Pregnancy After Loss with Courtney Reissig Held

In this episode of the Held Podcast, I chatted with Courtney Reissig about pregnancy after loss. We talked about common struggles and temptations that women face in pregnancy after loss including fear, anxiety, cynicism, blind optimism, triggered grief, and feeling guilt over not enjoying the very thing they’ve hoped for. I hope it this episode will encourage you to run to the Lord with whatever you may be feeling or facing, and find that he is compassionate and trustworthy.
About Courtney Reissig:
Courtney Reissig is a writer and bible teacher living in Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the proud mom of four sons, happy wife to Daniel, and author of three books: The Accidental Feminist, Glory in the Ordinary, and Teach Me to Feel: Worshiping Through the Psalms in Every Season of Life. They are members of Immanuel Baptist Church. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram (@courtneyreissig).
Questions in this Episode: Would you start off by just telling us a bit about your own experience with miscarriage?
 
How did your experience of loss impact your own subsequent pregnancies? Positively and/ or negatively? 
 
Let’s walk through some of the common struggles or temptations that face a woman in pregnancy after loss. And talk about how the good news of the gospel and God’s word offer help in that place.
a. fear
b. anxiety
c. cynicism
d. blind optimism (not thinking about negative outcomes)
e. triggered grief
f. guilt over grumbling
 
 
Practically speaking, what are some things we can do to fight this temptation/ remember the truth in those overwhelming moments? 
 
Questions for every guest:
What’s one way God has used your experience of miscarriage to work in your heart and life?
If you could encourage a woman to meditate on or memorize any verse or short set of verses in this season, what would it be and why?
Noteworthy Quotes: “I always describe [pregnancy] as, if you’re standing at the top of a black diamond mountain (and I hate black diamonds, I refuse to go down them), and you have no other way down. You’re up there and you’ve gotta go down, like you have to do it, and you could get really hurt along the way, but the only way out of this is down. And I feel like pregnancy, for me, was like that. I’m pregnant, and I have to deliver this baby, but it could go really badly and I could get really hurt along the way.”
“One of the things that I think the Lord did in my life with having hard pregnancies… What the Lord did in all of those was kind of rescue me from thinking I had any semblance of control over anything. I don’t think I would have said, “Oh, i think if I do xy and z it’s all going to work out fine.” I wouldn’t have told you that, but I know in hindsight 10 years later that that was kind of where my heart was.”
“It was a real test for me to have open hands before the Lord and say, “I have no control over this. I can’t keep a baby alive inside me. It sounds negative, but it's a positive!”
“I struggled to find joy in being pregnant. Instead of giving it to the Lord I would often just spin my wheels, look at message boards, look at articles, try to have some semblance of things are going to be okay… and the anxiety was just really hard for me at times.”
“Another negative that it was hard for me to process was that I would feel guilty over the fact that I didn’t like being pregnant.”
“All of the difficulty we face in pregnancy is not how God intended pregnancy to be. So, it’s all part of living in a broken world. And so in the same way that we grieve over the difficulties that this world brings us, throwing up in pregnancy is not how God intended pregnancy to be. [It’s not a good thing.] And not being able to enjoy food, and being so fatigued that you can’t take care of anything else. I think often-times we idealize and idolize what it means to be pregnant,..but feeling difficulty in pregnancy is just part of living in a br