Fertility Challenges and Reproductive Trauma
Supporting you or your partner with Fertility or Reproductive Trauma
in Calgary and Online in Alberta
The ache and longing that accompany fertility struggles can be overwhelming. Fertility challenges are often a lonely journey filled with many external triggers. The unknown can leave you searching for any hint of certainty.
Experiencing the distress of fertility struggles and reproductive trauma can take a huge psychological toll. It can leave you with feelings of anger, guilt, shame, confusion, inadequacy, sadness, failure, despair, and can impact your identity.
Experiencing infertility and fertility challenges and reproductive trauma can significantly impact deeply held beliefs about family, your identity, your body, and the future you thought you would have.
Having a confidential place to share your grief, longing, disappointment, trauma, exhaustion, tears, and silent struggle can bring some relief.
As a Psychologist that specializes in trauma, grief, infertility, and reproductive trauma, I can offer you a supportive space where your needs will be assessed and you will have someone to walk beside you through the reproductive journey. Hopefully this will leave you feeling less alone and equip you with what you need to take care of you.
How do I know if I need support?
You are crying, irritable, snapping at others.
You are feeling intense guilt and responsibility or like it’s “your fault”.
There is intense loneliness and you do not have anyone else to talk to about this.
You are feeling sadness and disappointment many days.
Anxiety and worry about things related to infertility and the reproductive journey take up much of your thoughts.
You have experienced a pregnancy loss or are having prolonged grief symptoms from any part of the reproductive journey.
There are flashbacks, dreams or “sticky memories” that don’t want to leave.
Withdrawal from family and friends or avoidance of certain activities/events.
Intense pre-occupation and feeling controlled by infertility and the reproductive journey.
Not eating or eating too much.
Not sleeping or sleeping too much.
Heart racing, gastrointestinal issues, headaches, body aches, or other body (somatic) symptoms.
Therapy will NOT just make everything better.
However, we can soften the intensity of distress that you are experiencing from Infertility or Reproductive Trauma.
Allowing space for all emotion and engaging in therapies that will address the grief and/or trauma can enable you to have more ability to tolerate the things that feel intolerable right now.
Treatment for Infertility and Reproductive Trauma
EMDR Therapy
EMDR is an evidence based treatment that stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. It utilizes bilateral stimulation, which means it activates both sides of the brain in order to reprocess distressing memories. When we experience trauma or distress, our amygdala (the fight, flight, freeze response system) gets activated. Those flashbacks or “sticky memories” are being triggered by this. In EMDR therapy we work to soften these memories without having to fully go into all of the details. That fight, flight, freeze response becomes deactivated in association with the memory and can provide relief from the distress and future triggers. We can utilize eye movements to do this, but there are other ways to also create the bilateral stimulation such as hand held buzzers or auditory sounds. EMDR has become a well research and effective strategy to address distress related to infertility and reproductive trauma. Check out the video at the bottom of the Perinatal Trauma page to learn more.
Grief Therapy
Often with infertility and reproductive trauma, we experience a great deal of grief. This is why grief therapy may be part of what we do in therapy. We will allow space for the grief within the therapy room. There will be opportunity to explore things like the different types of losses, memories, healthy grieving, restoration, boundaries, and what it looks like to grow around grief. This may include utilizing some somatic techniques, sandtray therapy, creative outlets, and you identifying how you can best grieve what you need to grieve. Grief therapy can involve some psychoeducation for you to know more about your own grief and exploring how this has impacted you and your relationship with others. Infertility and Reproductive Trauma can benefit from exploration with a trained and experienced grief therapist at Wild Path Counselling.
Compassionate Holding
Being met in a therapy session focussing on infertility or reproductive trauma with empathy and compassion can have an incredible healing impact. Healing in relationship and feeling heard in a neutral and confidential space, allows you to be seen and heard and will help you to feel less alone. This can also be restorative for those parts of you that were not previously seen or supported by others you have been relationship with or care providers through the infertility and reproductive trauma journey. Offering you compassion and teaching you to offer compassion to yourself can have a powerful effect on things like shame, rage, guilt, anger, exhaustion, and the other emotions that often become triggered by infertility or reproductive trauma. All of you will be welcomed with a non-judgmental and supportive approach that can encourage growth and healing. Compassionate holding might be what you need to start healing in your infertility and reproductive trauma journey.
Somatic Therapy
Trauma and distress are stored in our brain and bodies. Somatic therapy is therapy relating to the body that works well to treat trauma and distress because the focus on the brain and body. This type of therapy might include mindfulness therapy that helps us to have increased non-judgmental awareness. It often will involve grounding. Grounding is something that we utilize to keep us in the present moment. Staying in the present moment is important when addressing infertility and reproductive trauma because dissociation is something that our bodies can do in order to protect us. Dissociation has been that wise protector when we needed it. However, we want to start to allow your body to be more present and “grounded” again in order to start to slowly heal the trauma or distress. Somatic therapy could also involve body movements that allow for a release of the trauma that our body is holding. With infertility and reproductive trauma, your body can hold a lot and might benefit from somatic therapies.
Parts Work
This probably sounds weird, what is this? Well, parts work offers us a way to notice that we are made up of many different parts. These parts of us may be familiar and around for a while, or perhaps they are new and surprising. They may be things like emotional parts, people pleaser parts, numbing parts, identity parts, and more. We can utilize therapies such as The Dissociative Table or Internal Family Systems Therapy to examine these parts and how they have protected you, controlled, taken over, been dismissed, provided safety, created boundaries, and impacted who you are. When we examine our parts outside of ourselves, it allows things to become externalized that are often so internal to us. This can provide a wonderful healing container that might be what is needed to move you forward. Examining these parts and the way in which they impact infertility and reproductive trauma, may be helpful in your healing journey.
Sandtray Therapy
Sandtray therapy might seem like it’s something just for kids, but it can also be incredibly effective for adults. It is kind of like Art Therapy in that you are creating something, but what you are creating is done by choosing figurines and placing them in the sand. When we utilize something like sandtray therapy, we are accessing another part of our brain that is different than the mostly cognitive pieces. What we know from the study of neuroscience is that when we utilize our bottom, top, left, and right brains, we have more opportunity for change and healing in therapy. Something things that we do not cognitively know will show up in a sandtray and we can then process it, or it may be a way we process something that previously felt stuck. The other benefit is that it connects with our playful side that often adults will tuck away. This can encourage us to connect with our younger selves and again, maybe access healing in a different way. The somatic nature of sandtray can also offer the healing that our bodies need in order to move through our trauma or distress relating to infertility or reproductive trauma.