Reproductive Grief And Embodiment with Ailey Jolie

What happens when the grief carried inside the reproductive body is never fully named?

In this solo episode, Ailey speaks to miscarriage, endometriosis, adenomyosis, infertility, reproductive surgery, and the quiet grief so many people are forced to hold alone. Drawing from both her clinical work and personal experience, she explores what it means to live in a body shaped by pain, loss, diagnosis, and scar tissue.

Ailey examines how easily self trust can erode when symptoms are dismissed and answers are delayed, and how that experience impacts the nervous system and relationship to the body itself. She also explores the growing conversation around endocrine disrupting chemicals, reproductive health, and the complex realities many women are navigating inside modern environments.

From there, the episode moves into pregnancy, miscarriage, ambiguous loss, and the ways grief can remain invisible when there is no ritual, language, or collective witnessing around it.

This conversation offers a compassionate and grounded space for anyone navigating reproductive grief, chronic pain, or a changing relationship with their body.

In this episode:

• 2:53 Naming Reproductive Loss Out Loud
• 11:58 The Bigger Pattern In The Data
• 22:48 When Systems Shift Blame Onto Women
• 32:37 Miscarriage As Postpartum In The Body
• 40:22 Microplastics In Placentas And Loss
• 45:33 Surgery, Scar Tissue And Proprioception
• 49:03 Healing Through Witnessing And Choice
• 53:18 Where To Go Next And Share

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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• Email: info@aileyjolie.com

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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Transcript

Ailey Jolie 0:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pop power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life free from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like: how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. And if this is your first time here, welcome. I'm so happy you're here. This is a podcast about what it means to live inside your body, to not inhabit it, to listen to it, to trust it, and to honor the wisdom within. And I'm your host, Ailey Jolie. Today is a solo episode about a tender topic that most people don't speak openly about. And it's also a topic that I haven't yet heard anyone approach from a somatic lens either. Today I want to explore with you the reproductive body. And I don't mean the reproductive body from a textbook sense. Instead, I'm going to be giving voice to an experience that isn't often named publicly, but is very commonly named in the private space of my office. Today I'm going to be speaking about miscarriage, endometriosis, andomiosis, infertility, the surgeries that alter a body in the ways nobody prepares you for, the grief that has no formal funeral, and the partners who also lose but are told to be strong instead of being held. There's also one more topic I'm going to touch on, and this is one I've been reluctant to bring onto the podcast because I know it will sit uncomfortably

