GOOD GRIEF AND GRIEF FOLLOWING ABORTION
Posted by Philip Ney on Aug 17, 2004 in Science at www.messengers2.com
INTRODUCTION
Though painful, grief should be natural and normal because it is a necessary process and very few people will be spared. Grief is the acutely conflicted process of detaching and it always hurts. Post Abortion Grief (PAG) is seldom natural, and it is never easy. It is painful, prolonged. For most post abortion people, in this life, it never ends. Yet once the impediments are removed (PAG) will flow with little effort and end satisfactorily.
There are at least 25 complicating factors for PAG. These apply in almost every abortion. Because these factors are seldom acknowledged and almost never resolved, it is not surprising that for most women and men and children, post abortion grief never successfully finishes. It becomes pathological grief that often results in difficult to treat depression. Since about 60% of women and men world-wide have had at least one abortion by 45 yrs. it is small wonder that Post Abortion Pathological Grief (PAPG) is so common. It is the main cause for so much depression and suicide. Sadly it is badly misunderstood by those who could help.
Uncomplicated grief like sleep, flows in a recognizable pattern and ends with people feeling refreshed and hopeful. It seldom needs prompting. Because many societies recognize how important it is to fully grieve, family or formal mourners are employed to initiate and promote grief, at least promote the expression of grief. Too often people may go thru the rituals of mourning, weep and wail with little benefit. It is interesting to note that the ancient prophet Jeremiah described how the women of Ramah, refused to be comforted. Why?. probably because their grief was complicated by guilt. They recognized it would do them little good to perform the rituals when their grief would not normally flow.
Guilt is the main but by no means the only contributor to pathological grief, especially in the current age when at least 80% of grief is self-induced. For a long time, it has been recognized that if you contribute to the death of the person you must now grieve, that grief is complicated and won’t get started nor be resolved until you first deal with the guilt. For example, late at night you are driving your best friend home after a wonderful dinner. Out of nowhere, or so it seems, a car crashes violently into the right hand side of your vehicle. Although you are not badly injured, your beloved friend is killed. Subsequently it makes a great deal of difference to your grieving if at the moment of impact you were driving thru a green light or a red light. The grief is further complicated if you insist you were in the right and because the police were late to arrive, only you know you had too much to drink. The grief is further complicated by your self-righteous anger and prolonged court action against the other driver who was an innocent teenager, driving carefully but without his full license.
Post abortion grief (PAG) is the most difficult grief known to humans because it lacks all the prerequisites of normal grief and has almost all the impediments. Normal grief requires that:
- The body of the dead person is seen, preferably held and cuddled as long as the grieving parents desire.
- The full humanity of the dead person is acknowledged.
- The dead person is identified with a name and personality.
- The dead person is unconditionally welcomed into the family by all its members.
- The death was not contributed by any or the persons who now must grieve.
- The grieving persons feel accepted as genuinely mourning and they are supported and encouraged to express the full range of feeling stemming from the death.
- Any ambivalence toward the dead person must be resolved.
- No hindrance of time, work, false grief facilitators and counsellors can be allowed to intrude and inhibit the grieving.
- No medications be allowed to inhibit the full expression of feeling of grief.
- No rituals and traditions be allowed to stand in the way of normal grief.
- The body is visibly buried in the earth, the family all participating and some marker is erected.
- The person’s spirit is formally committed into the keeping of the Almighty God.
It is easy to see that none of these grief prerequisites can be achieved in PAG. It wasn’t possible to hold the dead baby. People are discouraged from talking about their abortion etc. Except on Hope Alive I know of no other counselling program which deals with all of these factors.
Even uncomplicated grief like sleep can become delayed by the efforts of friends and funeral arrangers who program a lovely “remembrance service’ where people make jokes when they need to weep bitterly. Superficial post abortion grief programs usually harm more than help. They teach that now the person is forgiven, the grief will stop and if it doesn’t it is because they don’t have enough faith. One reason for this is that the baby that was killed was not fully humanized before being interred and the guilt was never fully accepted or dealt with. The baby was not identified and welcomed because the aborting parents did not first deal with their dehumanization as the result of the mistreatment during childhood. Thus there is a logical sequence to first acknowledging and resolving at least 20 serious conflicts before grief can naturally begin. That is why in the Hope Alive program there is so much time spent working thru complex issues before grief is addressed. And because these conflicts are carefully addressed, the grief flows and ends with good results unlike any other program.
