In our last episode, I talked about how there are miracles everywhere and we can choose to see them. And I shared some examples that have happened in my life. And I wanted to really inspire you that it doesn’t matter how much pain you’re in or how long it’s been since your loss or what other challenges are in your life.

You can still find true deep miracles to show you that you are watched over by God, the universe, or whatever you believe in. Well, today I want to talk about what to do. If you’re really feeling like you are not getting any miracles, it’s all feeling dark and shut off and unfair. Uh, I recently, I just saw someone in a Facebook group saying that they’re not even hanging by a thread.

Like the thread is broken. It is a mess. They’re just. It’s rough and I know this feeling myself and I see it happening with my clients often So I’ve learned what helps the most and I’m gonna give it all to you today So that being said if you want to take the messages from the podcast and really implement them in your life You’re going to want to sign up for coaching.

We take all these tools and apply them to your specific challenges and goals to help you feel like yourself again. You’ll be happier, more at peace, and more confident after working with me. I have a few spots open to start now, and in just three months, you will be changed. Not because of me, but because of what you can do when you have expert support in your life.

It’s the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. Okay, so back to what it feels like sitting in some dark, shadowy pit of despair type places. Heaven seems closed, everyone else gets all the luck, and you get wave after wave of bad things happening. It’s like the whole world is conspiring against you and you don’t think you’re going to survive.

You’ve had your share of the hard stuff, but you can’t seem to catch a break. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Now I want to jump to movies and books and really engaging stories. There’s this thing called the hero’s journey. And if you’ve studied it, if you studied writing or literature or anything like that, we know that the hero’s journey has this moment where everything is going wrong.

And so I want you to think of your favorite movie, your favorite book, your favorite story. What is the part where everything is going wrong, and bleak, and bad, and it’s like you know that this is the end, but then we also know this can’t be the end because it has to, we like a happy ending, or at least a wrap up of the story.

So I just had a couple of random stories I was thinking of. If you’ve seen the Neverending Story, um, there’s a part in that movie where They are just stuck in the mud. The horse is stuck. Like, everything is just miserable. And you just want to cry because this kid is out there, like, trying to To make it, and he’s not making it.

Uh, even in Runaway Bride, the part where Julia Roberts and Richard Gere are gonna get married, and then she runs away again, like you think it’s the end, it’s the happy ending, and then she bolts again, and she hops on the side of a truck, and she goes off, and you see his face, and he’s like How is this happening?

And her face, or she’s just terrified and it’s awful. Uh, in Harry Potter, there’s a part, and I haven’t read these books for a long time, but I remember this part where basically Harry Potter is hiding out. He’s not using magic. He’s like living in a tent and everything is just awful. And they are just, they don’t know what to do.

And it seems like everything is unraveling. Um, I could go through so many movies. I’m not going to do that here. Really, any movie, any story, there is going to be a part where you wonder if the hero is going to make it. So have you ever been there? Are you there now as you’re listening to this? If you haven’t been there and it’s not happening to you now, I’m just going to say it’s likely that at some point in your life you are going to understand.

So this is the episode for all of us, because being in this space can feel really overwhelming. I’m going to keep my tips really simple today. So I want you to come back to this episode as much as you need it as many times as you need it, but really tuck these in your back pocket and keep them with you.

Now, before I give you the tips, I’m going to explain why this happens. Why we feel so just like down in the dumps, like nothing is working and there are no miracles. So we each have some beliefs in our head about how much we can handle, what’s fair, what other people’s lives are like compared to ours, and our brain gets fixated on all the problems.

So our brains have a negativity bias to begin with because we’re always looking for problems so that we can fix them or avoid them. But then we can get stuck in a negative cycle when life gets heavy. Now I’m going to share just a bit of my story around River’s death when it seemed like there were zero miracles in my life.

When River died, we had just moved to a new town. Um, and we sold our house, we closed out our house and then. We were going to buy a new house just a few hours before that paperwork was going to happen. When we have all of our kids and a truckload of stuff, um, we found out that our home that we had sold did not fund.

And the person said, Oh, we’ll get the money. We’ll get the money. Uh, but it was a very stressful time and a spoiler alert. He did not get the money. So our funding fell through after we had closed and moved. We didn’t know many people in this town. When I found out that River did not have a heartbeat, I was alone at the doctor.

