It may be weeks away, but Santa is already in your face. For infertility patients this can be a heavy-hearted time.
We live in stressful times to begin with and the demands of the season up the ante. Simple things like going to the mailbox and pulling out holiday cards with the smiling faces of your friends’ children can blindside. On any given day, uncertainty adds to the stress. It can be hard to feel joy when you feel dread. No wonder you’d like to disappear.
Upset is normal. It is also normal to find that coping skills, no matter how finely tuned and well-practiced, may cease to provide relief. People who usually cope well with adversity commonly feel the inadequacy of their coping skills, given the magnitude of the issue.
Honoring and validating your feelings along the way is an important part of accepting reality and releasing tension. You can think of an emotional component of infertility – your tears – as discharging the understandable swirl of emotions.
It helps if you understand that some problems that arise along the way with infertility can be reasoned through. It may be complicated but with time, patience and guidance (medical and otherwise) you can choose a solution for each problem. Overall, though, the infertility itself has no solution except bringing home your baby. There is nothing per se that you can “do” to speed up this longed-for outcome. You need the patience of a Saint given that each attempt is separated by a wait of an agonizing 30 days. And yet, you keep on keeping on.
But sustaining a high level of tension for an indefinite time without reprieve is too big a challenge. There is evidence that learning how to let yourself “be” in an infertility free zone can make a really big difference. Research has shown that letting go and just being in the present moment with a variety of meditative coping skills, releases the grip of frenzy and can return the body and mind to neutral. The Relaxation Response, Guided Imagery, Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis and Mindful Awareness serve this purpose. (They are taught in my book, On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility).
Think how valuable it would be to dive under the turbulence, so to speak. The bodymind is the stage upon which the infertility saga plays itself out. It is empowering to learn ways to escape from the stress so you can titrate the impact of stress on your bodies.
While you may not be able to control the fact that you are on an infertility journey, you can control how you navigate it. Simple as it may sound, many stress reduction techniques have one thing in common. The breath. We walk around with a built-in tranquilizer and yet when we are stressed, we tend to breathe in a shallow fashion.
Try this. Take one very deep, slow, generous inhalation and then feel the release of a slow but full and satisfying exhale. If you do not feel a shift, breathe deeply and release slowly again. Savor this release of tension and anxiety.
Broadening your coping options can make a difference. But your relationship is your sanctuary. How do you manage to maintain it as a place of solace especially if the infertility journey has strained your relationship? It is your right as a married or committed couple to make decisions about what is best for you. Therefore, your needs should move front and center, especially in the service of keeping your love alive by keeping the tension between you at a minimum. This may not be easy if each of your families have staked a claim to their holiday traditions as non-negotiable.
Even in the sanest, most well-meaning families, many pitfalls beyond whose house is holiday central can loom large: who buys presents for whom, who’s angry or jealous of whom, and the big one: who has babies or bellies. All conspire to disturb your sense of well-being. The complications have complications. Someone is bound to say the wrong thing.
Tension escalates even more if no one knows that you’re dealing with your fertility. You may be at an agonizing crossroads with complicated decisions to make. Are you and your partner on the same page? Do you know how to communicate clearly and gently with each other? You need to trust that you will get through these difficulties, even if you need to reach out for professional help. You will be looking back on this someday. In the meantime, the challenges that are particular to infertility and internal to the sanctity and privacy of your marriage leave you feeling raw and in no mood for faking gaiety. Decide together what’s best for you both. Feeling loved and understood goes a long way in reducing stress.
Learning to be and to breathe moment by moment in the context of the love and support of each other is as good as it gets. Learning to deal with adversity of this magnitude provides an opportunity for emotional growth. When you realize that you have the power to reverse the physiology of stress and that you can ground yourself as needed, even the sound of jingle bells won’t throw you off your game for too long.
