Being Kind to Yourself and Building Resilience During Coronavirus and Beyond. The past three months have been very difficult for all of us. The Coronavirus pandemic combined with enforced lockdown has meant we’ve found ourselves in situations we’ve never faced before. Personally, I have found it very challenging balancing my time between my work as a counsellor and also caring for my 6-year-old daughter. My emotions have varied and have ranged from feelings of despondency, anger and feeling overwhelmed by the need to keep my head above water. In such unprecedented times, individuals and families have faced different challenges some of them include: - Balancing work and family - Financial strain - Isolation from friends/family/support network - Missing out on holidays/trips/events/birthdays - Home schooling - Bereavements (not being able to attend funerals of friends and loved ones) - Big life events like having a
Recently it was Bereaved Mother’s Day. It was also the 8 th anniversary of my first miscarriage. Part of my counselling specialism is pregnancy/baby loss however this is the first time that I have written about my own losses, and it occurred to me that maybe I don’t talk about them enough. I was 39, I just had a 4 th round of IVF. I’d recently submitted my pregnancy test and the clinic called to say that the result was positive. I could not believe it! All these years of trying, the countless disappointments, invasive tests and painful injections, to finally hear the words I had been longing for. It did not occur to me that anything could go wrong. I had experienced a miscarriage when I was 18, so I thought it couldn’t possibly happen to me again. Surely life wouldn’t be that cruel. I went for my first scan at the clinic, which is normal when the baby is around 6 weeks (some people may call it an embryo but to me it was my baby). There was a concern that it had not grown t