3 Best Tips for Couples Going Through Infertility
In all my years of working, I have never worked with a couple who experience, processed, and coped the same way with all the emotions and stress that come with infertility.
It is critical that when you’re going through your family journey you work as a team. When you are in a partnership navigating the infertility avalanche is much easier when you navigate together.
So here are my top 3 tips for couples going through infertility.
1 - The Writing Exercise
Make some time by yourself to really sit and think about how you are experiencing these emotions, how you process them over time and the coping strategies you use to face them, whether you like those coping strategies or not.
The next step is I want you to ask your partner to do the same thing.
And finally, I want you two to come together and just share your observations with one another.
What this exercise does is it really helps to get rid of the myths, the assumptions that happen when couples are not going through an emotional experience the same way and make assumptions about the other person, maybe not showing up in the way you want them to, and therefore create the feeling that they're not caring for you.
If they cared for you more, it wouldn't feel so bad, would it?
99.9% of the time as I'm working with couples, they care and the love is there, but the assumptions on how it's going to show up really can vary. Understanding each other and how you move through this difficult time is going to be crucial.
2 - Start a conversation with your partner
Just because your partner wasn’t diagnosed with infertility, does not mean that they're not going through an emotional experience.
What I see often is that the person is really trying to hold it together.
Not saying it's helpful, but that's what they're trying to do.
So the intention to care and the love is still there. They’re thinking “just let me hold this together and create all this space for my partner.”
You can you acknowledge them and provide them with that same space by starting a conversation like this -
“Hey, this must be bothering you too. I'm not hearing much from you and I would like to hear about your experience.”
3 - Don’t Isolate
If you are the person who is NOT diagnosed with infertility in the relationship and you are not sharing how hard this is for you emotionally, I’m telling you, that can be a mistake.
I know that your intention is probably to create all this space for your partner, and so your intentions are great, but it can backfire because infertility can be so isolating.
Feeling isolated in pain is really hard. What I'd like you to do next time is share with your partner. You can start the conversation off like this -
“Hey, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about what my emotional experience is like going through this. And because I'm sharing this, you don't need to problem solve it. You know, you're not responsible for that.”
What I don't want is for you to feel so alone in this pain.
If you found these tips helpful, you might find my free webinar about navigating the infertility avalanche even more helpful. Learn more about it here.