Often like sleep, people don’t want to get into grief for they anticipate the pain sorrow from loss, the tumult of intense emotions, fears of loneliness, anger from being rejected, bitterness of accumulated disappointments, uncertainty about the future, weariness from poor appetite and doubts about oneself that are like the nightmares of sleep. But like bad dreams, they all must be endured if you are to waken refreshed. If you can go through the process and finish grieving, you spontaneously recover, feel refreshed, become more hopeful and can make new attachments. If you strive to avoid grieving or deal with grief superficially or misdiagnose the grief as depression, you may never recover.
Complicated Grief
Grief that never gets properly started and grief that is complicated by conflicts becomes pathological grief. Pathological grief often results in depression. By far the most complicated grief and the most common grief is that following an abortion. There are vast numbers of women, men and children stuck in Post Abortion Pathological Grief (PAPG) who are misdiagnosed as depression. They are much too readily given medication which further complicates and prolongs the grieving. The depth and extent of PAPG is greatly underestimated by even the most loving, loyal prolife people. Most post abortion counseling is a travesty of therapy, misleading the most vulnerable and adding to their pain and confusion.
Prolifers should understand that the most unnatural human act, to kill a helpless innocent child lying within the supposed security of her mother’s warm womb, will result in the gravest consequences. It always has and always will. To treat it superficially does harmful injustice to all those involved.
The most difficult complicating component of post abortion grief is guilt. The guilt stems from many sources, is seldom recognized as such and most often is not appropriately dealt with. Post abortion guilt is universal, inevitable and mistreated. Post abortion guilt primarily stems from an intuitive understanding that killing the most precious being carefully crafted by the Mighty Creator in His own likeness is the most arrogant, audacious, stupid, rebellious act anyone could dare commit.
Post abortion guilt is also biologically based. Except under unusual circumstances, all species recognize that to kill a member of their own, especially a new member, endangers the survival of all. There is a deep biological sense, even among the Godless, that killing another human is wrong, especially a baby. Though vociferously denied, there is some awareness of biologically derived guilt in everyone.
To damage, even in one member of the species, the instinctual mechanisms that sustain the whole will meet with approbation and avoidance by the clan or family. Abortion interferes with child-parent bonding that enables parent so read their child’s blueprint which awareness more than any other factor guides a parent’s individual need meeting.
protects the other children from the occasional loss of anger and abandoning control that affects all parents at times. Mothers in particular recognize this lack of protecting bond and also the diminished breast feeding desire that follows abortion and they feel guilty for it. They try to compensate by placing the child in the best day-care.
Abortion also interrupts the Species Specific Instinctual Restrain of Aggression and Abandonment which is a God given instinct that has protected our species for so long. The SSIRAA protects the young from any occasional parental tendency to aggression or abandonment. A post-abortion woman intuitively senses the loss of this restraining mechanism in her. She also feels guilty for producing this damage that will affect her and her other children. She senses the damage to her health now and in the future. Like a cigarette smoker she feels guilty for the diminished tidal volume, increased chances of cancer, prematurity etc. to which she has now exposed her-self and her preborn children. She feels guilt toward her children for she cannot be as sensitive to their needs. She feels guilty toward her husband for she has lost the freshness and excitement of marital sex. She feels guilty toward her parents for depriving them of a grandchild.
Does a starving she wolf who in desperation ate one of her new pups sense an irrevocable change in her nature that makes her feel the pack will tend to avoid her? From long and intimate association with ½ wolves, my dogs, I believe so. The Species Specific Instinctual Restraint of Aggression and Abandonment is weakened. The sense that this instinct and the bonding instincts are weakened and not likely to recover is true for humans and wolves. She has partially destroyed a species preserving mechanism.
