This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Normalize It: Breaking The Silence & Shame That Shape Women’s Lives with Dr. Jessica Zucker | 303

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Let’s be real—being a woman isn’t either empowering or exhausting… it’s both, often at the same damn time. And the parts we’re told to keep quiet about? The messy, emotional, deeply human ones? Those are exactly the conversations we need to have out loud.In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Jessica Zucker, psychologist, writer, and creator of the viral #IHadaMiscarriage campaign. She’s the author of I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, A Movement, and her newest book Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives is a battle cry for truth, healing, and visibility.We talk about the power of saying the quiet parts out loud—especially when it comes to miscarriage, reproductive health, grief, and the impossible expectations women are expected to carry. This is for anyone who’s tired of pretending everything’s fine and ready to tell the whole story—not just the polished parts.In This Episode, We Cover:✅ The emotional toll of silence, stigma, and “looking fine”✅ Why normalizing miscarriage, loss, and vulnerability matters✅ The importance of speaking up (even when it’s uncomfortable)✅ Why telling your story is healing for you and for othersWhen we normalize what’s real, we free ourselves—and each other. Let’s stop hiding our stories and start healing through them.Connect with Jessica: Book: Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame that Shame Women’s LivesIG: https://www.instagram.com/ihadamiscarriage/Related Podcast Episodes:The Good Mother Myth with Nancy Reddy | 274The Resilience Myth with Soraya Chemaly | 249127 / Trauma with Jessi BeyerGet up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/tiww ! #squarepodShare the Love:If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform!🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

I am Nicole Kalil, your host of the This Is Woman's Work podcast, and I have a question. Actually I have a lot of questions, but let's start with this one. Why do we do shit like this to ourselves and each other? And now you're logically wondering what shit. And I'm glad that you asked. Let me give you a few examples. Why do we act like our periods are some sort of top secret classified intel when half the population has them?

Why do we whisper about menopause like it's an underground fight club? Why do we only talk about our struggles after they've been neatly packaged into an inspirational journey instead of admitting that sometimes our life is just a chaotic, hot mess in real time? It's like there's this unspoken rule book for womanhood that says, thou shalt pretend everything is fine.

And always, for the love of all things holy, hide all the messy stuff, no matter how normal it may be. Like if you dare to admit that parenting is hard, you must immediately follow with, but I love my child. As if saying, I haven't peed alone in five years and I need a fucking break somehow means that you don't love your child.

I mean, come on, people. The pressure to be polished, unblemished, and feminine but not too feminine is everywhere. Our bodies, our careers, our relationships, our curated, filtered to death social media posts, we are taught to be seen but never revealed. Taught to be polished but not real, to keep the messy, hard human stuff to ourselves. And in doing so, we're making things hard, not just for ourselves, but for the next generation as well. But what if we stopped?

Like with a big resounding, fuck that. What if we replaced silence with storytelling? Stigma with solidarity? Shame with truth? What if we stopped pretending that being a woman is either all hardship or all empowerment and just admitted that it's both, like pretty much all the time. Well, here to help those of us who are exhausted from keeping up appearances, I've got Dr. Jessica Zucker with me today.

Jessica is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the author of I Had a Miscarriage, a Memoir, a Movement. She's also the force behind the viral hashtag I Had a Miscarriage, a memoir, a movement. She's also the force behind the viral hashtag I Had a Miscarriage campaign and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, and a list of other big name places that make her way more qualified than me to talk about all of this. And her next book, bound to be a bestseller, is Normalize It. Upending the silence, stigma, and shame that shape women's lives is exactly the conversation we need to be having today.

So Jessica, thank you for being here and let's just fucking dive in about this trifecta of silence, stigma, and shame and how it's impacting all of us as women. Like, what is that? Wait, first of all, you are everything. And you basically just summed up my second book in a nutshell. And I'm so excited to be here with you, to have this conversation with you,

and hopefully help people replace silence with storytelling. So my sense is this trifecta, the silence, the stigma, the shame is this kind of swirling element, the swirling of, you know, the silence begets the stigma, begets the shame. We can't break out of it until we figure out how to change culture once and for all. So we could say, oh, just shout things from rooftops and therefore you won't feel shame or you won't feel stuck in these stories that so many people feel they can't talk about. Well, that's not necessarily the case, right? Because we might say it,

and then we might be met with stunted smiles or strange glances, or be met with platitudes. And then there's the stigma, right? So which then, of course, if it comes back at you, oftentimes results in these feelings of shame. Maybe I shouldn't have said that.

