Failing to be Fertile
We live in a culture that is totally focused on lack. We are constantly fed a message that we aren’t enough, we aren’t thin enough, pretty enough, financially stable enough… and so on. If someone else is winning, we must be losing. We then end up attaching meaning to not feeling enough.
This is then reinforced by our thoughts and feelings, often from when we were growing up. We feel that we don’t fit into a certain mould, we aren’t good enough at this or that etc…and this bleeds through to the rest of our life. Later in life we then end up over compensating for these feelings of not being enough or feeling like we are broken. Which actually couldn’t be further from the truth as each and every one of us is perfect just as we are but it is our mind that tells us otherwise and we start to believe the negative thoughts.
We are also living in a time focussed on wellness which in many respects is great but sadly there is a shadow side to wellness and that looks like obsessing over perfectionism, which reinforces the feelings of “I’m not enough”.
Social media is a prime example of how this may show up for us. We see images of people on facebook and Instagram and assume the people there are successful, thin, happy, have a perfect family, have a thriving business etc…We project our own feelings of ‘not enoughness’ onto their perfect images.
What I see time and time again with the ladies I work with is they are left feeling if they do everything right and yet they still aren’t getting pregnant then there must be something WRONG with them. Which of course is not true and yet this is the conclusion that everyone jumps to whether consciously or unconsciously. This also reinforces the “I’m not enough” thought and feeling. For example:
“This Fertility treatment worked for them but not for me therefore there must be something wrong with me…”
If we do everything right but it doesn’t work, that in and of itself becomes a burden and a source of stress.
Ask yourself this; what have you made your fertility journey mean and what judgements of yourself have you picked up along the way? For example:
- I’ve failed as a woman
- My body doesn’t work properly
- I’m not worthy of becoming a parent
- I don’t deserve to be a mum
When you start to attribute meaning to these thoughts like the examples above it creates a sense in the body that you are not safe and it is a lack of safety that is the enemy of your Fertility. From a physiological point of view, when the body doesn’t feel safe it shuts down reproduction because when you are running away from a tiger (hypothetically) reproduction would slow you down.
I invite you to get curious about what comes up for you. There is a wonderful opportunity for a fertility journey to become a doorway to deeper healing for you. Also, be compassionate and kind with yourself as you would be with a best friend. We would never say some of the mean things to a friend that we say to ourselves in our head, so why do we say it to ourselves?