Does everyone recognize these guilt’s? After carefully listening to and treating approximately 6000 men, women and children, supervising the treatment of approximately 2000 more, scientifically assessing about 3000 more and helping in research on about 190,000 more, I have never discovered a person who didn’t feel at least some post abortion guilt even while they vociferously claimed they were guilt free.
In an effort to avoid imposing their morality, many post abortion counselors avoid a careful analysis of all sources of a couple’s post abortion guilts. Very few post abortion women, men or children are far more ready to talk about their guilts than are their counsellors. Far too often those who ostensibly deal with post abortion guilts, apply a few scriptural Band-Aids with little understanding of what response God requires. In Hope Alive the counsellee first makes and list of all the contributors to the tragedies and then with group feed-back determines the percentage of contribution and responsibility for each component of guilt.
Suppose you were driving a very good friend home late at night and out of nowhere a car T boned yours and your friend was killed, it makes much difference to your grieving if you driving through a green or a red light. This guilt occurs whether you contribute to the death of the person you must grieve in fact or in fantasy. Why does a woman who swears she would never have an abortion have prolonged grief when she miscarries? Because in her heart she wished the baby would die and miscarry. She believes her wishes contributed to the baby miscarrying and maybe they did. This is why, even in situations of fetal anomaly incompatible with life, it is so much better for uncomplicated grief if the parents always welcome the child, just as God made him and strive to keep him alive and well as long as possible.
A widow has longer grief if at any time she surreptitiously longed for her cancer riddled husband to hurry up and die to relieve his and her suffering. This is why family members have prolonged grief if they requested or consented to the “doctor assisted death” that killed the mother who went without so they were well fed. Grief is briefer and the result more healing if on every occasion, it is sustained with love and sustenance to the very end.
The Dead Puppy
Having been awakened by a primordial howl of the male, at 5:15 I hurriedly dressed in my best delivering clothes and went to attend the smart bitch who was calmly delivering her 6th. She was a wonder to behold. Without fuss or fanfare she calmly delivered one after the other at about 10 minute intervals while licking the others to clean and to stimulate their breathing. Nine in all. On examination they all seemed healthy and well formed. Both parents were bursting with pride and watched while we attended, admired and patted.
Two days later, on a bright and sunny am, I discovered one off by itself, cold and lifeless. Not having been taught how with animals I tried CPR while the mother pleaded so eloquently with her eyes. 10 min. later, still no signs of life so I gave him back to the mothers. She licked all over with great vigor and determination for about 5 min. I took over while she fed the others.
Three hours later I returned to find Star lying with her head on the dead puppy, so obviously grieving it tore my heart. On a previous occasion I made the mistake of taking the puppy from her and burying it without her knowing where, just in case she wanted to dig it up.
She took a long time to forgive me. In her eloquent eyes and posture there was such accusation, sorrow, anger, disgust and fear. Now I realize that animals like humans need to time with the body. There are very sound reasons:
- to be sure the puppy, baby, grandmother is dead
- to try once more to resuscitate the body.
- Looking on the body initiates the process of grieving much better than a picture or memory of the dead.
- seeing the limp form evokes a whole range of necessary emotions;
sorrow. “I want to weep and weep and never stop
anger, “why did this have to happen to such a sweet helpless creature
self-recrimination, “I should have done more to prevent this”
repentance, “Dear God I am so sorry for my self-preoccupation that I did not notice early warning signs.
fear “If such a healthy little creature could die so easily, what about old me?”
despair “What is the use? The world is a random and evil place and it isn’t going to get any better”.
glimmers of hope, “At least the sun is shining and the spring flowers are so lovely and my faithful dogs still love me”
Eight hours later Star is no longer cuddling the body of her pup or trying to resuscitate it, but she still gazes at him with such longing that she almost doesn’t notice the 8 other puppies.
All this points to aspects of grief humans need to observe and experience. It is perfectly natural that the grieving father shouts at the physician, “Please doctor try once again” or “I’m going to sue you and the nurses and the hospital” or “give me something to drink. I can’t take this”. Tragically, none of this happens with the average abortion. No wonder there is so much pathological grief and depression in this stupid world. If people can’t understand why grief following abortion is the most complicated, prolonged and pathological, maybe they should observe how animals grieve.