My husband was completely across the country. I was not offered to deliver my baby. Even though I had been in the baby loss space for a long time. I just didn’t I Felt like I only had two options surgery or having the baby at home and potentially just having that be really really difficult or dangerous.

I Went into surgery on Friday the 13th after waiting for my husband to get home from the other side of the country. I lost a ton of blood during my surgery with River and That was very scary. I mean, I was unconscious for most of it, but when I woke up, I also did not have any blood pressure and there was a whole bunch of stuff happening.

There were a lot of doctors in my room, there were alarms going off and they could not get ahold of my doctor for some reason to allow them to give me more blood.

We had surgery. Was the day before my birthday and so I had to make a Facebook post Letting people know that I did not want them to wish me. Happy birthday because I had just been through this very traumatic loss It was not doing well. I Did not get to make any memories with River. I Did not even get a pamphlet.

I got pretty terrible care to be honest and All through this pregnancy, I had prayed one thing. Please let this baby live. Just let this baby live. And we had made it through the first trimester and as much as I know that’s not out of the woods after having a full term stillbirth, still I know that your odds go up and I had never had a first trimester loss.

So I got through the first trimester and made it to the second trimester. And then found out that we didn’t have a heartbeat and it just felt like so unfair. Uh, the heavens felt shut. I was mad. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually just devastated and felt beaten down. I didn’t know why my kids had to go through this again.

I had just told them I was pregnant a few weeks before. And now I was at a store. Wiping my tears away, buying them stuffed animals to go home and give them the bad news. We did not find out a gender for our baby. We did not get answers. We had mistake after mistake, um, that happened so that we really ended up having just a really awful, awful experience.

So that was my season, like one of the seasons of my life where I can just say, Everything was going wrong. Everything was hard. And like I said, in the background of all of this loss, losing so much blood, feeling physically unwell, like not being able to stand for a week because I had lost so much blood, we are still going back and forth with this person who bought our house who never paid us and keep getting told that it’s going to work out and it’s not going to work out.

And it was the most awful part. And we ended up Just scrambling to figure this out, but here’s what I want to say. I get it and I have some tips for you. The first one is you don’t have to fix this. It can just be awful. Like, it can just be really hard and you can acknowledge that this is hard. These are hard circumstances.

We don’t have to talk ourselves out of it. We don’t have to tell ourselves that we’re, you know, throwing ourselves a pity party, like, or that we need to somehow find the good in this. It’s okay to just let it be what it is. My second tip is you can go inside yourself. Turn inward. Which means Just literally take care of you continuing to breathe and function and do the things you need to do.

I Also say pull in your circle You have all these things that you need to do things on your plate things that feel important Nothing else is important right now except for What’s essential. So cut it down to the essentials. You, your family, your relationships, like your day to day, um, things that you need.

And shut the rest of it out. This is not the time to continue doing things that you do not have the energy for. And then even physically curl up in a ball. We talk about the fetal position and why it can be just a natural response to just curl up and protect ourselves. And sometimes you just have to do that.

My third tip is don’t believe everything you think. In these seasons, your brain is going to want to freak out 100%. It’s going to project out into the future. It’s going to tell you that it’s always going to be like this. It’s going to tell you how overwhelmed you are. It’s going to tell you how impossible this all is and how unfair it all is.

And it’s, it’s going to tell you everything. So check in with yourself. See what your brain is offering you if you’re in a hard season like this and just pause. Take a breath and don’t believe everything you think. There may be some things that are broken that are never going to be the same that you really are going to have to let go but a lot of this stuff it’s going to be okay like you are going to figure it out.

So don’t believe everything you think when your brain wants to, we call it catastrophizing, but just going to the extremes of the consequences of this tough season. My fourth tip is look for outside help. This is not the time to DIY your life. Get some help. Get therapy, get a coach, get a friend on your side.

I will never forget my friend who came and stayed with me for the days between when I found out we lost River until my husband was able to be home. She was just there for me. And that meant so, so much. She just helped. She hung out. She kept me distracted. Um, it was amazing. So. Get help. And I know how hard, especially in these tough moments, it can be to ask for help.

Maybe you don’t even need to ask for help. You just need to share what’s going on. And then let people offer and take them up on your offer, on their offers, right? Um, and if you really feel like you’re in a lonely space, Honestly, just strangers on the internet are a great way to get support sometimes when you feel like there’s nothing else.

