Why who your surrounding yourself with matters to your fertility

And happy Wednesday to you. I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and empowerment coach, and I am here to talk to you about your circle and why keeping it really close in terms of the people that are around you, keeping it positive, is so important. So we know when we're going through infertility that there's plenty of emotions. High, high, low, high, high highs and low, low lows and a whole roller coaster in between, right? And so what we want to do when we're riding that roller coaster is we only want people on our, in our coaster car that are positive, that we are on the right ride. So what I mean by that is we really want to keep the people around us, um, that we have, that we take into confidence and we tell about our journey. We, we talk to about our doctor's appointments and things like that. We want those people to be your cheerleaders no matter what, no matter what you're saying to them. We want them to be supportive of the path that you're on. So if you're not going through infertility and you've never been through acupuncture, for instance, it might seem really unusual or it might seem really nonsensical to somebody who hasn't done the research, hasn't done, um, hasn't, hasn't looked into it, right? So maybe you have family members that think that it's just kind of hoodoo voodoo and it's not going to help you on your infertility journey. Those are not the people that you want close to you that you're talking to about your progress, your procedures, your testing, and things like that. You want people that are going to support you and not question your decision-making, because I know from my own personal standpoint, I had plenty in myself to question, right? So you want people that are going to be supportive and not question whether this is the right thing, not squash your hope. Hey, maybe you should just give up. Maybe you should just adopt. Telling you stories of their brother's sister's cousin's mom who got pregnant, you know, after whatever. Um, we want people who are actually connected to us and are encouraging and supportive in a helpful way. So what does that mean? We've talked a lot about boundaries, and I put my friend's book back here. Let me see if I can move it a little bit. I was running a little bit behind. That's Healthy Boundaries by Lauren DaSilva. And she and I did an hour-long conversation about boundaries. And I've talked to you here a couple times as well about boundaries for the holidays and how to have those conversations. I won't go into it again. I think it was, uh, Friday of last week that I talked to about— talked to you about that. So I really encourage you to define your boundaries for yourself and your spouse, and maybe that even includes I hate to say it because we as women take on a lot of, um, a lot of the responsibility of infertility ourselves, right? So let's just call it, we feel like if we can't give our partners the family, the child of their dreams, that maybe they should just go find somebody else, or maybe they should just I don't know what, right? So I hear this a lot, and I, I remember thinking those thoughts too. You just feel so devalued as a woman. So if your partner then starts to question you about, hey, maybe this or maybe not that, you know, I'm not saying shut them out, but you also need a good girlfriend or a couple good girlfriends or a support group of women in your corner that you can go to and kind of process your feelings about your spouse and about your relationship and have some positive contribution to come back and bring to that relationship. So while we're talking about that, I just kind of like, I'm gonna pull, go, go down a rabbit hole. Let's talk about the fact that, um, spouses sometimes don't know how to support us and we need to have those hard conversations with them. We need to encourage them. I don't want to say push, but encourage them to open up about their feelings and how they're processing things and not just put that in a box and shove it under the bed kind of thing. So we covered a lot of different topics today, but keeping your inner circle close and people that are going to be encouraging Finding support outside of your spouse and then also going to your spouse with encouraging them to share their feelings and things about what's going on in your journey for infertility. A lot of times in hindsight, after we get pregnant, we stay pregnant, we have the babies, then the husbands are able to unpack some of the feelings and, and talk about it a little bit more. So being on this side of it, we talk a little bit about that in the book too. Being on this side of it, I would tell you to have those conversations with your spouse and encourage them to open up and share, you know, their frustrations and their feelings as well so that you can walk this path together and that you're not stifling your own feelings for the sake of your partner. We're not talking about that. All right, well, I am here Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, um, around noon-ish, sometimes a couple minutes before, sometimes just a couple minutes after, like today. So if you're watching on YouTube and you want to get notified when I go live, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button. If you're watching on another platform like Facebook, who doesn't like to tell you when I go live, go ahead and head over to YouTube and hit that like and subscribe. I will see you Friday. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.