Naming Reproductive Loss Out Loud

Ailey Jolie 2:10

for almost all of us, but I want to talk about why those losses are happening at the rate they are happening at and what the research keeps pointing toward. Today's episode is layered and the bodies it describes deserves time. So if you need to take it in in pieces, please do pause, come back. If you find yourself crying or experiencing emotion, please let it move. Before I go further and dive right in, I want to speak directly to the women listening from inside the middle of this. Maybe you're mid-IVF, pregnant after a loss, stuck in a diagnostic process that's already gone on for far too long, recovering from a surgery that was supposed to be simple. Some of what follows will be hard to hold. And I want to name that before I begin. I'm not here to add another layer of what I should have done differently onto the body already caring so much. I'm here to do the opposite today, to lift some of this weight off of your individual shoulders and put it back where it actually belongs, onto the conditions, onto the systems, onto a culture that has built a way of life in which our bodies struggle to do what they've always known how to do, and then onto the conditions, onto the system, onto a culture that's built a way of life, in which our bodies struggle to do what they've always known how to do. I want you to know that you're not the problem and that you've never been the problem. If the area of reproductive health doesn't interest you, this may not be an episode for you, and that is totally okay. There's still wisdom to gather in exploring. There's still wisdom to be gained in knowing what's impacting the health of the people around you, but also the health of you. So if motherhood is behind you, something you don't want, something you can never participate in, please know that there's still tidbits of wisdom in this episode, even if this episode wasn't recorded specifically for your experience. To dive into this topic, I have to do a little bit of self-disclosing. I live with endometriosis and endomyosis. I have another reproductive health condition that I don't share publicly because it tends to elicit a lot of fear in everyone around me. And the fear really isn't a part of my experience, but so I keep that one private. But these three diagnoses combined have contributed to miscarriages in my past. I've had multiple surgeries on my reproductive body, some I chose, some I didn't really have meaningful choice around, some that happened in a more has some that happened in a more medical emergency type of way. And all of them mean that I'm left's scar tissue that's changed the way I exist in my own body. I live with conditions that make fertility uncertain in a way that isn't theoretical or future sense. This is the body that I'm in, the body that I'm in right now as I record this for you. It's also the body that I have been living in as I wrote my book for the past few years, sometimes through flares, definitely through a lot of surgeries. And in the experience of writing, for a lot of it, I didn't have a lot of language around the grief that I was feeling, or I felt really alone in my experience because even though the medical system was trying to help me, I didn't really have a frame to understand what I was experiencing. So I say all this because none of what I'm about to share comes from outside my body. I'm not the clinician who's read the literature and is reporting back from a very safe, comfortable distance. I'm instead the clinician and the body both at once, and the two have always been, and the two or have experienced a lot of what I'm going to share about today. All this to say that there were years when the part of me who's who went to graduate school studying introsception and later trained as a somatic experiencing practitioner herself could not trust her own pelvis and the information that was coming from her body. The dismissal from the medical system had gone so deep. The years of being told contradictory things by different different doctors had really gotten into my mind. So had the cultural script that our own reproductive pain is ordinary, our losses are common, our complaints are a little exaggerated. I'm sure you've heard some of these. But sitting with hundreds of women across the years of my clinical practice, women also living with endometriosis in the aftermath of miscarriage, navigating fertility treatment, women on the other side of surgeries, they were promised would take six weeks and never fully recover. I know that I'm not alone in my experience, that none of us are. And so that I hope, and that's my hope today, that yes, you're going to receive some new information, that yes, you're probably going to receive some new information. But I also really hope that you don't feel as alone if you're navigating any of the experiences I named right now, that I've named so far, or if you've navigated navigated them in the past. One thing that I wish I had known earlier is that a single reproductive story only makes sense inside the larger pattern these stories are forming together. Without the patterns, you will hear the rest of this episode the way you've probably heard everything else about your reproductive health for your entire life, as something individual, something happening to you because of something about you. Your hormones, your stress, your age, whether you waited too long or not long enough, your particular bad luck. And here's what the data actually says across populations and countries and countries and decades of collection. One in 10 women has endometriosis, as one in as many as one in five has endomiosis. The average woman waits seven years for a diagnosis, and that these are not rare conditions. They're the most common chronic gynecological conditions of the reproductive years. And the rates at which they're being recognized in epidemiological epi epi epidemiological studies are not. And the rate they're being recognized is not flat. 2020 French study documented documented rising hospitalized endometriosis between 2011 and 2017. With due with geographical hotspots, the authors could not be the authors could not the authors said with geographical hotspots, the authors said could not be explained by better diagnosis alone and pointed toward environmental risk as the probable contributor. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. That number has held relatively steady for a long time. What has shifted in the last few years is the resource in is the research into why unexplained losses happen. The field has begun looking in places it had not looked before. And what it's finding is unsettling enough that I'll spend a full section of this episode on it later. One in six people worldwide now experience infertility, according to the World Health Organization's most recent global estimates. This is a public health phenomenon at the scale of a major chronic disease. And this is not only a female body story, sperm concentration in individualized regions has fallen dramatically over the same decades, and testosterone in young men has followed. Findings come back to findings I'll come back to in the research. Findings I'll come back to later. Reproduction has never been a solo act, and the grief inside it has never been solo either. We'll dive into that more later. But I wanted you to hold these numbers right at the start of our time together. So I'll say them. I wanted you to hold these numbers right at the start of our time together. I'll say them again just so that you can feel the gravity of them. One in ten with endometriosis, one in five with endomyosis, one in four pregnancies ending in loss, one in six couples struggling to conceive, male reproductive capacity in steep decline across an entire generation. These are not separate phenomena housed in different medical specialties. They are increasingly common manifestations of the human reproductive system under a stress no generation before has asked to absorb at this scale. And they are being treated almost exclusively one woman at a time in private rooms with private grief, carried in silence. But we're inside a pattern, and the pattern is large enough to see if we step, but we're inside a pattern, and the pattern is large enough to see. But we are inside a pattern. So I'll try and walk you through what the peer-reviewed science actually says, what is well established, what's suggestive, and what is still being worked out without rounding in either direction. The category of substances we're going to be spending time talking about is endocrine disrupting chemicals. And if you're already a little like, I thought this was about the reproductive body, and now we're talking about endocrine disrupting chemicals, please just stay with me. EDCs, for short, are external chemicals that mimic, block, or interfere with the body's natural hormone signaling. The major ones studied in reproductive health include biciphenyl, biciphenyl A, which most people know as BPA, phthalates, the family of chemicals used to soften plastics and present in cosmetics, food packaging, and personal care products, dioxins, a byproduct of industrial processes