Now I must go and bury the little body and he was such a handsome little fellow. I’m so sorry sweat little guy.
Other common complicating factors of PAG.
- There are other unfinished griefs, e.g. previous abortions, an old flame.
- Often there are many mixed feelings towards deceased person, e.g. love and hate, desire and rejection
- The deceased person is dehumanized, seen only as a good or bad object, “that drunken bum”, “just a conceptus”.
- There is much unfinished business, e.g. unpaid debts, anger at boyfriend.
- Contributions to the loss e.g. paid to have preborn baby’s life terminated are not recognized or dealt with.
- There is no attempt at reconciliation, e.g. if they didn’t forgive and seek forgiveness, they will not forget.
- The grieving person is discouraged from talking and/or feeling, e.g. “There was no baby so the abortion was a non-event. There is no need to grieve. We don’t need to talk about it, do we?”
Since all these complicating factors and at least 25 more may and usually do apply to abortions, it is easy to understand why abortions result in the most difficult grief. Because grief for an aborted baby seldom starts and is often complicated, it frequently results in pathological grief which usually leads to depression. Thousands of physicians feel inclined to prescribe antidepressants to post abortion women because it appears they have the symptoms of depression. The proper treatment is to facilitate grief and provide counseling which helps a woman deal with all the conflicts surrounding her abortion. Sadly there are few people who are inclined to do this and even fewer who are appropriately skilled. Raw post abortion grief makes almost everyone feel very awkward so the tendency is to stop and grieving and pain with anything “just so they will stop bringing it up and making us all feel guilty”
Like Sleep Deprivation
Anyone who has not been able to grieve senses that they must do it sooner or later. They feel their mind and body become increasingly tense. When a person has been deprived of sleep for too long, they feel refreshed after a good sleep. They can function for a little while but also find that occasionally they need to nap. In such a way, grief may return may return a few times until it is completed.
Friends Feel Helpless
When you are grieving, your friends and relatives often don’t know what to say or do and so they tend to avoid you or make what they think is helpful small talk. Encouraging people to grieve by empathizing can be hard and painful work. Friends may avoid you because they have to experience the your mixed and conflicted emotions as you go through them your mourning. Because empathizing with you makes them uncomfortable and distracts them from other pursuits, they want you to finish grieving quickly. But it is too soon for you. If your grief is prolonged by complications, it means that their experience of vicariously felt grief is also prolonged. Your grief often triggers their unfinished or denied grief. If they won’t deal with it, they certainly don’t want to be near you. Friends often don’t know what to say and do and therefore begin to avoid you. The avoidance increases when it becomes obvious they are not able to help you.
Your Responsibility
Much as you may resent the added effort, it is your responsibility to inform your friends and relatives what they should and shouldn’t do and say to help you grieve. This could also be a letter written by a good friend who understands you well. Give them instructions so they can write something like this:
Keep Talking
Talking and feeling facilitates the normal healing process of everything. People are afraid if they talk it only makes things worse because it does bring feelings to the surface. However, without talking the mind has difficulty making sense of it all and organizing it’s response to difficult experiences. Don’t avoid talking about the dead person as a person with good, bad and mediocre characteristics and don’t avoid using the words ‘dead’, ‘grief’ or ‘mourning’, etc.
Grief Patterns Are Individual
Do not read books on grieving, until it is finished. It gives you the impression that you have to go through phases of mourning in a particular order in a particular sequence. Having read about the stages of grief, you may think yourself abnormal or unusual because you are not going through the process in the prescribed manner.
Analyze Your Dreams
Dreams are honest and will tell you a lot about your real feelings toward the deceased. Listen to your dreams and if you can, find someone help you analyze them.
God Knows
God knows about grief. He’s been through it. Moreover, He designed and made us so He is especially kind and patient with you when grieving. God knows the more we are attached to a person, the more painful is the detachment. He also knows that unless we detach the dead, we can’t attach to detach from the living.
