Sensemaking and Coping After Pregnancy Loss: The Seeking and Disruption of Emotional Validation Online

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Emotional validation describes when one believes that their activities, emotions, beliefs, or other reactions are relevant and meaningful given the circumstance. When people experience distressing, stigmatizing life events, their state of emotional validation and thus their perceived sense of normalcy is often disrupted. Online spaces offer opportunities for coping, managing, and making sense of distress and stigma. In this paper, we focus on pregnancy loss as the context of inquiry and as an important example of a disruptive experience that is also associated with stigma. We examine how online spaces help facilitate or disrupt the process of achieving emotional validation among pregnancy loss survivors. We conducted in-depth interviews with women in the United States who had recently experienced a pregnancy loss. We found that individuals seeking a sense of perceived normalcy after pregnancy loss engage in two forms of validation processes that result in emotional validation – informational and experiential. We identified encounters that disrupt the process of seeking, achieving, and maintaining emotional validation related to: information, designs, algorithms, and interpersonal interactions. We introduce the concept of algorithmic symbolic annihilation to describe the representational and emotional harm participants experienced when they felt they were targets of algorithms assuming that all desired pregnancies proceed as expected. Algorithmic symbolic annihilation refers to how algorithms perpetuate normative and stereotypical narratives about phenomena, where what they account for has power and authority, and what they do not account for does not. To aid in seeking, achieving and sustaining emotional validation among pregnancy loss survivors, we suggest designing for 1) representational belonging to combat symbolic annihilation and 2) information avoidance.