Ambiguous loss refers to bereavement that goes unacknowledged culturally and familially and has no resolution.

People who struggle with interoception might have high anxiety and difficulty managing their emotions.

Those who experience positive emotions during an emotionally difficult time may be more resilient.

My husband was at work when I might have miscarried. I was lying on the couch in our basement, zoning out to cable news, too nauseous to move. I had been showing what my doctor told us were symptoms of pregnancy—extreme nausea, breast changes, cramping, and fatigue—too early for a test. We had been hoping—praying—I was pregnant with a baby girl. But then, as I lay on the couch, my period started.

The blood didn’t seem real. I wondered if anything was. I felt the cramping but didn’t feel it, its weightiness in my body. I was alone both with the emotional agony and the sense of dissociation from my body.

Trauma Disconnected Me From My Body

I had experienced a bout of psychosis 10 years earlier after abruptly ceasing to take an antipsychotic. Since then, however, I’d rebuilt, developing a professional career in communications, marrying, and earning a master’s degree. Now, it was critical to me that I trust my mind: I had been pregnant. And I had lost that pregnancy.

But still, as the days passed, becoming weeks and months, the realness of my experience didn’t sink in. Of course, most women wouldn’t grasp the profundity of a miscarriage soon after it occurred. But I struggled with dissociation. This loss was real, but it had no clear location for me—physically, emotionally, or socially.

I have long struggled with symptoms of complex trauma (C-PTSD), which includes the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but also difficulty managing intense emotions, feelings of worthlessness, and relationship difficulties. Sometimes, I’ve felt profoundly distant from the world and my own physical self; in the past, I experienced such intense emotional pain, I self-harmed. After baby loss, I dissociated from my body’s........

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