Jeff Brazier has spoken candidly about how his perception of miscarriage, stillbirth, and grieving for unborn children, has changed during his journey to become a bereavement counsellor.
The 38-year-old explained that before he trained as a life coach in 2014, he had a misunderstanding about what it meant for parents to lose a baby before it was born.
“I naively felt that - as I think a lot of society does to be honest - when you lose a child before birth, because that child hadn’t existed, maybe your grief is not quite as difficult, as a result,” he said during an interview with BUILD on Wednesday 7 June.
“I couldn’t have been any further from the truth.”
Brazier, who has two sons, Bobby, 14, and Freddie, 12, explained how he now sees that parents who have lost a child during pregnancy face a different type of grief.
He explained: “It’s the type of grief that people least want to talk about - and people don’t really want to speak about grief a great deal anyway - no matter who it is, what their age, but when it is a child that’s not born that’s the biggest fear isn’t it.”
Now he empathises with the struggle that pregnant women have, if they’ve previously suffered miscarriages, about whether or not to share the news of their pregnancy.
“They don’t wanna share that elation, that joy, and all of a sudden it be taken away,” he said.
“So I have huge empathy now for parents who have lost a child at any stage.”
The TV presenter, who has just written a booked called ‘The Grief Survival Guide’ said that coaching clients on grief, and sharing his experiences in the book had been somewhat “therapeutic” for him and his family.
However, despite eight years having passed and having spoken a lot about his former partner Jade Goody’s death, he is still “ultimately in denial” himself about what happened.
“I always told myself it’s all about the boys, but there is some grief in there, for me, to Jade,” he explained. “I was ultimately in denial and I didn’t actually observe my own [grief].
“And I’m a better person now for having that knowledge.”
Watch the full interview with Jeff Brazier on BUILD. His new book, published on 1 June 2017, is available to buy here.