Books and blogs
PREGNANCY LOSS
In 2000 I published Small Sparks of Life, a book about my journey to motherhood through miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy.
I am sad to say that thirty years on, the pain of pregnancy loss remains a hidden grief. There is the unacknowledged sense of despair, jealousy, loneliness and trying to mourn someone who never fully came into being. Not to forget the hopeful fear that accompanies any future pregnancy.
The book is now to longer in print but you can download a free copy here.
Latest Healthy Neurotics Blog
Making your pain work for you
Reframing our aversion to suffering
Scarlett Lewis’ son Jesse was just six years old when he was killed, along with twenty schoolfriends, at Sandy Hook Elementary School almost fifteen years ago. Faced with unimaginable grief, she made a conscious decision not to let pain and hatred define her life.
In her book Nurturing Healing Love, she writes:
“Although my story has many moments of sorrow, it’s not a sad story, it’s a love story.”
Her words point towards something deeply important. Pain is inevitable in life, but becoming consumed by it is not.
Most of us are taught, directly or indirectly, that painful feelings are problems to solve. When life becomes confusing, unfair, or heartbreaking, our instinct is often to fight the pain, deny it, or run from it. Yet emotional suffering does not respond in the same way as physical danger.
If I place my finger in a flame, my brain reacts instantly. The nervous system identifies the threat and I pull my hand away. Emotional pain is different. When grief, trauma, loss, or illness enter our lives, there is often nothing to fight and nowhere to flee. The nervous system still reacts as though we are under threat, but without a clear solution, we can become stuck in cycles of anxiety, blame, helplessness, or emotional numbness.
Neurologists have found that emotional pain activates many of the same regions in the brain as physical pain. In other words, heartbreak genuinely hurts.
The question then becomes, how do we live with suffering without becoming trapped inside it?
I find it helpful to think in terms of regressive and progressive pain. Regressive pain keeps us frozen in survival mode. We deny reality, externalise blame, or endlessly revisit the wound. Progressive pain is different. It does not deny suffering, but gradually creates space for reflection, meaning, and compassion.
This shift often begins very simply, by allowing pain to exist without immediately trying to fix it.
After the loss of my first pregnancy, I held tightly onto the grief because I feared that letting go would somehow dishonour the life that had briefly existed within me. Yet constantly revisiting the pain only deepened my suffering. It was not until I began training as a psychotherapist that I realised I had never really learned how to sit with pain. I had learned to resist it, analyse it, or minimise it, but not simply allow it.
Strangely enough, allowing pain to be present begins to calm the nervous system. The mind no longer needs to spiral endlessly around blame or denial. Acceptance is not resignation, nor does it mean pretending that suffering is “for the best”. It simply means acknowledging reality honestly.
And timing matters. People in acute pain rarely need lessons or silver linings. They need compassion, space, and permission to feel what they feel.
The difference between remaining trapped in suffering and becoming an active participant in healing is the difference between regressive and progressive pain. It still hurts, but instead of being consumed by pain, we begin to relate to it differently, with curiosity, honesty, and compassion.
Perhaps that is where healing truly begins.
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