The Bigger Pattern In The Data

Ailey Jolie 11:15

that bioaccumulates in fat tissue, PCBs, which were banned in the 1970s but persist in the environment, are still being detected in human bodies 50 years later. Pesticides, including things like DDT, also banned but are still persisting in our environment today. I know that this might sound like fringe territory, but it's really not. And it's not because the endocrine society, which is the leading professional body of endocrinologists in the entire world, has formally defined EDCs as a public health concern. The World Health Organization has issued reports on them, systemic reviews, systematic reviews in mainstream gynecology, and reproductive medicine journals have documented associations between EDC body burn and reproductive disease. So you may be asking, what the heck does this have to do with reproductive health? I thought this was a podcast on embodiment. Why are we getting into endocrinologists and plastics? Like what's going on here and why is this relevant? Really tie the links together for you. I do have to get a little bit deeper into the research. And I hope through exploring the research that you'll be able to tie the links between what's happening in the reproductive body, will alt which alters our interceptive awareness, which is our ability to be connected to the body, and ultimately our embodiment. If we're absorbing things from the environment that are making us unwell, causing disease or hindering our interceptive awareness, that is an embodiment issue. I know that embodiment is often framed as shaking or jumping or bagal toning or nervous system work, but embodiment is deeply political. And embodiment also honors that we are a body in the world, sharing the body of the earth with everything around us. So I hope that go by going through the research, that link is drawn for you. So let's dive into that research now. For endometriosis, multiple studies have found higher concentrations of BPA, phthalites, dioxins, and PCBs in the urine and serum of women with endometriosis in the urine of women with endometriosis than in women without it. A 2025 review in the International Journal of Molecular Science synthesized the evidence, concluded that EDCs are likely playing a casual role in the development and severity of the disease. The proposed mechanism is biologically coherent. These chemicals mimic estrogen, and endometriosis is an estrogen-dependent condition. They also alter immune function and induce oxidative stress, both of which are involved in how endometriotic lesions develop. For miscarriage, a series of studies published in 2024 and 2025 began documenting something that I think every woman who's had an unexplained miscarriage deserves to know. I'll come to that shortly in its own section because the findings are weighty enough to deserve more than a summary. For infertility, sperm concentration is in industrialized regions fell by roughly 50% between 1973 and 2011, according to one of the most cited meta-analyses in reproductive health. A 2022 publication extended that finding across an even wider range of countries, and the trend held. A separate 2021 publication found that testosterone in levels in young men in the United States declined around 25% between 1999 and 2016. The leading hypothesis for what's driving both trends points to environmental exposure, particularly to EBCs, in combination with metabolic and lifestyle factors. Some researchers have pushed back and they argue that the methodology in certain early studies had limitations, and that pushback is a legitimate part of an honest scientific conversation. But the weight of the evidence across decades and population points consistently in one direction. What is well established is that EDCs interfere with reproductive hormones. They are present in the body of almost every adult in industrialized countries. They have biologically coherent mechanisms by which they contribute to endometriosis, infertility, and miscarriage, and the rates of all three of those conditions have either risen or stayed stubbornly high across the same decades that EDC exposure has become ambiguous. What is still being investigated is the precise weight of any one chemical for any one woman's diagnosis. The interaction effects of multiple low dose exposure across a lifetime. The epigenetic dimensions, whether exposure in our grandmother's generation are showing up in our reproductive systems now through inherited changes in how genes are expressed. An honest summary is the patterns are clear, the mechanisms are well mapped, the pattern is clear, and the mechanisms are well mapped. But the absence of certainty around which chemicals caught which women's diagnosis has been used for too long by too many institutions to stall the larger acknowledgement that these chemicals are impacting our reproductive health and our ability to be in our bodies. Women are told that their miscarriages are random, the intermetriosis is just bad luck, their infertility is age related. These women deserve to know that entire body of research is running in parallel in the shadows. And that research suggests that their losses may be a part of something much longer, larger than the diagnosis on their chart. None of this is shared openly because when the cause is your stress, there's a solution. You should meditate more. When the cause is your hormones, you should try a different birth control pill or this medication or that one. If it's your way, the solution can be change your body. If it's your decision to wait to have children, you should have decided differently. If it's your particular bad luck, then there's no one to be angry at, no one to hold accountable, no policy that needs to change. Just you holding it, just you holding it, paying for it, recovering from it. When the cause is in the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the cosmetics we put in your skin, the receipts we touch at the grocery store, the plastic lining the cans, the plastic lining in the cans in our pantries, the personal care products market to us specifically as women, when the cause is any one of those things, the burden moves. It lands on the companies producing the products, on the regulatory agencies that have failed for decades to act on chemicals known to be problematic, on a way of life that promit that profits enormously from going unexamined. This isn't a conspiracy. I'm not saying anyone is sitting in a room deciding to make women infertile. What I'm saying is something much more ordinary and in some ways much more disturbing than that. When the structural acknowledgement of a problem would require structural change, when the alternative is to let individual women absorb the cost privately in their bodies, in their relationship, in the quiet economy of their grief, the section, the second option is what tends to happen. That's what I'm saying. We have seen this, and I'm saying this because we've seen this pattern before. With tobacco, with lead, with the pet asbestos, with the opioid crisis. The science is established for years before the public conversation catches up. And during those years, the people whose bodies are being affected are told the problem is them, their genetics, their lifestyle, their bad luck, their failure to make the right choices. I'm not asking you to become an environmental activist by the end of this episode or to add another worry to a list that's already long. What I hope, what I hope that you're taking across right now is the link between the environment around us, our body, how commonly the systems around us put the blame on our bodies so that the system doesn't have to change. What I hope that this is pulling you into is an awareness that it's not your fault. It's not your body's fault. The shame, the judgment, the anger, the grief, the blame you've put on your body doesn't actually deserve to be there. Your body is always doing its best to protect you, to keep you here, to keep you well. But it's doing that in a world with a lot of systems that either intentionally or unintentionally are harming your body. I hope in hearing that, you can start to consider whether the shame you've been carrying around your body, your fertility, your losses, your diagnosis is that none of that might actually belong to you. And that it might belong to the system that I just named there that has found a convenient way to blame you and let you carry it. The moment you can put some of that shame down, your body's relationship with itself can shift. The diagnosis may not be able to change, but what can change is the weight of the self-blame, which is its own type of injury layered on top of the original one. And I would argue that the blame does cause more pain. And that's the shift that I hope this episode is trying to help you make because I know that shift was huge for me. And that's not necessarily a shift from grief into peace. The grief is appropriate, the grief is honest, the grief belongs to you, anger is valid. It's it's the layer of shame that doesn't belong to you. The actual loss is yours to carry. The belief that you caused it, it's not yours to carry. So let's keep going on this environmental layer and how it lands on the body that was already not being heard by the world around it. And if I move too quickly into microplastic and EDCs without sitting with what was true about the female reproductive body and medicine long before any of it, I risk making this sound like a 20th century problem when it isn't. The chemical exposures are new, but the dismissal of the female body, not so new at all. The word hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus. For most of recorded medical history, women whose bodies produced symptoms medicine could not explain were diagnosed with a condition that literally translated as your womb is causing your madness. The treatments were institutionalization, forced marriage, surgery on reproductive organs, or rest cures designed to silence the body further. What we now recognize as trauma responses, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, perimenopausal systems, and untreated reproductive disease, medicine called madness, and the cure was to silence the woman until she stopped complaining. And this is an ancient history. The diagnosis of hysteria was only formally removed from the DSM in 1980. The dismissal infrastructure it represented did not vanish when the word left the DSM. Today, the average woman with endometriosis waits seven years for a diagnosis, seven years of pain reported and minimized at being told she has a low pain tolerance, that periods are meant to be uncomfortable, that she needs to relax, that what she's describing is probably stress or anxiety in her head, seven years of appointments she's paying for time off work, inconclusive tests, and relationships starting under the weight of pain no one will believe is real. By the time she gets the diagnosis, her body has learned something. What it's learned is that what her body tells her it can't be trusted, that her own internal signals are unreliable witnesses to her own experience. This is a term for what the Research literature now calls interceptive fear learning. So the brain, trained