Like, we really have so many resources. Don’t tell yourself that you don’t. You do. Look for some outside help. And then my fifth tip is hold on. Now, I don’t know how old all of you listening are, but when I was growing up, there was this poster that I feel like every school had and it was this kitten hanging off of a rope by its claws and it said, hang in there.

And if you Google it, there are many versions of this original poster, but hang in there. It really means yes, you are hanging on by your dirty, broken, bloody fingernails sometimes, but you’re not going to quit. You are going to keep hanging in there. You’re not going to let go. You’re going to stick with it.

So hang in there. I can’t say this enough. Just Stay. Stay with us. Keep holding on. These tough times will not last forever, but they might last a long time. So be okay with it taking as long as it needs to. I want you to stay present. Right, that overwhelm, that fear, a lot of it comes from projecting out into the future.

So if we could just bring it back to today, bring it back to now, like today is hard enough. We don’t have to add a layer of looking towards the whole rest of your life and how awful it’s going to be. It’s not going to be all awful. It’s going to be a mix of all the things. So don’t. Go too far ahead.

Don’t be too far behind. Stay where you are. Be present and then be open to miracles even in the darkness. The darkness makes these little miracles that much brighter. But don’t force yourself and don’t judge yourself if you cannot see any miracles. Let it be hard. Let it be excruciating.

Let it be what it is and just hold on.

So those are my five tips. You don’t have to fix this. Go inside yourself, pull in your circle and curl up in a ball if you need to. Don’t believe everything you think. Look for outside help and hold on. I want to wrap up my little story that I shared about River. Um. We figured out the money for the house.

It was long. It was terrible. Like, it was terrible. Honestly, if we would have had the energy to sue this person, or if we thought we could have won, we might have done it. And I don’t say that lightly, because I would, that would be a very, um, drastic decision. But what they did, it was not okay. And it was really bad.

But we figured it out. The people we bought a house from were patient with us, and we figured out how to make that work while we figured out our funding. A stranger came and brought me flowers and visited with me in this new town after this loss of a pregnancy we hadn’t even told anybody about. I didn’t die.

That was a good thing. Um, I got to read all of the Anna Green Gables books for the first time ever. We had all, I think there’s seven books. I’d never actually read them. I’m Canadian, so I’ve seen the movies and the shows and everything, but I hadn’t read them, so I got to read them. Um, like I said, we managed two mortgages for a while.

We eventually sold our house. I, uh, especially cemented in my mind and heart how important support is after having a terrible experience after loss. I learned to advocate for myself even more, which helped me in my next and final rainbow pregnancy. And I had to dig really deep in my relationship with God.

Uh But I couldn’t really appreciate all of these things at the time. I was just miserable going through the motions and feeling very, very picked on. And that’s okay. Sometimes all you can do is keep breathing, keep plodding forward when your legs feel covered in mud, the rain is pouring down, and you can’t even see the horizon or hope for a brighter tomorrow.

What you can do is stop telling yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling this way. Of course you should. Life is hard sometimes and you’re only human. This is a part of it. Take the burden off of yourself that you’re messing this up. Stop forcing yourself to see miracles. Or find the silver lining. You are going to do this.

It’s just going to suck for a while. And I know that might not sound hopeful, but for most of my clients, when I tell them it’s okay to be sad, to be angry, hurt, frustrated, all these quote unquote bad emotions, they feel lighter immediately. I hope you feel that too. Hang in there, my friend. Come talk to me if you want someone to sit in the mud with you and tell you that it’s going to be okay.

But for now, it’s okay to not be okay. Now that being said, as your life coach, I know That deep down you do want a spark of hope. So I’m going to end with a really amazing Mariah Carey song that I think sums up what’s coming next for you. You are the hero of your own story and you might be in that dark part of every hero’s journey but it’s not the end.

So I’m going to read the lyrics but I want you to go listen for a few minutes of a musical pep talk. And I’m sending you big hugs and so much love. The song goes like this. There’s a hero if you look inside your heart. You don’t have to be afraid of what you are. There’s an answer if you reach into your soul and the sorrow that you know will melt away.

And then a hero comes along with the strength to carry on and you cast your fears aside. And you know you can survive. So when you feel like hope is gone, look inside you and be strong, and you’ll finally see the truth that a hero lies in you. It’s a little cheesy, but it’s so, so true. You can be your own hero.

This is your story, and it’s not over yet. I’ll see you next time.