Infertility

It is painfully ironic that you can spend the first few decades of your post-pubescent life trying to prevent pregnancy, only to find that when you want to get pregnant, you can’t. This flies in the face of everything we’re told – that you need to use contraception, or else you’ll lock eyes with someone across the room and a baby will be growing in your womb.

If you’re on this page, you’ve probably tried a lot more than locking eyes. You’ve probably tracked cycles, used various metrics to gauge ovulation, researched positions, dietary changes (does pineapple actually work for anyone?), and the impact of stress. You’ve scoured message boards, maybe read a book or two, and confided in friends and family members. In other words, you are very fucking resourceful and determined.

The All-Consuming Stress of Trying to Conceive

But when you are struggling with trying to conceive, you can start to feel like you’re losing yourself a little bit. People stuck in this loop stop thinking of time in terms of dates on the calendar, and start thinking of it in terms of 28-day cycles. (When I was going through this, I had to ask Alexa what the date was, but could tell you without thinking that I was CD12 – or on the 12th day of my cycle.) The follicular phase becomes a time of trying interventions (tracking! measuring! timing sex!), and the luteal phase involves pacing around, feeling helpless, and anxiously wondering whether it worked. It’s so easy to let your whole identity become “person who is failing to make a baby.”

And to make matters worse, people constantly tell you that you’ll have a better chance of getting pregnant if you “just relax” and “don’t stress out so much”. (And you’re not even allowed to punch those people in the nose, which might alleviate your stress a lot!) It can also feel like everyone else around you is pregnant, and as far as you can tell, they didn’t struggle like you do. Even with a support system, even with an engaged, empathic partner, this entire ordeal can feel deeply isolating.

This rollercoaster is hard for anyone, but can be especially challenging if your experience includes other factors – miscarriages, past abortions, genetic carrier concerns, or gender dysphoria.

The Double-Edged Sword of Fertility Treatment

Depending on where you are in your journey, you might be working with a fertility specialist.

This can come as a huge relief for some people. You can get off the rollercoaster, and just do what the smart doctors who understand human physiology tell you to do. There are checklists, calendars, and appointments, and they even puppeteer your cycle so you no longer have to count days! After months or years of feeling like you’re “winging it” and hoping for the best, this can feel deeply grounding and reassuring.

But IUI, IVF, and other interventions are also their own kind of all-consuming. They require a slew of appointments, some of which are deeply unpredictable, and you have to be ready to schedule the rest of your life with flexibility. You become a human pin cushion, give tubes and tubes of your blood for testing, and learn to be very comfortable with (or at least accustomed to) regular transvaginal ultrasounds. It’s invasive, and it can make you feel disconnected from your body.

Furthermore, even though fertility treatments are an amazing gift from science, a lot of people feel deep shame about accessing them. One of the reasons I’m so vocal about my own IVF experience is that I’m passionate about normalizing that this is a thing that a lot of people have to do in order to build a family. But in some families and cultures, there’s still a deep stigma around infertility, especially for people with uteruses.

Psychotherapy for Infertility

I am currently pursuing my certification in fertility and mental health from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, but most clients find my most useful credential in this area to be my lived experience.

An IVF veteran myself, I understand how large a toll infertility can take on a person experiencing it. Here are some of the things I work on with people who are in the throes of dealing with infertility:

Expanding your sense of your identity, and reclaiming yourself as more than a broken baby-making machine
Riding the waves of hope and disappointment that come with this process
Untangling shame
Helping you reconnect with your body
Coping with anxiety from the physical, financial, and relational toll of this journey
Managing external stressors, such as insensitive comments and pregnant friends
Navigating your grief over the story you thought you’d have
Sitting with ambiguity

Some people dealing with infertility will eventually find their way – through medical interventions or luck – to a biological child who they carry to term in their own body. Others will have to find alternate roads to parenthood, or decide that becoming a parent is not in the cards for them. And until you’re in it, you don’t know which of these categories you’ll fall into. This is what makes the process so hard.

Therapy does not guarantee the fertility outcomes that you hope for. But I can help you build your resilience, weather the ups and downs, and make meaning of whatever outcomes you experience. When I work with clients struggling with infertility, my goal is to provide you with skills and support to navigate the awful, uncomfortable ambiguity of a difficult and sometimes slow process.

Reach Out

For help navigating the unruly web of infertility, reach out to schedule a free phone consultation now!