When Systems Shift Blame Onto Women

Ailey Jolie 22:05

by years of pain met with disbelief, begins to read even neutral body sensations as threat. Studies measuring body awareness in women with endometriosis find significantly lower scores across every dimension of body trust than in women without the condition. This is not because women with endometriosis are inherently less in tune with their bodies. It's because they have been actively, repeatedly trained out of their knowing by a medical culture that did not believe them. Endomyosis runs the same pattern and in some ways is a worse version because it remains one of the most understudied gyneological conditions in existence. Women with endomyosis are in pain without answers and without language. When no language is available, the mind reaches for explanation that is always ready. The problem is me. My tolerance is low. I had gone through the removal of cancer cells, surgeries, more than one, tests, scans, so many scans, and so many scans before someone finally saw endomyosis in my uterus. And they weren't even looking for it. They were looking to make sure that the last surgery had gone well. And they commented on the presence of andomyosis so casually because they were shocked that hadn't already been told that it was present. My experience is a sad reality of the experience of many women. In many ways, I'm very blessed that someone did finally notice it and said, hey, this is what's going on. Because the reality is that we live in a medical culture that has treated women's pain as a credibility problem rather than a clinical one for centuries. I want you to know that even if every chemical in our environment, the ones that we explore that we know are causing fertility issues based on the research provided, even if all of them removed tomorrow, the female reproductive body would still be walking into a medical system that goes back centuries of disbelieving women. The environmental layer is real, the dismissal layer is older. And I'm presenting today that they can pound on each other in a way that is particularly cruel. Because here's what happens when you take a body whose interceptive trust has already been eroded by years of dismissal and add to it a chemical exposure environment that's contributing to disease. You get a woman whose body is being injured by structural conditions and who has been so thoroughly trained to distrust her own perception that she can't even register the injury as legitimate. She blames herself, she apologizes to others for her pain. She minimizes it before the doctor has a chance to, doing the work of dismissal so the medical system doesn't have to. This is what we're inside of. But the framework also applies to miscarriage, to infertility, to chronic reproductive condition that has altered what your life looks like, that has altered what your life looks like, your ability to have children or not. Disenfranchied grief is harder to heal than other kinds of grief, not because the loss is smaller, but because the cultural container around it is missing. There is no funeral, there's no obituary, no weeks of meals arriving at the door, no shared script for how friends should ask or how long mourning is allowed to last. The grief has nowhere to go. The second concept I want to introduce to you is ambiguous loss. This one comes from the researcher Pauline Boss, and this is loss without a body, without resolution, without a definable end. Loss that lives in the gap between gone and still here. Miscarriage fits here, infertility fits here, so does the conditional fertility of a body shaped by endometriosis, endomyiosis, scar tissue, or other reproductive issues, or other reproductive diseases. In this one, there's no clear ending. There's no moment you can point to and say, now it's over, now I can move on. The loss continues to be ambiguous, sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime. When grief has no container outside the body, it stays in the body. And this isn't poetic language. It's what unwitnessed grief actually does neurologically and physiologically. Having nowhere else to put it, the body deposits the grief into its own tissue, into chronic tension in the pelvis, shallow breathing, sleep that doesn't restore, an immune system that becomes reactive in ways nobody can quite explain. An autoimmune flair that arrives a year later after the loss and seems to have no obvious trigger. The trigger was the loss. The loss was never witnessed. The body has been carrying it by itself ever since. What the body needs in order to release this isn't a technique, a breathwork practice, a supplement, a protocol. It needs witnessing. It needs the thing it has been deprived of. Someone willing to look directly at what happened and call it what it was without minimizing it, without rushing you through it, without turning it into something else. For some women, what that witnessing comes from a therapist, for others, a partner or friend who's been through it herself. For others, it comes from a community of women willing to name their losses aloud to each other. And sometimes it comes from a ritual woman creates on her own, a private acknowledgement, a date marked each year, a small object that holds the place of what was lost. The form of witnessing matters less than the fact of it. What the body needs is to know that somewhere outside itself, someone has recognized that something real happened. Once that acknowledgement exists outside, the body can begin to set the weight down. Now, holding these two concepts with us, I want to explore some specific conditions with you. I want to spend some time telling you what it actually feels like from the inside because there's not enough language or personal accounts in the publix. Sometimes it sat clearly in my pelvis, other times it radiated up into my back and legs and ribs. The bleeding didn't match anything I'd been told was normal. The fatigue on certain days was so deep I couldn't sit upright through a meal, nausea arrived without pattern. And sometimes there would be this foggy disconnection from the rest of my life. I went to doctors, had scans, tests, different explanations from different people. It was probably stress, they would say, or my diet, maybe anxiety. I was told to track my cycle more carefully, as though the problem was that I wasn't paying close enough attention to my body. I was repetitively offered birth control despite the fact that I can't be in birth control because there's a family history of blood clots. I mean, it took years for me to get a diagnosis. And in between that time, I did what most women in that situation do. I started to wonder if it was me. Maybe my pain tolerance was just really, really low. Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe other women had all of this together and just dealt with it and I was making a bigger issue than it was. I pushed through flares, I taught, I saw clients, I held everything together and rarely said anything to anyone. It wasn't until I received my third reproductive diagnosis, which actually was my first and is big and scary and something I don't share or speak about publicly that that was when all of the other stuff started to be disclosed and known. And I remember when I got the diagnosis for endometriosis and endomyosis after this kind of big scary diagnosis and surgery and all the things that happened there. I remember feeling this like deep sense of relief because I finally had a name and an understanding for the pain that I'd had for years that was dominating my life, that I had created a story that I was just being sensitive around or had a low tolerance. And I remember that moment so profoundly and what it felt like to finally be like, actually, that's not true. Actually, my body has in pain been in pain. Actually, the medical system around me and the people around me have been gaslighting my pain and minimizing it. And I also have been doing that for years. And actually, we don't need to do that anymore. Actually, like, actually, this can change. So I share this to give you some hope, to keep advocating for yourself, to find a different doctor, to feel like you can voice this, to feel, to feel confident that there is a medical gaslighting that commonly is happening with reproductive disorders and diseases, and to give you hope that there are doctors who will take this more seriously, who will ask you questions. And also because I want you to know that your doubt was never yours. It was handed to you by a system that's used it on women like us for centuries, and you're allowed to hand it back. You're also allowed to hand back some of the information that we are given about pregnancy, because pregnancy is not actually a static state in the body. It's not a baby quietly growing in a container while the rest of the body continues as usual. Pregnancy is the body entering a state of active, comprehensive preparation, and the preparation begins almost immediately after conception, often before a women woman even know she's pregnant. What happens during that preparation is one of the most extraordinary biological transformations of the human that the human body is capable of. Here's some of what unholds So we ended there at the end of part seven, and this is just part eight. I want to move now to the territory of miscarriage. And before I say anything about loss, I have to tell you what almost no one names about pregnancy itself. Because the grief of miscarriage doesn't make any sense without it, and most women, even women who've had miscarriages, have rarely been have rarely been given this information. Pregnancy is not a static state. It's not a baby quietly growing in a container while the rest of the body continues as usual. What happens during those early What happens during those early weeks of pregnancy is one of the most extraordinary biological transformations the human body is capable of. During this time, the immune system reorganizes, the maternal body has learned to tolerate cells containing DNA from another person, which is another context, which which

