Virtual “campfire” - Learn to disengage from the stress of infertility In our frenzied world, it’s easy to lose sight of our body and our mind’s need for balance. Optimum health exists between activity and rest, work and play, wakefulness and sleep. This is how Nature means for it to be. Before electricity made it [...]
“Is my failure to conceive my fault?” In cases where there is no diagnosis preventing a pregnancy, this is a haunting question. With very few exceptions the answer is NO! Longing for a family is agonizing, especially because each attempt at conception is separated by at least 28 days. It is a short distance from [...]
At the time of this writing, The Museum of Modern Art in NYC is running an exhibition called Soundings: A Contemporary Score. Artists deconstructed sound and made it visable in a variety of ways. What interested me most were the artistic contributions that made silence audible. In one case, what a dog can hear was [...]
Purchase Helen's book, On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility. The following excerpt from my book speaks directly to those in an infertility struggle, but keep in mind that the tenets apply no matter what adversity you might be dealing with. On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility by Helen Adrienne, LCSW, BCD Chapter 10 Gain from the Pain: [...]
When I first went into practice in 1979 as a psychotherapist serving infertility patients, the scuttlebutt was that any inability to conceive for which there wasn’t an explanation meant that research hadn’t yet clarified the person’s specific problem. Today, much has been clarified and medical experts believe that if a correct diagnosis could be guaranteed, the number of those labeled “undiagnosed” would be very small indeed, rather than the 10% to 30% or more (depending upon whose statistics you look at) who fall in this category now.
Below is an inspirational quote from Charles R. Swindoll. It is a real challenge to maintain a positive attitude when in an infertility struggle. You certainly have a right to feel like dog poo, but you have a choice not to. Mind/Body coping skills are a sure-fire approach to learning how to respond to the stress of infertility rather than be reactive to it.
Impatience is virtually universal when our deepest longings are thwarted. And longing for a baby generates a particular agony because of the extended period of time that it can take until the baby quest is resolved. The following is a lovely story, synopsized from the book Stories for the Third Ear by Lee Wallace. This little metaphor may serve to settle the pressure that you may be putting on yourself in an attempt to barge through to parenthood.