Maybe something's wrong with me. Maybe I wanted to be a mom too much. Maybe I actually didn't want to be a mother at all. So all of these stories, all of these sort of echoes through our bodies that we tend to keep quiet. And my hope, and this is what my second book is all about, normalize it. If we can normalize talking about hard things, whether that be on a rooftop, a TED talk stage, whispering into the ear of a neighbor in a journal that you can then burn if you want to. If we can get our important stories out of us, they won't have the opportunity

to fester, which I think is where the shame becomes so damaging. That speaks completely to my experience. I find when I always say put words on it, that's like my go-to thing is when I'm feeling shame or fear or doubt or whatever, when I'm able to put words on it, I found more often than not, and as I've gotten older, I've gotten more particular about who I talk to or my group of friends or whatever, but I found more often than not, people are like, oh girl, me too, or I totally get that or I know someone or I don't know, I found that people are much more in it with me than they are stigma and shame. But what about like family or culturally, right? Like it's like maybe our peers are in it because they now realize how

important it is that we speak our truths. But I wonder if sort of other generations still don't or society in general still doesn't. I mean, I'm kind of used to shocking my mom at this point. I mean, I think that's like, and I hear what you're saying and you're absolutely right. And I do know that then when I think about if I were to say these things on social media, I mean, my God, the amount of stigma or shame or expectations or other people's opinions that would be put on some of these things.

I can't even wrap my head around. So I'm very clear that it exists. I think I just feel like maybe part of growing older and being in my late 40s has been a little bit about like, letting go of what everybody else thinks. And also a little bit of like knowing who my people are, knowing who I can have these conversations with versus, as you said, sort of shouting from the rooftops. I don't know if I'm that brave to go that big on it. Well, I think you are because you have this podcast and you're saying it right here right now.

So I think you are, but I understand what you mean. I think sometimes though we can have our people and then we're faced with trauma or tragedy, something really unexpected. So for me, I was 16 weeks into my second pregnancy and I had a miscarriage while I was home by myself. I had to cut the umbilical cord. I promptly began to hemorrhage.

My husband rushed home. We brought the fetus in a bag to my doctor's office. And then I had to undergo an unmedicated DNC. So I'm a psychologist and I specialize in reproductive and maternal mental health. And I've done so for about 15 years. So when this happened to me, I already was sitting across from women

who were talking about these unfortunate outcomes and navigating perinatal and postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, stillbirth, infant loss, the list goes on. And they would talk about the sense of alienation and isolation and where has my community gone? And I could not relate from a corporeal perspective. I mean, intellectually I could. But at the time, you know, all I had done was, you know, read all the books on the topics that I specialized in. I had been

to conferences. I had done as much as I could, but I had not experienced it firsthand until I did. And then I realized, oh, we can feel close and connected. We can feel open with our loved ones until we are faced sometimes, not in every situation, of course, but in pregnancy loss, it seems to be this way. We then share about something devastating and pregnancy loss is tricky because of course it's, it's only happening in her body, in my body. So I get it that the platitudes are often, you know, quote unquote, at least, you know, you can get pregnant, all of these phrases that begin with at least or, you know, God has a plan, everything happens for a reason, God doesn't give you more than you can handle. These things alienate the

fuck out of the person who's grieving. And my hunch is that it all hopefully is well meaning, of course, if these are people who love you and have been in your life for a long time, but they're saying it because we as a culture can't handle grief. We don't understand how to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and sit in it

with this person who's in pain. So rather than lean into it and say, how are you feeling? I'm here for you and check in every day or follow up in a month, whatever. We sort of come up with these like pretty postcard, you know, bumper sticker like sayings that actually leave people feeling like,

wait, is that really what my best friend just said? Did my mom just say that I look pregnant still even though I'm not pregnant anymore and I want to be like, wow. Yeah. So I think that these are these unfortunate experiences that actually create even more pockets of shame and more stigma and potentially more silence because when you are met with these well-meaning, hopefully, phrases, it leaves people running for the hills sometimes.

So you bring up, I think, an incredibly good point and a good but awful example. I'm so sorry that happened to you. And it drives the point home that I'm hearing that you're saying is that we are not very good with other people's grief. We don't know how to handle other people's shame. We are not taught how to sit with people and be in the discomfort. Like I know myself and I can't believe I'm the only one

who wants to say the best, right, most helpful things when I know someone I love is hurting or grieving or overcoming or even sitting in their own trauma. I want to so bad and I'm so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I think sometimes I inadvertently and unconsciously create that feeling of loneliness that I'm trying to not create for the people that I love. I guess my question is how do we get messy with each other? Like, how do we create relationships with people

where you can say the wrong thing with the best intention and the other person can say, I know you had the best intention, but fuck you, that did not. You know. That takes a certain sort of friendship I think well that's a that's a great question yeah I think it takes a particular type of relationship that has a whole lot of safety within it to be able to especially when you're in the midst of trauma, to muster

the energy, the words, the courage to say, hey, wrong choice with this at least phrase, like try again. I know you love me. I love you. Try again. I did not do a lot of that. I did it in retrospect. I think I went back to certain relationships six months, 12 months later, something like that. And I included the examples in my first book, not as a way of calling people out, but just as a way, because I knew, because I had heard in my clinical practice just how common it is to hear these things.

And I was hoping in a way to normalize how important it is that we can share how off these points can be. So I think getting messy with each other honestly takes each person being a pretty evolved human, to be honest. Because it takes insight and self-reflection and the ability to acknowledge one's feelings and the complexity of life to be able to say, what the fuck are you talking about? I also found myself similarly taken aback. Two weeks after my first book came out,

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my late forties, which was shocking beyond words. No woman in my family had ever been diagnosed with breast cancer. It turns out there is a gene, I don't have the BRCA gene, it's a gene that's been less studied, but it's from my dad's side. And so anyway, we don't have women

who have been diagnosed until me. And even with that, this is a life-threatening experience that I was in, right? I was stunned. I had young kids. I mean, they're still young, but they were young, young. And I was terrified. And some of the first words I heard were, you're a warrior. You're so strong. Of course you'll get through this. No one dies from breast

cancer anymore. You'll fight it. You're, you're such a, you know, you're a little soldier through all of this war like language I thought was fascinating and incredibly troubling as well. Because I think it indicates that therefore, like, if you don't fight, quote unquote, fight hard enough, and you quote unquote lose the battle, is it on you? Did you not want to survive badly enough? Right? So it puts the bonus on the woman. What are you saying? I mean, when I think of a warrior, I think of being like horseback, you know, whatever those gold plates and a sword. And as much as I love horseback riding, I do not see myself, you know, at battle, if anything, what I needed was for my community to say,

let's huddle up close. Let's lean into the intensity here. We're going to support you through it and we'll see what happens. You know, like because that's the reality. We can't know. No one can know. My doctors couldn't know. A psychic would know. My friends cannot predict the outcome, But everybody wants to because we all want a sense of control and we all want our friends and family to be good. Jessica, I'm gonna ask a deeply personal question and you can absolutely tell me to fuck off. I... I feel so close to you already.

I love it. I understand from empathy or maybe, I don't know, basic intelligence level that both of those situations, having a miscarriage, being diagnosed and going through breast cancer, I can understand fear. I can understand doubt. I can understand trauma. I can understand doubt. I can understand trauma. I can understand those things. Help me with the shame and stigma part because in both of those situations, I have a hard

time wrapping my brain around. I mean, you didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything to deserve you. The idea that anybody would shame you, like makes me want to go to battle on your behalf, right? Like you do what you need to do. I'll be the warrior because I'm strong and I can right now, right?

