When Infertility Becomes Traumatizing

By Mary Sabo, L.Ac, DACM 

Women struggling to conceive can score as high as cancer patients on stress surveys. While some women conceive easily, others can go through quite a long and painful journey. Depending on how long she struggles, and the way her journey unfolds, the process of having a family sometimes creates the experience of trauma in the brain. Unlike single traumatic events, it can be more of a slow trickle, but eventually some women exhibit thought patterns and physical symptoms including intense fear, anxiety, irritability, loss of interest or joy in activities, loneliness, insomnia, or feeling detached. Lately, I have felt like we don’t talk about this enough when it comes to infertility. Left untreated or without the right support, it can shift a woman’s perspective and create negative beliefs, behaviors, and habits, sometimes leading to depression and anxiety that can last long after she finally has her family. With the right support, however, women can build resilience, grow, and emerge feeling stronger and more whole through this sometimes very painful experience.  

What can be traumatic about infertility?

First, let’s define trauma.Trauma can involve a single event or repeated experiences that overwhelm someone to the extent they are unable to cope, impacting one’s sense of self and safety, creating disruptive triggers that last long beyond the traumatic experience(s). It often happens in situations where we cannot control the outcome when we think we can or should. Aside from the obvious events in a fertility journey like miscarriage, especially late-term miscarriage, repeatedly being let down cycle after cycle with negative pregnancy tests, especially when a woman is trying everything under the sun to help her odds, or the stakes are high with expensive fertility treatments like IUI or IVF cycles, it can overwhelm even the most positive happy women and couples. 

Acupuncture and Chinese medicine, while helpful with increasing natural fertility and supporting IVF and IUI cycles, also helps manage stress levels and emotional processing. Contained within the Chinese medical theory are clues on how to support someone navigating intensely emotional experiences, protecting the body and helping them process. As each of us processes stress and trauma a little differently, Chinese medicine diagnostic theory beautify helps to identify how parts of the body are being weakened based on that person’s emotional state and symptoms. For example, a patient coming in with insomnia, heart palpitations, poor memory, anxiety, and vivid dreams would be helped with specific acupuncture points and herbs to nourish the “heart blood”, whereas someone coming in with irritability, depression, headaches, worsened PMS, and constipation would be treated for “liver qi stagnation” with different acupuncture points and herbs. The diet can also be modified to support these patterns. We create a treatment plan for each individual to offer physical support while also helping the mind process optimally. That being said, having a skilled mental health practitioner to talk to, especially one who specializes in fertility, can be a game changer for coping and learning new ways to navigate this journey more efficiently. In some cases, targeted medications can also help, especially in combination with holistic treatments and talk therapy.

I think of trauma like a shattering…what you thought would happen, the control over your path you thought you had, or how you thought your world works disintegrates or shatters and you are left with a broken idea of the structure of life and sometimes even oneself.  It makes it hard to trust, and immediately after the shattering, whether it’s slow or sudden, we are typically stunned and frozen. Over time, we try to restructure order in our world and make meaning of the traumatic event(s) to feel safe again. Without the right support during this restructuring process, we can rebuild in ways that reinforce fear and negativity or create thick walls to try to protect us from ever having to feel so terrible again. With good support, however, we can reassemble the pieces into something stronger, wiser, and more resilient. We can rewrite old beliefs that no longer serve us, learn new ways to cope, and upgrade our perspective. The latter is far more powerful and beneficial for overall health and well-being, including sometimes even reproductive health and fertility. Similar to the Japanese art of Kuntsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, we can become ever more beautiful by breaking and repairing with the right care and materials. 

Almost all women and couples who stick with the fertility process and keep trying all options available to them go on to have their families, but what happens along the way can have lasting effects emotionally. If you feel like you are not coping well or are nearing your breaking point in any journey, including the fertility process, please make sure you have the right support to help you navigate so you can maximize this challenging time and turn it into positive growth. If you can’t find a mental health care practitioner and/or acupuncturist in your area who understands the unique stress of fertility, talk to your doctor about local options or try using the RESOLVE network to find a support group and extra resources.  https://resolve.org/support/find-a-support-group/

 

 


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