Elita Summers Beautiful Things my Miscarriage Taught Me BY ALETHEA MORRIS always seemed like it was exclusively theirs — like they were the only ones in the world who had gone through it. If people in general were a little more open about their experiences, Elita says, people might not feel so alone in their pain. It sometimes seems beneficial to store the emotion away, and come back to it later or solve it a little at a time. But often, that does more harm than good, she says. “ Losing her first child to miscarriage made Elita Summers confront her pain, and helped show her how sharing her own life experiences could help others who have gone through similarly terrible circumstances. She believes that her decision to not bury the pain has pushed her to an emotional comeback. As a data analyst and deep thinker, Elita shares with raw emotion the pain and heartache of her loss and reflects on her healing journey. She opened up about her miscarriage because she believes in the importance of letting the heart heal. Those who feel pain need not bury it, she says, and carry it with them for years. “Women physically and emotionally experience the miscarriage. Men experience it also, but in a different dynamic,” Elita says. “I want this story’s lessons to be out there. I strongly believe whoever needs to receive this story will receive it. When something is spoken from the heart, it always finds the person for whom God sent it.” Growing up, Elita did not have much of a model for learning about healing. Her parents were great, she says, but in their household, certain things couldn’t be brought up. “As a family, we had to store it away for a little bit and ... process it in bite-size chunks.” When her family was in the middle of a problem, it Your can’t use the same tools for every problem. ” You also can’t use the same tools for every problem, Elita says. When a coping tool is misued, it becomes a detriment. Elita learned that feelings are OK because the Lord wired us with emotions, and it’s up to us to process them and let them flow. Trying not to bury the pain, Elita states learned to process her feelings and keep them from dominating her life. “Emotions can just fester, and you have this broken smile on, but it’s really doing more harm than good,” she says. “It’s actually a little messy at first. It’s like if you’ve ever looked into a child’s room and it’s an absolute mess with stuff all over the place. It’s not until you acknowledge one thing that you can act on, or that is out of place, that you can start to bring order to a situation. When I was in the thick of everything, I really just had to cry it out, which is weird because I don’t cry.” “Whether it was my interactions with other people or my interactions with my husband or my relationship with the Lord, I really just needed to feel,” Elita says. The aftermath of her miscarriage taught her that she couldn’t keep it together all the time. She realized that we are not made to keep it together all the time, and she was trying to heal in her own strength. She was handling it in the way she thought she should, she says, but what she really needed to do was just let go. Instead of trying to control the outcome and compartmentalize everything, she needed to let go. During the pandemic, Elita remembers coping with mini crying sessions while her husband was on grocery runs. She wasn’t yet ready to bring him into the healing process, she says. “We can’t both ENVISIONPROVENSUCCESS.COM | 33
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