Miscarriage As Postpartum In The Body

Ailey Jolie 31:54

in any other context would trigger a powerful immune response. Pregnancy requires the immune system to hold open a window of tolerance for genet for genetically foreign tissue, something it almost never does. And this is a normal physiological undertaking, and then it begins in the early, early weeks. The cardiovascular system expands, blood volume rises dramatically across the course of pregnancy, and by the end will be roughly 50% higher than pre-pregnancy baseline. Vessels dilate, the whole system becomes a circulatory architecture designed to sustain two lives instead of one. Perception shifts, smell changes, taste changes, many women report their hearing becomes more sensitive. And none of this is random. This is because the body is tuning itself to detect environmental threats to the developing fetus, and that tuning begins within weeks of conception. In the last few decades, neuroscience has begun to document something extraordinary. The maternal brain itself reorganizes during pregnancy. There are measurable changes in gray matter volume, particularly in regions tied to social cognition and caregiving. These changes begin in pregnancy and persist for at least two years after birth. Some studies suggest they may be permanent. The brain of a woman who has been pregnant is not the same brain she had before, even at a structural level. Most women have absorbed somewhere along the way the idea that pregnancy is something that happens to a fetus while the mother waits, but it isn't. Pregnancy is something that happens to the mother comprehensively across every system of her body, beginning the moment of conception and continuing whether or not the pregnancy ultimately results in a baby or not. And that last part, that last sentence there is what I want you to hold as we move forward. Because as we know, one in four pregnancy ends in miscarriages. Sometimes it's six weeks in, eleven, later than that. And when it ends, and none of that preparation I just described simply reverses on its own schedule. The body does not get a refund for what it's already begun. Estrogen and progesterone, which had been climbing crash, prolactin, which had been preparing the body for milk production shifts. The immune system that had opened its window of tolerance has to close again, the cardiovascular system that expanded has to contract. The brain that had begun to reorganize has to undo the reorganization already underway. If that's even possible, we don't know just yet. This is what we call postpartum, and that's the word for it, and almost no one will use it with you. The hormonal cliff that follows miscarriage is biologically similar to the cliff that follows a full-term birth. The same neurological vulnerability window is open, the one that raises risk for postpartum depression, anxiety, mood disturbance, and psychosis. But there's no postpartum visit for the woman who's just miscarried. There's no screening, no appointments, no maternity leave, no structure really at all. What there is instead is usually a short medical appointment to confirm the pregnancy loss is over. Sometimes a procedure, sometimes medication to complete the loss, and the assumption that you'll return to your life fairly quickly and pick up where you left. Because the pregnancy was only X number of weeks because it was the first rhymer, because you can try again. I mean, there's so many cliches. There's so many harmful statements I could put in there. Language for the experience I've just described is so inadequate that women often come out of miscarriage, feeling that disconnection between what their bodies are growing through and what the world is willing to acknowledge itself as a form of injury. The disconnection is real. Your body is living in postpartum. The world is behaving as though nothing meaningful has happened. And the gap between those two truths is where so much grief gets stuck. There's something else here, something I think every woman who's had a miscarriage deserves to know. During pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta and migrate into the maternal body. They travel through the bloodstream and embed in maternal tissue, in the brain, the heart, the liver, the skin, the bone marrow. The phenomenon is well documented in scientific literature for decades, and it's been shown across pregnancies, regardless of the outcome of the pregnancy. What this means is that your body holds cellular evidence of the pregnancy you've lost for decades, sometimes for the rest of your life. The cells of that pregnancy are literally still in your tissue, still embedded in your organs, still walking through your days with you. When I first learned this, I actually did shed some tears, not from sadness. It was the first thing anyone had ever told me that matched my felt sense in my body. That the pregnancy had to end it, but somehow with me, my body hadn't forgotten it. The grief after miscarriage lives in the body because the pregnancy lived there. And the body did not get the message that was supposed to stop holding it just because the world had decided the pregnancy didn't count. I'm gonna spend some time on my own experience of a miscarriage so that I don't share pieces of clients' stories. And I'm including my own experience because I think that all of the things that I have shared about could be really would benefit from being grounded in the human experience, being grounded in the body-based experience. So for me, there's no one, for me, my in my experience of miscarriage, no one prepared me for how physical it would be. I had ready enough to know intellectually, I understood the processes, I even had a lot of the information that I've shared with you today. But the grief did not arrive when I expected it to. I had thought I would feel it most acutely the moment of the loss, or maybe in a few weeks after. But it actually came much later when a friend announced their pregnancy, and I had to sit with my own discomfort in the conversation. It came through my body and the way my pelvis would clench when I was nowhere near thinking about it and how often I catch myself holding my breath and sensations that arrive without warning and leave me crying in places where it didn't make sense. And I had therapists, friends who'd been through similar things, language, my own clinical training. And even with all of that, it took me a long time to give myself permission to call what I was experiencing, what it actually was, which was grief. The grief of a real pregnancy ending of a body that had begun to prepare and stop, of a future I had tentatively begun to imagine that had now been foreclosed. And then there's the lair that I'm still sitting in that I think anyone who's gone through a miscarriage still sits in, and that's living with conditions that make it uncertain whether I'll ever carry a pregnancy to term. With scar tissues from surgeries I've changed, what's possible inside my body, with the knowledge that my own reproductive history isn't over and that there might be more loss ahead. And that I don't know what shape it will take. And I think there's a particular kind of grief for women in this position that have no language anywhere in our culture, because it's it's the grief of uncertain loss. It's the loss that's not fully happened yet, but whose possibility lives with you every day. And these pregnancies you haven't been able to have, the pregnancies you still might have or lose or fail to reach and you live with daily. The loss has not fully happened yet, but whose possibility you live with each day. None of this grief gets named, but I do believe it accumulates. So I want you to know if this is your grief, I'm holding it alongside you, not as someone who's resolved it, but as someone who's in it with you. And I know that there can be so much silence and stigma and shame around these topics. So I hope that just even hearing someone else share about this experience can move some of that for you because it's not a topic that women often openly speak about, even though it's a topic that I hear about commonly in my office. We're gonna transition back to a little bit more research. Again, grounds a lot of things that I've been sharing about today. This is some research that I gestured at earlier in this episode and said I would come back to. In 2024 and 2025, researchers began publishing studies that did something no one had thought to do before. They examined human placental tissue using analytic techniques sensitive enough to detect microplastics, tiny fragments of degraded environmental plastic now present in essentially every ecosystem on Earth. In a study of 31 first trimester placentas, microplastics were detected in all 31, every single sample. Then the researchers compared placentas from women whose pregnancies were continually normal with placentas from women who had experienced first trimester miscarriage. The miscarriage placentas had significantly higher concentrations of microplastics. PVC was the most common type detected. Concentrations were higher

