How to deal with insensitive friends and family when you’ve lost a baby.

Recently, I had a beautiful soul reach out and ask “some of my family were really unsupportive when we lost our baby. Instead of coming to the event we planned to celebrate her life, they chose to go on a holiday instead. Our relationship has never been the same and it has hurt our whole family. How do you deal with family who are insensitive and uncaring when you’ve lost a baby?”

I haven’t experienced this first hand, however I have felt friends drift away since we lost our babies. Perhaps you have felt something similar and are questioning “How do I handle it now? How do we heal that relationship that’s been quite broken because of what feels like a lack of support, a lack of empathy and understanding?”

I wanted to make a video answering this question mostly because I think there will be many of you out there who can help answer this question for us. Mostly I like to think I am opening the conversation.  I don’t have the answers but these are some thoughts on how I would approach this situation.

Watch the video below or read on.

Have the conversation.

You need to have a conversation after the hurt, after the high intense emotions of what happened. For example, “You know, it really hurt me when you chose to continue going on a family holiday instead of coming to the funeral or the celebration.”

I think, until you know that they knew how you felt and still chose the holiday, you kind of don’t know where you stand and you don’t know where to rebuild from or if you even need to rebuild.

Step back.

Yes, we want to hope that people are empathetic enough to understand but we don’t know what was going on for them at that time. We don’t 100% know what was going on in their family. Maybe there are other things that you need to know.

Openly discuss without too much anger.

I would approach the conversation with “I am hurt, this hurt me and I’d like to have a conversation about it so that we can somehow move forward”. I think until you have that conversation and know their thoughts on the whole situation, you can’t go anywhere. Perhaps they didn’t realise they made you feel that way?

In order to kind of free yourself from that a little bit, you need to have this conversation and it will go one of two ways. They’ll either be incredibly apologetic and you’ll be able to rebuild from something true and real, or they’ll be dismissive and you know where you stand and can start to let go a little.

I know it’s incredibly hard to let go of that hurt but maybe you can take a little step back and realise that if they’re being dismissive, it’s only you who’s carrying the hurt now. So it’s only you who’s continuing to punish yourself with that feeling. If you can do the work to try and let it go, then you’re going to find a little bit of freedom from that. Rather than replaying it and getting stuck in that loop because it’s not affecting them. If they’re dismissing your feelings, it doesn’t impact them one bit whether you’re feeling hurt still, or whether you’ve moved on, it’s only impacting you. So I think you owe it to yourself to move on in that area.

I know we expect that everyone will feel the same way and understand that in that situation that’s not what you do. But unfortunately, that’s not how the world works, people don’t always understand. Sometimes they don’t think, they’re in their own world and we live in our own little bubble too. Having an honest conversation and expressing your emotions can be the step it takes to let go of the hurt.

Have you got some advice for this beautiful friend of mine? Share your thoughts with us over on social.