Helen Gallagher
World Childless Week Ambassador
My journey to healing started seven years ago, one year after my marriage ended and I was told by the IVF consultant that it was very unlikely that I would ever become a parent. This reality soon was to be confirmed and my world fell apart. It was not just the grief of not being a mother but the end of a marriage and so many hopes and dreams.
In those early years, life felt impossibly hard. I couldn’t imagine a way forward, let alone picture myself ever being happy again. I was held together only by my best friend and my mum who listened with love but, as parents themselves, couldn’t fully understand what I was feeling. How could they? My grief was invisible, complicated, and rooted in a dream that had been ripped away from me.
Amongst all of the debilitating sadness, I had a feeling deep inside that I deserved to be happy regardless of parental status and my usual non conformist inner voice was shouting at me that it was societal expectation that was compounding my emptiness and lack of self worth and that I could not allow it to define me. However knowing his and knowing how to rebuild were two very different things.
I began working with the Happy and Childless Matrix — a nine box grid of all the parts of my life that mattered, all of which had been abandoned during years of fertility trauma and heartbreak. I quickly identified that in order to even start to move forward I had to muster up the ability to love myself again and be kind to myself.
At that time, I would have won awards for harsh self talk. I was relentless with myself — cruel, critical, unforgiving and beneath all of it sat the visceral sadness that never really left, the grief that stopped me from fully settling into life or opening myself up to a new relationship.
It felt like being trapped in a revolving door endlessly spinning, unable to step out into a calmer space.
Slowly, through the practices, life began to feel lighter. I rediscovered pockets of joy and excitement however grief is never linear. It resurfaced with intensity when my partner’s daughter had her two children and I became a “Mops.” Not because of the children, they are beautiful but because their arrival exposed a wound still raw inside me. I felt like an outsider, observing someone else’s world from the periphery.
Again I didn’t recognise the person I had become at times, angry and defensive. Could this be the perimenopause? Was this still grief? Had I finally lost all sense of rationale?
This is where the missing piece finally presented itself. I had tried counselling many times, but it always left me feeling exposed, opened up, and then sent away for two weeks to cope alone. Nothing truly helped. It did more harm than good, however that was until I met Lauren, Mind Body Mechanic. It was like a light bulb moment. I was and always have been extremely self aware but the question always remained – how could I truly feel content and in control of my emotions even through the difficult times. I felt I had got myself so far but then when challenges appeared my emotions took over and made me question my progress. The following words changed my world and made sense of every dysfunctional outburst, every unexplained explosion of anger and frustration….
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. In fact your body is protecting you and this is why you have been in fight or flight mode for so much of your life. You are a ninja and a very strong one at that but you can’t stay as ninja forever. Your body needs some peace and this is what we must introduce slowly”.
Everything started to make sense -my people pleasing, catastrophising, angry out bursts, bitter rages. My body was reacting to the unsafe environment I had become accustomed to. It was not through the intentional actions of my family or friends, however the lack of belonging, of being listened to and understood. I had a wound inside which had never healed. Instead I had covered it, disguised it, held it in a way it felt tolerable and enabled me to adapt to the situations and environments around me.
These were not character flaws, they were survival strategies. My body had learned to exist in a state of hypervigilance. What I hadn’t done is sit with it, tend to it, care for it, place it in a healing environment and therefore when times were hard, when people would challenge me it was like a match on an already burning fire and the flames burned more ferociously.
I had tucked the wound away, shaped myself around it, adapted endlessly to the world around me. As Lauren so eloquently stated I had “bent to fit,” just like so many childless people do in a world built around pronatalism. In trying to remain relevant, connected, and significant, I lost touch with the essence of who I truly was outside of being childless.
But once I saw the wound clearly, once I understood my body’s protective instincts, I finally had a path to healing, real healing.
Childlessness and everything that leads to it is a form of trauma. It leaves deep wounds that often go unacknowledged by society and even by ourselves. We become ninjas - resilient, adaptive, fierce however ninjas are not meant to live in battle forever.
We need safety and nervous system regulation. We need to stop bending ourselves to fit a world that does not yet know how to hold our grief. Only then can we heal in a way that allows us to step into our most authentic, beautiful selves again.
This was my missing piece.
And finding it has changed everything.