Microplastics In Placentas And Loss

Ailey Jolie 39:39

in older women and higher in aging women who regularly drank from plastic water bottles or ate seafood. The usual caution applies. This is correlation, not causation. The study does not prove that microplastics cause miscarriage, and the researchers themselves were careful in how they framed the finding. But what the study is suggesting is that some portion of what we've been calling unexplained pregnancy loss, in fact, may have an explanation we've not been looking for. One that points outward to the conditions of modern life rather than inward towards something the women carrying the pregnancy did or did not do. The first time I read this research, I sat with my computer in my lap for a long time and didn't move. Because if any of this is is accurate and the evidence is suggestive enough that I believe at least some part of it is, then the losses we've been told to absorb privately have been in part because of conditions that were never our individual responsibility to fix. And that is not nothing. It changes what the grief is and where it can go, and that is not nothing. And this doesn't stop with the female body. All the forms of reproductive grief. Infertility is the one with the least language available to it. Miscarriage at least involves an event. Something happened on a particular date, there's a before and after. The grief is disenfranchised, but it still has a shape. In fertil often has no event at all. It's the accumulation of the month that was supposed to be the one, followed by the next that was supposed to be it. A first conversation with a doctor, testing, diagnosis, then treatments, cycles, schedules, and hopes that build up and are taken back again and again. Women in the middle of this often tell me they can't find anywhere in their lives to put the grief because the grief has no event detached to. There's no funeral for the baby that wasn't conceived this month, no acknowledgement for the year that's gone by, no ritual for the third anniversary of trying. The grief accumulates quietly while the woman is expected to keep functioning, to keep working, keep turning up at baby showers of her friends, answering meaning well questions about when she plans to start a family. Something else happens. But I know as a therapist, and also as a woman, but I know that something else happens to women in the middle of infertility that I want to name really carefully. They become acknowledgeable about what their bodies in a way that looks like from the outside embodiment. Cycle days recited from memory, cervical mucus described in clinical detail, hormone levels held by heart, cervical mucus described in details. This is an embodiment. It's something closer to body surveillance. The woman monitoring her cycle every day to optimize for conception is not living inside her body. She's standing outside it, treating it as a project to be managed rather than a place to inhabit. And her body knows the difference, even if she can't fully name it. The cost of this is real. Studies on fertility treatment have documented rates of anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, sexual dysfunction, and somatic complaints unrelated to the fertility treatment itself. A body under that kind of sustained surveillance doesn't flourish. It contracts and defends, becoming something the woman is in a battle with rather than a home she lives in. If you're in this right now, I want you to hear something. What your body needs from you is not better. What your body might need from you is maybe not better tracking or a supplement or another protocol. What your body might need is the same thing it's needed all along to be lived in, to be heard, to be listened to, and to be honored. This doesn't mean you should stop fertility treatment or stop tracking. Those decisions are yours, and I have absolutely no authority to say what you should or shouldn't do with your body specifically in this area. What I am pointing to is that the relationship you have with your body during this period of your life matters as much as the medical interventions you are pursuing. The relationship can be one of management where you stand outside your body and operate your body like equipment, or it can be one of embodiment where you stay inside your body even in the pain, even when it's uncertain, even when it's uncomfortable, even through the grief, and you keep that relationship with your one and only home intact. I know that the second is harder. I know that disassociating and disconnecting when there's so much fear of what may or may not happen and it hurts and it's hard is a great protective response. And it may not be possible for you to stay in your body during the full experience. But I will invite you to consider if this is something you're going through, how you can bring more moments of impact. Embodiment into the process. I've named several dimensions of reproductive loss during our time together, and I do think surgery is the one that gets the least attention. And so I'm gonna spend a little bit of time here, and maybe I'm spending time here because this is a huge part of my experience, and took me a really long time to find language and literature that honored what I'd been through. I'll start with common procedures that are done to the reproductive organs. This could be a laproscopy for endometriosis, assist removal, fibroid surgery, a DNC. During any of these, the conversation around recovery is almost usually entirely medical. When can I go back to work? When can I exercise? How long until the incision closes? What are the signs of complication? There's nothing wrong with those questions. They're so important. What

