Erica Hoke, an infertility mentor, explains why community matters during treatment. She distinguishes between groups that solve problems together and ones that only vent, and stresses the importance of support for secondary infertility, where you already have kids but can't have more.
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Happy Monday to you guys. I am Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and empowerment coach in case you're watching and you don't know me. Um, I bring you content about the infertility world, uh, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon and you can catch me here live on Facebook or on YouTube. If you're watching on Facebook, head over to YouTube and hit that like and subscribe for me because Facebook doesn't do a really good job of giving you notification. All right. Now that we've got all that business out of the way, let's talk about why the right community is so important when you're going through infertility. So the first thing that I would say about that is there are a lot of infertility support groups out there, right? And so what makes my group different? Well, a lot of the infertility support groups focus on, um, venting. And venting is good. There's nothing wrong with venting, but we want to do it in a way that, that we can move forward. So we want to be able to express our feelings and we want to be able to have a safe place to go, but we also want to then problem solve what we can do moving forward for the next cycle and that sort of thing. Lots of groups out there are, um, are a little bit too much sometimes when you're going through infertility, right? So if you're going through infertility yourself and you're part of either a private group or you're part of a public group and all that you do together is that you get together and you're very sad, then that's not necessarily doing anybody any good. There's definitely a time and a place for that, but we want to put you in a space where you have supportive people where you can vent that way, and then we can problem solve together about what your next cycle is going to be like. All right, so we want a supportive, caring environment, but we want an empowering environment. Okay. The other thing that being part of the right kind of community can do for you is it can really help you with your protocols. So every, uh, reproductive endocrinologist does a different protocol. And if you were working with a good endocrinologist that is collaborative, then you're going to, um, you're going to talk to them month to month and cycle to cycle about what their protocol looks like, what the changes are going to be after a failed IVF or IUI cycle, and that sort of thing. And sometimes REIs do things differently, and we can share that within our community about what kind of protocol they're doing. Was it successful? What, what were your symptoms? What are you going to do different next time? And provide some feedback collaboratively about things like that too. So the other thing is, is that a lot of people don't share. A lot of people going through infertility do not share with their friends and family that they're going through infertility. Infertility. So having a really supportive, um, and empowered group of women to hang out with is so important. Um, the reason that a lot of people don't share about their infertility journey is because it's really awkward. Um, they don't want to have constant, um, questioning about, uh, what they're doing, what's going on, uh, with their reproductive health and how things are going and things like that. And then they also don't want to hear, you know, they don't want to hear stories about the brother's mother's cousin's uncle's aunt who got pregnant with, you know, with a baby after she adopted or something like that. So those stories are kind of the go-to for people as them trying to encourage you, but it kind of gets old when you go through cycle through cycle that way. And then also, um, for especially, I hear this for secondary infertility and it's really just heartbreaking. A lot of people will just say to the person who's going through secondary infertility, well, you already have one or you already have two. So kind of like, what's your problem? Right? So can't you just be happy with having your one or your two or what have you? And that's very hurtful and, um, and not helpful, right? Um, because when you know in your heart that you— your family is not complete, you're really just not going to stop at anything to get to that point where you feel complete as a family. So, um, having a group, especially for secondary infertility as well, where you can go and you can normalize your experience and you can Um, have people understand what you're going through for secondary infertility is so, so helpful. All right, well, that's what I have for you today. If you like the content and want to see more like this, again, I'm here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.
