The mental anguish of wanting a baby
In this week’s blog post I want to talk about the mental anguish of wanting a baby.
It feels so real and can take a strong hold of you. That biological urge drives you to do whatever it takes to make it happen and yet it still eludes you.
Sound familiar?
The more women I work with, the more I realise that it is this mental stuff that needs to be worked with and or let go of.
A woman’s story
Last week I was chatting to a lady I know (I actually treat her two children with homeopathy). I really love treating children!
I was chatting to her about her son and at the end of our conversation, she made a point of telling me a story about herself, because of the work I do with fertility. It’s this story that inspired me to write about this topic.
She’s now 46 and had wanted a 3rd child for a while. Her husband gave her a short window of time to try for it naturally as he didn’t want to do IVF having had their two children together naturally in their early 40’s. While trying for a third baby she had put many ‘strategies’ in place to help her move towards her goal. These included yoga, seeing a healer, eating better etc…..She also got some hormone tests done and found out that her FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) level was sky high. She also noticed that her periods had started to become very irregular. She actually thought she was starting the Menopause because of her FSH level and cycle changes.
The time had run out that she had agreed with her husband to try to conceive and so they stopped trying. That meant she also let go of all her ‘strategies’. She said that she then got her hormone levels checked again shortly after this time and her FSH level had come right down (lower than it had ever been) and her period was back to being regular as clockwork.
Can ‘trying’ hinder conception?
She made a point of telling me this because she was shocked to realise that all her ‘strategies’ to get pregnant must have been stressing her body out and changing her hormone levels. Despite the fact that she didn’t feel stressed out about it at the time but clearly, it was having an effect on her body.
Do our thoughts create our reality?
Now I’m not saying you don’t need to make certain lifestyle changes if you’re out of balance in certain areas. But what I am saying is that our mindset and thinking plays a huge role in affecting how easy it is for us to fall pregnant because whether we are feeling it or not the stress is potentially impacting the body physically.
What I have observed is that the desire to achieve the goal can become so great that people start to become obsessed about it. This then manifests as control. However, getting pregnant is the one thing that is completely out of your control.
What makes this even more difficult is constantly hearing from friends, family members, the media and even society at large that:
“As you get older your fertility drops like a stone.”
The perceived additional time pressure of this thinking definitely makes the situation appear worse.
The way I see it is that unless you’ve found a diagnosable reason as to why you are not getting pregnant, chances are it’s not happening because it’s just not the right time. Perhaps you’ve been busy doing other things and your body just needs a rest right now. No amount of wishing it was the right time can change that fact, sadly.
We need to gather information, make necessary changes but then we have to let it all go and allow it to happen when it’s right.
This is easy to say and difficult to do but totally necessary.
What can you do…
I’d like to invite you to allow your own instinctive inner self to show you the right actions.
Here is a little tool that you can use. It’s a mantra that you could say daily as well as when doubt or controlling thinking creep in. You may want to change the wording slightly to the words you would use it but this gives you a starting point:
“I give my fertility fully to you (YOU can mean Love, the Universe, God, the Divine etc. whatever you believe in). Please make me open and show me the right actions. And if there’s not currently a solution, please at least let me accept this for now and make clear what I need to learn”
Acceptance is neither resignation nor powerlessness but an opening of the way for the
next right actions.
Hopefully, this has been a helpful blog post; I’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
By Henry David Thoreau