WHEN YOUR BODY HAS KNOWN LOSS
- Annette Tapia-Cornet
- May 5
- 3 min read
Acupunctuur bij herhaald miskraam en zwangerschap na verlies
Some women come to me carrying a particular kind of grief — one that lives quietly underneath hope. They've been pregnant. More than once. And more than once, that pregnancy has ended before it had the chance to become what they were dreaming of.
Recurrent miscarriage is not a single loss. It is loss layered on loss. And with each one, something shifts — not just in the body, but in the relationship between a woman and her own body.
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THE HARDEST PART: NOT KNOWING
Het moeilijkste: niet weten
The women I see with recurrent early miscarriage are often not falling apart. They are holding themselves together — tightly. What I see most is fear. And underneath the fear, frustration. Because what they want more than anything is to DO something, and instead, they are being asked to wait. To hope. To sit in the unknowing.
That is extraordinarily hard.
In acupuncture terms, what I often find is a Kidney/Water system that is severely out of balance — depleted and/or dysregulated from repeated loss and chronic anxiety — and a Liver/Wood that has become constricted and stuck, unable to move and flow the way it needs to. When Water and Wood are struggling, Earth follows. The Spleen — which in TCM is responsible for producing Blood and holding pregnancy — becomes compromised. And when the Blood is thin and the Earth is unsettled, the Heart has nothing to anchor into. The Shen drifts. These women are often not just anxious; they are unmoored — disconnected from their bodies, from the present moment, from any sense that things could be different.
What acupuncture does in these cases is help redirect energy — quieting the noise that rises when the body is overwhelmed, and rooting it back down into the lower jiao, where a baby grows. It settles the Shen. It gives the nervous system permission to stop bracing. And it gives these women something concrete to do, a place to come, a space where someone is paying attention to what is happening inside them.
Sometimes that is exactly what the body needs to do its job.
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WHEN THE FEAR HAS A DATE ON THE CALENDAR
Wanneer de angst een datum heeft
Pregnancy after late loss is a different experience entirely. These women are not just anxious — they are often quietly traumatized. And frequently, the hardest moment is approaching: the gestational week when they lost their last baby. That date looms.
One of my earliest patients had experienced a stillbirth at 37 weeks. She came to me within weeks of the loss, completely traumatized — her body still producing milk for a baby who wasn't there. We worked together to process that trauma, to help her body and her nervous system begin to find their way through the unthinkable. When she became pregnant again, she was terrified — not just of losing the baby, but of reaching that week. We worked together throughout her pregnancy, and as she approached 37 weeks we shifted to active labor preparation. She went into labor and delivered a healthy baby at exactly 37 weeks.
I don't tell that story to promise outcomes. I tell it because it captures something true about this work: sometimes what a woman needs is for someone to help her body remember that it knows what to do — and to feel supported enough to let it happen.
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WHAT I CAN AND CANNOT OFFER
Wat ik wel en niet kan bieden
Acupuncture cannot prevent every miscarriage. Some losses are chromosomal, some are unexplained, and no one — Eastern or Western medicine — has all the answers.
What I can offer is support: for your body, your nervous system, and your ability to stay present in a process that asks an enormous amount of you. I encourage my patients to stay in close communication with their midwife, OB, or fertility specialist. My work sits alongside that care, not instead of it.
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IF THIS IS YOUR STORY
Als dit jouw verhaal is
You don't have to have it figured out before you reach out. You can just be where you are — grieving, hoping, terrified, or all three at once.
That's enough to start.
📍 Free Spirit Acupuncture NL — Hoofddorp & aan huis
