How to Cope with The Brutal Emotional Drain of Infertility

Hi, sorry, I'm a few minutes late. I'm here to talk to you today about how to cope with the brutal emotional drain of infertility. I was talking to a client the other day who actually had not told anyone in her family or anyone in her circle of friends that she had been going through infertility for over 6 years and she was at the end of her rope. In terms of being able to cope and move forward. And part of that has to do with the fact that she was doing this on her own. So one of the things to get right in it, and if you are, um, if you're wondering if this is going to be a long video, you know my videos are short, just 5 minutes. So, um, one of the things that she could do going forward to be able to cope is to talk to a licensed mental health counselor, clinical psychologist, preferably somebody who is informed about the trauma of fertility and that the trauma that infertility brings with it, right? So if you're not willing to, uh, to tell your family, to tell your friends, if you want to keep that private between you and your husband for whatever reason, then I would say to you, in order to cope well with this ongoing process, you need to have some good mental health counseling in place. Okay? So tomorrow in my group, Infertility Empowered, we have an amazing free, uh, training workshop that we're— I'm bringing in, um, clinical psychologist Mandy Rodriguez. She also is an infertility warrior, and she is amazing. She's going to give us tons of tools to be able to cope with the ongoing grief, frustration, anger, loss that you experience as you go through infertility. So the second, uh, the second way to cope as you're going through this infertility process is acknowledging these feelings as normal and validating your own feelings, right? Um, there's nothing worse than like stuffing all of those feelings down inside and thinking that they're going to go away if you ignore them. It creates a lot of discord in your relationships. It creates a lot of dis-ease in your body. So it's also, you know, we're trying to— overall health is our goal, and part of that is dealing with your mental health as you go through the process. So the third thing that I would tell you, and we've talked a little bit about this before, and you can check out my other videos about cycle mapping, is to create a plan. What does it look like for you in order to have a plan laid out in place to address the specific thing that you turn to? Some people get really angry. Let me, let me clarify that. That was a whole lot of worse. So do you get angry? Do you get more frustrated? Are you more sad? Is it a combination of those things? So what can we do in terms of cycle planning so that we can, um, map out what that looks like for you to be able to address that thing? Do you need to do something physical to release your anger? Do you need to do some journaling in order to release some of the, um, emotions? Do you need to to address yourself in a self-care way, um, so that you feel, um, seen in that emotion. So those are the things that I would say to you that are going to be the most important. I'm going to drop the link for Mandy again. She's going to be in my group, Infertility Empowered. She's an amazing resource if you, um, if you want to hop on there, just click on the link and we will be live with her bright and early tomorrow morning at 7:30 in the morning, um, Eastern Standard Time, because she's actually joining us from South Africa. So health and blessings to you guys, and I will see you then.