Carrying Hope and Fear at the Same Time
You wanted this pregnancy. You may have hoped for it, tried for it, prayed for it. And now that it's here, you can't fully let yourself feel excited about it, because some part of you is bracing for something to go wrong. That contradiction — wanting so badly to feel joy and not trusting yourself to feel it — is one of the most common things I hear from clients carrying a rainbow baby.
If you feel like you are living in two realities at once, one hopeful and one terrified, you are not alone in that, and you are not doing anything wrong.
What This Anxiety Can Look Like
Pregnancy after loss brings a specific kind of anxiety that doesn't always look like typical worry. It can show up as:
Avoiding attachment to the pregnancy "just in case," like refusing to buy anything for the baby
Panic in the days leading up to ultrasounds or checkups
Counting weeks obsessively, especially approaching the point of the previous loss
Guilt for feeling anxious instead of purely joyful
Intrusive thoughts about losing this baby too
Difficulty being around other pregnant people or celebrations
Why This Happens
Your body remembers loss, even when your mind tries to move forward. This is not irrational, and it is not something to push past through positive thinking alone. It is a nervous system trying to protect you from being hurt the way you were before. Once you understand it this way, the anxiety usually makes a lot more sense — and that understanding is often the first step toward loosening its grip.
Why This Deserves Its Own Kind of Support
Pregnancy after loss is not the same experience as a first pregnancy, and it often is not treated that way by the people around you. Friends and family may assume that once you're pregnant again, the fear should ease. In reality, many parents describe rainbow pregnancies as harder emotionally than the pregnancy before the loss. You are not just managing normal pregnancy nerves. You are managing grief, hope, and fear for the future, often all in the same hour.
How Therapy Helps
Compassionate Empowered Counseling supports parents through pregnancy after loss with a blend of compassion focused therapy and EMDR. EMDR can help process the earlier loss directly, so that grief is not silently bleeding into this pregnancy without you realizing it. Compassion focused work helps quiet the harsh inner voice that tells you not to hope, not to attach, not to feel joy until it's "safe."
The goal is not to force positivity or talk you out of your fear. It's to help you hold grief and hope at the same time, without one having to cancel out the other.
Are you struggling to enjoy this pregnancy the way you thought you would? Together, we will work on this, with as much patience as this experience deserves.