Infertility Counselling

For some people living with infertility is a never-ending journey of agony and anxiety over whether or not they will be able to conceive a child. You may be weighed down by a persistent sense of sadness and emptiness. It may feel like with every negative pregnancy test, medical appointment or failed infertility treatment you are being pulled down even further into the grasps of depression, losing the little hope you are already struggling to hold onto.

Infertility can make it hard for you to separate who you are as a person from your illness. You may be overburdened with guilt, feeling like you are to blame for the infertility. As this guilt festers, you may struggle with shame, feeling like there is something wrong with you.

Infertility is all encompassing, it can wreak havoc on every aspect of your life. You may feel like you are grasping onto the threads of your relationship with your partner, no longer reaping enjoyment from intimacy, feeling so pressured to conceive a child. You may not know how you got here, but intimacy has lost its excitement and has become clinical.

Your relationship may be stricken by conflict, finding yourself so emotionally strained. Each thread is pulled tighter and tighter as you and your partner struggle with the inability to express how this terrible ordeal makes each of you feel. With every passing day, your hopelessness may pull you even further from one another, increasing your feelings of isolation. You may feel unable to help your partner, whether it be facing an intro-vitro fertilization procedure or seeing another negative pregnancy test. As this helplessness grows, you may feel like you have failed your partner and yourself, so lost on how to support them.

For some people they may be overridden with the constant belittling thoughts from society telling them that they are only worthy if they become a parent. It may feel like you are no longer in control of your life, having your choice to conceive a child being ripped from your grasp. The idea of being around others may become overwhelmingly daunting, feeling like there is no escape from the obsessively difficult feelings and thoughts. You may find yourself crawling deeper into your cave of despair as you hear the next person share their pregnancy announcement. It may feel like your life is being controlled by a ticking clock, living day by day with torment over your biological clock.

While for some people they may still possess the hope to conceive a family, others may face intense grief and loss around what their infertility has taken from them. There may be anger at how this could happen to you, stricken by the question “why me?”

While for some people they may possess an official diagnosis of infertility, others may face the debilitating experience of struggling to conceive a child without official medical recognition. Despite experiencing similar challenges associated with not being able to conceive a child, your challenges are ignored and overlooked. It can feel so deeply invalidating to have others dismiss your struggles with conceiving a child. While at times you may feel angry and frustrated by their dismissal and lack of care, other times you may struggle with self-compassion, considering your own struggles as less than and not warranting true empathy and recognition.