The Impact of Fertility Challenges on Mental Health
How a therapist in Berkeley can help.
The journey towards motherhood is hard enough…reproductive challenges can make it feel impossible!
It’s heartbreaking to recognize that your fertility journey is more challenging, and may even take a different path, than what you imagined or wanted for yourself and your family. With every medical appointment, every pregnancy test, every article or book you read about fertility, you continue to push ahead hoping for some good news. The internal strength to keep going won’t get replenished without acknowledging the grief, loss, anxiety, sadness, and anger that may also be there.
Is it Grief?
Women who have struggled with fertility often experience significant grief over the following:
Loss of child (miscarriage)
Loss of fertility
Loss of identity
Loss of having a biological child
Loss of dream of how you imagined your family
Loss for your partner’s dreams of family
Loss of perceived youth
Impact of social perceptions and stigma related to infertility
Loss of experience of being pregnant and having children with your friends/peers
Loss of community - feeling of isolation, that no one understands your experience
Of course, this list is not exhaustive and each woman has a unique experience with and relationship to grief, loss, and their reproductive challenges.
Emotional Wellbeing
Women who struggle with reproductive challenges often identify with feeling one or more of the following feelings:
Sadness
Anger
Anxiety
Shame
Hopelessness
Guilt
According to the National Institutes of Health, ~40% of women struggling with fertility meet criteria for a depression or anxiety diagnosis. In addition, reproductive challenges can impact relationships and intimacy.
It’s ok to grieve and hope at the same time!
You don’t have to go through this alone. You deserve holistic care with specialists who understand the profound and layered impact that reproductive challenges, and successes, can have. Therapy can give you a space to experience your pain and grieve your losses while, simultaneously, holding hope for the potential of building your family. I’m here to help.
Contact me for a free 15 consultation to see if I am the right therapist for you by calling 510.519.1779 or by clicking the button below.
If you’d like a free downloadable pamphlet with the information included in this blog, click this link: