Beyond Postpartum Depression After Miscarriage and Child Loss: The Healing

Last year I publicly went through the most common yet least reported type of postpartum depression (Part 1 and 2 here) – the type based on true tragedy, unrelated to a chemical imbalance, the kind of depression that has, as its source, actual loss, and grief. Having gone through many miscarriages, and faced with the almost absolute lack of compassion in the believing community, I and many others were forced to stomp down and swallow that pain, to face it alone, to endure shaming because of the unresolved and therefore unending grief. The end result was catastrophic – unresolved grief, anger, bitterness, shame, jealousy – you name it. I lived it day by day for over sixteen years until the day came when God said, “No more, this is going to get dealt with now.” Just like that, He stripped away all of my protective mechanisms and the full onslaught of the pain was raw and inescapable. It was horrific and outside of my control – I was literally insane with grief and anger at times. It got worse before it got better – but now it is finally better. I saw the first hard evidence of healing two weeks ago when a friend asked me if I minded if she named her baby after me. My response was, “You’re pregnant?”

What shocked me was that my surprise was only a surprise, that there was no resentment or anger or jealousy involved – I didn’t hurt inside, at all. I didn’t even feel numb about it. I didn’t have to fake a congratulation. As I sat there, I found myself able to feel pleased for her – even though she already has a house full of youngsters. But, I thought – she is naming the baby after me – maybe it’s just my ego. (My ego is sizable, so it was a legitimate consideration)

This morning another friend with children announced her pregnancy to me as well (see her beautiful ultrasound above). No, they aren’t naming the baby after me. LOL. And much to my surprise, I had the same exact response – I actually am happy for them. Her pregnancy did not arouse even the slightest pain within me, no twinge of jealousy. That’s huge. I actually even got a little weepy for them, which is even more than I felt for my first friend.

I can’t even begin to tell you how terrible it is to hate other people’s good news, their blessings, and to have no power over those feelings. It is terrible to want to be happy for them, to know you should be and to feel ashamed that you don’t, yet to have the pain flood in and destroy all feelings of warmth and compassion.

Since May of 2000, I have not been happy for anyone who was pregnant – unless they were like me and knew nothing but infertility and loss – and now, all of a sudden, because God forced me to deal with the pain I really can rejoice with those who rejoice and not simply weep with those who weep. It was a strange dichotomy – certainly not wishing infertility, miscarriage or child loss onto anyone and yet being full of pain and rage if people were not so afflicted! Such is the nature of unresolved pain, of not being given permission to mourn by those around me.

You need to know that I didn’t choose to have this happen – I had so many protective barriers built up to shield myself from the constant pain that I was no longer able to choose how to deal with it. I was in crisis mode – I always tried not to think about it, and I always tried not to allow it to control my actions. All I was ever able to accomplish was not allowing it to hurt other people – and that took a lot of self-control.

There is truly no “snapping out of” grief – it has a mind of its own and takes as long as it takes. There is no shame in it. In Bible times, grieving was very scripted – people were expected to weep and wail and be externally nonsensical with grief. It would be very strange indeed not to mourn deeply. Because it was expected, and accepted, people were usually able to move through their grief and anger and get on with their lives, with the notable exception of Jacob at the loss of Joseph. Death happened in the ancient world, it was expected and acknowledged as a society – it wasn’t expected to be pushed aside or experienced alone.

It is strange that today we feel differently, though we credit ourselves with greater compassion and pride ourselves with being more in touch with our feelings. Perhaps the trouble is that we are in touch with our own feelings but have lost sight of everyone else’s feelings. We don’t want to be bothered with them; we don’t want to sit shiva with mourners for a week and cry with them. We are moving too fast; we want them to get beyond their grief so that we won’t be burdened by the obligation to mourn alongside them. We want to be entertained, not bored with someone else’s personal tragedy. If we don’t feel the same feelings, we really don’t much want to pretend like we do.

What I went through was a big wake-up call for me about the importance of grieving as a community, of having it be okay to treat grief like the insane thing that it truly is. Acknowledging death and loss as decidedly unnatural – well, maybe that is part of our mourning over what we lost in the garden. Humans weren’t originally equipped for death, and we probably still aren’t. That it still happens, that we are not yet what we were created to be, I guess it should cause a greater disconnect than it does.

Maybe every death really is supposed to be greeted with the cry, “This was never supposed to happen!” And in that case, anger and mourning both seem both natural and healthy.

The Character of God as Father 3 — I Will Never Leave You…..

It’s the pain and sense of loss that doesn’t ever really die — the pain a child feels when their father abandons the family, or was never there in the first place. The sense of loss when the man who had an obligation to be a pillar in the life of his child decides he has better things to do. It may be masked with anger, but the pain is always there. Our prisons here in America are filled with angry adults who were once sad children, who became angry children, who in turn became angry adults. Abandonment breeds hopelessness, and hopelessness kills. There are many degrees of abandonment, from the father who just stuck around long enough to get their mother pregnant, to the divorced dad who never shows up again. Or sometimes the wandering type who shows up unexpectedly, raising hopes and making promises and then disappearing again. Then there are the fathers who are physically there, but emotionally they are far away, or there for one child but not the others. Being abandoned strikes at the deepest places of fear and insecurity in a child. Being abandoned undermines every aspect of the child’s psyche.

The abandoned child does not have the luxury of feeling completely grounded, because the foundation of their life is incomplete.

The abandoned child grows up in incomplete, unrealized love and longing — regardless of how loving the remaining parent is.

The abandoned child cannot completely relate to reasonable expectations of what a mother is or what a father is.

The abandoned child does not see the world in terms of security, because they grow with the belief that trust is a fairy tale.

The abandoned child will often internalize the blame for the parent not loving them enough to want to stay.

The abandoned child often cannot conceive of a scenario where God the Father will not abandon them at the first sign of trouble — or when He has had enough of their flaws. They often imagine He is looking for any excuse to leave.

Such a person is not going to be able to make a true emotional connection to God the Father, because the prerequisites to such an attachment were not constructed in their early life. I have to tell you, that based on my reading of scripture from front to back, our Heavenly Father is literally screaming from just about every page that He is not like that. And not even every earthly father is like that, some fathers choose that path because they choose to esteem themselves and they choose not to become entangled in committed, loving relationships that require responsibility. They decided to withhold themselves from those who were born to need them. It was a personal choice rooted in their personal character flaws, a choice that never could have been changed by the inherent worth of the child. When a choice like that is made, the merit of the child is not taken into consideration. A child can be a perfectly behaved, straight A student, Prom Queen or Quarterback, doing all the housework and cooking and earning a living on the side to provide for the family — and it will not enter into the decision. No child, really, no one, can ever be good enough to turn back a decision that someone really wants to make. There are some things out of our control, and someone else’s life choices, no matter how deeply they impact us, are at the top of that list.

So before I go any further, let me sum it up. If you were emotionally or physically abandoned by a parent, even if they tell you it was about you or act like it was your fault, it was really because of what they wanted, not about what you deserved, which was a stable, loving home — whether you were Prom Queen or the social outcast. If you were abandoned, you need to really come to terms with that or everything I am about to share with you about the character of God the Father will go right in one ear and out the other.

From the beginning, the revealed character of God as Father is that of a father who will never leave us, nor forsake us — EVEN when we deserve it. What He does do is withdraw His protection, but not until it is His only remaining option to drive us towards repentance when we have decided in our hearts to hate Him. Withdrawing from us is only ever something we decide for Him to do, and it can’t be done lightly, and it doesn’t happen in an instant, and it is generally with the intent of future restoration. Withdrawal is not the same as abandonment, withdrawal has a purpose towards the benefit of the person being withdrawn from, abandonment is entirely about the person doing the abandoning, for their own purposes.

Gen 28:15b I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of

This was the promise to Jacob, and the things referenced to were, in verse 14 “And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

Here we see an eternal promise, a promise not to leave someone until things that would never occur in his lifetime would take place. YHVH has still never left Jacob, even though Jacob has been asleep now for thousands of years. And Jacob wasn’t always wise, he wasn’t always righteous in all his actions, Jacob made mistakes, and so did his children. But the promise to never leave and forsake was never based on Jacob’s worthiness, it was based upon the character of God, which is a constant.

To the casual eye, the Father portrayed in the Tanakh, what Christians call the “old” Testament, is very violent and unpredictable. But it only appears that way when we fail to look at the whole picture. And that picture is always a picture of a Father doing whatever it takes to protect His beloved family from external and internal dangers and guide them towards righteousness leading to life. But when we lack the perspective of a healthy father/child relationship, we will miss it. We will see an unpredictable tyrant, ready to leave us at any moment, instead of facing the kind of Father who patiently allows decades of rebellion to pass before taking drastic action – and even then not withdrawing His love, but proving it through creating situations where His children have a choice between returning to Him or dying at the hands of their oppressors. Because He sees rebellion as a life or death situation, He has to communicate that to the children He loves by lifting His hand of protection and showing them. But does He ever leave? No.

What do good parents do when their child is rebelling? They discipline because they can see the consequences of the behavior that the child cannot see or simply lacks the maturity to care about. When we look at God’s actions throughout the Word from this vantage point, we start to see two beloved children removed from the tree that would have left them living forever as sinful beings, instead of two people rejected by God. God never left Adam and Eve, He just took them out of danger. In the same way, God never abandoned the children of Israel in the Wilderness, even when they were profoundly irritating. Sometimes He took deadly steps to remove danger from their midst, in order to save the whole nation, but He never left. They complained and He never left, they worshiped the golden calf, and He never left, they refused to go into the Land and He never left, Moses took credit for getting water from the rock himself, and He never left. The nation didn’t drive out all their enemies, and He never left them. Eli and his sons defiled the priesthood and the offerings, and He never left the Nation. Hundreds of years of idolatry off and on, and He disciplined, but never abandoned them.

He doesn’t leave — but He does allow us to leave Him, and sometimes He recognizes the fact that we have left Him, like when He handed the Northern Kingdom of Israel a certificate of divorce, an admission that they had broken the covenant and had long since walked away.

A Father who has that kind of patience, who tries that hard to reign in His children, who frankly puts up with things most of us never would — a Father who continued to love the unlovable, people who in many cases didn’t even desire His love, or even His blessings or His Name — and He never left.

How likely is it, that when He treated the rebellious house of Israel with such patient kindness for so many hundreds of years, when they wanted nothing to do with Him — well, how likely is it that when someone longs for Him and really does desire to do right that He will abandon them for what, in comparison, are very small things? Its impossible.

Deut 4:30 When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the Lord thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice;

31 (For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

We are living in the latter days, and we have a promise written here that if we turn to Him and obey Him that He will not destroy us, nor forsake us. Unlike some earthly fathers, He will never do the leaving. We have all the control over who leaves the relationship. We have to leave, its all on us, but that doesn’t mean we can behave however we want, because if we are rebellious, we are already leaving Him in our hearts. But that is our choice. We can leave, He won’t. He won’t break the Covenant, but we can. In many ways, this relationship with our Heavenly Father is nothing like the relationships we have with our earthly fathers. We decide who stays and who goes. If we want Him, then we stay with Him and He will not leave. If we want him, then we treat Him like a good father deserves to be treated, by beginning to give Him our trust, to acknowledge that He knows better than we do what is good and bad, that we live in His house according to His rules, and when we fail, we repent and return to Him.

The father of the prodigal son didn’t move away, or build a huge wall, or reject his son, or drive him away, or threaten him. He let him go, but He also accepted him back because his heart was genuine. The prodigal son was a fool who became wise, who learned that the ways of his father, which he had despised, actually led to a good life. The father had the wisdom and grace to let him go and accept him back, and he accepted him back because in his heart, he had never left his son, his son had just left him.

God has never destroyed nor abandoned anyone who ever truly wanted HIM. And if you are the kind of person who is afraid to get close because you are afraid He will make an exception in your case — then that’s just proof that you want Him very desperately indeed. If you can find anyone in scriptures who wanted Him, who really wanted him, who He abandoned and callously left, then you have a perfect right to suspect Him of being potentially unfaithful to you. But if you can’t find anyone like that, with all the wickedness and provocation He endured, then it’s time to let your guard down and realize that He was telling the truth.

He isn’t fickle. He isn’t chaotic. He doesn’t have anywhere more important to be or other people He would rather be with. His dedication to you is based on His perfection, not your imperfection. He isn’t spending His time anxiously waiting for you to screw up so that He can have an excuse to leave you. His character is long-suffering, and forgiving and full of grace and it always has been. He is not anxious to depart but to dwell within, and He has proved it for millennia with people way more challenging than you are.

If your heart longs for Him, it is because He planted that longing within you — not to crush you with hopelessness, but to draw you near to where He wants you to remain. If your distrust hasn’t driven Him away so far, then I can safely say that you owe Him the benefit of the doubt. Its not going to be easy, but I can assure you that it is worth it. He isn’t the one who abandoned you, but He is the one who has adopted you from the one who abandoned you. He must have seen something incredibly special.

You’ve spent your life judging your earthy father based on his revealed character, its time to judge our Heavenly Father according to His revealed character. We have a choice in this life, to base our sense of stability and worth upon the memories of a broken pillar, or to take a chance, and lift our eyes and notice the ancient, strong, enduring pillar that was always there in the background. I love Darlene’s picture here because my eyes were drawn to the broken pillar, and I had to make a concerted effort to notice the intact one. Isn’t that such a picture of our lives?