Like, I love that. But I don't understand. I have a hard time because I know that a lot of women experience stigma and shame in things like that. Why do you think that is? So I feel like you've read both of my books like 12 times each because these are the very questions that I am wondering about and I'm so passionate about and have dedicated my career to. So in the first situation, with my miscarriage, part of the reason I felt inspired to start this campaign and write all about it and do the first book and get on Instagram and hop on a soapbox was because I actually felt no stigma, no shame, none.

I didn't feel a sense of self-blame. The research shows that a majority of women do, that people feel a sense of body failure. I think the only thing I can think of that sort of saved me from any of those thoughts was maybe because I had already had a healthy child. And so I believed that something must be wrong with this fetus. And I was right, there was a chromosomal

abnormality. And in no way did I go to this place of like, did I not eat enough blueberries? Did I have an orgasm last night and I shouldn't have, did I drink a sip of wine before I peed on the stick, did I have an extra cup of coffee and that's why the fetus didn't make it, none of it. And then it's when I started to say things out loud that I realized I could see why so many people feel shame or feel this body failure because people are saying these silly, you know, trite things that then make you question yourself, you know, and, um, you know, at least, you know, you can get pregnant is such a ridiculous one because

what is getting pregnant have to do with it if you don't stay pregnant? is what is getting pregnant have to do with it if you don't stay pregnant? Or at least you're young. Well, there's plenty of people who have fertility issues young and forever. So it's just these things I things that morphs into shame. So if people aren't sort of talking about miscarriage, like we're talking about what we're going to have for dinner, I think that's where the buildup of shame and hush hush tones come from. And then with breast cancer, I will say I was relieved when the geneticist told me that I had a genetic component

that really took out any feeling of what did I do? Did I drink too much during the pandemic, which I didn't drink that much, but still, it's like, was it a lifestyle thing, which I sort of knew in my body that it wasn't but you know, there are cancers that are related to that, of course. makes me more susceptible to other cancers, which is incredibly scary and unfortunate, it did help ground me in like, oh, okay, this is why this happened to me, rather than my mind going all over the place and trying to make up stories

about why something this horrible would land in my lap. So I think I am actually sometimes right now, because, you know, in many ways, the breast cancer feels in the rearview mirror. However, I have to take tamoxifen, which is an estrogen blocking medication, which affects various aspects of my physical life and my energy level. And I can see people are sick of hearing about it. And I find that interesting. And so I can see for some people that that could build up to be, to sort of form a whirlwind of shame.

It's like, oh, I've taken up too much space or I've said too much about this or I should be over this by now. And it's the same with grief with miscarriage. It's like, Oh my goodness, move on. You know, and it's like, what's where's this timeframe? Why is there a timeline on grief or, you know, post cancer survival or feelings about your changed body or changed life. Yeah, it kind of falls into, and I sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around this. Some of it feels clear to me and some of it feels gray. But this idea that if we make all the right, best, perfect choices,

that we eliminate all the possible bad outcomes. Life doesn't work that way. Or if you make a series of really, really bad choices that you're gonna have horrible consequences. I did drink too much, like way too much in the COVID year. And knock on wood, have had no big consequences from that. I wonder why we do this to ourselves and each other. I think this is a little bit more of a woman thing

where it's like, well, you didn't do this or you did too much of that and therefore, and the implication is therefore you deserve or chose in some way. That's right. As opposed to for the most part, we are all doing the best that we can with the information and knowledge that we have.

And we go through hard things no matter what our choices are because that's what life does. Yes. And again, what's a little gray for me is like, yes, you can make a series of bad choices and face negative consequences and you can shrug your shoulder and been like you should have known better.

There are some examples of that, right? My question is, how do we do this now as grown adults and how do we help to prevent doing this earlier, this notion that we are supposed to pick all the right best choices and that somehow that eliminates hard things. Is my question making any sense? Yeah, no, this is great. You're making me think of my... So I did get pregnant again after my loss and my daughter is now 11. So I have a 16 year old and an 11 year old. And I think about this

a lot. Because how do we embed in them a sense of complexity, dynamicism, humanity, like humaneness, you know, meaning the opposite of perfectionism is what I'm going for. Paradox, right? Two seemingly opposite things can both be true. Like there's just so much... I guess the first time I remember feeling shame about something that's normal is when I started my period. I can remember like hiding tampons and pads

and like being embarrassed to let people know and all of that. And my daughter is 11 and she's sort of headed towards that. And I'm worried about mean girls and stigma and shame in a group of young girls that don't have the maturity. That's right. I mean, it's so hard for us to remember this and pinpoint things maybe from our childhoods. But why do you think you felt a sense of shame? Was it within your family, the response?