Touch and Bury
Death is difficult to acknowledge and loss to accept. It boggles the mind, literally. So it isn’t unusual for people to keep hoping that the deceased was only partly dead or will somehow return. Especially for children, it is important to see and preferably touch the body. Feeling the cold lifeless, stiffening flesh is the most convincing evidence to the mind “yes she is really dead so stop trying to convince yourself it isn’t true”. Touching the cold, pale skin also helps initiate the rejecting reflex, i.e. “get that smelly body out of here” Then it is more natural and necessary to throw dirt on the body in a grave. This is why elaborate embalming and strong coffins interfere with the grieving process. For grieving it is better that the body is buried in a plain wooden coffin or in a rough burlap sack.
“Celebrations” of his/her life also interfere with grieving. It is far better that the person be buried and grieved for at least 1 year and then a remembrance of his life, all the good and painful parts, be available to family and friends.
In Abortion the Lack of Touch and Grief.
Parents who have their children aborted have indicated to me that sometimes they wanted to see the remains of the aborted child. Gruesome as it may sound, it is part of the natural process. Sometimes she says, “I just wanted to know if ‘it’ was a boy or a girl” Women may chance a peak and see a grizzly sight which can help to convince them, “never again” Men never get a chance and this helps explain why post abortion grief, covered by getting drunk, takes men longer.
Since seeing and preferably touching the dead body is so important to grief and since it cannot happen with aborted children, it is one of the principal reasons that post abortion grief is so much more difficult. In the Hope Alive post abuse and post abortion program, we use a “visual parable” to make the process of attaching and detaching as real as possible.
When I was a young physician, the Obstetrician might drop the miscarried baby into a bucket of formalin right before the mother and father. From their increase knowledge of bonding and because of the mother’s protest, they now allow both parents to see and sometimes to hold the miscarried child as long as they need to. It is amazing to watch how much tenderness is expressed by parents to stillborn children if given time and opportunity. This change in medical practice probably began in New Zealand at the insistence of Maori mothers. They pointed out that in their language the word for placenta and earth are the same. Therefore they must return the placenta and the body of the child. So powerful was their input that the NZ medical association (about 1982) strongly advised all physicians to give the products of all pregnancy losses, including abortions, to the Maori parents for burial if they so wanted.
Associated Losses
The loss is not only of the person, but all the hopes and dreams and past experiences that went with that person. One has to grieve every one and anything that you were attached to and lost. These can be partners, friends, animals, places, and experiences. One satisfactory grief facilitates the next. The logical order is usually grieving the loss of oneself as you were designed to become.
Grieving the PISHB
You have not become the person you were designed by God to become. This means that you must grieve the loss of the Person I Should Have Become (PISHB). When you are able to do that, you are much better able to grieve pregnancy losses and all other losses. When you are able to grieve the loss of PISHB, you can more easily accept who you are. A very important reason you will not become PISHB in this life is because the aborted child is very unlikely to be reconstituted and resurrected. Of course God can do anything He wants without our permission but because this is such a serious error, as far as I know He hasn’t and won’t undo it. When you can accept who you are, a shadow of who God intended, you can accept other people as they are.
Antidepressants
Grief is probably the most common painful experiences of humans. No one can avoid grief. Yet modern people who are taught you can fix anything with the right part number will keep trying They try with distraction (fun, fun, fun), or denial (‘I’m just fine’), or alcohol and drugs (‘I don’t feel a thing’), or frenetic sex ( isn’t this wonderful) or incessant work or entertainment (the more violent and sordid the better) or re-enacting the same grief necessitating scenario again and again e.g. repeat abortions) or antidepressants (‘Now I feel better’) All these avoidance mechanisms only delay the inevitable and increase the chance of depression.
