Infertility:“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

It’s a Journey… Yuk!

When you are having IVF and someone smiles ruefully at you and says, “It’s a journey,” it’s hard not to want to hit them with a baseball bat. So I’m taking a calculated risk is writing this blog piece.  However the concept of journeying is important I feel, and I’ll try to explain why.

This particular journey starts when we go into the IVF process full of hope and expectation. We’ve been trying naturally to get pregnant, we feel frustrated or perhaps time isn’t on our side, so we turn to assisted reproductive technology for some help.

Then… however long after this, we reach our personal tipping point. We begin to allow ourselves to put down the burden of relentless positivity, and start to wonder whether this is ever going to work.

At some point, we actually stop IVF and begin the process of taking stock. Where am I? Where have I been? How have I changed? What do I want?

To our less empathetic friends and family, this is the journey of starting off believing you are a fertile woman who just needs a little kick start; and stopping when you have to face being an infertile woman who cannot have her own biological children naturally or via IVF.

Inside, psychologically and physically, it is an enormous, soul-aching transition that is very difficult to put into words. That is when psychotherapy can help.

The Importance of Taking Stock

We have to stop. We have to look around and inside. We have to acknowledge and mourn what is lost. We have to reflect. We have to re-centre ourselves and begin the slow process of rediscovering our sense of purpose.

Furthermore, this ‘taking stock’ is really only one basecamp in a longer journey. The longer journey is that of rediscovering who we are and what we want after our experiences have changed us.

But when we reach this personal tipping point, climbing the rest of the mountain feels impossible. And so it should. At this point, it’s healthiest to stop and take stock.

The Journey Within a Journey

At risk of overcomplicating something already complex, it strikes me that our infertility journey is an exquisitely intensified and sped-up story about overall life transitions.

Our infertility journey is a time to navigate the same three existential milestones as we need to navigate during our life. These are:

1.   Navigating changes to our sense of identity

2.  Facing and mourning our losses

3.  Making changes in order to keep on living a purposeful life.

The thing about life transitions is that we tend to journey through them together as a reasonably big tribe and we therefore don’t feel so alone. We can journey through adolescence with our school friends; or the menopause with our women-friends; or health limitations with our older friends.

The difficulty with navigating the infertility journey is that it leaves us feeling lonely, “different to other women like us” and on the outside of our own community and family.

We Can Help

At RSF Therapy, you can see Sarah for individual therapy or join her therapy group, Infertility: See You On The Other Side.  Gity can see couples, who are struggling with infertility and the IVF process, in particular when it has affected their sex life.

We work with Tea who offers hormone testing and nutritional support to return to health, particularly after the drug-regime of ART interventions. Simon helps people reconnect with their body through mindfulness and yoga therapy.

Email us for a chat: therapy@rsftherapy.com