Was it the lack of conversation? Was it that no other friends had it? You know what I mean? Like, I was trying to figure out where the roots lie. Yeah, so I'm half German. My mom is German and very European and there was no stigma. I felt comfortable talking to her. I don't remember feeling anything negative on her side.

My dad is Mexican. And so there is a little bit of that male dominated machismo. Like we don't talk about women's things and my grandmother always literally like she was working in a restaurant would cook whatever like me or my cousins would order the food that we wanted to eat. Like, you know, and she would just make it. So I do think there could have been a sense of that from my dad's side of the family. But I think it was more school.

It was more boys and being embarrassed and, you know, on one hand, like thinking I should have started earlier than I did. And on the other hand, like being embarrassed how my body was, I don't know, there was just a lot of like, I don't know what to do with all of this. And it didn't seem like anybody else did either. And I just somewhere got the message that it was embarrassing and something to be hidden. What about you? I myself got my period later. I was 15, actually, and I only got it once at 15. And then I started regularly at 16. So I was actually like worried that something was going on with my body,

because everybody had it before me. So I think by the time I got it, I was actually just relieved. But I don't believe my dad's a doctor and he's the person I turned to when I started developing breasts and I, you know, would have discharge. And I was worried that I wasn't getting my period. He was the person I spoke with. I wasn't getting my period. He was the person I spoke with. I don't feel like my mom was this kind of comfortable resting place for all of these important changes that I was going through as a young person. And so I so badly would like to be that for my daughter. But I see now that I'm faced with these changes in her body, how overwhelming it is, you know, because what do I say? What do I do?

What do I not do? What do I not say? And I would think it would sort of come naturally to me, but even though I'm a psychologist, I don't work with children. So I don't necessarily know exactly how I want to put this. Do I want to have a period party for her or is that going to incite shame or embarrassment or something?

What I do want to do is express how normal that normalize being able to talk about all of the things that do come along with menstruation. You know, if she's having pain, I would like to help her express that. I feel like girls are taught from such a young age to be quiet about even their period symptoms, let alone, you know, everything else. But I want her at least at home to feel like she can say it all.

Mm-hmm. Me too. And... How are we gonna do this? Yeah, how are we? Because I feel like, actually, your book is starting to give me a little bit of an answer here, but I feel like I try to talk about things and, like, test what she's willing to talk about and what she's not, and just let her know that I'm here like I try to talk about things and test what she's willing to talk about and what she's not and just let her know that I'm here whenever she wants to talk.

But you know what I haven't done is I haven't done much storytelling. I haven't told her about my experiences. And she does like to hear about stories of her past and my past. And I do wonder if maybe some of the opportunity and some of the answer is in storytelling, as you say. That's exactly what I honestly hadn't thought to kind of share with my daughter where I was when I got my period for the first time. I was at a good friend's house that my friend still lives in that house as an adult actually. And so, you know, I would love to kind of explain to her how that unfolded and how I

felt to at least normalize it now because she might not be home when it comes. And I don't know that I'll be there. So I want her to be able to be able to like dip into a bevy of information and stories to be able to help herself in that moment. Because I don't know, you're right. Like, the school environment can be so strange. Do you go to the nurse's office? Do you tell your teacher? Do you hide it because you think, you know, the boy next to you or the girl next to you is gonna judge you?

Yeah, it's funny as you were talking, I hadn't even thought about this, but when I started my period, I was at my aunt and uncle's house on my dad's side. And my uncle was thoroughly annoyed with how, like he thought I was being dramatic. And I worry a lot about what JJ's experience is gonna be like when she starts her period.