The symptoms of grief are so similar to depression and many family physicians cannot face their own compromises and guilt from referring the woman for an abortion. In 80% of the instances of unresolved post abortion grief woman complain, “I feel really low, I cry all the time, I’ve lost my appetite, I try but I can’t enjoy sex, I just want to stay in bed even if I’m neglecting my children, I don’t exercise any more etc. they are diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. Then they are told they have a “biochemical imbalance” and prescribed antidepressants even though this diagnosis is wrong and there is no evidence of a biochemical imbalance. The post aborted woman initially feels much better on the serotonin reuptake inhibitor but within a few months begins to feel jaded. When she reports this to her family physician he/she is likely to double the dose or add another chemical. She may suspect that something is wrong and may try weaning herself off only to discover the terrifying symptoms of Serotonin Depletion Syndrome, (SDS).These convince her wrongly that she really must have a chemical imbalance which though now true is iatrogenic and not the cause of her basic complaint.
Because the antidepressants interfere with REM sleep she cannot dream all those useful images that can help her understand what she is really thinking about her aborted baby and his/her loss. Moreover she will not be able to feel or feel to the necessary depth all the emotions (anger, resentment, betrayal, sorrow, fears for her future, disappointment etc. she needs to sense and work through that are the inevitable components of her grief. Of these the most important is guilt. As long as she doesn’t deal with her guilt she will not be able to grieve. Thus her guilt complicated grief becomes a pathological grief. This guilt complicated grief does not often naturally resolve but turns into a difficult to treat depression.
For pathological grief there is no way around, only a painful way thru. It takes a very skilled psychiatrist or counsellor who understands these conflicts to help her thru. The most detailed and carefully developed pathway through is called Hope Alive. It is the only program that deals with the biochemical, behavioral, emotional and spiritual components and has scientifically established good results that have been reported in a peer reviewed journal.
Summary
Here is a short list of grief complicating factors that make post abortion grief the most difficult known to humans because:
- Post abortion grief is compounded with a persistent sense of deep guilt from killing an innocent, helpless child that depended on her for life and protection. It is the most unnatural thing a human could do and offends God very deeply. Very few post abortion people don’t want to read what God has to say and so they don’t find comfort and forgiveness by reading God’s word.
- Many post abortion women feel and although they know God will forgive them, they will not forgive themselves, at least not until they suffer enough and that is why the women of Rama refused to be comforted.
- The guilt riddled parents feel they have angered God who will bring harm to their family, ensure the next pregnancy miscarries or the child is malformed or they will lose their salvation.
- They feel guilty for harming themselves, knowing although they may be able to keep up appearances, they have irrevocably damaged their self-respect and self-confidence.
- The vast majority of post abortion women and men won’t find, if they ever look, a pastor or priest who will hear the depths of their guilt and despair and lead them to forgiveness and salvation in Christ.
- The grieving person must say good bye to the Person God designed them to be which in this life will now never happen.
- The grieving couple must say good bye to the amazing first awakening of their body, mind and spirit that prepares them to welcome and bond to the new baby and which makes it so much easier to recognize the child’s blueprint and therefore be the best parent possible.
- Results in many unwelcome hormonal and cellular changes that increase the chances of breast cancer, genital and uterine abnormalities that increase the chances of premature births etc.
- Decreases the chance of easy bonding and breast feeding.
- Complicated grief also stems from contributing to the cause of the loss, i.e. paid for someone to kill their child.
- Abortion prohibits the sight, touch, holding and caressing the baby’s body.
- There is no body to bury and throw dirt on and no grave to mark with a monument showing the child’s name in some quiet woods where the parents can quietly weep.
- Very seldom is the baby’s spirit committed to the Heavenly Father.
- Abortion is very damaging to normal sexual desires and together with anger and distrust disrupts marriages which the woman has little desire or energy to maintain.
- Many men feel betrayed when their woman without or against his knowledge and consent have an abortion. The deep sense of rage from being castrated extends their mutual distrust.
- To abort, the child is first dehumanized but must be re-humanized before the real loss can be acknowledged and experienced.
- All babies attach to their mothers by the umbilicus and placenta. Because the mind always follows the body, every woman is unwittingly subconsciously attached to her baby. Post abortion, she must detach before she can properly attach to the next infant but her intense ambivalence toward the infant gets in the way.
- Shame and social prohibitions inhibit the essential full range of discussion and emoting with family and friends about.
- Politically motivated media bombardment the grieving mother with ideological nonsense e.g.”It wasn’t a baby therefor your grief is unnecessary”. So stop your crying and get on with life.”
- The childhood neglect and abuse that so often damages a person’s integrity is not dealt with.
- The complicated post abortion conflicts results in prolonged post abortion grieving that is misdiagnosed as depression and usually antidepressants are given. These interfere with the normal flow of intensified emotions that accompany all griefs.
- The common misdiagnosis of “bipolar disorder” diverts the woman’s and her family’s attention from the real problem of grieving.
- The antidepressants also interfere with REM sleep and normal sleep bio-rhythms of restorative rest required for grieving.
- REM deprivation makes a woman restless and anxious. It also deprives her of dreaming that is full of helpful images that can result in important insights for the major conflicts of post abortion grief.
- There was intense ambivalence toward the aborted baby: love, desire, fear, anger etc. which must be resolved before grieving will flow.
- The lost person was dehumanized for purposes of destroying him/her, but now she/he can only be grieved as a real, individual person with name and personality.
- Fibromyalgia is an intense pain hard to localize and describe and it resists analgesia. It is quite possible this stems from the pain hormones that were release as the babies flesh is torn apart. They cross the placental and the blood brain barrier to produce an engram of life long pain that isn’t the mother’s but the baby’s last agonies.
- Other family members are also affected. The surviving children feel frightened and guilty. The symptoms are misdiagnosed as “behavioral disorder” or ‘ADHD”. The father is often very angry at himself and partner so he drinks and drives. He is more of a hindrance than a help to his wife and children. The grandparents of the aborted child are often sorrowing, angry at the world and fearful for their futures, knowing full well they are the next to become “unwanted” and expendable.
- Bad spiritual advice. E.g. “If you repented, God has surely forgiven you so now you can smile and count your blessing”.
- Spiritual Band-Aid’s from poorly trained post abortion counsellors that feel good momentarily but are quickly forgotten.
- Quick fixes on weekend retreats where the child’s name is written on a stone which is soon cast into a stream or the ocean. This only adds to the progressive dehumanization that the post abortion mother, father and sibling have been deeply affected by.
- When she doesn’t quickly recover from her “depression”, women from much religious background blame themselves for having too little faith for which they feel more guilt.
THE NET RESULT OF BAD GRIEF
History repeats. The human organism is programed to spontaneously heal. For healing the mind, the person needs and seeks insight. “Why did I do that? I can’t believe I could be so stupid”. The three principle ways human seek to understand themselves are: 1) “If I keep thinking and had the chance to be by myself without distractions, I think I could figure this out” With major complicated conflicts like those arising from killing your own child, usually people have interminable, obsessive thoughts and very little insight until they find themselves going in circles or going crazy and they the return to their favorite distraction or drug. 2) “If I could just talk this out, surely someone can help me understand why I would do such an unnatural act. So they talk and talk around the subject until they drive their friends to distraction and avoiding them. 3) “If I can’t figure this out and my friends don’t understand, maybe if I re-enacted the whole unhappy scenario I could watch it unfold and figure where I went wrong. This is the primary reason for repeat abortions and for trans-generational abortions. They understand even less from the experience of a second and third abortion than from the first, principally because their self and species preserving instincts are weakened.
Un-resolving pathological grief and depression. Although almost everyone categorizes post abortion symptoms as pathological, they are not. How would you expect a couple to react if the watched their beloved 2 year old daughter run over and killed by a car and knew it was their fault for not restraining the child running onto the busy road. Grief, guilt, fear, mutual recriminations, anger at themselves and the driver etc. would be the normal and predictable reaction. You would consider that anyone abnormal who walked away from the crumpled bleeding body with a grim faced, “oh well that wasn’t pleasant but I will get over it. For now I will drink a couple and my favorite pub”. Yet in the realm of bad science, the person who reacts strongly is diagnosed with some rubric and those who don’t seem to care are normal. These with apparently normal reactions tend to show up 40 years later needing much help with grief. In the meantime they tend to have a wide variety of psychosomatic disorders that are investigated with every medical modality to no avail.
