Is infertility making you feel powerless?

Are you acting out of fear or faith?

So often the women who come to see me are the type of women who achieve everything they set out to in life.  Intelligent go-getters, you might say.  When they aren’t falling pregnant, no matter what they do, they often feel a huge sense of failure and frustration.  As I’ve said many times before when it comes to fertility, it’s the one thing in this life that is completely out of your control.  Leaving women feeling powerless.

It’s all too easy to look for solutions and guidance outside of ourselves when we feel helpless.  IVF may well be one of those situations because the doctors control your body with different drugs.  They also take all the responsibility to make conception happen away from you, plus you get a guaranteed answer as to whether it’s worked or not, a couple of weeks later.

For some IVF works and fulfills their dream of becoming a parent. But, for many, it doesn’t.  So I want to pose this question to you:

When you ask for help or imagine assistance coming to you, what is the form that assistance takes?  That is, is help or assistance big? Is it obvious? Is it physical? Does it come in the guise of a person ie: a practitioner/doctor? Money for treatment?

Do you associate help or assistance with external changes in your life or internal /interior changes – or both?

This is a tricky question because once you pause to think about you, you are likely to say, “both.” However, let’s say that you are in a financial crisis and someone turned up at your door and offers you two packages.   One containing a million pounds and the other containing wisdom.  Which one would you actually take? That is your real answer.

I would say that most people associate assistance with something external as opposed to guidance from within.  We look outward for some force other than ourselves to “come to our rescue” who has the wherewithal to make things better in our life.

No doubt that goes back to our childhood.  Problems, no matter what they are, immediately make us feel vulnerable, and vulnerability brings out feelings of being helpless.

Secondly, people generally associate assistance or help with something physical.  Help is a resource such as money or a connection to another person or a referral to a fertility specialist.  That’s logical, as often that is exactly what is needed, but is it needed the most? Or, if that type of assistance is not forthcoming, do we assume that no assistance has been given to us in our time of need? Would you assume that?

Would you select money or wisdom as your means of solving your fertility situation?

Depending on your individual rationale for your answer to this question will depend on whether your inner dialogue leans more towards fear or faith.   Symbolised by money or wisdom.  Money, always seems like a big problem solver, if not THE problem solver.  Wisdom, on the other hand, is invisible.  It’s a small gift carried into your life via a poignant podcast or a conversation.  You can’t hold it in your hand or use it to buy your way out of debt.

In the immediate moment, therefore, wisdom can appear to be a small thing if not something useless. Especially when measured against money that you can hold in your hand.  Yet, one drop of wisdom, at just the right moment has the power to shift the direction of your life for the better.

Reflecting on the past

Everyone looks back on their life with the capacity to see things more clearly.  We understand more deeply the complexity of people we knew when we were children and we appreciate even more acutely their significance and influence in our lives.  Significance and influence are subtle forces.  You can live with someone for years, for example, and yet when it comes to truly discern the person’s influence upon you, often you will think in a very compact way, reducing your memories of life with that person. Highlighting words that were exchanged in either love or anger in a matter of moments.

Small things that are really big

A moment in time is not a small thing.  A moment of your life is a small thing that is really big.  Thinking of how many words you have exchanged with someone in just a moment’s time that have either filled your heart or broken it – in less than a minute.  Or think about receiving an answer to a question that solved a problem for you or changed the course of your health.  Maybe that took only two or three minutes, but how big in terms of power and consequence to you? The truth is, your entire life can change in less than a moment.  It often does.

Small things that are really big.  The tone of voice we use in speaking to someone, giving of our time to someone, really listening to what someone is saying without interrupting, taking a few minutes during the day at times for reflection.  These are all small things that are really big.

I wonder how you will reflect on your fertility situation in years to come?

It’s something to really meditate on.

Look for the wisdom especially in the dark moments of despair.  Perhaps you are confused and don’t know what to do next.  Try not to make knee jerk decisions based on fear.  If you suspect that’s what you are doing, just stop, take some time out, sit with your situation and wisdom will come.  You just need to have the ears to hear it and the courage to truly hear and trust what to do next.