5 Things You Might Say Out Loud for the First Time in a Therapy Session About Infertility
Therapy can be a powerful space to process the grief, isolation, and uncertainty that come along with fertility challenges. Whether you’re in the middle of treatment, taking a break, or somewhere in the messy in-between, there are things that are hard to say out loud anywhere else.
Here are five things people commonly say for the first time in a therapy session about infertility.
I’m happy for them…and jealous.”
You don’t have to choose one feeling. When someone in your life announces a pregnancy, it’s completely possible to feel genuine happiness for them and grief for yourself at the exact same time. That’s what it means to be a human being navigating something painful while the world keeps moving around you.
It’s also normal to not feel happiness for others during this time at all. Those feelings tend to be hard because it often feels very different than how you have felt in the past, particularly before the fertility challenges came along. All feelings are welcome in the therapeutic space. You don’t have to edit yourself or keep those emotions bottled up inside before you walk in.
“I don’t know who I am anymore?”
Infertility has a way of quietly reshaping your identity. The version of yourself you imagined…the parent, the partner, the person with a plan. Those start to feel out of reach. And when so much of your time, energy, and emotional bandwidth is consumed by treatment cycles and waiting and hoping, it can be hard to remember who you were before all of this.
Therapy can help you reconnect with who you are outside of your fertility journey. Because you are more than this. Even when it doesn’t feel that way.
“I feel like time is running out.”
The pressure of timelines and the uncertainty of outcomes is one of the most difficult and overwhelming parts of the fertility journey. Every month that passes, every cycle that doesn’t work, every birthday that comes and goes, every year that comes to a close without the baby you thought you’d have at this point can feel like sand through an hourglass you can’t stop.
Therapy can help you find ways to ground in the present moment. Not to bypass the urgency you feel, but to make it a little more bearable. To help you breathe inside the waiting instead of being consumed by it.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
The mental load of infertility is relentless. The daily injections, the monitoring appointments, the phone calls, the waiting, the google spirals, the trying to function like a normal person in between all of it. It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
Therapy can be a space to figure it out one step at a time, one breath at a time. Our clinicians have lived experience, so we understand on a personal level what it’s like. Therapy is not a space to have all the answers, but it’s a space to have somewhere to put it all down for an hour.
“I’m scared to be hopeful, but also scared to be hopeless.”
This one might be the hardest to say out loud. Hope can feel like both a lifeline and liability all at the same time. Hope feels scary because it means risking another loss. But letting go of hope feels unbearable, too. People often feel like they “should” be hopeful in order for it to work, and if they allow hopelessness to trickle in, it’s going to fail. This is a very frequent experience for people navigating infertility.
Therapy can hold that tension with you. It’s a space to say the hard things out loud without having to resolve them right away. You don’t have to choose between hope and reality. Both can exist at the same time.
You Don’t Have to Carry This Alone
If any of these resonated, know that you are not alone in feeling this way. These aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that you are human and you’re navigating something genuinely really hard.
At Authentically You Psychotherapy, we specialize in supporting individuals through every stage of the fertility journey through individual and/or group counseling, and retreats. If you’re ready to have a space to say the hard things out loud, we’d love to connect.