And I think it's because of my own experience. And I think letting her know that, like, hey, I'd love to throw you a period party. I'd love to be part of the celebration of this transition towards womanhood that you're experiencing. And I think part of the reason I want that so badly for you is because I had this experience and I don't want you to have that.

And then, you know, sometimes I think when we tell people where we're coming from, that helps them understand and not make us seem so strange or so out of left field or so annoying or whatever the case may be. From your expertise, how do we replace the silence, the hiding, the shame with storytelling and community? What are some recommendations or steps that we can take or things that we can do differently to begin to dismantle this for ourselves and for each other? It's interesting because I want to just have a quick answer that would be, just do it. Just tell that story.

But obviously, our familial backgrounds, our cultural backgrounds, our religious backgrounds inform who we are. It's not that easy to just spill it. So the book gives a ton of examples of ways people can replace silence with storytelling. And I think we talked about it before. It doesn't have to be a public arena. You don't have to even try to change the world

because of something that you've been through. There's no, I in no way believe that people need to make it their life's mission to get on board with this necessarily. But I do believe that the pain that can exist within us when we do not say something out loud can eat us alive. And that is not okay. So it can be in a therapist's office

that you're sharing your story. If that's something you're comfortable with, if it's something you can afford, if it's something you can access. It can be like I said earlier, you know, writing in a journal that at least gets us out of it. Like it's it even if no one's listening, we are writing our truth down on the page. If somebody feels like they don't want that page to exist because it's the scariest thing they've ever shared in their lives, you can get rid of it. You can, you know, so it's, it can be that simple.

I mean, I don't, I'm not trying to oversimplify. I actually think you're saying something really important is I think starting small, whatever that means for you is a great place to start and asking yourself, where does it feel safest? As a starting point, right? You can go to sharing your story on Instagram and changing the world. That is an opportunity if you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be. And probably the most impactful thing is where we live with the people we surround ourselves with.

And so starting small and safe makes a lot of sense to my brain and it feels practical and buildable. And I think it's excellent advice. And if someone's too scared to, you know, tell their community or tell their neighbor, you know, you could even be anonymous in a support group, you know, online or in person. You know, so if whatever somebody is holding inside, let's say it's a story of sexual trauma, and they don't want to share with their friends and family because it happened somewhere in that community or something.

You can go other places. So we can feel so alone. We can feel so trapped in our heads and our thoughts. And we can even come up with so many reasons why we should not replace the silence with storytelling. But the thing is, we must and we will. And you don't, it doesn't mean that you're fully exposed. Like you can get vulnerable without, you know, revealing your entire self if that feels like too much. Yeah, I think that's excellent advice. And just a reminder that there are often

more resources available to us than might instantly come to our minds. So, okay, I wanna encourage our listeners to get their hands on your book. The book is called Normalize It. Go to bookshop.org, your local bookstore, get your hands on the book. You can also find and follow

Jessica on Instagram at I had a miscarriage. Jessica, thanks for having this conversation with me and for encouraging, motivating, challenging all of us to let go of the fronts and be real and create community and get better at being in the messy and being with each other in the messy. I think it's so, so, so critical. And I'm grateful that you're out there doing the work. Thank you, you too. This was such a wonderful conversation.

I agree. Okay, friend, silence, stigma and shame are like the mean girls of womanhood. They're always gossiping, always making us feel like we're doing something wrong just for existing. The pressure to be perfect is real, exhausting, and frankly, a giant waste of time. We don't actually have to keep up appearances,

we just think that we do. So what if we normalize the messy, the imperfect, and the human parts of all of our lives? Because it's freeing for us and necessary for the generations coming up behind us. If we want our daughters, our nieces, the young women with it, we mentor to stop apologizing for being human, then we've got to go first.

Start small and safe, but please start. So here's the invitation for all of us. Talk about the stuff that makes you feel like you should stay quiet. Say it out loud. Break the silence. Sh about the stuff that makes you feel like you should stay quiet. Say it out loud. Break the silence. Shatter the stigma. Burn shame to the ground. As the saying goes, I have matches and we ride at dawn because that is woman's work.