As far as uncertain outcomes go wondering if you will ever get pregnant and have your longed for baby, has got to be right up there in the list of top 10 worse uncertain outcomes to have to live with, hasn't it?
Some would say it holds the number 1 spot.
Infertility doesn’t just bring with it the worry of whether or not you will get pregnant though does it?
There are so many other worries, such as…
- What If I get pregnant and I then have a miscarriage?
- I’ve had a miscarriage(s) and I don’t know if I can cope if it happens again.
- How do we afford to pay for assisted fertility treatments?
- The debts are piling up from our fertility treatment, how can we keep doing this?
- What if we pay out for assisted fertility treatment and it fails?
- How long do we keep trying?
- Can my relationship survive?
- Will my partner leave me?
- I feel so guilty that I can’t give my partner a baby, maybe I should leave him/her so that they can find someone who can.
- I can’t concentrate properly at work I worry I might lose my job.
- My friends must all think I am selfish because I don’t do things with them anymore.
The list goes on and on and of course is a unique list of worries for each person.
Sadly, whilst not conclusively proven research has also suggested that anxiety has the potential to harm fertility success.
In my experience when a client is able to reclaim emotional control of their fertility journey, it enhances their chances of becoming pregnant.
Whilst that is good to know, it isn’t the only important thing to consider though when exploring how to stop (in)fertility from causing anxiety.
Because here’s the thing…
Everyone deserves to be able to live their life more joyfully again. So if we make that the base point for this post then everything else is a bonus isn’t it?
Here's what you can do about those worry thoughts and the anxiety they create.
As far as I see it if anxiety is caused by excessive worry around an uncertain outcome, to help relieve it we have to look for a way for you to FEEL CERTAIN.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you certainty around whether or not you will get your longed for baby. However looking at all of the worries that I tend to get from my clients, the biggest fear is around how they will cope and I CAN give you certainty around that.
You may wonder how I can be so certain about this claim, so let me explain.
You have handled everything life has thrown at you to date, haven’t you?
You may not have wanted to, it may have been awful, you may have wondered if you would ever get through it (whatever ‘it’ is in your situation) and yet you did.
Why is that? The true answer is that you had no choice. Once we are caught up in something difficult, we just have to keep dealing with it until we have got through it don’t we?
And you do eventually get through everything don't you?
We might not be able to see that at the time but I guarantee there is stuff from your past, that when you look back upon, you felt at the time that it would never end and now it has.
You may have been changed along the way, part of moving through something may have been that you have become a different person in part. Even if you are different though, you are no longer stuck in the same place as you were back then are you?
Once you are able to acknowledge this, it becomes easier to turn off those excessive worry thoughts that are causing your anxiety and say...
"So what Anxious Annie/Alan – you can’t frighten me with your messed up crystal ball trying to predict my future”.
What you know about your fertility journey is that you don’t have a certain outcome. However, what you can remind yourself of is that no matter what you can handle it.
So next time Anxious Annie/Alan turns up, tell her/him to get lost, because there is no place in your head for their made up nonsense.