Surgery, Scar Tissue And Proprioception

Ailey Jolie 44:50

I feel should be discussed in parallel with them is an honoring of how the body has changed after surgery when we go home. Because scar tissue is not just cosmetic. It's structural. It can be inside the abdomen from adhesions, bands of fibrous tissue that connect organs together or to the abdominal wall in ways they never connected before. Adhesions can pull in tissue, alter how organs move during ordinary motion. They can cause chronic pain that doesn't show up on imaging because the imaging isn't designed to detect it. Even when adhesions don't form to a problematic degree, scar tissue changes proprioception, which is why I wanted to focus here, because proprioception is the body's sense of itself in space. Your pelvic floor remembers what it was like before the procedure. Afterward, the felt sense of your pelvis might be slightly different in ways you might not be able to describe. Sensation can change, so can sexual responses, so can the way you carry yourself, often without your conscious awareness. And then there's the grief layer that almost never gets named, the grief of fertility uncertain, that that the surgery introduced or compounded of a body that didn't heal the way it hoped it would, being told this was the best option, and then living with the consequences nobody fully prepared you for, of having signed the consent forms for procedures whose long-term implications were never made clear to you in any embodied sense. I've lived this and I've lived multiple versions of it. The part that was hardest every time was that there was nowhere to put the grief. The medical system treated each surgery as a discrete event, successful or not, healed or not, with complications or without, and had no framework at all for the felt sense of having a body that had been operated on structurally different than what I knew. If you've had reproductive surgeries, what your body went through is worth grieving, being compassionate for and honoring, being awake for the conversation did not mean you were prepared for it. Signing the consent form did not mean you knew in any embodied way what you were consenting to. And the surgery being medically successful does not mean your body experienced it as anything other than an enormous event that is still, often years later, integrating. You're allowed to grieve that, you're allowed to have feelings for it. The body remembers and the body deserves to be acknowledged. Across everything I've named in this episode, there's the same pattern repeating, a body preparing, that preparation interrupted or never completing or is altered, the interruption that goes unwitnessed, the grief and the emotions that stay because there's no container to hold it, the self-blame or judgment that happens because there's no cultural conversation, and the woman carrying that loss is an individual case privately, often with shame, while the same loss is happening to thousands of women in parallel. The feelings that come with all of this is appropriate. None of it is pathology. And what I want to leave you with here is one presentation of what healing from all of this can look like. When I use that word in context of reproductive loss, I don't mean having a baby or having a great scan or any of those things. When I use the word healing in regards to the reproductive body, what I mean is being allowed to finally feel what your body prepared for. When I use healing in regards to reproductive loss, I mean honoring your experience and letting yourself feel it. Sometimes healing means naming the pregnancy that was never marked, speaking its existence out loud. Sometimes it means letting your partner grieve in his own body without translating his grief for him. Sometimes it means finding your own language or using your voice with others. You get to choose what your healing looks like.

Healing Through Witnessing And Choice

Ailey Jolie 48:20

You get to choose how you honor your experience, your body. You get to choose how you honor the experience of your body. If you're listening to this and have any of what I've named above, I want you to know your pain is real. Your years of being dismissed were not in your imagination. The body you're in isn't too sensitive. It was right all along. If you're listening to this and you've had a miscarriage, what you went through was real, the grief you're carrying, however many years later, is not excessive. The pregnancy that ended was a pregnancy. The preparation you did was real and the loss was real. Your body isn't exaggerating, the loss was real. If you're listening to this and you're struggling with fertility, there's nothing wrong with you. Your body is responding to conditions you didn't choose in a generation that is collectively struggling in way in ways no previous generation has. You're not alone, even when the medical system continues to treat as though you are. If you're listening to this and you've had reproductive surgeries, the body you have now isn't is allowed to grieve the body you never had before. The surgery being necessary or recommended or successful doesn't erase what your body went through. You're allowed to integrate it slowly. If you're listening to this as the partner, someone who's experienced any of this, your body has been through this true. You don't have to carry it alone and you don't have to be strong for the person you love. You can be honest with her instead. That is what she actually means. And if none of this is your story, but someone you love is inside it. I hope this episode gives you some language to know how to be with her. Not so that you can try and fix things, so that you can actually meet her in her experience. We are all in something, all of us. These losses are individual, but they're also shared. The grief belongs to each woman who's caring and it belongs collectively to a generation. As I named, we have more and more research that's pointing to our environment, being the reason why fertility, embodied experience of pregnancy is hard, is challenging, more painful, and harder for all genders. And that's what I really wanted to get across today. That yes, these are individual experiences. And I hope that my intimate time focused on each of them and there were others, just didn't have time to go into all of them. But I hope that you felt the intimacy I was speaking with for the individual experience. But I also hope that in spending that dedicated time, parts of you are able to soothe so that you could step back and see the larger collective issue in front of all of us. And this is something that I am so passionate about because it's one thing to go and do our embodiment practices, our shaking, our vagal toning, our nervous system hacks and feel better in our bodies. But the more that we come into connection with our bodies, the more we do those practices, ultimately we're going to be led into the realization that we all share a body. We all share the body of the earth. And there are things in our earth's environment right now created by systems that are making it harder for us to be in our bodies, that are making our bodies react and protect us and create symptoms that we could judge or shame or feel like they're our personal fault when in actuality they are the result of the environment around us that is being created by systems outside of us. They are not coming from the sacredness of our skin. So I hope today, even though we took a little bit of a different journey, you heard a little bit of a different perspective on embodiment, that there was something in our time together that you can take that will help you feel more at home in your one and only body, the body that we all share, the earth body too. If this episode starts something in you, if you're in the middle of a thing that I described, or you know someone who is, embodies a 14-week guided journey back into the body. It's not a fertility program, it's not a healing protocol either. It's a slow, supportive process of returning to a body that may have been hard to live in for a long time. But you can always find out more about future offerings at embodymethod.com. My Substacks is where I keep writing about all of this, the research, the grief, the things that don't fit anywhere else. You can find me at alishalee.substack.com. There is both a free and paid subscriber option. Becoming a paying subscriber is a nice way to say thank you. Lastly, if you want to spend some time in person with me, you can find me in Costa Rica this November.

Where To Go Next And Share

Ailey Jolie 52:35

I'll be hosting my first Embody Retreat at Blue Spirit in Nosara, Costa Rica. Thank you again for being here, for listening, and for allowing my voice to be a part of your process of coming home to your one and only body. Until next time. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very human body.