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited

The Character of God as Father Pt 1

I am writing this with Father’s Day having just passed us by. And for many people who grew up with abuse, it’s the worst day of the year — a day filled with anger, bitterness, regret and confusion. Being a father is the greatest privilege on earth, apart from the privilege being grafted in to God’s Nation of Israel, but it is also the gravest responsibility on earth.

The privilege and responsibility are tied up in the same cause. Simply put, our God has revealed Himself first and foremost as our Father, and therefore each father on earth has the sacred duty of representing the character of God in his own home, with his own children. Whether he is a good man or not, kind or abusive, reasonable or unreasonable, accepting or rejecting, with each and every day he is solidifying how his children define the word “father.” They will carry those perceptions into their adult lives, into their own parenting (even if it is just in their utter rejection of how their father did it), and most tragically into their relationship with the Creator.

Over my life I have known hundreds of people who cling desperately to Yeshua (Jesus) but who want no part of the Father — not out of rebellion, but out of an unhealthy form of fear brought on by years of having their hopes, their spirits, and their definition of the word father twisted and crushed. They get to the point where they cannot even fathom that it is possible to have a father absolutely unlike the one they had. To people who grew up with a Charles Ingalls or a Cliff Huxtable for a dad, accepting God the Father is a no brainer — but to people who grew up in day to day abuse or outright abandonment, another father is the last thing they want, or are even able to accept.

And I don’t want anyone to accept God the Father before they can see who He really is, because if you accept God the Father with that twisted and unholy definition, it isn’t our Heavenly Father anyway. I want to prove, step by step, starting with Yeshua, His Son, who came from Him and went back to Him, that He is different, that He is a good Father. If you have accepted that Yeshua is good and merciful and love and grace personified, then I am not going to ask much of you, I am only going to ask you to trust His own words.

Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

Here, we see a principle established that would not be doubted by any first century Jew. God is good, and only God, which means that to be considered good, one must have no evil within them whatsoever. This is our first difference between the character of earthly fathers and our divine Father in Heaven. It is a common misconception that Yeshua was the first to equate God with being our Father, but the first was actually Moses.

Deut 32:6 Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?

God has been our Father since the beginning, calling Israel His son. So this was not a new revelation Yeshua was bringing, but instead bringing new light to an eternal truth. He intensified that light when He made the claim,

John 10:30 I and my Father are one.

The word He would have used, is the Hebrew word echad, it means one, united. In Ex 24:3, it was the word used to reflect the “one” voice the nation of Israel spoke in to agree to the covenant at Sinai. Echad, in this case, means agreement, voices speaking as one in unity.

I am going to take certain things for granted. One, I am going to assume that we all believe that Yeshua never lied, or broke any commandment, because if He did He would have been disqualified from being Messiah as per I John 3:4, which states that sin is transgression of the law, the Torah, the Word of God. So whatever Yeshua says is bedrock truth, nothing anyone says can come into disagreement with His words and still be truth.

So when Yeshua says that He and the Father are one, echad, united, in agreement and in absolute unity, it means that Yeshua is fully in approval of everything that God the Father has ever thought or done and vice versa. There is nothing the Father would do that Yeshua would not do Himself, or that he would disagree with or disapprove of. The Father is absolutely good, Yeshua is absolutely without sin — therefore anything we feel towards Yeshua, anything we believe about Him, must also be believed about the Father.

I want that to sink in.

I want you to start to see that we have believed lies about God the Father because of the failings of our human fathers, and it is my fervent desire to rehabilitate our Father’s reputation, because He is grossly hated and slandered because of flawed human ideas about what being a father means. Many people have fathers who have ruined the meaning of the word, but lets wash it off a little and search the scriptures and see what a Father is supposed to be like. And its okay if you get angry during the process, its a grueling ordeal to retrain our thoughts and our definitions — especially when we don’t want to, when we want a safe distance between us and any father figure. I get it, I really do, I totally understand. But I am on the other side now, and I want you to join me there, I want you to get to know what you deserved to have all along — a knowledge of the Father that Yeshua preached.

The kind of father every little girl and every little boy came into this world needing and deserving.

Your earthly father might have done great evil, he made a choice to do evil for whatever reason. He chose to hit, or drink, or molest, or abandon, or reject – he chose to not act like a father. He chose to not act like a father, he chose to misrepresent what it is to have a father. Maybe you have never considered that before, maybe you didn’t have a father at all, not a real father. Maybe there was a male in the house, maybe he brought home money, or not — but maybe he just mostly lived as a single guy who was interested in having sex but not interested in having the responsibility. But it was the responsibility that was rejected, not you, if you never read anything I write ever again, if you never believe anything I say otherwise, I pray you can wrap your mind around that.

Copyright Holly Steele Trudgeon, reproduction without permission is prohibited