet. We wanted to make sure all was well before
sharing the news with friends and family. We’d already gone through the big announcement
only to have to go back and tell others that I had lost the baby and we really didn’t want to do
that again. So rather than publicly share both our joy and our pain, we kept quiet about both.

Emotions are funny things. They’re meant to be outward expressions of what we’re feeling inside, but often we try to bottle them up. We can feel them inside of our bodies. For me grief manifests as a lump in the throat and a burning in the eyes, you know right before the tears start. Anger tends to be a flush in the cheeks and an explosion of breath. Anxiousness is characterized by the flutter in the stomach. Hope brings on a feeling of lightness. And on it goes. Yours may be a bit different from mine.

But what happens when we don’t want to feel or deal with those emotions? What happens
when they’re just to much and we want to pretend they don’t exist? What happens when we
don’t give ourselves permission to express them, so we bury them instead? Do they just go
away? Or do they remain with us somehow?

They remain with us. I know, that statement may sound a little crazy to you. How can
something you felt remain with you even years later? I won’t go into all of the specifics, but
suffice it to say that your DNA was made to record information and that emotions qualify.
There has been plenty of research on the subject if you’d like to dive deeper into it. I know
that they’ve stayed with me, because I’ve been feeling their effects.

The shift was subtle. I didn’t even notice it. I was carrying so much shame, grief, and
heartache related to both the miscarriage and infertility, but I had buried it deep because it
was so painful. I never even noticed that anything was wrong. It took someone on the
outside, in this case my husband, to open my eyes to what was going on.

I realized later that I blamed myself for what had happened. *I lost the baby. *I was broken.
*My body didn’t work right. *I was less than a real woman. Granted, this was all
subconscious so I didn’t even realize what I was doing to myself. Because I placed the blame
squarely at my own feet, I also decided to act as judge and jury. Obviously, since * I * was the
problem, I would just deny that part of me existed. It’s not like it worked anyway. So over the
years, these subtle poisons from thoughts and buried feelings went to work. I became less
and less interested in being intimate with my husband. I still enjoyed our time together, but
honestly if someone had told me we had to give up physical intimacy permanently, I’d have
been perfectly ok with it.

Wow. Shame is such a thief. And my body shame wasn’t even physical! It was functional. I
wasn’t ashamed of the way my body looked. I was ashamed that my body didn’t function the
way it was supposed to. And I carried that shame, buried deep beneath the surface, for
years. And I would have gone on carrying it if my husband hadn’t noticed the change in me
and confronted me about it. I took his words to heart and started digging.

I’m familiar with buried emotions. I’ve done emotional releases on myself before. So, after our difficult conversation, I started digging. I utilized tools like muscle testing to see if buried emotions were causing the problem. Sure enough, they were. So I started un-burying them. Up and out came feelings of failure, helplessness, hopelessness, grief, and heartache. Many, if not all of them related to my thoughts around the miscarriage and infertility. The release was immediate and the effects profound. It was like I gave myself permission to be a sexual being again. All those thoughts and emotions that had been slowly fading away over the years came flooding back. I was finally healed and whole again.

Trauma can have some seriously long-lasting effects, especially if we decide to bury the
emotions that said trauma brings up. My desire in sharing my story with you is to give you
hope that you too can find full healing after whatever trauma you have experienced. It doesn’t
matter if the trauma was from an external or an internal cause, full healing is available.
Remember that you are more than just a physical body. You are made up of your body, your
mind, and your spirit. All three are closely intertwined and each affects the others. In my
case, my mind, in the way of thoughts and buried emotions, was having a profound affect on
my physical body. The physical body couldn’t return to its proper function until the mind was
ministered to.

Jessica Meades