Antidepressant aided prolonged grief. Since antidepressants inhibit the grieving process, the grief doesn’t often spontaneously remit. Since about 80% of post abortion women are wrongly diagnosed as “depressed”, or “bipolar” and in North America there are about 1.5 million abortions per year, there are about 1.2 million women and about the same number of fathers and children and grandparents or about 4.8 million new “depressed” patients each year. Since the so-called treatment only worsens the condition, this figure is cumulative. Within a few years the North American nations can no longer afford the costs so rationing, euthanasia and eugenics are promoted only to find they further add to the costs because patient confidence in the physicians declines so rapidly.
What should happen is that post abortion sorrow should be recognized for what it is and treated with insight, Godly guidance and repentance. The above partial list indicates what deep conflicts must be addressed before grieving can proceed. The majority of these are not known to most counselors. Sadly as in most areas of medicine, if an illness is not properly treated the first time, it tends to become chronic. Hope Alive counselors are trained to address and deal with all of these and by relying on God, they have very good results.
Good Grief
Although emphasized in this brief article, grief and guilt are only 2 of 10 essential issues that need to be addressed. These are: a) Naming and assessing all the contributors to this tragedy of abortion.
- b) Effecting reconciliation with all those who hurt or were hurt by the abortion and all those who could have and should have done something to avert this tragedy. Letters of reconciliation must be written and exchanged with perpetrators, victims and observers including abortionists.
- c) Forgiveness must be genuinely sought and given.
- d) Predisposing pain, limitation and dehumanization from childhood must be dealt with.
- e) Deep grieving for the loss of: family I should have had, the Person I Should Have Become including loss of sexual identity, femininity,
- f) Prevailing cultural dehumanization must be identified and confronted.
- g) Shame of using one’s soft vagina as a torture and death chamber and so disinclination to invite one’s marital partner when the thought puts him off or makes him impotent.
- h) Fears of retaliation &/or punishment resulting in an expectation the next baby will be abnormal.
- i) Anger at being abandoned by the baby’s father just when he is needed most.
- k) Continuing parenting problems.
Grief is inevitable and necessary. Once the prohibiting factors are dealt with, grief will flow spontaneously. Still grieving is work. It takes time and effort that Christ acknowledged. The time Christ spent preaching to the souls in Gehena was no time at all because as God everything for Him is timeless. Nevertheless, Christ deliberately gave his disciples about 2 days of intense grief saying goodbye to their dear friend and teacher so they could say hello to their mighty resurrected Lord and Saviour.
With grief we detach, re-orientate and mature. In this way death may result in a fuller life for those who stay behind. For those who have been already reborn by faith in Christ, death is a transition to the place where they will be “clothed in an incorruptible body”. “Death is swallowed up in victory”
Solid research has established the reciprocal connection between abortion and childhood mistreatment. Those people who were abuse and neglected are statistically much more likely to have an abortion. Those who had and abortion, are more likely to abuse, neglect and abandon their children. Thus the Hope Alive program deals with this continuum of dehumanization by first re-humanising the person deeply damaged by abuse and neglect. Then guilt is estimated as a percentage of contribution and its deepest depths plumbed, Then it is possible to re-humanise the aborted or miscarried babies, then welcome them, then watch them die, then bury then commit their spirits to God. Letters of reconciliation (LOR) are written and sent to all the contributors to the mistreatment and to the abortion, including the abortionist. Likewise LOR are sent to victims and observers and to God. This is one aspect of the program that counsellees find hardest and most beneficial. This is a very short list of all the components of Hope Alive. The healing is progressive and follow-up is essential. A careful analysis of before and after treatment outcome has be published in a medical, peer reviewed journal
Hope Alive is a 32 session post abuse and post abortion health recovery program. It is taught at Mount Joy College and in other receptive centers of the world. Information is readily available on www.mtjoycollege.com and www.messengers2.com If you have questions go to www.pubmed.com or www.mountjoycollege.com
Amen & amen, come buy information without money or appointment.
Sincerely Philip G. Ney MD, FRCP(C), MA.